Paul McCue Books

Armand Lansdell was born 11 July 1904 in Saint Barnabé, Marseilles, France, the son of John Lansdell, a British subject and Clementine Lansdell (née Mordrelle) of French nationality.  He originally took the French nationality of his mother and had two sisters and a brother, and a half-sister from his mother’s previous marriage.  

Lansdell was brought up in Marseille where his London-born father had met and married a Frenchwoman. He left school in 1919 at the age of 15 with only a limited mechanical /technical ability and went to work for the Eastern Telegraph Company.  As a French subject, Lansdell should have been eligible for national service from 1922 to 1924, but there is no record of such service.

He took British nationality when he was 21, by which time he had been transferred to Bône (now Annaba) in Algeria. There, he met and married Thérèse Luongo, a woman three years older than himself. They had a son in 1929 and in 1932 Lansdell left the Eastern Telegraph Company to open his own mechanical workshop in the town. In 1940 he went to work for the Domaine Bertagna vineyard in the Guebar/Mondovi wine region of north-eastern Algeria, where he lived with his wife and son.  After the Allied invasion of Algeria, he volunteered for service with the British forces on 22 November 1942 and was recruited by SOE’s MASSINGHAM mission in Algiers and sent to Britain in the first half of 1943....... [Remainder of case study is complete - contact author for further details].

Copyright  © Paul McCue 2014