Talk:Kazi Lhendup Dorjee

Personal observations

The following observations have been removed from the article. Given the mysterious nature of the lady and the possibility that the facts can be verified, I am including them on the etalk page, which is where there should have been put in the first place. Note that this was not my material but that of another editor. Motmit (talk) 06:27, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Note: Elisa-Maria Langford-Rae was my grandmother. Far from being of Baltic extraction she was of mixed Scots and English descent and was born Ethel-Maud Shirran in Dunoon, Scotland. Her father George Shirran was Regimental Sergeant Major of the Black Watch in World War One, and was later Chief Inspector for the SSPCC in Edinburgh in the 1920s. They lived in Borroughloch Square at the edge of the Meadows.

I don't know whether Ethel-Maud did actually gain a law degree or not. When she met my grandfather, a police-officer from the British raj, he was a student at Edinburgh university and she, so far as I know, was a shop assistant in a pharmacy although it's possible she had done a degree prior to that. She was initially listed as being my grandfather's "common law wife" - I imagine she married him when they went back to India, because being shacked up together would have affected my grandfather's promotion prospects.

My grandfather, Frank Langford-Rae, became chief inspector of police in Calcutta. Their son Roderick (Rory) Denis Edward Langford-Rae was my father. I have documentation relating to my father's death (in a road accident in Assam in the 1960s), with Elisa-Maria Dorjee listed as his next of kin.

Whitehound (talk) 19:29, 12 August 2010 (UTC) Whitehound here: I've since found my mother's original geneaology notes and also been in touch with other members of the Langford-Rae family: my father's father was Bertram Langford-Rae who was iirc a policeman in Calcutta, but not the same policeman called Langford-Rae who became chief of police in Calcutta.

However, there's no doubt about the rest of it. I am Claire Margaret Jordan, the illegitimate daughter of Roderick (Rory) Dennis Edward Langford-Rae. My father's mother was Ethel Maud Langford-Rae, née Shirran, and on the probate report following his death his "lawful mother" is given as Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa.

I have spoken to the journalist Sunanda K Datta-ray, who knew Elisa Maria well when he was a young man, and he confirms that he knew her real first names to be Ethel or Edith Maud and that she had either a son or a stepson called Rory, whom she spoke of lovingly. I have spoken to another member of the Shirran family who knew her as great-aunt Ethel and who confirms that the Shirran family knew her to have "presented herself as Belgian about the time she married the future first minister of Sikkim".

Sunanda K Datta-ray's book Smash and grab: Annexation of Sikkim, published 1984 by Vikas, isbn 0706925092. contains the following quote: "She called herself Elisa-Maria Langford-Rae, but Vicky Williams, who had peeped into the register of foreigners at the police-station, let it be known that the glamorous if no longer young blonde had been christened plain Ethel Maud" and "Her own son, Rory, had been in tea, killed in a motoring accident in north Bengal." I have the documentation to prove my father was Acting Secretary of the Indian Tea Association and was killed in a motoring accident in Dikom in Assam (not actually in Bengal but next door to it) in March 1965.

Other than that, you will not find any of this in published articles because she went to great lengths to cover her tracks, but I can show you the probate report which names Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa as my father's lawful mother, and the other relevant documents are all either in the Indian Office or the Scottish Records Office. She was born in Dunoon and raised in Edinburgh and was the daughter of George Shirran and Florence Blanche Franklin, and the sister of Florence, Blanche, Jessie, Lillian and William John George Shirran.

She is listed as a witness to the marriage of one of her sisters circa 1920, where she is described as a member of the Church of Scotland and as being at that time my grandfather's "common law wife" (which is a perfectly legal form of marriage in Scotland). Either she or her sister - but I believe it was Ethel - was working as a shop assistant in a chemist's shop at the time. I don't know if she did have a Law degree from Edinburgh University as she claimed - I'm waiting to get access to the university's archive - but an Ethel Shirran graduated from Skerry's Civil Service College in Edinburgh circa 1922.

I imagine she changed her name from Ethel Maud to Elisa Maria when she began working as a journalist, since she couldn't very well write about international affairs with a byline which said Ethel: it sounds too like somebody who writes about knitting patterns. Then she got a taste for reinvention. I can see why she did it - she seems to have been a genuinely brilliant woman who deserved to be heard, and she must have feared that no-one would take her seriously if they knew how humble her background was. But be that as it may, she seems to have had an extremely strange sense of humour, and nearly everything she ever claimed about her background was a lie. Whitehound (talk) 17:26, 12 August 2010 (UTC)—Preceding unsigned comment added by Whitehound (talk • contribs)

Thanks for adding that. The Datta-ray book is a good reference. Do you know Ethel Maud's dates of birth/death which would be useful, and a Scottish Register office index would be a valid ref. Do you have any information on her meeting with George Orwell (then Eric Blair) in Burma? Regards Motmit (talk) 22:57, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Found a reference to Rory Langford-Rae in Malaya -[1].Motmit (talk) 23:09, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

I have changed "Baltic" to Scottish per above (and private correspondence). (It is a myth that she was the illegitimate daughter of General Mannerheim of Finland.)--Shantavira|^{feed me} 14:36, 5 May 2011 (UTC)