HIGH ADVENTURE

Evening Star, Issue 23481, 23 January 1940, Page 12

HIGH ADVENTURE

MODERN "SCARLET PIMPERNELS" AT WORK Smoking a pipe in a London Hat sits a little bald-headed architect (states the ‘Daily Herald’). As ho smokes ho is planning a war-time courier service. Ho ran one during the last war. Just as they did last time, his men and women will journey from capital to capital. Sometimes they will carry samples of silk to bo matched in Paris, sometimes they will take schoolgirls to destinations in Switzerland, sometimes shoes and perfume for a Bond street shop, or even, occasionally, a note from a French politician to a British Cabinet Minister. Doubtless, too, the couriers will be assailed by as many spies as they were in the last war, and may succeed in building over a few more to the authorities. FRIGHTENED WOMEN. The architect, Mr A. B, Houeiiiu, started his Frauco-British courier service because ho happened to have an office in Paris-in 19JL4, and architecture did not seem to have much of an immediate future. He found dozens of old men and women, girls and children stranded in Paris, too frightened to travel home alone. So he grouped them into parties and took them back to London himself. Then -he engaged several professional men and women—lawyers, ex-soldiers, journalists, painters—and sent them off on a regular courier service across Europe. By the end of the war there were 19 of them. “ We did every sort of job,” he said in an interview, “ from bringing over a few luxury articles far big firms to carrying letters for Cabinet Ministers, and duplicates of Government despatches. RESCUE JOB. “ The spies were on to us when wo started to carry official documents. Men and women would try to get into conversation with the couriers on trains and boats. The couriers always reported to me,‘and 1 went straight round to Basil Thomson, head of the British Intelligence. Very rarely could I tell him anything he did not already know.” The most romantic job on which Mr Houchiu’s organisation ever embarked was that of trying to rescue an Englishman from the infirmary- in Germanoccupied Cambrai, where he had lain sick at the outbreak of war. “ It was to have been a regular Scarlet Pimpernel affair,” Mr Houchiu said. “ Some of our men were going to cross the front lines at night. But the sick man died before we could start. “ Through the agency of a Dutch business man, however, 1 did get back to England the abandoned baggage of English and American tourists, which the Germans had stacked high in Cologne Cathedral.” Already Mr Houchin has seven men, mostly ex-sailors, and a few women for his iffiw courier service. Their journeys are being mapped out through Europe. This time many of the journeys will be by air.