If you looked at my parents’ families as they were around eighty or a hundred years ago, you would never have expected any branches of those families to end up broke. My father, Rory Langford Rae. attended Ampleforth College, a very grand Catholic public school in Yorkshire, and his adoptive father, Bertram Rae, was one of the most senior British police officers in Burma (Myanmar), and was once tipped to take over as head of CID Burma. Later on, during the Malayan Emergency, Rory himself was Executive Secretary to the State War Executive Committee for the state of Negeri Sembilan – which you would think would be a well-enough paid job. My mother Kathleen Jordan’s two oldest brothers were at Rugby, a very famous, and expensive, public school founded in 1567, and their father, Harold Jordan. was Regimental Sergeant Major of the Royal Corps of Signals between the wars.

[Note for Americans. In the UK, free schools run by local government are called state schools. A public school, in the UK, is a very grand fee-paying private school, whose students generally board at the school (yes, like Hogwarts, but expensive). They are called “public” schools because the oldest ones date back to a time when nearly all schools only taught boys who were in training for the church or the law, whereas “public” schools would take anyone (anyone male!) who could pay the fee.]

What happened on my mother’s side is sad but relatively straightforward. As RSM Signals, one of my grandfather’s responsibilities was to oversee the officers’ mess. Despite the general reputation of Sergeant Majors, he was a kind man who looked after his soldiers. Unfortunately his kindness led to his allowing a young officer with personal problems to run up a massive mess bill on tick. The officer absconded and left my grandfather to carry the can, with the result that he had to sell the family home and move to somewhere smaller and cheaper in order to cover the bill, and the younger children in the family had to go to ordinary state schools.

I’m not sure whether it was this incident, or simply his age, which led to Harold leaving the army and going to work for an electronics firm. In his early sixties, during WW2, he fell off a ladder at work and landed flat on his back on concrete, bashing the back of his head. He appeared to be fine, but some months later he developed severe dementia and died a few months after that. At the time, his delirium was attributed to heart disease, but with hindsight it seems likely that he was suffering from a slow subdural bleed.

Unfortunately, his death came just before he would have been at the firm long enough for his wife to receive a company widow’s pension, so she was left with nothing except her state pension, and the family supported her.

What happened in my father’s family was rather more exotic. Bertram (Bertie) Langford Denis Rae, who was half Asian and half Irish, joined the Indian Police – which at that point included Burma – in the mid 1920s, and served in Burma for over twenty years, making the acquaintance of Eric Blair/George Orwell on the way, In 1933 he became an Officiating (or Acting) District Superintendent, roughly equivalent to a Chief Constable, and in 1939 he was promoted to full District Superintendent at Insein, a district on the outskirts of Rangoon/Yangon. I have been told that he would have been in charge of three thousand-plus personnel, and he would have reported daily to high-ranking government officials and followed their directives.

In 1940 he was divorced from my father’s adoptive mother, an unusual lady who started out as Ethel Maud Shirran, a shorthand typist in Edinburgh in the early 1920s, and finished up as the Kazini Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa of Sikkim – but that’s another story. Bertie then remarried to an Austrian lady named Herta, by whom he had five genetic sons. Rory meanwhile was at school in England.

During the war, Bertie was heavily involved in Special Ops. Major Sam Newland of the famous “Z-Force Johnnies” was an old schoolfriend of Bertie’s, and Sam’s assistant in Z-Force was Bertie’s youngest brother Denis. Sam wrote in his memoirs about the various other units who were operating in the same area, that is, in the Chin Hills between India and Burma, at the edge of the advancing Japanese line. He also wrote about Bertie coming and going along the edge of the Japanese line and stopping by occasionally for a visit, and about receiving equipment intended for Bertie. Unfortunately he never tied the two together and stated outright which unit Bertie was attached to, but by putting together Bertie’s movements and the movements of the various units as recorded by Sam, I’m fairly sure he was with an obscure outfit called the Civil Intelligence Bureau, who collected political rather than military intelligence from behind the Japanese lines.

At any rate, he was doing something which involved being “Mentioned in Dispatches”, having a personal radio operator and being personally hunted by the Japanese, who made blood-curdling threats as to what they would do to him if they caught him. He finished the war with what we would now call PTSD, which lasted for the rest of his life.

