Guest Post: Queer Ancestor Spotlight - Denis Rake

Queer Ancestor SpotlightGuest Post
Written By Guest

Boudica is an eclectic witch & pagan living in MD with her husband, cats, and ever expanding book collection. A former tutor currently working at a non-profit focusing on environmental issues, she also volunteers with a cat rescue. In her spare time she’s a fusion bellydancer specializing in sword, is an unabashed geek, and according to the book on biblioholism a friend felt compelled to get her, not a biblioholic.

I’m excited to share my first guest Queer Ancestor Spotlight. Boudica spent time researching an amazing and almost unbelievable character from World War 2 history, Denis Rake. I hope you enjoy this deep dive into the colorful and exciting life of a British spy.

He was raised in a circus, counts a British diplomat, a Greek prince, and a Werhmacht officer among his lovers, survived two ship sinkings despite not knowing how to swim, performed in cabarets and lived in a brothel in France while working as a spy for the Special Operations Executive, crossed the Pyrenees Mountains from France into Spain on a crushed foot, walked 130 miles in 3 days, received numerous medals and is listed on the British Special Forces Roll of Honour website, and was described by his employer later in life as a, “shortened, rounded and jovial incarnation of Jeeves.”  

In today’s edition of ‘How the Hell Have I Never Heard of this Person?!’ I present Denis Rake. 

Denis Rake, date unknown

Denis Rake was born on May 22, 1902 to a Times correspondent father who supplied false papers to Edith Cavelli’s network in WWI (which led to a mass escape of Allied prisoners, and thus set a family tradition for saying ‘fuck you’ to Germany during wartime) and a mother who Rake claimed was a Belgian soprano with the Opéra de La Monnaie in Brussels (I say claimed because records indicate that she was in fact a very nice Welsh woman named Margaret Jones). According to his official records with the SOE, he was given by his mother to friends in the Sarrasani (or Sarazini) Circus and was raised as a child acrobat traveling about the continent; only to be returned to his parents with the outbreak of WWI. There is no actual evidence of this, but then, pre-WWI circuses are not well known for their record-keeping. Following the death of his father from tuberculosis, Margaret returned to England with her children in tow, and while there Rake studied radio operations and transmissions. 

When the War to End All Wars ended, Rake returned to Brussels where he met and fell in love with an English diplomat. When the diplomat was transferred to Athens Rake went with him; although they ended their relationship after a short while. Rake then entered a relationship with a Greek prince, and was happily maintained by him in an apartment until the man entered politics and his relationship with Rake was targeted by the opposition. After a brief stay in Venice, Rake returned to England and from 1924-1939 performed in musicals under the stage name of Denis Greer, and by all reports the highlight of his career was a starring role in Mercenary Mary. 

In 1939, with hostilities involving Germany well underway and given his fluency in French Rake was recruited by the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) to serve as an interpreter in Nantes. In June of 1940 all British nationals in the city were formally evacuated due to the encroaching German forces - and Rake had the misfortune of boarding the RMS Lancastria. 

The Lancastria was a passenger liner pressed into service for the evacuation and had an official carrying capacity of 1,300. No one knows exactly how many people were on board, but the loss of life was estimated to be between 3,000-5,800 when the Nazis sank her on June 17. This remains the largest loss of life from a single ship in British maritime history. Rake could not swim, but a friend pulled him from the water and they were rescued. Once back in England, Rake was transferred to the Royal Navy’s Volunteer Reserve, and was assigned to serve as interpreter aboard a minesweeper named Pollux. Which sank. Rake still didn’t know how to swim, but was once more rescued from the water.

In an interview given many years later Rake confessed that he sought out dangerous assignments was because he felt he needed to prove himself and test the limits of his courage due to the insecurities he felt about his homosexuality - being gay was not legalized in England until 1967. So when Rake overheard a conversation in a pub about the newly formed Special Operations Executive (SOE), who were recruiting spies and saboteurs to go to France, he naturally felt he had found his next challenge. He pulled some strings and got himself an introduction, and in August 1941 was assigned the name Dieudonné Rankin and sent for training. Even by SOE standards the 40 year old openly queer and jocular stage actor ‘Rankin’ was … an unconventional recruit. He refused to go over the assault course claiming he was too old. He refused explosives training on the grounds that, as a radio operator, he would not be involved in sabotage (technically true) and also because he didn’t like the loud noise. He tried to negotiate his way out of firearms training on the same grounds, but only partially succeeded. He reluctantly participated in parachute training, and was remembered by colleagues as needing to be pushed or thrown out of the plane each time he went up. 

