Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice: The True Story of WWII Special Agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne

Didi’s suspicion that her sister had been keeping something from her continued to trouble her. Then Jacqueline received the news that the interview had been successful, and within two weeks of her interview had passed a medical and completed the application form to join the FANY. In order to be accepted she needed sponsorship in the form of recommendations by two people; one had to be a woman, and both had to have known her for at least two years. Her sponsors were Lieutenant Prudence Macfie of the FANY and Captain Selwyn Jepson, neither of whom had known Jacqueline for more than two weeks.

When Jacqueline appeared wearing the uniform of the FANY, Didi realized that her main worry hadn’t really been about Jacqueline joining the FANY. It was the driving job that had given her the nagging doubts and she was now sure that it was this that was the lie. She had wondered why the FANY would have picked her sister for a job that any English girl could have done, and she hadn’t been able to understand why even though the WRNS was unwilling to accept a driver who had no experience of the blackout, the FANY didn’t seem to have considered that at all.

Despite Jepson’s instruction not to discuss her interview with anyone, Jacqueline knew that she would have to disclose some details to Didi. So, impressing upon her that she mustn’t tell a single soul, she admitted that she had been selected to work for a new organization called the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the French Section. Enrolling in the FANY was a cover for what she would actually be doing. Didi, of course, wanted to know what that work was, but Jacqueline said that she had already told her too much and really couldn’t tell her anything else.

While she waited to hear when she would be starting her SOE training, Jacqueline kept in touch with her friend Jimmie, mostly by post, as he had been sent on a training course, although they spent a day together in July, after which Jimmie wrote to Jacqueline expressing the hope that ‘you managed to get back safely on Monday and that your sister etc had not telephoned all the Police in order to discover the wandering one’. He later wrote to ask Jacqueline to

tell me more about your life and your thoughts. I am very interested in your life and want to hear all about it, if you will tell me. How do you really like your new life?

It is a pity your location appears to be a closely guarded secret – why I don’t exactly know – yours is certainly the first training centre that has not had a proper address … I hope that you will not forget me now that you are making lots of new friends. The F.A.N.Y.s had the reputation at the beginning of the war of being rather select and snobbish. It never pays to be like that and I hope very much that you won’t get that way – always remember that old friends are the best.2

This letter appears to have been the last one that Jacqueline received from Jimmie. It may, of course, just have been the last one that she kept but, by the time she read it, she had already started her SOE training and she was determined not to let anything interfere with that.

Frustrated that she was still unemployed and beginning to believe that she knew what Jacqueline was going to be doing, Didi was delighted when she too received a letter asking her to attend an interview at the War Office with Captain Jepson, a month after her sister’s.

Jepson was a 43-year-old Army captain. A well-known playwright in peacetime, he was also the author of several books. When he joined the SOE as a recruiting officer in early 1942, he was found to be very good at picking the right sort of person for undercover roles within the organization. Calm and efficient, he managed to put prospective recruits at ease while asking questions that would reveal whether or not the person concerned would be good at the job. A report from the SOE to Military Intelligence placed on his file in March 1942 described him as being ‘far ahead of anyone as [a] talent spotter’3 and he himself said of his role: ‘I was responsible for recruiting women for the work, in the face of a good deal of opposition, I may say, from the powers that be. In my view, women were very much better than men for the work. Women, as you must know, have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.’4

When Didi attended her interview it didn’t take her long to realize that her suspicions about her sister’s new job were correct and she told Jepson that she wanted to do the same as Jacqueline. He felt that she was, perhaps, a little young to be sent to France as an agent but asked her to tell him about herself. She told him that she had been born in England but had lived in France since she was a baby. She talked about her parents and brothers and sister, and described how she and Jacqueline had escaped from occupied France to come to England and obtain war work. She said that she knew several areas of France quite well, and was fluent in spoken and written French. She also stressed that although she liked people and generally got along well with them, she also liked her own company and was sure that she would be able to work completely alone should the need arise. She simply wanted to do something worthwhile for the war effort.

Jepson could see that Didi, although lively and enthusiastic, had a serious side as well. She was obviously intelligent and sincere, but he was still concerned that she might be too young. Being the baby of the family and having had a convent education, she had obviously led a sheltered life and he worried that she might not stand up to life in occupied France, alone and with no family support. He did, however, feel that there was about her a hint of the cool and lonely courage he was seeking. He told her that the SOE needed to recruit wireless operators who would send and receive messages to and from agents in France. There was also a requirement for decoders to interpret the messages, all of which had been encoded before transmission. He believed that Didi would be effective in either role and asked her which she would prefer.

