Women Wartime Spies: Active or Passive?

Introduction

Women of Substance

In September 2010 British newspapers and the BBC carried stories of a ‘brave hero spy’ who had died alone in her flat in Torquay aged 89. The woman was Eileen Nearne. She had lived the final years of her life as something of a recluse, so few of her neighbours knew anything about her or of her extraordinary past life. As details emerged it turned out that Eileen Nearne, who her niece described as a ‘very private and modest person’, had been one of the remarkable women recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. Using a false identity she had been sent into enemy-occupied France where she acted as a wireless operator for five months, sending back more than a hundred coded messages to London. Captured by the Gestapo, she was interrogated and tortured but managed to survive – and ultimately escape from Ravensbrück concentration camp. In recognition of her importance, senior military officials attended her funeral and the eulogy was given by Adrian Stones, chairman of the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, London, the club that was founded after the Second World War for surviving members of the SOE.

Perhaps it is not surprising that few people outside her specialist circle and immediate family knew very much about Eileen Nearne. Spying is by definition a secretive profession – a good spy passes unnoticed in a crowd – and very few women, or men for that matter, say much about what they are up to. It is also probably true to say that with some notable exceptions, most female spies or secret agents, from the courageous women of La Dame Blanche through to Noor Inayat Khan, have rarely received the recognition they deserve. There may be various reasons: women’s achievements are often ignored, forgotten or subsumed under those of men while the nature of the work itself is a hidden one. Either way the female spies who spring to most people’s minds are more likely to be women who have been immortalized through popular fiction and even legend.

Ask anyone to name a woman spy and the answer is most likely to be Mata Hari. She is probably the best known of all women spies; her exotic lifestyle, sexual behaviour and tragic death in front of a firing squad in 1917 have become the stuff of legend, and have probably coloured perceptions of women spies ever since. And yet Mata Hari was probably not a spy at all, or, if she was, she was inept and naive and quite untypical of the women who have worked in the field of espionage and intelligence gathering.

Even so, the image dies hard; only three months after Eileen Nearne was in the news, another woman made the headlines: Katia Zatuliveter, research assistant to Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock, who in December 2010 was alleged to be a Russian spy. Media images focused on her youth, blond hair and apparently raunchy lifestyle; she was being investigated by MI6 for possible connections to Russia’s foreign intelligence service, and certainly met the received image of a ‘typical’ woman spy, one that has been fostered and generated through popular fiction and writers of spy history for a very long time.

It could be said that there are two major stereotypical images of women spies: the Mata Hari spy, who uses her sexuality to extract military and other secret information from unsuspecting men – a stereotype that reflects spying’s tag line ‘the world’s second oldest profession’, one assumes second only to prostitution – and who may well have been duped into espionage, perhaps by financial need or love, and the highly virtuous woman who dies heroically for love of her country. Edith Cavell, also of the First World War, is a prime example of this. She, it could be said, represents the complete reverse, all that is good in women as opposed to all that is evil. But it can also be argued that both these images were fostered for propaganda reasons, and that they reflected prevailing and deeply-held views of womanhood. Either way the images belittle women’s true skills and courage in the field of espionage and certainly the reality for women who have worked as spies during wartime is quite different from the popular stereotypes.

Although often seen as a male-dominated world, which it has been until women such as Stella Rimington helped to open the doors for women, espionage – the business of obtaining secret information from an enemy, particularly during wartime – has frequently involved women. During wartime women have played very significant roles in the secret war of intelligence gathering, whether working as undercover agents in the field, listening in to enemy intelligence, decoding secret information, or as resistance fighters, harrying an enemy while at the same time obtaining crucial military information. Some of their names, particularly those of women who worked with SOE, are quite well known; others such as the women who worked with spy networks in occupied Belgium and France during the First World War have all but been forgotten.

Until about the Second World War, many male writers, such as Hamil Grant, who published a history of espionage in 1915, considered that women could never make good spies; Hamil Grant believed they were not capable of sustained patriotism, were too inclined to be knocked off course by romantic attachments and would not do the work without financial gain. On the other hand, there were those who considered that women were by nature duplicitous and therefore were to be automatically regarded with caution and suspicion during wartime in case they were spies. Other writers such as Richard Hannay or Ian Fleming continued with the stereotypes, trivializing or sexualizing the female spies in their novels, and making them subordinate to men.

