[3] He was the son of Col Edmund William Creswell (who played for the Royal Engineers in the 1872 FA Cup Final) and Isabel Agnes Vulliamy.
The diplomatic objective of Great Britain was for Spain to remain neutral in the war despite the close association of the Franco government with fascist Nazi Germany and Italy.
She asked the British to pay the Comet Line's expenses of 6,000 Belgian francs and 1,400 Spanish pesetas (the sum of the two currencies amounting to the equivalent of $2,000 in 2018 U.S. dollars) for each Allied airmen or soldier exfiltrated.
Most of the exfiltrated military personnel were airmen shot down over Europe who had evaded capture by the Germans and made their way to Spain with the help of the Comet or other escape lines.
There, Creswell and Northomb met with Airey Neave of the MI9 section of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, a highly secret department of the War Office.