Over the years, there have been many claims and counter-claims about the behaviour of a group of Australian troops who boarded the Empire Star in Singapore without Captain Capon’s authority the afternoon before the ship sailed.
Many years after my father died, I read some notes he had written about that journey to Batavia. He writes about what he calls ‘unscheduled’ Australian troops being aboard. He makes the comment that they did not displace civilian refugees, nor were they a hindrance to the safety of the vessel. He certainly apportions no blame to them for leaving a city in chaos, where, due to the penetration of Japanese troops well into the city, and the cutting of lines of communication, the chain of command within the armed forces had virtually broken down. These ‘unscheduled’ troops were to disembark in Batavia to rejoin the war effort and heaven knows what fate awaited them in the weeks ahead.
By 16 February, Tanjong Priok was becoming congested with ships and refugees as the Japanese advanced through the East Indies.
The Empire Star, in company with the Dutch ship Plancius, left Tanjong Priok to continue its journey. The Plancius sailed to Colombo, while the Empire Star proceeded south to Fremantle. The day the ships left, the sky and the sea met in a dark grey line. Due to mist and smoke, visibility was poor. Luck, speed and poor weather conditions for enemy aircraft ensured a safe and uneventful completion of the ship’s journey down the West Australian coast. The Empire Star finally docked in Fremantle, and passengers leaving the ship, including my family, were disembarked on 23 March 1942. The Empire Star then continued on to Melbourne where the rest of her passengers were to disembark.
Despite being strafed in Keppel Harbour and receiving two direct bomb hits during her run for Batavia, Captain Capon and his crew brought many grateful people out of war-torn Singapore. Unfortunately, Capon’s luck was not to last — on 23 October 1942, the Empire Star was torpedoed north of the Azores and sunk by the German submarine U615. Captain Capon and 38 members of the crew managed to escape in a lifeboat but, tragically, were never seen again.
After the catastrophe that was the fall of Singapore, my family must have welcomed their arrival in Australia with open arms and happy hearts. A small house in Swan Road, Bicton was allocated to the family. Clothing and immediate needs were provided and medical care given to my mother. Even with the rationing of sugar, butter, tea and meat, food here was plentiful. The Western Australian climate was hot, but healthy. Normality, and a certain stability, had once again entered our lives.
I was born without complications a few weeks after our arrival in Fremantle. Denis was seconded to the Royal Australian Navy and our family settled gratefully into life in Australia for the duration of the war.
Although the family was now out of harm’s way, Denis’s duties became perhaps even more hazardous than in Singapore. With his understanding of what had transpired in the last weeks of the Malay campaign, his knowledge of Malay and a bit of Mandarin he was considered by the Navy to be a valuable asset. Almost immediately he was attached to the West Australian Branch of the Naval Intelligence Division working with the fledgling Coast Watcher program.
To maintain a watching brief on Australia’s eastern shore line and immediate neighbours, the Coast Watchers Organisation was set up in 1939. Developed to watch and report on enemy activity, approximately 400 coast watchers served in various capacities in Australia, New Guinea and the Pacific Islands during World War II. Their dangerous task was to gather information about shipping and aircraft and to transmit it to the Australian or American naval intelligence organisations. This form of intelligence gathering was to play a significant role in the determination of the war in the Pacific.
Denis’s area of responsibility was from Merauke in New Guinea to Karumba at the bottom of the Gulf of Carpentaria to Cape Melville on the Cape York Peninsula and Kairuku outside Port Moresby. During this period he was stationed on Thursday Island just off Cape York Peninsula. He spent many months patrolling, monitoring and gathering information on the Japanese in those areas until he become dangerously ill with not only a recurrence of the dysentery and malaria that had plagued him since his early days in Malaya, but dengue fever as well. After suffering debilitating bouts of illness, Denis’s health deteriorated to such an extent that he could no longer work in the field. He was sent home to his family in Fremantle to recuperate. When he recovered, he was sent east to join a group of people who were waging war in a very different way.
There are diverse ways to fight a war, and some of the most effective do not involve armies, ships, planes or guns. Australia was beginning to recognise the importance of the secret world of espionage. To know in advance your enemy’s next move, to understand their psyche, their capabilities and weaknesses — these were the weapons of choice of the newly formed Intelligence Service whose headquarters were in Melbourne.
Denis, with his knowledge of Singapore and Malaya, had come to the attention of a man who would alter the course of his future, Commander R. B. M. Long. In June 1943, Denis left Perth and travelled east to join the fledgling Naval Intelligence Service on the other side of Australia.
The linchpin of Australian intelligence and security work, Commander Long set up an espionage system in the Netherlands East Indies and South-West Pacific. In 1940, he advocated the formation of the Combined Operational Intelligence Centre to be situated in Melbourne; in January 1941 he became its first director. He founded the Special Intelligence Bureau to help break Japanese consular and merchant navy codes, and received ‘Ultra’ material (intercepted and decrypted enemy messages) from Britain.
