As part of our occasional series pro ling remarkable yet unheralded characters from history, Gavin Mortimer introduces Johnny Hopper, the British lone-wolf ghter who embarked on a campaign of violence that made him one of the most wanted men in Nazi-occupied France
Johnny Hopper and his wife, Paulette, arrived at the cafe on the rue Beaubourg on schedule. They chose a table at the end of the long narrow cafe, their backs to the wall and with an unobstructed view of the entrance.
It was Paris, 8 May 1942, a dangerous place to be for an Englishman who was the subject of a nationwide manhunt having slain two policemen the previous year in Caen.
Hopper ordered two coffees and waited for the arrival of a doctor, a member of the Resistance. He claimed he had information about Paul Cole, a former British soldier who had been captured in 1941 and turned by the Gestapo into one of their agents.
The doctor arrived on time and Hopper rose to greet him. But as he advanced he noticed another man coming into the cafe. Then two soldiers came into view on the street outside. Hopper reached for the pistol in his pocket; at the same time the man accompanying the doctor went for his weapon. Within seconds, shots were being exchanged across the cafe as terrified customers dived for cover. Hopper felt a blow to his arm. “I didn’t know at first how badly I was wounded,” he recalled. “I ducked back through a door next to our table, to take stock and to get a fresh gun unstrapped from my leg. It was only a sort of closet back there, but the Germans must have assumed it was a rear door to the alley. I had hit all of them more or less badly, and when I kicked my door open, they were all running out the front door to get help.”
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The Long Road Back - The Election Was Tough for the Conservatives but the Past Holds Clues on How Parties Can Return From the Brink
Itâs election night 1997, and Jeremy Paxman is grilling Tory grandee Cecil Parkinson. âYouâre the chairman of a fertiliser firm,â the famously pugnacious broadcaster asked Parkinson. âHow deep is the mess youâre in?â Twenty-seven years later, as the Conservative party comes to terms with another landslide defeat, itâs worth applying the same question to the present day. How does this result compare with previous devastating losses â not only those suffered by the Tories themselves, but also those experienced by the other major parties? And what can history teach us about the tools that politicians use to dig themselves out of the dung heap and set themselves back on the road to power?
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ROGER MOORHOUSE is absorbed by a little-known but politically significant Polish princess whose life encompassed the major events of the later 18th and 19th centuries
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From Magna Carta to parliament, taxation to the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries laid the foundations for the modern British state
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Ãthelstan is one of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon monarchs. So why, asks Michael Wood, does the first king of the English remain so fiendishly elusive?
