George Reginald Starr

George Reginald Starr DSO MC (6 April 1904 – 2 September 1980) was a British mining engineer and one of the Special Operations Executive's best secret agents during World War II.

He was born in London, one of two sons of American Alfred Demarest Starr and Englishwoman Ethel Renshaw. He was a grandson of William Robert Renshaw. He was educated at Ardingly College, and at the age of 16, undertook a seven-year apprenticeship as a coal-miner in Shropshire. After studying mining engineering at the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London, he joined the Glasgow firm of Mavor and Coulson Ltd, manufacturers of mining equipment.

In 1940, he was working in Liège, Belgium when the German invasion began. He escaped back to England with British forces in the Dunkirk evacuation. He joined the British Army, being commissioned on the General List. He was subsequently recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) for his language skills and give the code name Hilaire. His brother John Renshaw Starr was also a member of the SOE.

In November 1942, shortly before German forces began their occupation of the Vichy Republic, he arrived secretly by boat on the Mediterranean coast of France. Based in Castelnau-sur-l'Auvignon, posing as a retired Belgian mining engineer who had made a fortune in the Congo, he successfully organised a French Resistance network in the southwest corner of France, between Toulouse, Bordeaux and the Pyrenees, designated by the SOE as the 'Wheelwright Sector'. Starr spied on the German 11th Tank Division near Bordeaux. The group he led also cut telephone and power lines and sabotaged power stations. He managed to persuade anticommunist and communist resistance member to join forces to fight the German occupiers. One of his team members was Denise Bloch.

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