In 1942, Long persuaded General Sir Thomas Blamey to set up the Far Eastern Liaison Office for psychological warfare. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Long’s proposal to establish the Allied Intelligence Bureau, which coordinated the activities of coast watchers and other intelligence and sabotage parties operating in Japanese-occupied territory.
Denis’s role initially was to be secretary to Commander Long; later he became his personal assistant and ultimately a lifelong friend.
My family’s flight out of Singapore left my parents with nothing but the clothes they stood in, a few extra clothes for their two small boys and the new baby yet to be born and a few precious photos. Later, Norma told authorities she had no official documentation such as passport or birth certificate when she left Singapore. She was lucky to have escaped with her life.
Denis carried a passport issued to him by the British High Commission in Malaya in 1939. The name shown is not his birth name, he has lost three years in age and handwritten under ‘Observations’ are the words ‘Bearer previously travelled on Foreign Office passport, number unknown, issued in 1934, now stated as lost.’
To lose your official identity through the circumstances of war would be a calamity for most people, but for my parents, it was something else. The absence of any identifying documents presented them with an opportunity. From 1942 onwards both Norma and Denis would carry passports that gave my mother a new nationality and both of them backgrounds that had nothing to do with reality.
Part Two
Then, watching for the first hint of a smile on my tear-stained face, my father would tweak the second littlest toe and continue:
And this little piggie stayed home …
Chapter 6
The winds of change, Australia, 1943–1946
Out of the haze of early childhood, recollections come to me like soft drawn sketches. So muted and blurred are the lines and the colours of these pictures in my head, that I cannot be sure which are fact, and which were stories told to me that have blended with these fragments from the past.
Now that Denis was working for Commander Long in Melbourne, the whole family packed up and moved there too. Initially we stayed with the Battens, parents of a new-found friend of Denis’s, until we found a home of our own.
Very soon after his arrival in Fremantle on the Empire Star, Denis had met a young naval officer called John Batten. They struck up a friendship and during
the period Denis was involved in surveillance in New Guinea and northern Australia, he formally requested that John be assigned to his team. Denis would have been aware that a family of Battens on his mother’s side of the family had migrated to Australia and he believed (or hoped) John Batten and his family were distant relatives and maintained that belief during his lifetime. However, extensive digging into birth and migration records has not revealed the link. There certainly was a family of Battens who migrated to Australia in the late 1800s but they do not appear to be the Battens to whom Denis’s mother was related — but more about that later.
We children called John’s parents Aunt and Uncle Batten and they were to figure largely in our lives for many years to come. After arriving in Melbourne, Norma grew to love and depend on Aunt Batten. After Norma died, we found two small photos of Aunt Batten tucked away in a hidden inside pocket of her handbag. I believe that Aunt Batten became the mother that my mother had missed for so long.
Many years later, when John was nearing the end of his life, I spoke candidly to him about the frustrations I had in finding my father’s and mother’s true identities. He would become both confidant and adviser.
I was around one year old when we first moved to Melbourne. After spending a few weeks with the Battens, we moved into a small timber-clad home in the leafy outer suburb of Croydon. Our new home was a modest bungalow with a large shady garden. Some of the strongest and earliest memories I have are of this garden where we three children played among the trees and flowers. Our family was safe for now in our small piece of paradise, a world away from the horror of the war.
Not long after we moved a fourth child was born, a boy they called David. The birth was very difficult, complications occurred and David died soon after birth. My distraught mother, it was said, hung between life and death for many days. Slowly, she recovered. There were no more babies after David.
Our parents always loved a picnic in the bush. I recall outings in our newly acquired car and being madly envious of my two older brothers as they got to ride in the dicky seat, that small opening at the back of the car that has now been superseded by the boot. The picnics were usually a casual affair with simple fare and a billy can of tea. The memories of those outings are brought back to me even now by the smell of eucalyptus and wood smoke.
Norma had help in the house at that time. Shirley, part housekeeper and part nanny, looms large in my memory as the adult who called the tune as far as we children were concerned. Denis’s work at Naval Intelligence would not have brought in a great wage, and considering our financial circumstances, it must have stretched the budget to employ full-time live-in help. Mother’s continued delicate health and her past reliance on two amahs to help with the children was no doubt why Shirley joined our family.
There is a story told in our family of the famous ‘separated’ birthday party. Either we, or the next door neighbours’ kids, I am not sure which, had measles and were still in the infectious stage. Apparently after much crying and wailing from all of us, both sets of parents decided to let the party go ahead under strict conditions. We three children were to sit on a rug on our side of the fence, and they on theirs, a timber paling fence between us. Party food was eaten (but not shared), party hats worn and gifts unwrapped, all in the splendid isolation of our individual gardens.
