Francis Cammaerts

While seeking air-tight security, Cammaerts said that he always informed the families in the places he spent nights, usually rural farmhouses or in villages, that he was English and left them no doubt of the danger they were in by hosting him. He was always received, he said, with “open arms.” As in the case of others who operated in enemy-held territory for prolonged periods, he gave a great deal of credit to the ordinary French citizens who had provided him and his colleagues with safety and comfort. In the BBC TV series Secret Agent, broadcast in 2000, Cammaerts said, “The most important element was the French housewife who fed us, clothed us and kept us cheerful.”

He was Principal of the Leicester Teacher Training college in Scraptoft, between 1961 and 1966, overseeing a liberalising of the training methods used. He then moved to Kenya to help with the development of the country’s education system in the immediate post-colonial period. Cammaerts became Professor of Education in Nairobi from 1966-72. He later returned to England, to become head of Rolle College, a teacher training college at Exmouth, which later became part of University of Plymouth. In 1981, aged 65, he came out of retirement to start a teacher training college in Botswana. He had a major impact on the development of education on all levels in the country, which had the most advanced policies on the African continent. Cammaerts finally retired in 1987, returning to live in the south of France until his death in 2006.

He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1958 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre. In 1959 he appeared for the defence in the notorious trial of Penguin Books over the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The trial, at the Old Bailey was front-page news and Cammaerts statement under cross-examination that he had let members of his 6th Form read the book and they did not appear to have been corrupted or become depraved, was widely reported. The publisher won the case.

Cammaerts did not forget his wartime lover, Christine Granville. Following her murder in 1952, he became part of a group of men dedicated to ensuring that her name not be “sullied and succeeded in stopping several press reports and two books” to protect her from stories of her active and diverse sex life.

In 1948 Cammaerts became the first Director of the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, which was a UNESCO agency and enabled him to undertake international trips including to the USA. In 1952 Cammaerts returned to teaching, with the encouragement of John Newsom and Ronald Gould. He later became the headmaster of Alleyne’s Grammar School in Stevenage for nine years, at a time when Stevenage New Town was growing rapidly. Cammaerts was keen to implement the Labour Government’s move towards comprehensive education, encouraged by Newsom. Alleynes enrolment increased from 170 to roughly 600 boys during Cammaert’s tenure, and new classroom blocks were added.

Cammaerts wanted to be transferred to work in the diplomatic world, but despite his extraordinary war record the Foreign Office considered Cammaerts to be a foreigner, as his father was Belgian, and so unable to work at the Foreign Office. In 1946 he was offered work in Brussels with the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency, and he was able to move with his family to Belgium for 18 months. In 1948 a daughter, Christine (named after Christine Granville), was born with multiple disabilities. For the remainder of her short life, Christine’s circumstances played a large part in the decisions made by the Cammaerts’ about their own lives.

In March 1945, when the Allies had crossed the Rhine, Cammaerts was asked to join the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force (SAARF). Many of the personnel were SOE or OSS agents. Their main objective was to help in the reconstruction work in Germany after the fall of Hitler. For Cammaerts it primarily meant dealing with the appalling aftermath of the newly liberated concentration camps. Cammaerts visited Dachau, Belsen and Ravensbruck. He was appalled and felt impotent in the face of what he found. He later said ‘the SAARF period was blank and grey and one of those certain areas in my life when I didn’t know what I was doing’. SAARF was disbanded in July 1945.

On his return to France in February 1944, Cammaerts’ aircraft crashed on landing, although he was unhurt. He went on to check that his Jockey circuit was operational and later visited the 3,000+ group of Maquisards (young Frenchmen who had fled to the Vercors plateau to avoid being sent for forced labour in Germany). In April 1944 he informed SOE’s London headquarters that the Vercors had a finely organised army, but they needed long-distance and anti-tank weapons. Cammaerts’ Jockey circuit played its part following the Normandy Landings: they and the other SOE circuits cut railway lines and helped to severely hinder German troop and machinery movements. Cammaerts was appointed head of Allied missions in southeastern France. By this time he had built up an organisation of more than 10,000 people.