Normally, all of this would result in someone being booted from the program. The SOE was desperate for radio operators though, and Rake was acknowledged as excelling in that. In his memoirs, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, commander of the section that Rake was in, recalled a conversation between himself and another officer:

“This Rake is an odd character sir. I just don’t understand him. He doesn’t like women. I mean, he really doesn’t like women. He prefers men.” 

“But he’s a damn fine wireless operator.” 

And that was that. Buckmaster also called the man that others were labeling as ‘a trifle effeminate’ as being, “...the most coldly courageous man he had ever met.”

In 1942 Rake was sent to France by boat, as there were concerns that he wouldn’t actually jump from the plane if they tried to parachute him in. After being in the country for roughly 48 hours he was stopped by a member of the Milice (the paramilitary police force organized by the Vichy government). Rake had a bag containing his radio in one hand, and a bag containing 2 million francs in the other. Being caught with the radio would result in arrest and being turned over to the Gestapo, where he could expect to be tortured and killed.

There are two versions of what happens next:

Version 1: Rake confessed that he found the radio and was hoping to sell it on the black market, and offers the officer a bribe.

Version 2: Rake confessed to being a thief. He had just robbed the home of a wealthy family just outside of town, because the rich weren’t suffering from the war the same way he and the officer were. They were leading easy lives and it just wasn’t fair, so he stole antiques and money from them. This version also ends with him offering the officer a bribe. 

Rake succeeded in avoiding arrest and traveled on to Lyon, where he contacted the legendary SOE operative Virginia Hall. She arranged for him to stay in a brothel, where Rake reports that the madame repeatedly offered him her services free of charge. He settled into a routine of sending radio transmissions during the day, and performing at the cabaret La Cicogne in the evenings. To help maintain his cover, of course. 

Unfortunately he was outed as a member of the SOE by one of the young men on the boat with him, who told his aunt about smuggling in SOE operatives without realizing his aunt was a Nazi-sympathizer. Virginia Hall’s contacts warned her about the situation, and she contacted Rake to tell him that his identity was compromised and the Gestapo had his description. Rather than taking Hall’s advice and evacuating to London (he’d only just gotten to France!) Rake instead offered to relocate to Paris to be the radio operator there. 

At this time Lyon was in Vichy-controlled France and Paris was under German occupation. The border between the two was heavily patrolled, and unfortunately for Rake he was recognized and arrested. He was questioned by the local police, and once again, there are several versions of what happened next:

Version 1: He massively bribed a guard into letting him go.

Version 2: When put on a train to take him to prison in Dijon he persuaded (or seduced) a guard to look the other way and he jumps off the moving train. 

Version 3: After being imprisoned in Dijon, he escapes in a garbage can with the help of a priest. 

On foot and with little to no funds from the SOE left, the slightly pudgy and bespectacled Rake arrived in Paris and reached out to his theater contacts for help, who were happy to oblige. It was while posing as a Belgian drag performer that he met an aristocratic German man dressed in civilian clothes named Max. It was love at first sight and the two lived in ‘domestic bliss’ for several weeks, never mind the fact that Max was a Wehrmacht officer. This affair was not mentioned in Rake’s official reports, but he does mention it to his SOE contact (agent Edward Wilkinson, who was captured and executed by Nazis in 1944) and later to Col. Buckmaster, insisting to both men that Max was anti-Nazi and never suspected that Rake was SOE. The affair came to an end when the radio that Rake was waiting for never arrived, and he had to return to Lyon to get one. 

By the time Rake reached Lyon he was severely ill with dysentery, and had to be nursed back to health by his friend, Virginia Hall. She got him a radio and arranged for him to travel back to Paris with two SOE operatives. The group split up to rest overnight in Limoges, but came under suspicion. Rake was arrested, and when the other two agents came to the agreed upon meeting place they were also arrested. Rake reports that in a panic he first tried to flush his forged identity papers, and when that didn’t work he ate them. Other reports are that sympathetic police officers disposed of the documents in the hopes of lessening the charges against him. Originally part of Hall’s resistance network until threatened by the Gestapo after a few too many prisoners went missing,  the local police chief  took the risk to delay their transfer to give Hall time to arrange for an escape. 

