Roy C. Firebrace

Brigadier Roy Charles Whitworth George Firebrace (16 August 1889 – 10 November 1974) was a British Army officer, who served as Head of the British Military Mission in Moscow during the Second World War. He was also a sidereal astrologer, founder and editor of the journal Spica, and a co-founder of the Astrological Association of Great Britain. Early life According to data reported by him in Spica (January 1973), Firebrace was born on 16 August 1889 at 5:00 p.m. AST, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where his English father had an army post. He was second son of Lieutenant-Colonel George Firebrace, of the Royal Artillery, of a branch of the family from which also came the Firebrace baronets, and Agnes Adela, daughter of Henry Aylmer Porter, of Cranborne Court, Windsor Forest, Berkshire. His elder brother was Aylmer Firebrace. Military career Firebrace was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1908. He was promoted lieutenant-colonel in 1936, colonel in 1937, and retired as a brigadier in 1946. He was the British military attaché in Riga before the beginning of the Second World War and later in Moscow until 1940 as Head of the British Military Mission in Moscow. He acted as an observer and interpreter for Winston Churchill at the Potsdam and Yalta conferences and when Molotov visited London in 1942 and ran the War Office Russian Liaison Group. Nikolai Tolstoy recounts some of Firebrace's military views and experiences in his 1977 book, Victims of Yalta. Firebrace is also mentioned in Nicholas Bethell's 1974 book, The Last Secret.