Despite his meticulous care for security, on 13 August 1944, two days before the Allied Operation Dragoon landings in southern France, Cammaerts, Xan Fielding, an SOE agent who had previously operated in Crete, and a French officer, Christian Sorensen, were arrested at a roadblock by the Gestapo at Digne-les-Bains. Cammaerts had received a large amount of money for operations which he divided among the three of them, an action that would prove a mistake. Entering Digne by automobile, they came upon a German checkpoint. Under questioning, Fielding denied knowing the other two, but a young German civilian examining their forged identity papers noticed that the serial numbers of the money each of them carried was in the same series, thus indicating a connection among them. The three were taken to Digne prison and roughly interrogated. They claimed they were involved in black marketing to account for the money. The Germans apparently did not know they had captured Cammaerts, the most important SOE agent in southeastern France, but decided to execute the three suspecting they were associated with the French resistance. m.

Cammaerts’ time in occupied France ended in September 1944. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Legion d’honneur, Croix de Guerre and the American Medal of Freedom for his work in south-eastern France.

Disillusioned with what he had seen of the Carte Organization and the Spindle network, Cammaerts organised his own circuit (Jockey). He worked initially in the area of Montélimar. His first associate was wireless operator Auguste Fioras, a man as cautious as Cammaerts himself. The first message the pair sent to London was on 27 May 1943. Fioras would transmit 416 wireless messages to London during 1943 and 1944, a record for SOE wireless operators.

In the latter part of 1943 Cammaerts established several small semi-autonomous groups of resisters to the German occupation. They were located along the left bank of the Rhône between Vienne and Arles and eastwards through the hinterland and into the Alps. He traveled around on a motorbike visiting each group. By the end of 1943 Cammaerts had ensured that his Jockey circuit was ready to play its part in any sabotage that might be required. In November 1943 he was recalled to London for debriefing, and, while there, he raised the problems among the SOE agents working in France, often at cross-purposes, some under the command of General Charles de Gaulle’s headquarters and others, many of them French citizens, under the command of SOE’s French section.

Cammaerts began extensive training with SOE in October 1942. Training included fieldwork experience in the New Forest, Scotland and Manchester. Cammaerts was considered by some of his training officers to be lacking in physical skills, and ‘more intellectual than practical’. Nevertheless he was considered to be above average in all areas. He was given the rank of captain and the code name Roger, and flown into occupied northern France in March 1943. More than a dozen SOE circuits were active in France at that time. Cammaerts was assigned to the Donkeyman network or circuit, then operating in the upper Rhône Valley, but his reception party from Donkeyman and the Carte network drove him first to Paris, with a dangerous disregard for security that alerted him to the risks of such behaviour. Cammaerts concern was heightened by his appearance. He was 193 cm (six feet, four inches) tall with feet so large his nickname in France was “Big Feet.” He spoke French with a noticeable Belgian accent. Cammaerts worries about security were confirmed one day after he arrived in Paris when Carte leader, André Marsac, was arrested by the Germans. Cammaerts fled Paris by train to Annecy

In 1940 Cammaerts was refused registration as a conscientious objector by his Local Tribunal, but it was granted by the Appellate Tribunal, conditional upon him taking up agricultural work. He joined a farm training project at Holton cum Beckering, Lincolnshire. During this period he met Nancy Findlay (Nan), and they married on 15 March 1941. After the death of his brother Pieter while serving in the Royal Air Force, Cammaerts believed he could no longer stand aside from participation in the war, and, as a French speaker, he succumbed to the urging of Harry Rée to join SOE.

At the beginning of World War II in 1939, Cammaerts declared himself a conscientious objector, but in 1942 he joined the SOE. He recruited and supplied with arms and training a large number of resistance networks and cells over an extensive area east of the Rhone River extending to the border with Italy and north from the Mediterranean Sea to the city of Grenoble. Despite being very careful in his work, Cammaerts was captured by the Germans in August 1944, but saved from execution by his courier, Christine Granville.

Cammaerts was born in London and raised in Radlett in Hertfordshire, the son of Professor Emile Cammaerts, a Belgian poet, and Tita Brand, a successful actress. He was educated at Mill Hill School, where he was a contemporary of Francis Crick and Patrick Troughton. He became a pacifist in the 1930s while at Cambridge, where he read English and history at St Catharine’s and also won a hockey Blue. After university he briefly began a teaching career. He taught in Belfast before moving on to Beckenham and Penge County School for Boys, near London, where he taught with his close friend from university, Harry Rée who also joined the SOE.

Francis Charles Albert Cammaerts, DSO (16 June 1916 – 3 July 2006), code named Roger, was an agent of the United Kingdom’s clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe and Asia against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. In France, SOE agents allied themselves with French Resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. Cammaerts was the creator and the organiser (leader) of the Jockey network (or circuit) in southeastern France in 1943 and 1944.