Francis Cammaerts

Francis Charles Albert Cammaerts, DSO (16 June 1916 – 3 July 2006) was an outstanding Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent who organised French Resistance groups to sabotage German communications in occupied France.

Cammaerts was born in London and raised in Radlett in Hertfordshire, the son of Professor Emile Cammaerts, a Belgian poet. 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 was also to join SOE.

In 1940 Cammaerts was refused registration as a conscientious objector by his Local Tribunal, but it was granted by the Appellate Tribunal, conditional upon taking up agricultural work. He joined a farm training project at Holton Cum-Beckering, Lincolnshire. However, after the death of his brother Pieter while serving in the Royal Air Force, he felt he could no longer stand aside, and, as a fluent French speaker, he succumbed to the urging of Harry Rée to join SOE.

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