But in reality women wartime spies have rarely been sexual vamps or passive dupes. There was nothing passive or subordinate about the patriotic Belgian and French women of La Dame Blanche who risked their lives and the lives of their families to spy on the Germans in occupied Belgium and France and send back valuable military intelligence to Britain during the First World War. Nor did they get financial gain for taking such risks. Similarly there was nothing passive, subordinate or vampish about women such as Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo and Yvonne Cormeau who also risked – and in some cases lost – their lives working undercover in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. In both instances the women involved in undercover operations were both patriotic and extremely brave. There was opposition to using women as undercover agents during the Second World War – the dangers were enormous and, from instructors’ reports during training, there were men who had serious doubts about the women’s abilities and others who considered such work was not appropriate for women but eventually it was decided to use them. And, of course, women make excellent spies during wartime; on a practical level they can operate unnoticed more easily than men, they are often able to establish information networks more easily than men, and according to Selwyn Jepson, who recruited women for the SOE, women are capable of a greater and lonelier courage than men, which is certainly something women spies have frequently demonstrated. Sadly, however, many women’s achievements in the field, and even their names have either been lost or ignored; only a few have won their way to some sort of fame. Most people know about Violette Szabo, heroic winner of the George Cross; far fewer know about the gentle Noor Inayat Khan who also won the George Cross, and probably even fewer about Madeleine Damerment or her French colleagues, who had previously risked their lives with the Resistance before signing up for special operations.

Operating from a safer base were hundreds of women during both world wars, who might not have risked their lives in the field but also contributed to the secret war of espionage, gathering spy catching material, coding and decoding sensitive intelligence and listening into the enemy. Their contribution to the creation and development of the British Secret Service has frequently been overlooked, particularly those who did this work during the First World War. Their achievements and dedication were remarkable but few people know their names. Those who staffed the great bombes and decoding machines during the Second World War also made an enormous contribution to the secret intelligence war, something that was recognized at the time but in this field too most of their names are unknown.

Uncovering the women who worked as spies during the First and Second World Wars, and those who worked behind the scenes during both wars, most of whose names I had not come across before has been a fascinating experience for me. Reading their files in The National Archives and tracking their achievements was enthralling. Far from being passive dupes, the women that I encountered in my research were clear-thinking, determined women who actively made their own decision to put themselves in great danger in order to fight for an ideal or patriotism or both. They also took the need for secrecy very seriously; in contrast to the received image of women as unthinking gossips, these women kept their mouths closed no matter what was done to them. They did their dangerous work, and some of them died as a result. Their names and achievements deserve to be better known than they are.

I am indebted to Tammy Proctor, whose excellent book Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War first introduced me to the little-known La Dame Blanche intelligence gathering network about which I knew nothing at all when I started this book and which led me to Captain Landau’s lively account, and also for her sharp analysis of the stereotyping and ideologically driven perceptions of women spies. I would also like to thank Madeleine (Maddy) Brooke for her time, patience and kindness in sharing information with me about her remarkable family and in particular her aunt, Madeleine Damerment, who worked with SOE and died with three other women at Dachau in 1944. I am most grateful to her as well for allowing me access to her family’s papers and memorabilia; I know it is not easy for her to talk about this subject. I am grateful to Helen Currie for talking to me about her life as an ATS working on the Tunney machines at Bletchley Park and for allowing me to quote material from her personal account, and also to Cynthia Waterhouse for permission to quote extracts from her private papers which are held in the Imperial War Museum, Documents Department. Thanks also to the staff at The National Archives; the archives are a fantastic resource, it would be only too easy to disappear into them and never re-emerge; the staff are incredibly helpful. Likewise I would like to thank the staff of the Documents Department at the Imperial War Museum, who never fail to answer questions and provide help. And finally my thanks to St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, for providing me with photographs of the WTS Memorial and to Simon Adams who clambered onto his bicycle and braved a rainy day to take photographs of the Violette Szabo mural and blue plaque in Stockwell. I am most grateful.

Chapter 1

Women and War

‘Upon women the burden and horrors of war are heaviest.’

