Six Children of an Armenian Refugee, and the War They Chose: A London family in WWII
Six Children of an Armenian Refugee, and the War They Chose: A London family in WWII
There is a Spitfire in the Imperial War Museum in London, serial number R6915. The pilot who flew it shot down four German aircraft and twice brought it home so badly damaged he was forced to land. He was the son of an Armenian who had fled the massacres at Smyrna, and a Frenchwoman who once bought a derelict biplane at auction and stood it in the back garden for her children to play in. He was killed over the Libyan desert at age 24.
His brother was executed at Flossenbürg, five weeks before the war in Europe ended. On the wall of his cell, before he died, he tapped out a message to his wife in Morse code. A Danish prisoner memorized it and carried it out of the camp.
One sister ferried Spitfires across England. The youngest lived until 2017 and spent her life building a theory of how human groups survive.
The airplane came from the mother’s side. In 1923 Jacqueline bought a war-surplus Sopwith Pup at a Croydon auction for five pounds and stood it in the garden as a plaything. Three of the four boys would end up in the Royal Air Force.
Noël
He went up to Oxford in 1935, after Trinity College had turned him down. The reason, as he told it, was his blood: the college could not take him because “in 1911, when the last coloured gentleman had been at Trinity, it had really proved most unfortunate.” He went to Wadham instead, and became a friend of Richard Hillary, who would immortalize him in The Last Enemy as “cosmopolitan, intelligent, and a brilliant linguist.”
Five years after that rejection he was flying a Spitfire over the Channel in defense of the country whose oldest university had turned him away for his ancestry. Through the Battle of Britain he shot down German aircraft over Portland and Portsmouth; one of his Spitfires, R6915, survives in the Imperial War Museum today. In 1941 he was posted to North Africa. On May 16, over Libya, he was shot down and killed at twenty-four. His squadron’s logbook records it without ceremony — the take-off time entered, the landing time left blank: “F/O Agazarian has not yet returned.”
Jack
The second brother joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Churchill’s secret service for sabotage and resistance behind enemy lines. Trained as a wireless operator under the code name Marcel, Jack parachuted into France at the end of 1942 and made his way to Paris to join Prosper, Britain’s most important network in the country.
Jack Charles Stanmore Agazarian (1915–1945). SOE wireless operator, Prosper network; executed at Flossenbürg, 29 March 1945.
Prosper collapsed within weeks — not through treachery so much as its own dangerous improvisation: too few radio operators, too many agents sharing the same flats and cafés. By the summer of 1943, the arrests had begun. Jack, sent back into France to find out what remained, was arrested walking into a meeting the Germans themselves had arranged. He was tortured at Fresnes prison and, his historian records, told them nothing. He was moved to Flossenbürg and executed there on March 29, 1945.
And there, on the wall of his cell, he tapped out his last message in Morse — to Francine, his wife, herself an SOE courier who had worked beside him in Paris under the name Marguerite.
As for the message he had tapped out, we do not know. Every source records the same two facts — that the message existed, and that it reached her. In a story whose subject is the cryptic mantle over what these six thought and felt, it is almost too fitting that his last words, like his reasons, should be unreadable.
The Others
Levon, the eldest, was the one who came back — flying Hurricanes over Calcutta, then patrolling behind Japanese lines in Burma with Wingate’s Chindits. Monique began the war nursing the burned faces of aircrew at East Grinstead, decided to fly anyway, talked her way past a medical that judged her too short, and ferried Spitfires until 1945; told later that pilots were not to fly while pregnant, she took to crossing the airline booking hall with her handbag held in front of her.
And Yvonne, the youngest by a decade — ten years old when the war began — went on to build a theory of how human groups survive, and traced it, in her memoir, to the nursery floor, where “one or other of ‘the boys’ would climb over my nursery gate and give me lessons on strategy.” Two of them were dead within five years. She named her own son Jack.
The Question, Heavier
A boy escapes the destruction of the Armenians and reaches England with nothing. Thirty years later, four of his children are in uniform against a regime carrying out an extermination of its own — and he dies without learning what became of them. They were not fighting for a country that had entirely accepted them: one of them had been refused a place at Oxford for his blood, and died for England all the same. The point is not that Britain deserved them. It is that they chose it anyway — and that the choice was made by a whole household, not by one exceptional child.
Which returns us to the question we began with, still unanswered and now heavier: what does a family transmit, that four children out of six should make the same decision, alone, and never explain it? The mantle stays drawn. We are left, as Yvonne was, with their acts — and with a Morse message on a wall that no one alive can read.
Sources & Method
Three registers are kept distinct. Facts — dates, units, places, awards — come from the sources below. Open controversies — whether Prosper was carelessly lost or deliberately sacrificed — are left unresolved. Inferences about what these six thought or felt are declared as such: with the exception of Yvonne, none of them left any testimony of their motives. The content of Jack’s Morse message is not reproduced because it exists in no public record.
Principal sources: Imperial War Museum — sound interview with Marie Monique Agazarian (catalogue 9579) and the Private Papers of Flight Lieutenant J. C. S. Agazarian (Documents.16204); RAF Operations Record Books (AIR 27), No. 274 Squadron; Dulwich College War Record 1939–1945; Croydon Airport Society. Published works: Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (1942); M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France; Francis J. Suttill, Shadows in the Fog (2014); Susan P. Gantt, “In Memory of Yvonne Agazarian, 1929–2017,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy (2018); Richard Riding, “Aggie’s Airline,” Aeroplane Monthly (Nov. 1987).
Image note: the photographs are period images gathered from public collections (Imperial War Museum, Croydon Airport Society, and public-domain sources by age). The IWM licenses its own image of Spitfire R6915.
Research, historical interpretation, and the selection and arrangement of material — and final responsibility for them — are the author’s. Drafting assistance: AI language model (Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic); every fact was checked against the sources listed at the end.
