An unlikely hero

This sparkling biography of a small-part actor who did two missions into Nazi-occupied France as a radio operator for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) begins with a rather iffy 60 pages on his identity and pre-war stage career; much of what the agent said about himself was contradictory, much was exaggerated, and little of it was reliable. Almost everybody who met him agreed that he was tremendous fun to be with; anyone who knew him at all well realised that he was homosexual — in an age when homosexuality was illegal. Who his father was remains in some doubt; his mother was an opera singer, under the stage name of Emma Luart. He seems to have been born — certainly he was brought up — in Brussels; his first brush with the secret world was to act as a teenage courier for Edith Cavell’s escape line. His mother was then able to bring him over to England as a refugee. His name was Denis Rake.

By mere luck, he got taken under the wing of Lady Aberconway, who got him trained as a telegraph operator. He did not stay at that job long, picked up work as a circus stage-hand, drifted into work as a small-part comedian in theatres and night clubs, and helped to run a small hotel. As the next world war approached, he notified the war office of his fluency in French and in Morse, and so got absorbed into SOE, which badly needed Morse operators. Noble friends continued to help him: his sponsor for SOE was the Marquess of Carisbrooke.

Geoffrey Elliott originally got interested in SOE because his father had been an unsuccessful agent for it in Yugoslavia (as described in Elliott’s first book, I Spy).