The years that Denis spent in the rubber plantations of central Malaya and with the Coast Watchers program had taken their toll on his health. His early duties in Northern Australia and the Torres Strait Islands had left him with damaged eardrums that caused great pain and some hearing loss. He was to suffer bouts of dysentery and dengue fever and recurrent attacks of malaria for the rest of his life. The work he did for the war effort was demanding, sometimes dangerous and very hush-hush. He would have been away from home a lot leaving Norma to cope with the loss of a child and to manage three young children in a strange country without family support.
Norma had left Singapore with virtually nothing — none of her clothes, furniture or household goods. In the beginning she would have had to accept the charity of strangers for the least little thing. Life in this country was going to be vastly different from her home among the palms and silver lawns in Changi. She had been used to a privileged life with servants to care for the children and to cook and clean.
Life for my brothers and I was pleasant and relatively uneventful during those early years in Australia. We were all too young to really appreciate what was going on beyond the boundaries of our small house and garden. So passed the first few years of my childhood, and the last few years of the war in the Pacific. But all these things hardly touched me. An outing, an occasional sweet treat, a pretty ribbon for my hair, a warm bed to sleep in — this was what my life consisted of, and this was all I needed.
By early 1945, big changes were on the way. Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, a week after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.
Japan held out for another few months and was preparing for a desperate and bloody defence of the home islands when an extraordinary event occurred. America unleashed its most secret and most deadly weapon on the Japanese people. Two atomic bombs were dropped, one on the city of Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively. Unbelievable devastation and loss of civilian life gave the government no option. The Imperial government sought the Emperor’s personal authority to surrender, which he granted. He made a personal radio address announcing the decision. The surrender was signed on 2 September 1945 aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
The war in Europe and the Pacific was finally over.
For our small family, the end of the war meant making decisions about where we would live and in what field of endeavour Denis would make his living. No doubt many discussions were held between my parents, then decisions made and acted upon and some nine months after the war’s end the war’s end, we were once again on the move. It would seem that the promise of a good living, a comfortable life, and the opportunity to once again be part of what had been before, all pointed to our return to Singapore.
We returned in style on the MV Charon, with many leather suitcases, a few crates of personal belongings and some sample goods in the ship’s hold for Denis’s new business venture. And this time, my mother travelled with a passport stating she was a British citizen, born in the same village in Somerset as Denis. Copies of both their passports would, many years in the future, lead me to a small village in rural England to face the disappointment of perhaps never finding the truth of my ancestry.
Denis’s new enterprise, Emerson Elliott & Co., merchants for the import and export of goods into and out of Singapore, was to become extremely profitable. By 1947, he had accrued a sizable fortune, importing a wide selection of goods from Australia and selling them on throughout Singapore and Malaya for a very handsome profit. The ravages of war had led to magnificent trade opportunities in the Far East and Denis was there to exploit them. His company imported a variety of desirable goods ranging from toothbrushes to motor vehicles and morphine and other pharmaceuticals to surgical instruments, while exporting timber, pepper and copra.
For the next few years, Singapore was to be our family’s home, until the winds of change would once again blow.
Chapter 7
Memories, all mine, England 1949
Some time after my sixth birthday, the family left the steamy tropical climate and political unrest of post-war Singapore to try our luck elsewhere. Denis’s business in Singapore had been sold for a comfortable little fortune and new opportunities were being considered in South Africa. It was said that the climate there was warm and dry, which would benefit my mother’s weak lungs.
We settled in Cato Ridge, a small town outside Pietermaritzburg. South Africa was experiencing great economic growth (at least for the white population) and it was known to have a climate kind to people with ‘weak chests’. In those wide yellow plains and mountain ranges, fortunes could be easily made, or so it was hoped. T
his was to be a land of golden opportunity. The reality, however, was to be quite different.
When we arrived in late summer 1948, signs of social and political unrest were evident everywhere. Within weeks of arriving, there was a racially motivated brutal murder not far from where we were living. Uncertainty, fear, and a government that was forcing a regime of oppression and inequality on the majority of its population, made living there an impossibility. Within months of our arrival, we were once again packing our bags, this time to travel to England to try our hand at being landed gentry.
It was here that my conscious and ongoing memories begin. From about three years of age, I have flashes of events in my childhood. But they are fragmented, only half-remembered incidents; recollections of people and places mixed with stories told so often that they have become part of the lexicon of my early life.
From the age of six, when I was first taken to England, my recollections are all my own. It was England that cradled many of my most happy childhood experiences.
In December 1948, we arrived by ship from Durban at the London dock, planning to make a home in rural England. We were armed with tea chests of tinned and packaged foods, as rationing was still a part of English life. With many steel-bound leather dressing cases, hat boxes and monogrammed suitcases, we arrived with all the paraphernalia that would have denoted a comfortably-off family.
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