Ida (1904-1986) and Louise (1901-1991) Cook lived in Sunderland at 37 Croft Avenue for the first few years of their lives. Their parents moved briefly to Barnes in London, but on the birth of a brother for Ida and Louise, moved back to North East England, settling in Alnwick. The children all attended school in Alnwick, where Louise proved to be the remarkably intelligent but painfully shy. As was often the case, the two girls left school with minimal qualifications and, in 1921 the whole family moved to South London, to Morallo Road in Balham.
Ida and Louise both obtained work as typists in the Civil Service, earning £2 a week to start with. In 1923, Louise stumbled into a lecture about opera at the Board of Education, where gramophone recordings were used to accompany the talk. Entranced, Louise announced to her family that she wanted to put her birthday money towards buying a gramophone, and after a few more months of rigorous saving, she and Ida went to an branch of HMV and paid out the enormous sum of £23 for the machine, including ten records. One of these records was a recording of the soprano Amelita Galli-Curci. By chance, Ida and Louise learned that Galli-Curci was going to perform at the Royal Albert Hall in 1924, so they saved up again and bought tickets for all four of her performances there. Both sisters were entranced by her performances and decided to save up to see Galli-Curci perform in an opera in her native New York. Ida embroidered a handkerchief which they sent to Galli-Curci with a note to announce their intention. To their surprise, Galli-Curci replied, inviting them backstage where she told that they should contact her when they reached New York and she would arrange tickets for them.
Ida and Louise saved every penny they could, walking rather than catching the bus, and taking packets of sandwiches for their lunch rather than buying food at work. After a year of scrimping and saving, in late 1926, they boarded a ship to take a third-class journey to New York. Their luggage contained evening gowns that Ida had made from a pattern in Mab’s Magazine. When they arrived in New York, their eccentric act made minor celebrities of them, and Galli-Curci was true to her word, arranging tickets for her performances for them, and even inviting them to visit her at home.
Ida (seated) and Louise in their Mab’s Magazine finery. Image courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
On their return home, Ida wrote a short story about their adventure and sent this to Mab’s Magazine. To her delight, this was very well received and, after a few more tentative adventures in journalism, left her job in the Civil Service and started working as a magazine writer. She earned more money, which allowed the sisters to travel around Europe to visit their favourite opera stars in places such as Saltzburg, Munich and Vienna. One particular favourite, who became a friend, was Rosa Ponselle. Through Rosa, they met and befriended conductor Enzio Pinza, who introduced them to his friend, Clemens Krauss in 1934. Kraus was married to soprano Viorica Ursuleac who became a close friend of the sisters.
Around this time, Ida had signed a contract to be one of the first novelists for a new series of romances, published by Mills & Boon. The payment she received for this was beyond anything she had received before and she used the money to purchase a newly-built flat in Dolphin Court, which would act as a central pied-á-terre for the sisters to entertain their opera-loving friends. Ida’s first book for Mills & Boon was A Wife for Christopher, which proved to be a huge hit. She dedicated this book to Viorica Ursuleac, writing: ‘To my Dear V.U. who. Lent me her initials to bring me luck, and to whom I now offer my first book as very small tribute to a very great artist.’ Ida wrote under the pen name, Mary Burchell: Mary was their paternal grandmother’s name, and Burchell was their mother’s maiden name.
To return to Clemens Krauss for one moment: Krauss rose to be the manager and director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich following the departure of Richard Strauss. Hitler has spent the previous few years trying to create an opera scene in Munich that would rival that of Salzburg. He granted Krauss the equivalent of £20m in annual costs. Krauss was directly responsible to Hitler.
This brings us to the period 1937-1938. Ida and Louise had a growing relialisation that there was something very wrong going on in Germany. Many of their opera friends were Jewish, and the sisters were increasingly alarmed by the treatment of these friends. They hatched a plan to try and help as many people as they could, using opera as their cover. Krauss and Ursuleac were central to this, as the sisters used letters of invitation from them as a pretext to travel so frequently. Louise started to learn German so as better to understand the people they were interviewing to help flee persecution. Ida took up public speaking in the UK, such on Hyde Park Corner and in town halls across the country, trying to raise awareness of the plight of the Jews.
So frequent were their trips to Germany, they started to suspect that they were being watched. They took the decision to ‘hide in plain sight’, using the same luxurious hotels as the Third Reich officials when they stayed in Berlin and Munich, trips funded by Ida’s Mills & Boon payments. The flat in Dolphin Square started to be used as a base for newly-arrived refugees.
Immigration in the 1930s was feared just as it is today. The USA, for example, had a cap of just 7,000 visas for people from Germany in 1937, whilst there was a waiting list in excess of 90,000 that year. Britian also tightened its rules on refugees at this time, including the requirement that all refugees should have secured work before arriving, or else arrive with a considerable fortune. Meanwhile, in Germany, new anti-Jewish laws prohibited the transfer or removal of money and valuables from the country. This is where Ida and Louise were able to help.
They volunteered to smuggle jewels and furs out of Germany, again adopting the ‘in plain sight’ approach. As they travelled home with handbags bulging with jewels, they played up on their gender stereotype, Ida writing that ‘We would put on our nervous British spinster act and say quite simply we always took our valuables with us because we didn’t trust anyone with whom we could leave them at home.’ They were very careful in what they carried: neither sister had pierced ears, so any earrings they smuggled had be clip-on.
At one point, Ida describes being given an incredibly valuable diamond brooch to smuggle. She pinned it to her Marks & Spencer jumper, opened her coat, and brazenly rationalised that no-one would think that anything pinned to such a cheap garment could be valuable, likely thinking that it would be from Woolworth’s.
They also took expensive fur coats out of Germany to sell back in Britain. They were very careful to unpick the German labels and replace them with British ones. They also were careful not to use the same airport to arrive and depart, in case they aroused suspicion in their dramatic change of clothes in the space of two days. Ida writes: ‘We came into the Cologne airport each Friday evening with practically empty suitcases, shivering in our tweed suits, and we went across the Dutch boarder on Sunday wearing furs, sparkling with jewellery and scarcely able to drag our bags. We were smuggling people’s lives.’ (2020: 172)
Throughout 1938 and into the middle of 1939, the sisters made almost weekly trips to Germany. They rescued 29 individuals and assisted the escape of dozens of others. Their last visit was just one week before war was declared in September 1939.
After the war, Ida’s career as a novelist continued to be highly successful. She became the President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, and in 1959 was the subject of the tv show This Is Your Life. Ida and Louise had a tree planted in their honour in 1962 in the Avenue of the Righteous in Israel. Rather oddly, the records the sisters had kept of their travels and the individuals they had tried to help were all destroyed by Louise, without any known reason, in the 1950s. She burnt them all, to the dismay of Ida and later historians.
In 1923, musician Alison Cotton was inspired to compose a musical piece about the sisters. She calls this Engelchen (Angels) and you can listen to some of it here Engelchen.
Ida’s account of their lives can be found in a book originally called We Followed Our Stars, and is currently published as The Bravest Voices (2020) Harper Collins. There is an excellent biography of the sisters, using recent discoveries in the archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Isabel Vincent Overture of Hope (2022) Regnery History.