Columbia. Brother of Jack Pickersgill, a member of the House of Commons of Canada and a Cabinet Minister until 1967. Captain Frank Pickersgill (code name: Bertrand) spoke English, French, German, Spanish and Greek. After receiving his MA in classics at U of T in 1938, he went to study in London, England. While travelling in Europe he was interned as an enemy alien by the Germans and put to hard labour. After using a metal file smuggled to him in a loaf of bread to saw his way out of his cell and escape, he returned to Britain, briefing Canadian units on conditions in German-occupied France. He volunteered to be parachuted into France with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to support the French Resistance. Along with John Kenneth Macalister, another U of T student and Rhodes scholar from Guelph, Ontario, he was inserted on the night of June 15, 1943. The two were almost immediately picked up in a random search by the German army. The two men were tortured by the Gestapo, who wanted them to pretend to still be free, and so encourage more SOE personnel to parachute in and be captured. Neither cooperated with the enemy. The Gestapo entertained Pickersgill at their Paris headquarters in an effort to persuade him to assist them. Pickersgill didn't relent. Instead, he broke a wine bottle, used the jagged edge to slit a guard's throat and managed to escape by jumping out a second-storey window before SS guards shot him four times and recaptured him. He was sent to the Buchenwald extermination camp, where he and Macalister were strangled as spies in early September, 1944. Buchenwald survivors said Pickersgill continued to try to keep his fellow captives' spirits up to the very end, telling bad jokes and encouraging them to march in step like soldiers. Captain Pickersgill, an alumnus of the University of Toronto, was honoured on September 15, 2004, at a wreath-laying at a small garden dedicated to him and his fellow Special Operations Executive agent, Captain John Kenneth Macalister at the foot of the University's Soldiers Tower. He was buried at Groesbeek Memorial, Netherlands. Grave Reference: Panel 11. Citations 1939-45 Star, France and Germany Star, Defence Medal, War Medal 1939-45, Canadian Volunteer Service Medal and Clasp. Mention in Dispatches, 12 November 1945. He was posthumously awarded the Cross of the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (France) in a ceremony