Although disappointed that she would be staying in England, Didi decided that of the two positions offered, she would rather be a wireless operator and Jepson recruited her as such. She also decided that she would continue to press for a job as an agent whenever an opportunity arose. It had occurred to her when making her decision that the training she would need to be a wireless operator would be more beneficial to her than becoming a decoder, should she manage to persuade Jepson at a later date to send her to France.

Satisfied that she wouldn’t be remaining in England for long, Didi was also enrolled in the FANY, joining what was known as Bingham’s Unit. This unit had been established by a member of the FANY, Phyllis Bingham, at the behest of her friend Major-General Colin Gubbins, Vice-Chief of the SOE Council, because of the necessity for absolute secrecy in the SOE; those who joined Bingham’s Unit were the SOE women selected to serve as wireless operators and decoders in the United Kingdom. One of the sponsors who recommended Didi to the FANY was Mrs Bingham herself. This was done, of course, as with Jacqueline’s sponsors, to keep the paperwork straight and believable, and the undercover roles secret; Mrs Bingham did not know Didi personally and at the time she recommended her to the FANY they had not even met.

Didi then went off to learn how to receive and send Morse code. She proved to be quite a good student and passed the course satisfactorily.5 She then settled down to life in the listening station.6 Although she had a flair for the work, she found it tedious and longed for the day when she would be able to do something more exciting. With the impatience of youth, Didi began to send in requests to be transferred to the French Section of the SOE so that she could train to become an agent like her sister.

When she had told Jacqueline that she had guessed what her real role with the SOE was to be and that she intended to join her as soon as possible, Jacqueline had responded with a lie, saying that Didi wouldn’t be allowed to go to France until she was 25 years old. Didi was still only 21, and Jacqueline hoped that the war would be over by the time Didi reached this fictional minimum age. But knowing Didi so well, she also knew that the small detail of an age limit would not stop her from asking to be sent overseas. She worried that Didi might discover her lie and, worse still, manage to persuade someone to allow her to go to France, so she asked to see Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of the French Section of the SOE.

A meeting was arranged that was also attended by Buckmaster’s assistant, Vera Atkins. Jacqueline explained to them that she was worried that her sister Didi wanted to go to France as an agent and that she had told her she was too young. She asked if there was some way that her lie could be kept up so that when Didi applied she would be told that she was too young. As well as explaining that Didi had led quite a sheltered life, she wanted them to know that Didi was unworldly but very strong-minded, impetuous and stubborn, so they could expect several more requests from her if her first request was denied. It was obvious to Buckmaster and Atkins that Jacqueline was very worried about Didi, and since she was in the middle of the training herself they agreed to go along with the story so that she could concentrate on her work and not worry about her sister.

Just as Jacqueline had predicted, Didi began to put in requests to be transferred as an agent to France. Each time she did so her request was refused. Buckmaster kept his promise to Jacqueline but Didi had no intention of giving up; determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps, she repeated her requests at regular intervals.

Although some individual female agents had been sent to France before, Jacqueline was one of the first to be trained with a group of other women. This group was known as training party 27.OB.67, and Jacqueline’s fellow students were Odette Sansom (code name Lise), Lise de Baissac (Odile) and Mary Herbert (Claudine). It was fairly clear that the whole training programme for this women’s group had been rather rushed and haphazard. Although the men being sent to France were given a strenuous paramilitary course in the wilds of Scotland, these women were simply sent on a parachute course at Ringway near Manchester, and then on a finishing course in the New Forest. There seemed to be a misconception that, as women, they were not in the same danger as the men and that if caught, the Germans would treat them in a better, more gentlemanly way; training them in subjects such as unarmed combat and silent killing would not, therefore, be required. It took the SOE only a short time to realize that it was mistaken, and courses in these skills were soon made available to both male and female agents.

Jacqueline proved to be a good shot and had no trouble at all with a pistol. But parachuting was another matter. Wearing protective clothing, which included overalls and a large, round, padded hat, the students were attached to ropes as if on an enormous playground swing so that they could become used to the motion of a parachute descent before making an actual jump. This didn’t give Jacqueline any problems, but she was less than enthusiastic about her first parachute jump, which was made from the specially adapted basket of a hot-air balloon. She was frightened by it and felt very insecure, as the basket had a hole, large enough for an adult to pass through, in its base. It was also very quiet, which she and her fellow students found disconcerting. When she finally made a jump from an aircraft she declared it to be much better, even quite exciting, attributing this to the sound of the aircraft’s engines, but parachuting wasn’t something she ever really enjoyed and she wished that there was some other way to get to France so that she didn’t have to use a parachute at all.

