It is always a great boost to any family history research when we are able to find a short biographical piece about an ancestor. It may be an entry in a Who’s Who type of book, a few lines in a regimental history or roll of honour, or a paragraph in the person’s school or college register. This last type of record will usually be published some years after their attendance at the educational institution and will be intended to inform their readers about the achievements of the past pupil of the educational establishment. In some cases the school may have produced a book as a tribute to its former students who had lost their lives in the First or Second World Wars.

It was this memorial type of book that I came across on TheGenealogist recently while looking at the life and times of a student of Dulwich College. In a book record named the Dulwich College War Record 1939-1945 I noticed the Agazarian brothers recorded in its pages and wondered at their unusual surname. The three siblings had joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve for the war and had been commissioned as officers. While two of them held the ranks of flight lieutenant, one was a flying officer and, tragically for this family, two of them would not live to see the peace. Searching this book record on TheGenealogist, using their last name, gave me a number of results from elsewhere in the same publication – including the Roll of Honour for Dulwich College 1939-1945 for those who had died in the war.

The entries indicate that there had been four brothers at Dulwich College, though it didn’t give details of the two whom we assume survived. For one of the siblings, Jack, the book editor had written a chilling line that indicated that this past pupil of the school’s wartime death had been anything but normal, even for a time of war. Before we delve into investigating Flight Lieutenant Jack Charles Stanmore Agazarian’s demise, however, first we will explore the records of his brother, Noel, who the Dulwich College book tells us was ‘Killed in action in the Mediterranean May 16, 1941’. The records on TheGenealogist are most enlightening.

Flying Officer Noel Le Chevalier Agazarain, we are told in the Dulwich College War Record 1939-1945, had been the third of the four brothers at the school. A sportsman, he had been in the First XV for boxing and swimming having been the captain of both in his last year at the school in 1935. Combining sporting achievements with academic study he went up to Oxford to study for an honours degree in Jurisprudence (legal theory) and while there boxed for Oxford against Cambridge. Rugby football and athletics were also part of his pursuits at Oxford, as was the University Air Squadron which gave him an entry into the RAF when in 1939 he was called up to fight in the war. Before being summoned for war service he had set out on the road to becoming a barrister and so had read for his bar exams at the Inner Temple. Whether he had time to take the exams, sit the required dinners and be called to the bar, the book does not say.

It does tell us that he was posted to a Spitfire squadron and that he took part in the Battle of Britain before he was posted to the Middle East, where he joined No. 274 Squadron and flew a Hurricane fighter plane. The 1939 Register, however, catches him in Cambridge at a public house called The Anchor where his profession is still noted as ‘student’. As an Oxford man we may wonder what he was doing in Cambridge at that time.

Reading further in the Dulwich College Roll of Honour, it is explained that not long after his arrival in Libya that he was credited with destroying a Me109 over Tobruk harbour and then, just a month after his posting there, he was recorded as missing in action after shooting enemy transport. Turning to the RAF Operations Record Books, fully searchable on TheGenealogist, to see if we can find this recorded in these official AIR 27 Air Ministry documents, we are in luck. These journal-like records can provide the researcher with an eyewitness account of life in a squadron as it was recorded at the time. Capturing everything from operations carried out against the enemy to visits of concert parties, a great deal of the unit’s life was recorded in the pages of the ORBs.

On 6 April 1941, in these RAF AIR 27 records we read about his arrival in Libya where in the records of No. 274 Squadron he and another three pilots flew in with their Hurricanes to bolster the squadron’s complement. The records allow us to follow FO Noel Agazarian as he completes several other operations in the month that he is there before we note his final mission and the report of his being missing in action. In the details of the sortie recorded in these documents we can see the aircraft number for the machine that took him on his last flight, the time that he took off and see that the time down is left chillingly blank for him and another pilot. Another page in the squadron’s operations record book gives details of the action that they had been a part of and concludes with ‘F/O Agazarian and F/O Clostre have not yet returned’ – as if there remained hope.

FO Noel Agazarian, along with many other pilots from this conflict, is commemorated on a number of war memorials including that of the Battle of Britain memorial on the Victoria Embankment in London, the Capel Le Ferne Battle of Britain memorial in Kent and, having been studying for the bar, he is included on a war memorial for members of the Inner Temple in the Temple Church.

