Frank Pickersgill

Captain Frank Pickersgill

Frank Herbert Dedrick Pickersgill (May 28, 1915 – September 14, 1944) was a Canadian Special Operations Executive agent.

Biography

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Pickersgill graduated from Kelvin High School in that city. Holding an English degree from the University of Manitoba and a Master's degree in classics from the University of Toronto, Pickersgill set out to cycle across Europe in 1934, then returned to Europe in 1938 to work as a freelance journalist for several Canadian newspapers. During his travels he met Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work he hoped to translate into English, though the oncoming war distracted him from the project.

Pickersgill served the first two years of the war imprisoned by the Germans in Saint-Denis Internment Camp (Stalag 220) as an enemy alien. He escaped by sawing out a window with a hacksaw blade smuggled into the camp in a loaf of bread. Pickersgill made his way to the American Consulate in Lyon, France. The United States still had diplomatic relations with Vichy France, not yet occupied by Nazi Germany. On arrival in Lyon, American diplomat Constance Ray Harvey described him as lean, hungry, and with practically no clothes. He helped the Americans write a newsletter in French describing events in the war while he waited for them to arrange an exit permit from France for him. He made his way to neutral Lisbon where the U.S. Embassy had a fund to help escapees from Nazi-controlled Europe.

Frank Pickersgill was the younger brother of Jack Pickersgill, a member of the House of Commons of Canada and a Cabinet minister.

SOE agent

Once Pickersgill was safely back in Britain, he rejected the offer of a desk job in Ottawa and instead received a commission in the newly created Canadian Intelligence Corps. Because he was fluent in German, Latin, Greek and especially French, he became an agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Together with fellow Canadian, Ken Macalister, Pickersgill was parachuted into occupied France during the night of June 15/16, 1943. Pickersgill was to be the organiser (leader) of a new SOE network called Archdeacon. Three days prior to their scheduled arrival, French SOE agent Pierre Culioli had requested the operation be cancelled because of many German soldiers in the drop area. His SOE leader, Francis Suttill, declined the request and the two Canadians parachuted into France as planned.

Both men were met when they landed by Culioli and SOE agent Yvonne Rudellat (codename 'Jacqueline'). They stayed a few days with Rudellat and Culioli near Romorantin to get their French identity papers in order. On June 21, Culioli and Rudellat drove the Canadians toward Beaugency but they were stopped at a German checkpoint in Dhuizon. The four were ordered out of the car for questioning and for their papers to be examined. Rudellat and Culioli were cleared and returned to the car but the Germans were suspicious of the Canadians. While they were waiting for the Canadians to be released, a German soldier ordered Culioli and Rudellat to get out of the car for more questioning. Culioli sped away, chased and shot at by Germans in another car. Rudellat was seriously wounded and they were captured when they ran into another checkpoint about 10 kilometres away. Rudellat subsequently died in Bergen-Belsen; Culioli survived the war.

In March 1944, Pickersgill tried to escape from SD headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch. He attacked a guard with a bottle and threw himself out of a second-storey window. He was shot several times and recaptured. He was then interned with other agents in a camp at Ravitsch, 25 miles North of Breslau.

On August 27, 1944, he was shipped with members of the Robert Benoist group to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was executed on September 14, along with 35 other SOE agents, including two other Canadians, Roméo Sabourin and John Kenneth Macalister. Though there are conflicting reports about their deaths, the men are thought to have been hung on meat hooks and strangled with piano wire. Their bodies were incinerated.

After the war, SOE's Vera Atkins interviewed Josef Kiefer, former head of the German SD in Paris. Kiefer named Pickersgill as one of three SOE agents he knew who successfully resisted all German efforts to obtain information from them. Two other successful resistors he named were Noor Inayat Khan and France Antelme.

Posthumously, the government of France awarded Pickersgill the Legion of Honour, and he is listed as one of the SOE agents who died for the liberation of France on the "Roll of Honour" on the Valençay SOE Memorial in Valençay in the département of the Indre. He is commemorated by an obelisk at Romorantin-Lanthenay, where he is one of 4 members of SOE to be listed. He is also honoured on the Groesbeek Memorial in the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery in the Netherlands. The University of Toronto designated a Pickersgill-Macalister Garden on the west side of the "Soldiers' Tower" monument, but later the plot was rededicated "in memory of those tho gave their lives for peace and freedom", though there is still a plaque saying that it was originally dedicated to Macalister and Pickersgill.

Further reading

• The Pickersgill Letters, written by Pickersgill during the period 1934-43, was published by George H. Ford in 1948. The book was republished in 1978 by McClelland & Stewart in an expanded edition under the title The Making of a Secret Agent: Letters of 1934-1943.
  • In 2004, two of his letters sent to his family from Central Europe in 1939 were published by Charlotte Gray in Canada: A Portrait in Letters.
• His story and that of Ken Macalister were retold in Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation, by Jonathan Vance (HarperCollins, 2008). This book used material recently made available from SOE files to tell a more complete story of their endeavours than had previously been possible.

External links

• CWGC: Frank Herbert Dedrick Pickersgill