It was while undertaking their parachute training that Jacqueline and Lise de Baissac became friends. Lise was 37 years old when she joined the SOE. She had lived in France since the age of 14 but came from a Mauritian family and had been born in Curepipe so, as the island of Mauritius was a British possession, she was British. Like Jacqueline she had escaped from France and, as an intensely loyal British subject, come to England looking for war work. Her brother Claude, two years her junior, had also escaped to England and had preceded her into the SOE, becoming the head of the Scientist circuit in south-west France. Maurice Buckmaster described Claude as being ‘the most difficult of all my officers without any exception’8 and it seems that this was a family trait, as Lise herself was thought to be ‘difficult but dedicated’.9 But despite this, and their 11-year age difference, Lise and Jacqueline became firm friends. It was a friendship that would last for the rest of their lives.

When they had successfully completed the parachute training the four women went on to the finishing school at Brockenhurst. Hastily set up in January 1941, this was housed in several requisitioned large homes built amongst the trees of the New Forest on the isolated Beaulieu estate of Lord Montagu. The section to which the women were sent was known as STS 31, which comprised two houses, the Rings and the House in the Wood. These facilities soon proved to be too small for the large number of administration staff, lecturers and students, and the students were moved to other buildings in the complex, while a third house was also requisitioned. The chief instructor at this time was 50-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Woolrych, a First World War veteran, who was soon promoted to commandant of the school, a post he held until the end of the war. Subjects taught included evasion techniques, recognition of German military uniforms, escape techniques in the event of an agent being apprehended by the enemy, coding and decoding of messages, wood craft, living off the land, shooting with a pistol, and security and propaganda warfare. The instructors were a varied bunch and included convicted criminals, a former gamekeeper from the royal estate at Sandringham and a man who would later be disgraced for his spying activities, Kim Philby.

When the course was over, the four women parted company. Lise was the first to leave England, parachuting into France at the end of September 1942 with another agent, a Frenchwoman named Andrée Borrel (Denise). They were the first two female agents to arrive in France this way. Lise went on to Poitiers, where she was tasked with setting up a new circuit to be called Artist, and with finding safe houses for agents. She was known in the area as Irene Brisse. Borrel’s destination was Paris, where she was to be the courier for the Physician circuit and its leader Francis Suttill.

Mary Herbert and Odette Sansom managed to reach France without the use of parachutes but theirs was a difficult and lengthy journey, undertaken at the beginning of November. They were originally due to be taken by flying boat, but their flight was cancelled at the last minute and they were transferred to a submarine for a very uncomfortable trip to Gibraltar, from where they continued their journey by felucca to Port Miou near Cassis, south-east of Marseilles. Mary was to become the courier for Claude de Baissac (David), Lise’s brother, in the Scientist circuit, while Odette headed for Cannes, where she met Peter Churchill (Michel), head of the Spindle circuit. Although it was intended that she would eventually work for a circuit in Auxerre, Churchill persuaded the SOE in London to let him keep Odette with the Spindle circuit as its courier.

Although Jacqueline had done everything that was asked of her on the course to the best of her ability, her final training report, written and signed by Lieutenant Colonel Woolrych on 25 August 1942, said of her:

Mentally slow and not very intelligent. Has a certain amount of determination but is inclined to waver in the face of problems.

A reserved personality and somewhat shy. Little depth of character – in fact, she is a very simple person.

She is lacking in self-confidence, which might be entirely due to inexperience.

She might very well develop after long and careful training, but at present she could not be recommended.10

After all her good intentions and hard work, it seemed that Jacqueline had failed. She was inconsolable, knowing that she would never have a chance like this again.

CHAPTER 3

A Shaky Start

What Jacqueline did not know, when she learnt of Lieutenant Colonel Woolrych’s damning report, was that the final decision about her suitability as an agent was left to Colonel Buckmaster in his role as head of F Section.

Maurice James Buckmaster, born in 1902, had been too young for military service in the First World War, and by the time the Second World War started he was almost too old. The son of a wealthy businessman, he had been educated at Eton and awarded an exhibition at Oxford to study Classics. He was on the point of taking it up when his father was declared bankrupt and there was no longer any money to spare for a full-time education. Abandoning Oxford, he decided to go instead to France, where he remained for several years, first working as a reporter in Paris for Le Matin and eventually becoming a manager for the Ford Motor Company, promoting the company’s image to French car buyers. He returned to England in 1936 and two years later joined the Army Officers’ Emergency Reserve. He received his call-up papers in the first month of the Second World War, serving with the 50th Division as an intelligence officer. He was soon back in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force and remained there until he was evacuated from Dunkirk during the last few days of Operation Dynamo. When he learnt sometime later that his division was going to be posted to North Africa, he contacted his divisional commander and asked him to intervene on his behalf and obtain a position for him where his knowledge of France, French business practice and the French language would be of use. In the spring of 1941, at the age of 39, he found himself in Baker Street, working as an information officer for the SOE.

