‘Prosper’ Tour of Paris March 2025

This was a private tour led by my good friend Ian Titman, whose knowledge and expertise on the subject are unsurpassed, resulting from over forty years of painstaking research.

‘Prosper’ was the codename assigned to Major Francis Suttil, whose very large network of SOE agents and Resistants adopted this as the circuit name replacing PHYSICIAN with PROSPER.

He was married, with a small son, Francis and his letters home were tender and sweet, never revealing the increasing burden he carried and the huge and ever-mounting responsibilities on his young shoulders.

On this tour we visited various addresses associated with Prosper and his agents; for example where his radio operator Noor Inayat Khan and his courier Andrée Borrell, had stayed, amongst others.  Also the sites  of their arrests which of course was very poignant.  On the tour, I was struck by the sharp contrast between the luxurious apartments used by these agents compared with the way other female agents such as Diana Rowden, Nancy Wake and Virginia Hall had lived in other parts of France, often without running water and inside toilets. As a woman, of course I noticed this.

What was much more significant and shocking was the proximity between cafés frequented by the various German Intelligence agencies and addresses used by Prosper and his agents. Sometimes next door to each other, sometimes allowing a clear view across from a café to a ‘safe’ house.  They were frequent visitors to the ‘Hot Club’ to hear jazz also being enjoyed by the Germans.  Given the various lapses in security, it is hardly surprising that when the Germans pounced, the network was decimated.

Even more flabbergasting was to see the location of the double agent Henri Déricourt’s apartment, literally around the corner from the infamous Avenue Foch.  Slipping into the building and climbing to the second floor we saw what had been the door to his apartment: next door to that of Hugo Bleicher the Abwehr’s master spycatcher!

The collapse of the PROSPER circuit is acknowledged to have been the biggest disaster for SOE in France and ultimately led to the capture, deportation and almost inevitable death of hundreds: agents and their Resistance associates. There were inevitably some grim moments on the tour when we visited various sites where the Gestapo, SD or their acolytes had conducted unimaginably brutal interrogations.  We did this quietly and respectfully, each lost in our own recollections of the terrible accounts we had read and pausing in quiet reverence for the souls of all those who had suffered so horribly in the name of freedom.

I was also most keen while in Paris to pay my respects at the site of the Vel d’Hiv (near Bir Hakeim Metro station close to the Eiffel Tower.) Where the former indoor cycling stadium once stood, has been created a memorial garden dedicated to the four thousand Jewish children kept there before being transferred to internment camps prior to deportation to the death camps. The site of their names and pathetic ages engraved along a memorial made me gasp in horror. In just two days in July 1942, in addition to these 4,000 children, 3,118 men and 5,919 women were rounded up and brought to this site by the French police. About 6,000 men and women were sent from there to Drancy internment centre,  another infamous site associated with the Holocaust in France, prior to deportation to Germany. The remainder were kept in the stadium for five days without food, water or sanitation. It was heart-rending to stand in that garden and look upon that monument.

Other visits squeezed into the time available included one to the Pantheon where I was able to pay my respects to two huge heroes of the French Resistance: Pierre Brossolette and Jean Moulin and to Les Invalides which had some excellent exhibitions on the French Resistance and the Liberation.

On our penultimate day we attended the ceremonious unveiling of a plaque dedicated to Francis Suttil, placed on the building he had lived in and where he had been captured.  It was quite emotive, especially having read accounts of his capture. Like so many of his loyal network, he gave his life to the cause of freedom, shot in Sachsenhausen just weeks before the end of the war in Europe. The ceremony marked the anniversary of his execution.

With grateful thanks to Ian Titman and my other dear friends who were members of the tour group.