Ile Saint-Louis in Paris, where Darsie and Cecilia Gillie had their home before and after the Second World War.

Darsie Gillie, Born 1903
foreign correspondent and broadcaster

Darsie Gillie was a distinguished foreign correspondent and broadcaster. He was of Scottish descent, his father Robert being a distinguished Presbyterian minister. Darsie Gillie was educated at Rugby school and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Modern Greats. After Oxford he became a journalist, working for the Morning Post in Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. During the Second World War he joined the BBC as head of their French service. This service, broadcast to occupied France, played a particularly important part in the British propaganda war against the Nazis. After the war he married Cecilia Reeves, who had herself worked for the BBC in Paris then for the BBC’s French service. After the war they returned to Paris, and retired to a farmhouse near Courtenay in the Loiret district of France.