Charles Drage

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Charles Hardinge Drage (* 29 March 1897; † 31 July 1983[1][2]) was a British naval officer, secret agent and author.

Life[]

Charles Drage was the son of the writer and politician Geoffrey Drage (1860–1955) and Ethel Sealby Ismay (1870–1952). He joined the Royal Navy in 1910. During the First World War he took part in the Gallipoli campaign as a midshipman. After the war he studied at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with honours in 1920. From 1923 to 1926 he served in China aboard the sloop HMS Bluebell. In 1928, he married Enid Lomer, with whom he had three sons and three daughters.

Drage retired at his own request in 1933 with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. After leaving the Royal Navy, he worked for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). During the 1930s and 1940s, Drage was in charge of an MI6 station in Hong Kong. Officially he was the commercial adviser to the British government and had offices in the Head Office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.[3]

In the 1950s and 1960s, Drage published a number of biographies of various figures whom he had known during his years in East Asia, notably Morris Cohen, an adventurer, and Walter Stennes, a military aide to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and former head of the SA in Berlin. His book about Stennes, The Amiable Prussian, was translated into German.

One of his sons is the academic and scholar of Russian poetry and phonetics Charles Lovell Drage.

Works[]

  • Two-Gun Cohen (London, 1954). (Published in the United States as The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen (New York, 1954))
  • Chindwin to Criccieth: The Life of Godfrey Drage (Caernarvon, 1956).
  • The Amiable Prussian (London, 1958). (German version: Als Hitler nach Canossa ging (Berlin, 1982))
  • William King's Profession (London, 1960).
  • General of Fortune. The Story of One-Arm Sutton (London, 1963).
  • Servants of the Dragon Throne, Being the Lives of Edward and Cecil Bowra (London, 1966).
  • Family Story. The Drages of Hatfield (Hatfield, 1969).
  • Taikoo (London, 1970).
  • The Poon, and Other Stories (London, 1971).

References[]

  1. ^ "A typical Englishman" (a tribute by in The Spectator, 16 September 1983)
  2. ^ "A great character" (letter in The Spectator, 22 October 1983)
  3. ^ Kwong Chi Man and Tsoi Yiu Lun, Eastern Fortress: A Military History of Hong Kong, 1840–1970 (Hong Kong, 2014), p. 147; George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads: Horror, Hunger and Humour in Hong Kong 1941-1945 (London, 1994), p. 22.

External links[]

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