Valencay 2024

This year I was thrilled finally to have the opportunity to attend the annual commemoration at Valençay in France.  The very moving ceremony remembers the 118 SOE. agents who failed to return from their missions in France.  It is held every year on the 6th May as this was the date on which the first ever parachute landing of an SOE agent into France, during the night of 5th-6th May 1941. 

The agent’s name was Georges Bégué,  He had been trained as a wireless operator and as he was the first to be dropped into France,  became known as George 1.  He was dropped ‘blind’ that is to say, without any reception waiting for him, so had to walk some miles to Valençay, carrying his heavy radio set and his personal suitcase.  He had been given a name but no address, so he had to look up the address in the local post office.

On arrival at the house to be told that the man whose name he had been given, Max Hymans, was away, he walked into the village and stayed overnight at a hotel there. (The Hôtel de Rome now Aux Portes du Château.) The next day he returned to the house and spent the day with his contact, each man weighing the other man’s character and words and deciding whether or not they could trust each other.  Once trust had been established, Max took him in for a few days before escorting him to nearby Châteauroux where he began his work.

He set his first message to London on the 9th May, the first ever received from France.  Establishing communications with London was crucial to all that the Resistance groups and SOE agents hoped to achieve.  Georges was then able to set about organising parachute drops of weapons and material.  He worked with the (later famous) Pierre de Vomécourt, developing the first SOE network: AUTOGIRO.  It was Georges who came up with the idea of using the BBC via ‘personal messages’ to communicate with different Resistance groups and networks.

While AUTOGIRO was the first SOE network, Max Hymans founded one of the very first Resistance networks.  Moreover, he had contacted London and it was thanks to him that the first SOE network was founded in France. His status as a former Député allowed him to use a car, which enabled him to travel across France building his network.  Eventually he had to escape to London, finally arriving there in August 1942.

Working for de Gaulle as General Secretary for the Committee for Aid to Prisoners he saw to it that each month parcels were sent from the USA and Canada via the Red Cross, to POWs in Germany.  Around 800,00 in all. This support was vital, as the prisoners’ families didn’t have the means to send anything.  On virtually starvation rations themselves and having in most instances lost their breadwinners to the POW camps, they were unable to do anything to alleviate the misery of their loved ones’ imprisonment.  He also participated regularly in broadcasts in French from the BBC, urging French people in rural areas to resist the Nazis and the Vichy régime.  

Max and Georges both survived the war (Georges having been arrested and later taking part in the famous break-out from the Mauzac internment camp).  After the war Georges went to America and became an electronics engineer.  Max had an illustrious career which included effectively founding Air France which he then headed as its President until his death in 1961.  The town of Valençay is justly proud of their Resistance hero who has his own stele near the house where all those years ago he braved the risk of receiving a British agent.  Courage surely magnified by the fact that he was Jewish and could so easily (and not unreasonably) have chosen flight over fight.

Not surprisingly being so close (20km) to the demarcation line separating Occupied from Unoccupied France (until November 1942 when the Nazis swept into the formerly ‘Free Zone’ in response to the Allied landings in North Africa) with excellent transport links and a terrain well-suited to receiving parachute drops this area is steeped in history relating to the SOE, the Resistance, the Maquis and so forth.  I have focussed here on some of the key figures celebrated locally but all sorts of so-called ‘ordinary’ people had the most extraordinary courage and audacity to support the work of the Resistance and Maquis: including doctors and nurses amongst others.

I was thrilled to be able to visit the stele dedicated to the first two female agents parachuted into France, in an obscure field not far from Valençay. Andrée Borrell was to die horribly in Natzweiler Concentration camp two years later but Lise de Baissac survived  the war. She (and her brother Claude, also an agent) were two of 13 Mauritian agents to join the SOE.  You can watch a series of short filmed interviews with her made by the oral historian Martyn Cox (Co-founder of the WW2 Secret Network) on www.legasee.org.uk

Another woman renowned in the area was the formidable Pearl Witherington who actually led a local Maquis.  I of course popped into the Lion d’Or Café for a coffee – she had held meetings in one of the back rooms and her maquis often ate there.  She will be featured in a forthcoming talk I am planning for next year’s International Women’s Day…