TheGenealogist also has a record set that gives researchers the opportunity to find the GRO death records for military servicemen who have died overseas. In this we find Noel in 1941 and his brother Jack in 1945.

Murder, mayhem and Marcel
From the death index we can see that while Noel has 274 Squadron recorded as his unit, Jack’s unit is listed as Intelligence. The Dulwich College War Record 1939-1945 reveals that Jack had joined his father in business from school and in his position as a director of the family business he had travelled extensively in Spain and America. Their father, Berdj Rupen Agazarian, was an Armenian immigrant married to a Frenchwoman, Jacqueline Marie-Louise Le Chevalier. Mr Agazarian Sr appears several times in the Street Directories on TheGenealogist without there being any mention of what business he conducted. Consulting the 1939 Register on TheGenealogist, where he is resident at 19 St James’s Square in Westminster, it also provides us with the details that ‘petrol, drills and tools’ formed a part of the undertaking for which he was a director. Mr Berdj Agazarian also appears in a passenger list for a sailing in August 1933 from Plymouth to New York, when he travelled First Class on the French ship Paris. In this record he is described as a managing director. Another passenger list then reveals Berdj’s son, Jack, on a trip before the war to New York in June 1937. In this passenger list Jack’s occupation is noted simply as being a ‘representative’.

We may now go on to discover in the Air Force List for 1942 in TheGenealogist’s Military records that Flight Lieutenant Jack Charles Stanmore Agazarian was in the Administrative and Special Duties branch and not a pilot. The letters ASD* tell us this much but we need to scroll back to the beginning of the section of the book to discover what the asterisk after the three letters denotes: it indicates that the officer was not serving on the active list of the Royal Air Force, which ties up with him being in the Intelligence branch of the RAF, as recorded in the GRO Overseas Death Index. The biographical information provided from the Dulwich College War Record 1939-1945 shockingly tells us that he was ‘Murdered while prisoner of war, March 29, 1945’.

In the section for the Roll of Honour for Dulwich College 1939-1945, a fuller explanation is provided. We read that he was commissioned into the Royal Air Force ‘and became a liaison officer on special RAF duties in the Intelligence branch. He was captured by the Gestapo in July 1943, and was a prisoner in the camp in Flossenburg, Germany, when orders were received that all British prisoners were to be liquidated. He and others were murdered in cold blood on March 29, 1945, a fortnight only before the Americans liberated the camp.’

During the mayhem in the final days of the camp’s existence, the SS executed 13 Allied secret agents and seven prominent German anti-Nazis. Jack Agazarian, whose code name was Marcel, was one of those intelligence operatives put to death. It turns out that he was a member of the clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose purpose was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Jack Agazarian served as a SOE wireless operator and had been parachuted into France to join a network based in Paris. He was captured by the Germans on 30 July 1943, when he showed up for a scheduled meeting with one of his fellow agents. The Germans had already detained the other agent and were attempting to lure the deputy leader of SOE’s French Section, Nicolas Bodington, to the meeting. Unfortunately for Jack Agazarian, it was he who attended instead.

The penultimate line of the entry in the Roll of Honour for Dulwich College 1939-1945 reveals that in 1941 he had married Francine André, the daughter of a French civil servant.

This wartime marriage we are able to confirm happened in the district of Holborn in London by referring to the marriage index of civil registrations on TheGenealogist.

What none of this tells us is that she too was an agent of SOE and had worked in France in the very same network as her husband. After the war she settled in London and explained, when asked, that while they had both been in the Prosper circuit in Paris, they did not actually work together. As a wireless operator Jack would have worked alone while she delivered messages around the various agents. It is reported in Unearthing Churchill’s Secret Army, written by John Grehan and Martin Mace (Pen & Sword, 2012), that, while in prison, and just prior to his execution, Jack Agazarian tapped out a message to his wife in Morse code on the wall of his cell. The Danish prisoner who received the message was able to later deliver it to the SOE and from them it was then sent on to Agazarian’s wife.

Sometimes it is quite extraordinary the stories that can be found that lead on from a short biography in a school or college register book. In this case these literal brothers-in-arms, who laid down their lives for Britain, tell a tale of two lives cut short in very different ways but in the same fight against the wartime enemy.