George Reginald Starr

George Reginald Starr was born on April 6, 1904, to Alfred Demarest Starr and Ethel Renshaw, in London. While his father was an American, his mother was an Englishwoman. He was one of the two sons born to the couple.

Young Starr completed his early education from Ardingly College. Following his studies, he apprenticed for seven years as a coal miner in Shropshire.

Having gained enough experience, he resumed his studies at the Royal School of Mines later followed by Imperial College London. He soon attained his degree in mining engineering.

Upon completing studies, Starr started working for the Glasgow firm of Mavor and Coulson Ltd. The company dealt with manufacturing mining equipment.

As a mining engineer, he spent the greater part of the 1920s and 1930s traveling to northern side of France and Belgium for work purpose.

In 1940, when the German invasion commenced, Starr was working in Liege, Belgium. With the help of British forces, he escaped to England. Following the Dunkirk evacuation, he joined the British Army. His language skills earned him a place in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) department. Starr worked under the code name Hilaire.

As an SOE secret agent, he was sent to France in 1942 to help in the resistance. Starr posed as a retired Belgian mining engineer who had become rich in the Congo. This made the large sum of money that he had and his unusual accent imperceptible to the German invaders.

Based in Castelnau-sur-l'Auvignon, he spied on the German 11th Tank Division situated near Bordeaux. Under his hoaxed identity, he successfully organised a ‘Wheelwright’ French Resistance network in the southwest corner of France, between Toulouse, Bordeaux and the Pyrenees

Starr’s most notable contribution in his life came as a Special Operations Executive agent in France during Second World War. Under the code name ‘Hilaire’, he set up a highly successful Wheelwright resistance network around Bordeaux, Toulouse and Pyrenees in southern France that dampened the German spirit completely. Along with his troops, he harassed the Germans by disrupting communication, cutting telephone wires, blowing railway lines and sabotaging power lines for many days at a stretch.