Late in the war, when the Japanese were retreating, Bertie joined the Civil Afairs Service (Burma), a military outfit whose job was to tidy up after the retreating Japanese, restore order, make sure the civilian population had enough food etc. He finished the war as an Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel, and returned to his old job in Insein in late 1945 or early 1946.

Back in Insein, Bertie used his local knowledge and connections to report on the political shenanigans surrounding Burma’s move towards independence. I have seen a transcript of a parliamentary report calling him the British government’s most reliable source of information about Burmese politics, so he was still in a sense in special ops.

In 1946 and early 1947 there was a lot of unrest in Rangoon, and agitation for a quick move to independence. This included a strike by the prisoners at Insein Central Gaol. This was not yet a political prison and most of the prisoners were petty crooks, with a few dissidents who were serving token six-month sentences. But the prisoners were impatient and wanted their freedom and their say in the new Burma.

Two senior officers called MacEvoy and Round claimed that the prison officers had lost control, that a breakout was possible and imminent and that it would be necessary to use the threat of armed force to bring the prisoners back in line. Privately, they had both been overheard saying that they actually needed a full-blown riot which would give them a justified reason to shoot and kill some of the prisoners, in order to shock the others back into line, and MacEvoy later said so officially.

On 9th February 1947 MacEvoy and Round, with two Burmese officials, came to the prison to negotiate and Bertie, as District Superintendent of Police, was stationed outside the prison with a unit of police some of whom were armed.

The prisoners initially dicked the officials around, but they had settled down to what promised to be a productive session when MacEvoy and Round barged in and had one of the prisoners’ leaders dragged away, although he doesn’t seem to have been doing anything wrong. The prisoners became angry and restive, Round doubled down on throwing his weight around, and a full-blown riot kicked off, with bricks, stones and plates being thrown at the prison staff.

Bertram summoned the armed police, who fired on the rioters. Four prisoners were fatally shot, three were wounded by gunshot and seventeen by warders armed with bamboo staffs, and one suffered a fatal heart attack. Given that twenty-four rifle and four pistol shots were fired at fairly close range, and only seven people were hit, it seems likely that warning shots were fired first, but that point was never established.

It is unclear whether the initial order to fire was given by Bertram or by MacEvoy or Round. Nor is it clear whether the lives of the prison staff were in actual danger, justifying the shooting, or whether Bertram might reasonably have thought that they were. It is certainly the case that MacEvoy and Round both provoked the riot and wanted the police to fire on the prisoners, but the precise role they played was never established. All three officers were suspended.

An initial enquiry was held, at which prisoners said that gaolors had fired on the prisoners on MacEvoy’s orders, instead of or as well as the police doing so, but they were not believed. Bertie admitted giving the order to fire but said he had feared a mass break-out and that the warders were in serious danger, but it’s questionable whether he was right to think this.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it is likely that Bertie’s recent, traumatic wartime experiences and PTSD made his reactions more hair-trigger and extreme than they might otherwise have been, and he was with two senior officers who definitely wanted him to react in an extreme way, one of whom may actually have given an order to fire. We can be almost 100% certain that racial prejudice played no part, at least on Bertie’s part, since he was half Shan or Chinese and his white father was an amateur anthropologist who loved and was loved by the native tribes he studied.

On the other hand, one of the most important things we expect from our senior police and army officers is to not lose their heads and start shooting at civilians unless it’s absolutely unavoidable, and four relatively innocent people died. I don’t count the fifth against Bertie, as his heart attack might have been due to the riot itself.

The initial enquiry held Bertie to be solely guilty and exonerated MacEvoy and Round, but an Executive Committee chaired by General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, rejected this and declared that MacEvoy and Round had acted maliciously to provoke the riot, and should be sacked. But MacEvoy was an officer of the Indian Medical Service and Round was employed by the British Army, not the government of Burma, so sacking them would have required a full formal enquiry. Instead, they were got rid of by being palmed off on other countries.

Bertie meanwhile was suspended on half pay, pending a more formal enquiry. By this point, however, MacEvoy and Round had both left the country and could not be recalled to give evidence, and General Aung San had been assassinated. In January 1968 Burma/Myanmar became independent and the force for which Bertie had worked was dissolved. He found himself, as the British Ambassador James Bowker was later to put it, “in the anomalous position of being suspended from a post in a service which no longer exists, or, alternatively, of being suspended from the present Burma Police, in which he has not agreed to serve, and to which he has not been officially appointed”.