The escape attempt failed due to Rake’s continued ill health, and all three men were transferred to Castres prison, an infamous place where prisoners either died, were deported, or sent on to Dachau or Buchenwald. During one interrogation session  his foot is crushed. On November 8, 1942, after being imprisoned in Castres for several months, the men were transferred to the P.O.W. camp Chambaran. On November 11 the Germans crossed the demarcation line in response to Allied attacks in North Africa, and began rapidly expanding their control over the Vichy-ruled areas of France. The commander of the Chambaran camp was given orders to execute the three SOE operatives. Instead, he said, “fuck the Nazis,” and offered the men clothing, cigarettes, and chocolates; and a window of time where he and the guards were going to be conveniently distracted if the operatives would like to make their escape. Which they promptly did.

Sadly for Rake, as he had been arrested first, the other two agents believed he had betrayed them. So as soon as they were clear the two left Rake and made their own way to Paris. That left Rake to team up with several other escapees whose plan was to reach the relative safety of neutral Spain. This involved a dangerous crossing over the Pyrenees Mountains, which Rake had to make on a still injured foot. Once across the border his group was arrested again, this time by Franco’s paramilitary police, the Guardia Civil. Rake was imprisoned at Figueras and then transferred to the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp, where he was finally able to make contact with the British embassy. They arranged for him to be transferred to yet another internment camp, but this one was for officers and thus the conditions were slightly better. Rake was finally released in April, and by May 1943 he had returned to London. 

Rake had surgery to repair his crushed foot; but between the multiple arrests, imprisonments, torture, and the emotional stress of being accused of betraying the two operatives in Limoges, he  suffered a nervous breakdown. He was cleared of suspicion by the commanders of SOE, and put on light duty as a trainer for new recruits after he recovered. 

In May 1944 he returned to France to resume his work as a radio operator. There he reconnected with an operative that he’d met at the Miranda camp - in his memoirs, Rake described their relationship as intimate. He teamed up with Nancy Wake (who, along with Virginia Hall, was considered one of the most formidable women in the SOE) and called in supply drops for Resistance fighters. With the approach of D-Day, Rake's former lover requested that he join him as his radio operator, but the man was killed shortly after the two reunited. In order to reach his next contact, Rake had to cover an estimated 130 miles on foot, which he managed to do in roughly three  days. With his health once again failing Rake returned to England in October 1944, and left the SOE in December. Not yet done with the war effort, he next signs on to the Army Welfare Service and spends the rest of the war organizing entertainment for Allied troops in Belgium and Holland.       

After the war Rake once more returned to England, and like many other surviving SOE operatives had a difficult time finding work and fitting into civilian life. Not being able to openly discuss what they’d done during the war didn’t help during job interviews - they were by definition spies, and most of what they’d been  involved in was classified. Despite his track record with boats sinking, Rake took various positions on cruise ships. When he wanted a rest he stayed in a gaudily decorated caravan near his sister’s home in Dorset. He was later employed by Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as a butler/valet. Fairbanks was utterly clueless about his openly gay, exuberient, smallish butler’s past until one day a letter addressed to “Major Denis Fairbanks” arrived in the post; to which Rake responded with, “Oh dear. I was hoping you would never hear about all this nonsense.” 

Fairbanks persuaded Rake to write his memoirs, which were published under the amazing title, “Rake’s Progress: the Gay - and Dramatic - Adventures of Denis Rake, MC, the Reluctant British War-Time Agent.” In 1969, in part to promote his book and in part to campaign for greater recognition for his friend Virginia Hall, Rake took part in Marcel Ophüls’ documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity). Little is known about Rake’s later years, but it is believed he died alone in his caravan in Kent in September 1976. Upon his death, part of his estate was donated to the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. 

The man known for muttering, “Pull yourself together, duckie,” during challenging or stressful times was awarded the Military Cross by the UK;  and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) and awarded the Croix de Guerre avec Palme  (War Cross), by France. The name Denis Rake can also be found on the British Special Forces Roll of Honor website. A note in Rake’s official SOE files contains a message from one of his commanding officers: “Rake told me he is not afraid of death and I believe him.”  

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