Ida & Louise Cook

Ida and Louise Cook were born in a red-bricked terraced house with bay windows in Millfield. They moved to London to work as typists for the Civil Service, where they visited the red velvet heart of the Royal Opera House. They fell in love with the gold-flecked ceiling and the lamps that blazed from the seats. They watched women in furs press painted nails to lip-sticked mouths and peered through silver-rimmed binoculars.

Ida stayed up late in their shared attic room, scratching her feelings onto paper by the light of a waning candle. She discovered she had a flair for romance and began to write novels for Mills and Boon. Over her lifetime, she wrote 112 romance novels under the name Mary Burchell. She lived a whole secret life in the candlelight.

When WW2 broke out, the sisters were friends with Viorica Ursuleac, an Austrian Soprano singer who told them about the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Using the money Ida made from writing, the sisters boarded a boat carrying as little as possible, winking at the soldiers who asked for their documents, claiming to be opera fanatics travelling to see a show. On their return, they draped themselves in feathers and furs and filled their trunks with jewellery belonging to Jewish families. When the sisters helped the families escape to the UK, they would use the smuggled items to meet the financial requirements of the British immigration system, so they could begin new lives as legal citizens,

Ida and Louise saved 29 people from Nazi Germany. To avoid suspicion, they stayed at a hotel where Nazi officials spent their lunchtimes drinking sharp whiskeys in their stiff military boots. One afternoon, a Jewish man telephoned the sisters and told them he would be driving past their hotel in a taxi. He asked if they would run out and jump into it, to help him escape. The sisters risked their lives right in front of the soldiers, to save people they had never even met.

‘The funny thing is,’ Ida said, years later, ‘we weren’t the James Bond type. We were just respectable Civil Service typists.’

Read more about Ida & Louise Cook