Whatever Remains

by Penny F. Graham

  His four-year contract with Guthrie & Co. and the lease on the house at Rifle Range Lane had expired at the end of 1938. During that year, there may well have been pressure from family back in England for Denis to return to see his now widowed and elderly mother. Thomas Emerson, my grandfather, had died in November 1937, only weeks after the birth of my eldest brother Tony.

  It appears that Denis’s trip ‘home’ to England early in 1939 was his last contact with his family. He left Singapore on 27 January on SS Carthage, and his passport puts him in Marseilles on 17 February and in Calais the next day. He must have left the ship in Marseilles and gone overland, most likely by train, to make it in one day. He then crossed the Channel, presumably by passenger ferry to Dover.

  With money a-jingle in his pocket, an accent now moulded and smooth with culture, a new, more poised son has returned to the bosom of his family. But not for long. His passport is again stamped in London on 23 February for a visa to visit the USA. It would seem that England holds little attachment for him now. His world is in the East with his young family. Perhaps he learnt on the voyage or on arrival in England that Nona was pregnant and that made him anxious to return and caused him to cut short his stay in England.

  His stay in London was brief — only five days. He did, however, take time to visit his ex-wife and see how his young daughter had turned out. With a bunch of flowers in hand, he paid his last visit to Doris.

  Pat was 13 when she first remembers seeing her father. The family was living in Ferndale Road, Clapham at the time. When Pat arrived home from school that afternoon she was told her father had come and wanted to see her. Later that afternoon she played her party piece, The Maiden’s Prayer, on the piano for him. Her memory was of a tall, slim man with a quiet cultured voice. His shoes, she remembers most vividly, were brown with white patterned toecaps. Very, very posh, she thought. Later, Denis told his family that ‘the child favours her mother’.

  Denis took Doris out to dinner that evening. Did he tell her of his life in Malaya? The life she would now never know? They dined, he took her home and Doris was never to see him again. Their lives had diverged for good.

  Denis also made time to see his mother, his sister Maud, and some other family members, and to visit his father’s grave at Tooting Cemetery. My cousin Eileen remembers this visit to the cemetery, where he apparently told some who were present that this would be his last visit to England and not to bother letting him know when his mother died. This is the first time I heard Eileen speak harshly of Denis but obviously she considered this a cruel attitude to adopt to such a loving mother. Fanny Emerson now lived alone above the shop at Brixton Road and she would have lapped up every minute she could have of her beloved son’s company. He would have told her of his successes in his job, his obvious popularity among his peers at work, the success he was making of his life. He did not, however, tell her of the young woman who was waiting for him in Malaya and the birth the previous November of his first son.

  He left Southampton docks on 24 February 1939. Les Emerson Elliott was a passenger on the SS Manhattan. The ship was of magnificent proportions and sumptuously appointed. At the time of their construction, Manhattan and her sister ship Washington, also built by New York Shipbuilding, were the largest liners ever built in the United States, and Manhattan was the first large liner built in the US since 1905. Denis travelled Tourist Class, although it was considered that Tourist (Second) Class on the Manhattan was so luxurious that it rivalled First Class on other ships. Denis was getting a taste for the good life.

  The passenger lists (for both the departure from England on 24 February and the arrival in USA on 3 March) show his occupation as Merchant and his age as 30, again three years younger than his real age. He disembarked at New York and travelled overland to San Francisco. The passenger list on arrival in New York shows him as having a wife (although he has not married Nona yet) and their address in Malaya as 16 Rifle Range Road, Kuala Lumpur.

  Doris received a letter, and Pat a postcard, written by Denis on that voyage. The visit to Ferndale Road and the postcard from the Manhattan were the last communication Pat had from her father until she met him at our home in Canberra on her 68th birthday, a gap of 55 years. Our father was by then 89.

