Rodney Drake

Father of Nick Drake and Gabrielle Drake married to Molly Drake. Nick Drake's father, Rodney Shuttleworth Drake, was born in Redhill, Surrey on 5 May 1908. The family was rather wealthy and his father was a surgeon. When he was fourteen he went to Marlborough College, where his father also had studied and later where Nick would go. He stayed at the school until he was seventeen, when he began to train as an engineer. In his mid-twenties he left England for Burma where he stayed for almost twenty years, working for a trading company, called the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation (BBTC), dealing principally in teak. In Burma Rodney met Mary Lloyd, or Molly, and the two of them got married on 14 April 1937 in the cathedral in Rangoon. Five years later Rodney and Molly moved to India due to disturbances in Burma. During this three years period in India Rodney ran sawmills at Poona and Jhelum. In 1944 they had a daughter who they named Gabrielle. Back in Burma he continued to work for BBTC and in 1948 Nick was born. Four years later Rodney, Molly and their two children decided to return to England. Rodney had become Company Manager of BBTC, but he felt that they had been away from England enough by then, and that it was time to leave. Back in England they moved to the little village of Tanworth-in-Arden, and Rodney began to work for the Wolseley Engineering Company in Birmingham and became Managing Director in 1953. From then on Rodney lived together with Molly in Tanworth-in-Arden until he died in 1988.