Brian Stonehouse

Brian Julian Warry Stonehouse MBE (29 August 1918 – 2 December 1998) was a British painter and Special Operations Executive agent during World War II.

He was born in Torquay, England. When his family moved to France, he went to school in Wimereux, Pas-de-Calais. Back in Britain in 1932, he studied art in Ipswich at Ipswich Art School

Stonehouse worked as an artist but joined the Territorial Army after the outbreak of World War II. He was later conscripted into the Royal Artillery. In 1940, he worked as an interpreter for French troops in Glasgow who had been evacuated from Norway. In the autumn of 1941, he was training for a commission in the 121 Officer Cadet Unit when the Special Operations Executive contacted him. Due to his fluency in French, SOE recruited him as a wireless operator with code name of Celestin.

On 1 July 1941, Stonehouse parachuted into occupied France near the city of Tours in the Loire Valley. His radio got caught in a tree and he spent five nights in the forest before he could get it down. After finally retrieving it, the radio would not work properly and his contact told him to move to Lyon. In September, accompanied by another agent, Blanche Charlet, he went to a safe house and made contact with the other SOE agents. By August he was in regular contact with the SOE station in London. However he became careless and transmitted too much and too long. As a result, German direction-finders triangulated his position and the Milice arrested him on 24 October 1941 in near Lyon. Charlet was also captured but later managed to escape to London. After the war Stonehouse discovered that Charlet had tried to commit suicide.

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