Society's ongoing expansion brings about a move to new offices

From Friday 21st June 2013, Society’s UK head office address will be 83 Baker Street, London, W1U 6AG.

These new offices have an interesting history. During World War II, 83 Baker Street was one of the buildings that housed the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a top-secret branch of the UK military tasked with undertaking sabotage and insurgency missions behind enemy lines. Winston Churchill personally ordered SOE’s commanding officer to “set Europe ablaze”.

It is known that the SOE’s members included James Bond-author Ian Fleming and the legendary film actor Christopher Lee. The group attracted various nicknames including ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’, the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’, and the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’.

The SOE's most notorious missions were codenamed ‘Operation Grouse’, ‘Operation Freshman’, and ‘Operation Gunnerside’; a series of sabotage actions between 1940 and 1944. Linking up with their allies in the Norwegian Resistance, the SOE helped to destroy the Vemork hydroelectric power plant outside Rjukan. Vemork had the capability to produce heavy water (deuterium oxide), which could have been used to create a nuclear weapon for Nazi Germany.