Georges Kopp was born in 1902, the son of Alexander Kopp and Henrietta Neuman (1876-1942), at St Petersburg, Russia.
His father was from Rostov, his mother, the daughter of Michel Neimann and Anne Bermann, was from Odessa.
He and his parents fled St Petersburg at the onset of the revolution and came to Switzerland.
From there they moved to Belgium.
He was too young for service during the First World War but had lived under the German occupation.
He first married a Belgian lady, Germaine Warnotte, and had five children, which ended in a divorce.
His track record included service as an officer in the Belgian army, as a member of the French Foreign Legion, as a volunteer officer in the POUM militia, and as a field operator for British Intelligence.
He died when still a comparatively young man.
His service is unrecorded.
He was a committed sociologist with some military experience from his conscription period.
He had been commissioned and was still a member of the Officer Reserve.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he helped to organise the buying of arms and gun-running for the Republic in Western Europe.
He was a powerful man weighing 15 stones and very athletic.
With his military training and qualification as a member of the Belgian Army Officer Reserve, his coolness and experience, he was a bounty to the raw volunteers.
He quickly rose through the ranks and was elected head of a POUM Centuria.
When George Orwell arrived in Barcelona at the end of December 1936 he was sent to the Aragon front and joined a column of which Kopp was then in charge.
Kopp ended up being jailed by the people whom he had come to help in their battle against the Fascists.
He had given up his job and career for people who had flung him into prison.
In his period of service he had been wounded once, and was in the front line almost continuously for eight months under the most hazardous conditions where his personal bravery had won the respect of all who knew him.
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Orwell (and Eileen) visited Kopp in prison, but had to be careful not to recognise too many of the inmates, for to do so would have put the finger on them as people who should also be arrested.
In December 1938, when the Russians were winding up all their commitments in Spain to prepare for the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he managed to get out and into France. From there he came to England, making contact with Orwell.
He was nursed back to health by Laurence and Gwen O'shaughnessy, the brother (and his wife) of Eileen Blair (Eileen Orwell), at Croombs Hill, Gwen's home.
This is where he met the lovely Doreen Hunton, Gwen's younger sister, whom he later married.
When, in less than a year, the Second World War broke out, Kopp went to France and volunteered for the French Foreign Legion.
In June 1940 he was wounded and captured by the Germans south of the Marne. For a good period he was in a French military hospital, and when well enough to be mobile he escaped to unoccupied France and lived in Marseilles.
In Marseilles he linked up with British intelligence, monitoring shipping and other activities.
Details of his work are obscure.
We know that he was working as an engineer and enrolled in British naval intelligence.
He must, however, have been important, for when the Gestapo alerted the Pétain secret police, the British flew him out in September 1943.
Upon his return to England, he quickly married Doreen Hunton, discussed above, and so became a distant relative of George Orwell, the man he first met on the Aragon front in Spain.
They lived briefly in London, before moving to Toftcombs House, Biggar, Scotland.
By early 1949, they had moved back to England, to Shallcross Manor, Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire.
But in 1950 they moved again; this time to Marseilles, France, after a brief stop at LaMotte Beuvron, near Orleans.
Georges died on 15 July 1951.
Sections of above excerpted from "The Spanish Civil War. The View from the Left",
Read more about Georges Kopp, by Don Bateman.
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