By the time Dick Cooper (as he was known to colleagues and friends) was ten years old, he had been kidnapped and held to ransom by Bedouin tribesmen, rescued from wolves in Turkey, escaped an ambush set by Kurdish bandits, received a bullet wound during the Constantinople uprising of the Young Turks, and become fluent in eight languages.

He joined the French Foreign Legion when he was fifteen and won his first Croix de Guerre at Gallipoli a few months later; a medal that had been instituted less than a month before.

The citation read: Tres belle conduite au feu, but later when his true age was discovered, the citation was changed to read: Notwithstanding his young age, fifteen and a half, has enlisted voluntarily for the duration of the war in the Foreign Legion, has been wounded in the Dardanelles. Very good conduct under fire.

Dick Cooper was to see service with the British Army in both world wars. During the Second World War he was the only secret agent to be landed in North Africa where he was betrayed and detained at Laghouat, a prisoner of war camp. Like many of his fellow agents he returned to England via an ‘underground’ operated escape route over the Pyrenees.

His visit home was brief and soon he was operating with other agents in Italy setting up a sabotage school and giving Italian agents’ intensive training before putting them through German lines.

In peacetime Dick Cooper served as a civil servant in the Continental Telephone Service where one of his tasks was to monitor the calls between Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson during the abdication crisis.

In retirement he assisted a group of Canadian ex-servicemen in obtaining backdated state pensions from their government by evidencing they had been prisoners of war with him in North Africa.

The penultimate paragraph in Dick Cooper’s autobiography entitled ‘Born to Fight’ reads:

‘I do not think it sad that I survived into old age. Gone are the days when I believed death on the battlefield was a splendid short cut to heaven. For I know the joy of a child’s laugh, the thrill of a blackbird’s song and the indescribable pleasure of that first whiff of perfume from a rose planted with one’s own hands. My campaigns are fought over parochial issues such as maternity units and factory dust. And even though the biggest event of the week might be the milkman dropping his bottles, I am content.’

Following a short illness Dick died peacefully at his home in 1988 leaving his wife of 57 years, two children, five grandchildren and one great grandchild.

For further gripping adventures of Captain Dick Cooper please visit the comprehensive BOOKS section.