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Francis Herbert Dedrick Pickersgill
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Journalist, SOE war hero.
Born at Winnipeg on 28 May 1915, son of Frank Allen Pickersgill (1879-1920) and Sarah Cornelia Smith (1877-1961), brother of John Whitney Pickersgill, he graduated from Kelvin High School, earned a bachelor’s degree in English from United College (1936), and a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Toronto (1938). For the next two years, he worked as a freelance journalist in France where he wrote numerous letters that were published in the Winnipeg Free Press.
When France fell in 1940, the Germans arrested and interned him as an enemy alien. After more than a year in custody, he escaped with the help of French friends. He made his way to England by way of Portugal. He joined the Canadian Intelligence Corps, was commissioned in the rank of Lieutenant on 9 November 1942 and promoted to the rank of Captain on 6 December 1943.
On 15 June 1943, he parachuted into occupied France on a Special Operations Executive mission to work with the Resistance. Three days after he landed, on 21 June 1943, he was captured by the Germans. In March 1944, he was shot and recaptured after he attempted to escape from custody in Paris. On 27 August 1944, he was moved to Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar, Germany. After weeks of maltreatment, on 14 September 1944, he was executed.
He is commemorated on the Groesbeek Memorial in The Netherlands and on the SOE Memorial in Valencay, France. The French government posthumously awarded him the French Legion of Honour. In 1996, the Province of Manitoba named Pickersgill Lake in his honour.
See also:
Personal Memoirs: The Story of Earl Grey School (1952) by James Dudley McLeod
Birth registration [Unnamed Pickersgill], Manitoba Vital Statistics.
Dictionary of Manitoba Biography by John M. “Jack” Bumsted, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999.
Frank Allen Pickersgill (1879-1920), WikiTree.
We thank Gordon Goldsborough for providing additional information used here.
This page was prepared by Robert Nash.
Page revised: 22 May 2024
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