  The Manhattan passenger list on arrival in New York indicated that he would be in the USA for eight days and would leave on the President Coolidge from San Francisco on 10 March. Similarly, his USA transit certificate shows that he would leave from San Francisco on 10 March bound for Hong Kong. However, he actually left from Los Angeles on the SS Lurline on 17 March bound for Honolulu. We can only conjecture as to why he extended his stay and left on a different ship. After two days in Hawaii, he sailed on SS Empress of Canada via Japan to Hong Kong. He disembarked in Hong Kong on 8 April and was back in Singapore on 13 April, but it is not known how he travelled in between.

  My brother Derek was born in August 1939 at 1 Holland Hill, Singapore. His birth certificate names the mother as ‘Norma Roberts’ with nationality ‘British’ and country of birth ‘England’. The push to change Nona’s personal details has begun.

  Denis opened another import/export business, Emerson-Elliott & Co, East India Merchants in the Union Building in the heart of Singapore. The smell of a good profit and the opportunity to be his own boss drove him to once again try his luck as a business man. Around the same time Denis moved the family into a charming home overlooking the ocean just outside the village of Changi and called it Whitelawns — because on a moonlit night, the lawns turned silver.

  A rather strange ‘Reference’ on Emerson-Elliott & Co letterhead is dated 29 September 1939 and addressed ‘To whom it may concern’. It states that Denis ‘joined this Company in 1934 and since then has applied himself diligently and wholeheartedly to his duties’. This is, of course, rubbish as he joined Guthrie & Co. in December 1934 and worked for that firm for the next four years. The testimonial finishes ‘Mr Emerson-Elliott leaves us to take up his duties with the Navy and every member of this Company takes this opportunity to wish him God Speed and a safe and early return.’ It is signed A. G. Emerson Elliott. There is no AG Emerson Elliott and the signature is remarkably like Denis’s.

  Denis’s new import/export business venture either failed or did not bring in a living wage. Did he overcapitalise? Was he under-experienced? Whatever the reason, he is looking for other work within the year. The 1940 (for 1939) Singapore and Malayan Directory shows an L. D. E. Elliott as an Assistant in the import, export and engineering firm of Getz Bros & Co at 53 Robinson Road, Singapore. However, Emerson-Elliott & Co continued in some limited form during the war years as it was re-established, at the same address and with the same phone number, when Denis returned to Singapore in late June 1946.

  After the war, the business advertised a wide range of goods for importers and wholesalers, including foodstuffs, medicines (including penicillin), surgical instruments, kitchenware, office requisites, cars and car parts and even small ships. From his return in 1946 to when he sold the business to his assistant Anthony Pang in August 1947, the business thrived, providing our family with enough money, when invested, to travel and live comfortably for many years into the future.

  The marriage certificate that caused me (and Denis) such heartache when he gave it to me in December 1983 prior to our leaving for the USA makes so much more sense now. One thing that Denis had said about why, after living together so long, he had decided to marry Nona, was the financial security it would give Nona and their two children should anything happen to him during the war that was now upon them. This I could certainly understand.

  At St Andrew’s Cathedral, Singapore, on 19 January 1940, by Licence, Leslie Denis Emerson-Elliott married Norma Brayer. The minister who conducted the service was Archdeacon Graham White. The two witnesses are Georgina White (Graham White’s wife) and C. R. Nair. Denis’s father (my grandfather, Thomas Emerson, with the impish grin) is shown as Theodore Stracey (sic) Emerson-Elliott and Norma’s father is sh
own as Gustar Brayer. A whole new family background has, by the stroke of a pen, come into existence.

  If you approach the city via the harbour, St Andrew’s Cathedral is a prominent feature of the island’s landscape. Its stark white exterior almost glistens in the bright tropic light. It is surrounded by lush green lawns which meld into the wide padang (field) adjoining the Singapore Cricket Club. The white church building is framed by large trees that arch their soft green leaves over the west door and porch.

  As with Denis’s first marriage, there are no surviving photos of his marriage with Nona.

  From February 1940 until his demobilisation in 1946, Denis was a naval officer, first in the British Royal Navy and then, after arriving in Fremantle, on loan to the Royal Australian Navy.

