The Cook Sisters and Dolphin Square

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 In brief, Ida and Louise Cook were two humble, unprepossessing, unmarried civil servants living in Wandsworth, south London, with their parents. They became obsessed with opera and made friends with famous opera singers of their day. An Austrian friend and conductor and opera impressario Clemens Krauss asked for their help in rescuing an Austrian Jewish friend. So began an almost implausible series of daring missions to Germany and Austria under the guise of opera-loving trips.

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In 1936 Ida Cook started writing romantic novels under her pseudonym Mary Burchell. She was a prolific Mills & Boon author who entranced her fans with tales of intrigue, passion and danger. The money from her writing helped the sisters to fund their trips to Austria and Germany before the outbreak of the war and to buy the flat in Dolphin Square which they created as a sanctuary for Jewish refugees.

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The risks taken by the sisters are not overstated. Every week, they would fly from Croydon airport to Germany at a time when flying was still considered hazardous. And the sisters even ramped up the danger by staying at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, a favourite haunt of senior Nazi officers. For the intrepid pair these were risks worth taking.

 

They saw their deeds as “the right thing to do”, the courageous sisters were also swept along by their love for music, as well as the excitement and romance of their actions – much like the fictional protagonists Cook wrote about.

 

Unlikely smugglers, the mild-mannered sisters were endlessly inventive in their strategies of evasion. Once, entrusted with a valuable diamond brooch, they pinned it to a cheap jumper and walked through customs unobserved. Before smuggling out furs they replaced the German labels with labels from London stores. With these precautions, their rescue operations were successful, by themselves engaging in a little theatricality and putting on their nervous British spinster act, despite great risk to themselves.

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The success of the Cook sisters' smuggling operation depended, in part, on the sisters' remaining quiet and unobtrusive, but they became quite vocal in Britain. When their smuggling operation and refugee work became increasingly expensive— the Cooks themselves put up guarantees for refugees, as did their family—Ida Cook shook off her shyness and spoke, eventually with enormous and effective eloquence, in churches across Britain; possibly to Mill Hill Chapel, the Unitarian Church in Leeds, frequented by the Boyle family, who were to sponsor our family. She pleaded for funds, for sponsors for refugees who had no money, and for increased awareness and concern for European Jews.

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311 Howard House in Dolphin Square became a hub where the sisters housed refugees during the war and later fêted such opera stars as Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi. The Cooks were famous for their Dolphin Square parties, which brought together music lovers rich and poor, celebrated and unknown. Ida and Louise themselves, neither of whom married, lived together all their lives in their family home near Wandsworth Common, London.

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RS 2020