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Louis Burdet ? "The Stafford club
The Wine Cellars were an air raid shelter, and the Free French Resistance had a base here.To add to what must have been a unique period in its history, a German bomb fell directly into the roof, travelled down the lift shaft, but did not explode.When Sir Richard Costain bought the hotel in 1947, he installed the much decorated Louis Burdet as General Manager. Monsieur Burdet had led the French Resistance in Marseille."
shire-stafford.jhsites.net 
"The students who came to my school, which was held in a large country house near Wokingham, were mostly French. SOE had two French sections. One was the Anglo-French section under Colonel Buckmaster, which sent over such well-known agents as Odette Churchill and Captain Yeo-Thomas ("The White Rabbit"); these were mostly people who were bilingual in English and French or were of dual nationality. The other section comprised the De Gaulle French under "Colonel Passy", who took his pseudonym from a station on the Paris Metro, and these were the ones with whom I was mostly concerned. They were Frenchmen who had escaped from Occupied France, usually via Spain and Algiers, and very few of them spoke any English so my French came in useful after all. (One exception was a middle-aged man, Louis Burdet, who owned a hotel in St. James's; we met again after the war following his appearance in a TV quiz show, "Find the Link", in which he publicly stated that the training at our school had saved his life. He organized the resistance in the Marseille area under the name of M. Circumference). These French men and women came from all parts of France, from Lille to the Pyrenees, and from all walks of life. Their politics varied from extreme Right to Communist, but they were all solidly behind De Gaulle, whom they felt was the one man who could save their country, and they appreciated our efforts in training them for the work they were-going to do."
www.musicweb-international.com Laurent Laloup le mercredi 30 avril 2008 - Demander un contact Recherche sur cette contribution | |