  What my mother thought of the identity Denis gave her, I will never know. She gained a British upper middle-class background, new citizenship, a few years of gracious living and a loving husband. But she died denying her Russianness, her language and without the comfort of her mother’s and siblings’ love. She loved her husband and children dearly, this I know, and maybe, hopefully, that was enough.

  Chapter 17

  Setting the record straight

  When my father died in 1997, he and his many untrue stories should have faded genteelly out of the limelight and into the shadowy past of our family history. But that was not to be. My brother Derek could not and would not let his memory go. By the time Denis died, his eldest daughter had been discovered, his real family and that of his wife had been uncovered and much of his past life was known. But Derek, I believe, wanted more for the memory of his father — more glamour, more excitement and a lot more mystery. An ordinary man who created a new persona for himself and his wife was not good enough nor interesting enough for the memory of Derek’s hero, our father.

  Perhaps this is as good a time and place as any to set the record straight.

  There have been many assertions made by my brother since my discovery of our real Emerson family that Denis’s change of name, birthplace, age and parentage (and the similar changes for Nona) resulted from his role in MI6, the British spy organisation. In particular, Derek believed, or would like to think, that Denis disguised his and his wife’s identity to protect his family. I think this is neither credible nor realistic. Nor have I seen anything in any records relating to Denis or in any other sources to suggest that he was at any stage an ‘undercover’ agent or recruited by MI6 or the British Government in any capacity as a spy.

  Maybe one of the most difficult things to prove is the claim that someone was or was not working for MI6. By its very nature, the British Secret Service does not keep (at least on the public record) lists of, or information about, their recruits. By the same token, it is just a little bit too easy to claim that someone was an MI6 operative so as to explain away inconvenient actions such as changes of names, birth dates and birthplaces.

  In the 2010 book Deadly Secrets: The Singapore Raids 1942-45, the author, Lynette Ramsay Silver, makes many references to Denis being an MI6 operative. She says, for a start, that Denis left England in 1926 ‘rather mysteriously for Srinagar, Kashmir for reasons which were not disclosed’ implying that he was trained there in espionage. In 1926, Denis was 21 and just married, had left school at 14 and was from a working class family. I do not believe that even the most desperate of governments would have considered him as likely spy material. We know that he sailed to Singapore that year and, at the time Silver says he was in Srinagar, he was working as a shop assistant in the John Little & Co. retail store in Singapore.

  Nowhere in Deadly Secrets is there concrete evidence that would convince any reasonable person that he was a spy or worked undercover for the British Government. Although Silver met my father several times near the end of his life and spoke to him of his involvement in operations Jaywick and Rimau, two Australian-led attacks on Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbour, she presents some very colourful but unsubstantiated conclusions about his life in general, and in particular, his supposed role as an undercover British agent. Her primary source of information, she told me, had been my brother Derek; helped, I am bound to say, by Derek’s hero worship of his father and his determination to present him to the world as someone even Denis never aspired to be.

  Among the many inaccurate and unsubstantiated statements in Deadly Secrets, it is suggested that Nona was involved in intelligence gathering through her stepfather, Ernest Arthur Roberts, who worked for Phin Soon Tin mines in Malaya. With absolutely no supporting evidence, she credits Roberts with also being an MI6 operative.

  My mother was the Russian emigrant daughter of an itinerant circus worker and a hairdresser, not of hereditary Russian nobility as Silver portrays her. She was 15 when Silver suggests she was involved in espionage activities as Roberts died eight days after Nona’s 16th birthday. As with Denis, I can find absolutely no evidence, nor any credible reason, to indicate that either Nona or Roberts were ever spies for the British Government or anybody else.

  After looking at Denis’s war records, British and Australian, and any other relevant documentation I have been able to find, I have seen no indication that he was recruited by MI6 as a 21-year-old or at any other time in his life. He was certainly involved in the secretive Coast Watchers program during his time in Fremantle in 1942 and, of course, it is on the public record that, when he moved to Melbourne, he worked as secretary and then Personal Assistant to Commander R B M Long, Director of Naval Intelligence. His work for the DNI through the war years would have given him access to sensitive and secret information on many matters related to the Australian war effort.