In July 1941 Buckmaster was made the temporary head of T Section, looking after the agents operating in Belgium, and later that year was appointed head of F Section, in which position he remained for the rest of the war. His appointment was surprising given that his real forte was public relations, but times were hard and people with his knowledge of France were in short supply. He was not, however, agent material. Although he was not frightened of hard work, his personality was not suited to the life of an agent. Whereas public relations was not a profession in which one kept quiet about what was happening, the work of an agent relied almost entirely on secrecy. In addition, Buckmaster could be short-tempered and irritable at times, was too trusting of people and disliked difficult situations, finding them hard to handle. There were many who believed he was offered the job as F Section head not because he possessed any particular talent for the work but simply because there was no one else.

Buckmaster tackled his new role with gusto, however, and worked very long hours, often going home at the end of a working day and then returning to the office after dinner. Many of those with whom he worked in London and those he sent to France thought of him as an avuncular figure, the guardian of those who faced danger every day in Nazi-occupied territory. They liked him tremendously – one of the staff members at SOE headquarters declared him to be ‘an absolute sweetie’ – and many referred to him affectionately as ‘Buck’.1 But not everyone shared this opinion. There were those who thought of him as an anti-social, unapproachable man in an ivory tower.2 They believed him to be a well-meaning but ineffectual man whose understanding of his agents, and the lives they led in France after the German occupation, was unsound and, in some cases, badly flawed. He could be stubborn and often dismissed the opinions of others, preferring to rely on his own instincts about people and situations. Sometimes these instincts served him well but he made some serious errors of judgement that he failed to acknowledge.

Vera Atkins, who helped Buckmaster, was an intelligence officer who had been with the SOE since April 1941, when she had been employed as a secretary to Major Bourne-Paterson, Head of Planning. She pushed for Buckmaster’s appointment as F Section head when his predecessor was sacked for ineptitude and no one could think of anyone suitable to replace him. At face value it was difficult to see Atkins’s motivation for promoting Buckmaster for this role but there were at least two reasons for her support. Extremely intelligent and capable, much more so than Buckmaster, she would herself have been a highly effective head but, as a woman, would never have been given the chance to show her enormous talent in this role. He, on the other hand, had far less aptitude but was grateful for the support she had given him in obtaining the position he coveted and never forgot that he was in her debt. Having made herself indispensable to him, she was able to exert her influence in many ways that would not have been open to her had she not ensured his appointment.3

However, perhaps the most significant reason for her championing of Buckmaster was that she needed someone on whose loyalty she could rely, as she should not have been working for the SOE at all. The organization’s regulations stated that its London headquarters’ staff should be British by birth. Vera was not British-born; nor did she have British nationality. She was Romanian, having been born in Galatz, Romania, in 1908, the daughter of Max Rosenberg, a German Jew, and his British-born wife, Hilda Atkins. Vera had not even lived in Britain until her arrival with her mother in the autumn of 1937, when she adopted the latter’s maiden name and obtained an Aliens Registration Certificate. After the Allies declared war on Romania in 1941, she was regarded as an enemy alien and, as such, could have been sent to an aliens’ internment camp, but somehow she managed to avoid this indignity. She applied for naturalization the following year but was refused, and she didn’t manage to secure her British nationality until 24 March 1944.4 Her success in obtaining the Certificate of Naturalization was due, in no small part, to the lengthy letter supporting her application that was written on her behalf by Maurice Buckmaster. Whilst there was never a suggestion that Vera Atkins was anything but loyal to her adopted homeland, her appointment to the SOE in contravention of its own security regulations, and the support she received from the head of F Section, show a worrying disregard for security in the organization, a situation that became a trend rather than an exception as the war dragged on.

Buckmaster revelled in the power his position gave him and, although he had no knowledge or experience of the training that agents undertook, countermanded the recommendations made by the instructors about prospective agents on several occasions.

When Jacqueline Nearne’s finishing school report arrived on his desk, Buckmaster gave it a cursory glance and then took a pencil and scribbled in the margin, ‘OK. I think her one of the best we have had.’5 He gave no further explanation of why he believed her to be so good but it is likely that his decision was based on Jacqueline’s appearance alone, as he hardly knew her. She was a beautiful young woman and Buckmaster admired beauty. He had a particular fascination with bone structure and, in Specially Employed, a book he wrote after the war, said of her: ‘Jacqueline is the sort of girl whom most people would describe as typically Parisian. She has the dark hair and eyes, the slim figure and the delicate bone of that type of Frenchwoman, of whose chic the French themselves are most proud.’ In the same book he waxed lyrical about another recruit, Violette Szabo, who had also been given a less than satisfactory finishing report, declaring her to be ‘really beautiful, dark-haired and olive-skinned, with that kind of porcelain clarity of face and purity of bone that one finds occasionally in the women of the south-west of France’.6