Today’s Cool Person of the Day: Ida Cook, who wrote Mills & Boon under the pseudonym Mary Burchell. According to the article in yesterday’s Guardian, Cook and her sister were huge opera fans who, under the cover of being opera groupies, snuck in and out of Germany before WWII to smuggle the valuables of Jewish families to safety. Later, Cook began writing Mills & Boon novels to fund their activities, and helped 29 people escape the Nazis.
The mild-mannered spinsters became expert smugglers, regaling border guards with tales of the previous night’s performance, switching labels in fur coats, and wearing real diamonds with outfits so dowdy that customs officers would presume the jewels were paste.
Ida Cook and her sister, Louise, were named among the Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Israel.
Thanks to azteclady and Ms. Anon who forwarded me the link.
Very cool story indeed! Thanks for sharing!
Talk about having cojones, hmm? Amazing, amazing ladies.
That is a neat story. Thanks for posting it.
“Righteous Gentiles” – that is fantastic!! Awesome story!
I’ve lost count of the number of Burchell books I’ve read.
Well done!
Thank you for posting this – talk about awesome! Hopefully some screenwriter will see this article, because it practically screams “movie” or better yet, “BBC mini-series.”
I don’t remember if I’ve read any of her work, but I’m going on a Burchell hunt now!
Anyone have any favorite titles that I should look for?
What a great story. I had no idea Mills & Boon had been around for that long.
That’s pretty cool.
I have about a dozen or so Burchell’s that I got off ebay a number of years ago. I discovered her books way back when I first started reading romances.
That’s fantastic! Doing the right thing at great personal risk, just because it is the RIGHT THING. This is absolutely the kind of thing that needs to not only be recognized, but shouted from the rooftops and cheered loudly and often.
WELL DONE, LADIES!!!
Go to that website and read some of the stories of the people who’ve been given the Righteous Among the Nations title. Absolutely amazing and inspirational. http://www1.yadvashem.org/righteous/index_righteous.html This one moved me to tears.
I’m going to bookmark this website and return to it whenever I start losing my faith in humanity. People can be seriously good, y’all. They really, really can. Wow.
I love hearing stories like this one. It amazes me the strength and bravery people can summon. They could have turned a blind eye like others did yet…
What amazing people. They did the right ting because it was right, how great is that? Thanks for sharing this.
thing, not ting. Sheesh I need to proofread.
How cool!! Way to go, sisters Cook!
I used to read her books all the time as a teen. I’ll have to look and see if any of them are in my keepers upstairs. I remember that quite a few of them had a musical theme. Now I know part of the reason why.
She had several connected books called the Warrender Saga. It had a dozen or so books that were all about the same family. I vaguely recall (and I dunno—it could just be the voices in my head talking) that there were several generations, since she wrote them over a 20 year period. I know many of her books have been reprinted in various collections over the years too.
I read somewhere recently that Mills and Boon is (are?) celebrating 100 years in the publishing biz, or something equally impressive.
Diane
I was at Yad Vashem last year and saw the trees and plaque in honor of, among others, Oskar Schindler at the Avenue of the Righteous.
It’s an amazing, humbling and moving experience to read the stories of ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
She’s one of the handful of Harlequin authors I regard as keepers. The Warrender saga begins with famous and notoriously difficult conductor Oscar Warrender falling in love with young soprano Anthea. Later books involve one or both of them helping out protegees with both success and romance.
table84—obviously I’m not on the A list…
My Burchells are quite possibly the first things I’d save if my house were on fire. (Not including the cats and the dog.)
What? That makes total sense. Some of them would probably be very hard to replace.
There are many deeply moving stories on the Yad Vashem website about the ordinary, decent people who took huge risks to help their Jewish friends and neighbours during that dark period of history; people who refused to believe the lie that whole races, whole cultures and religions, are ‘the enemy’, who clung to the knowledge that we are all one species, and acted on it.
On the matter of the age of Mills & Boon: the company reaches its centenary either this year or next – I forget whether it was founded in 1908 or 1909. They published a lot of non-fiction in the early 20th century, for example books on crafts, but the women’s fiction line also started early, and was well established in the 1920s and 1930s. I am sure some of you will know jay Dixon’s scholarly study of the publisher and its early output. One of her points, as far as I recall (I seem to have mislaid my copy of the book) is that the heroines of that between-the-wars era were usually far from being the wimpish girl-women who needed a man to look after them. They were often rather intrepid and independent, I gather.
The Song Begins, the first Warrender book, was one of my very first category romances when I was probably about nine or so. I remember that Harl was rereleasing them as Presents at some point in the late seventies, which was the edition I had. In fact, I just bought an old copy from alibris, because I couldn’t find the one I’d kept for years and years.
She wrote about music with such passion and love and devotion. Not to mention accuracy. Oscar Warrender was a class A dramatic bastard, but absolutely spot on, in terms of being a musical genius. Somehow, I’m not in the slightest bit surprised to find that she used her passion for music in more than writing. Very cool story.
Ha! spaminator is “eight25” My birthday is August 25.
There was an early Harlequin (could be Burchell, but I’m not sure) involving a nurse heroine who helped people escape during the Hungarian revolt.
I started reading Harlequins in the mid-sixties with Burchell, Eleanor Farnes, Jane Donnelly, Doris E. Smith, Essie Summers, and Betty Neels—unfortunately, most of the other authors weren’t nearly as good. I stopped reading them around 1970, when sex was introduced, mainly because the longtime Harlequin authors were so awkward about it. It mostly turned into the romance of coitus interruptus.
four66—Yes, by 1966 there were only about four Harlequin authors I liked.