  There are many statements in Deadly Secrets about Denis and connected people and events I know to be factually incorrect and have documentary evidence to prove it. Silver’s book does not quote specific sources for any of the statements in it, providing only a broad list of references for each chapter, so it is impossible to deduce her sources for any particular statements. It appears, however, that most of them rely on the so-called ‘Emerson-Elliott Family papers’, which, if they exist, I have never seen.

  I contacted Silver shortly after the publication of Deadly Secrets pointing out the many incorrect and doubtful statements and inviting her to provide access to the sources and evidence on which her statements were based. Subsequent exchanges of emails can only be characterised as unsatisfactory and no evidence whatsoever was provided. It is particularly disappointing that Silver’s book, which is dedicated to Denis, my father, was published without any consultation with me, one of his three surviving children; especially as Silver and I had met some years before and discussed the many discrepancies in Denis’s life and my interest in finding out the truth.

  As further background, it is worth recounting that sometime in 1996, Derek attempted to further muddy the waters surrounding Denis’s early years. He told me that he had received two handwritten letters from England signed ‘A Sincere Friend’ and he gave me a copy of the second letter. Derek maintained that the first letter claimed Denis was the illegitimate son of an actress and dance hall entertainer Maxine Elliott and King Edward VII of England. After the birth the baby was supposedly given to our grandmother Frances Emerson to rear. It was an incredible story — in fact just a bit too incredible. After reading about Maxine Elliott’s life and doing my own research, I realised it was a hoax and put it down to Derek’s vivid imagination and his desire to explain some of our father’s many lies about his childhood. Not long after that, Tony, my older brother, apologised for his part in the hoax. When I asked Derek why on earth he had made up this ridiculous story, he just grinned and shrugged his shoulders. Silver knows of this incident yet apparently believed Derek to be a reliable source when writing her book. I’m not so sure.

  The emergence of Denis morphing into a dashing secret agent had its genesis when a well-respected historian and author Barbara Poniewierski, who writes under the name Barbara Winter, was researching material for her book The Intrigue Master. The
book was about the life and times of Commander R. B. M. Long, Director of Naval Intelligence during World War II, Denis’s war-time boss. During the writing of this book, Winter first came across the name Leslie Denis Emerson-Elliott, Long’s Personal Assistant. Then, a little later, when making a submission to the HMAS Sydney Inquiry, she interviewed Denis about his involvement in the interrogation of a Chinese cook, one of the few survivors of the Kormoran, the German raider that sank the Sydney with the loss of all lives. It is here, during Winter’s discussions with the very elderly Denis and his son Derek that the words ‘Chinese-speaking MI6 contact agent’ first appear. And so was born the idea that Denis was this handsome, debonair and courageous spy and counter-spy.

  In Denis’s later years, whenever he was asked about his time as a naval officer, his response to questions about any sensitive work he may have done for the DNI was an enigmatic smile accompanied by suggestions that he was not at liberty to discuss his work. I believe that others misinterpreted this reluctance and assumed he knew more that he was prepared to tell. He was always prepared to, without actually saying so, let others make more of him than was the truth. Charming, urbane, and very unreliable he, and some of his family, was always happy to give the impression of an influential past not his to claim.

  Denis’s change of identity (his name, age, birthplace and details of his family) was a gradual affair. It started in 1926 after his unwanted marriage to Doris Rathbone and prior to his departure for Singapore, continued through his years in Malaya and Singapore until the opportune loss of all (or, more correctly, I suspect, selected) personal papers at the time of his escape from Singapore in February 1942.

  From 1946 onwards both my mother and father had identification papers that were incorrect. From then, until her death in 1952, Nona carried papers stating she was a British citizen born in Milverton, England. My father had changed his name, age, place of birth and parents’ identities. Not, I believe, because he had a secret world in espionage, but simply because it suited him to be the man he wanted to be and not just plain Len Emerson from working class Lambeth. It is a pity that now, after his death, others are embellishing his life to include more fanciful incidents than even he aspired to.