Lt Colonel CB Orr, the outgoing Deputy Inspector-General CID Burma and a former colleague of Bertie’s in special ops, was of the opinion that Bertie was being punished out of spite, because of his former role in reporting on the late General Aung San’s political activities to the British government. He said that Bertie had actually been suggested as a suitable replacement for himself as head of CID Burma, showing the esteem in which he was held, but he was rejected as a candidate because of the Insein incident.

I have to say I think it quite understandable, and not necessarily any indication of spite, that the Burmese government, knowing that Bertie was in effect a British government spy, would not want to see him in a position of considerable power which would give him access to almost every piece of intelligence in the country, and would want to mothball him somewhere out in the sticks where he wasn’t likely to find out anything they didn’t want the British to know about.

However, evidence of spite was soon to come. In January 1949 it was reported that Bertie had now been reduced to quarter pay retrospectively, meaning that he, his young sons and his very pregnant wife would receive no money at all for three months, and were now destitute.

The following month the Burmese government concluded that there could be no definite finding as to Bertie’s guilt or innocence because the initial enquiry had been incomplete, Bertie had never had a proper chance to defend himself and MacEvoy and Round were unavailable to give evidence. Bertie could be neither convicted nor aquitted. Bertie’s employment was terminated – a few months short of the point at which he would have completed twenty-five years’ service and qualified for a pension.

Once Bertie had received some leave pay owed to him and could afford the fare, he and his family moved to the UK, where he argued against the decision on the grounds that if the Burmese government admitted they didn’t have the evidence to convict him he should have been honourably aquitted, and that if MacEvoy and Round had been available for him to cross-examine in court he could have proved that he had acted honourably.

Nothing came of this, however, and he and his family ended up in his wife’s native Austria, where he became a salesman for a firm that traded in builders’ supplies. He died in his seventies of a blood clot, still haunted by nightmares of his time spent being hunted through the Chin Hills by the Japanese army.

Meanwhile, Rory had ended up in London, after his very senior Civil Service job in Malaysia had ended when the country became independent. He and my mother had an affair, but did not marry because he was a Catholic and she was by that point an ex Catholic and didn’t want me to be raised as one.

Rory was by all accounts a lovely man and nobody that knew him seems to have had a bad word to say about him, but he wasn’t a great communicator, and he failed to explain to my mother that as a mere British Overseas Citizen he wasn’t allowed to stay in Britain without a job. Nowadays he would have been a full British citizen, no problem, because his (adoptive) mother was Scottish born and bred, but in those days the mother’s nationality didn’t count, and although his (adoptive) father’s family had all been officers of the British Raj, you had to go all the way back to his father Bertie’s grandfather to find a male-line ancestor who had actually been born in the British Isles (in Dublin, which at the time was part of the UK).

At any rate, shortly after I was born Rory announced that he had to go out to India on a job, but failed to explain that he didn’t have a choice because he’d failed to find a job in the UK. He gave my mother his address out there so they could stay in touch, but she saw him as having deserted her, and threw it out in a fit of temper. In order to be at home with me she took a series of jobs as a live-in housekeeper until just before I started secondary school, when she became a secretary, but it’s not a great way to make money.

When I was twenty-one she decided finally to contact Rory, and got in touch with some old friends of his, only to learn that he had died when I was six. He had gone out to Assam as a labour negotiator, mediating between the Indian Tea Association and the tea pickers, and had been greatly loved by the workers for his kindness and fairness, but he was killed in a traffic accident in March 1965. For reasons too complex to go into here there were rumours that he had followed his father into spookdom, had been working for or with Indian Intelligence, and had been assassinated. But, he was a lousy driver and Assam is very foggy, so who knows….

My mother got hold of the documents relating to Rory’s death, which was how I found out the identity of his (adoptive) mother, and began the process of tracing her bizarre career. These documents showed that despite having been both a senior civil servant and a senior official of the Indian Tea Association, he died with just £200 to his name. I suspect, although I can’t prove, that his salary went on putting his five much younger adoptive half brothers (the youngest is only eight years older than I am) through school, as they all went to private, fee-paying schools and it seems unlikely Bertie could have afforded it from his salary as a salesman for a builders’ merchant.

And that, my dears, is why there is no money in my family – at least not on my side of it.

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