MARGARET SANGER

War impacts profoundly on women’s lives, whether on the home front, in occupied territories, or on the battlefield. With the advent of total war and the mass mobilization of civilian populations during the twentieth century, women’s formal involvement in war increased enormously. The two World Wars had an impact on women’s lives that was far greater than in previous wars, not least because aerial bombardment, invading armies and the enlistment of whole populations brought war directly into the home, affecting civilians on the home front – a term that was coined during the First World War – just as much as soldiers on the frontline. During both World Wars women were involved in myriad roles: maintaining homes and families, doing war work, in caring roles as nurses and doctors, working within the armed forces – and as information gatherers, spies and resistance fighters. Many, although not all, were roles previously only held by men, or believed to be suitable only for men.

Opening the Doll’s House: women’s war work

Writing in 1917 about women’s involvement in the war, American journalist and feminist Mabel Potter Daggett declared: ‘I think we may write it down in history that on 4 August 1914, the door of the Doll’s House opened… For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most ancient occupation – and women to every other’. To some extent she was correct; between 1914-1918 and even more so between 1939-1945, the demands of war meant that women were pulled out of their more traditional roles as homemakers and carers and plunged into activities previously dominated by men.

In Britain, when the First World War broke out, large numbers of women, including several who had spent the pre-war years fighting the British government for the right to vote, now demanded the right to be involved in the war effort. Leading suffragist, Millicent Fawcett writing in The Common Cause urged: ‘Women your country needs you… let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship whether our claim to it be recognized or not.’ Emmeline Pankhurst too, charismatic leader of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), called an end to suffragette activities and threw her influence behind the British government, actively helping to recruit men – she and her supporters were reputedly involved with the appalling white feather movement – and urging the government to use women in the war effort. These calls on women to back the government split the women’s movement but even so as increasing numbers of men were left to die in the trenches, an estimated two million women entered the labour force, working for the first time as bus and tram drivers, painters and decorators, postal workers, bank clerks, butchers and munition workers producing thousands of shells while their faces and hair turned yellow from the DDT. Women worked as chimney sweeps, delivered milk, toiled on the land in the newly-formed Women’s Land Army and were employed as communication workers and police. By the end of the First World War, women in Britain and some of the other warring countries were doing just about every job imaginable to help the war effort – and this at a time when, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, women did not have the vote, nor did many people believe they should have. Their involvement in war work did not necessarily open the doll’s house but despite considerable male prejudice it challenged the conventional view that a woman’s place was only in the home, so much so that in January 1919 The Times featured an article about a forthcoming exhibition on women’s wartime work to be held at the Imperial War Museum, which would inform the public of the ‘extraordinary range and variety’ of the work that women had done on the home front and in military hospitals.

The guns of the First World War fell silent on 11 November 1918 and as surviving soldiers returned from fighting, women were encouraged to give up the waged work they had done during the war, and return to their domestic roles. Most did so, some with relief, but nothing was ever quite the same again. During the inter-war years women in Britain, the United States and various other countries finally gained the vote. More women enrolled in universities and an increasing number of occupations began to open up for women. The First World War had also left a specific legacy: many women had lost husbands and fiancés, leaving a considerable number of single women, many of whom forged independent lives. From the mid-1930s however worldwide economic depression, coupled with the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany were ominous signs, and as the decade wore on it appeared that a second major conflict was emerging. In Britain, from 1938, the government began to make plans to put the country onto a war footing.

To some extent women’s involvement in war work during the First World War was voluntary, fed by a wave of patriotism and government propaganda as well as by the need for women to replace the men who had gone to fight. During the Second World War Britain organized for ‘total war’ and government recruitment drives for women workers were even more intense, with propaganda and radio broadcasts urging women to come into the factories and ‘do their bit’. From spring 1941 every woman in Britain aged between 18-60 had to register with employment exchanges and those who were suitable had to choose from a range of possible wartime occupations. So urgent was the need for women to be involved in the war effort that in December 1941, under the National Services Act (2), the British government took the unprecedented step of introducing conscription for single women aged 20-30, although it was emphasized that women would not be required to bear arms. By the end of the war the total number of British women in war work was around 7,750,000, two million more than in 1939. Once again, women did every job imaginable, working on the railways, in shipyards, in transport and factories. Some 80,000 women also worked on the land in the Women’s Land Army and Women’s Timber Corps, helping to bring in 70 per cent of the nation’s food by June 1943. Women worked as engineers, welders, carpenters and electricians; they built roads and barrage balloons; drove tractors and farmed the land; and helped to produce millions of tons of armaments but, despite doing the same work as their male counterparts, women consistently received less pay.

Women’s entry into male-defined areas of work, whether agriculture or industry, did not go without comment and during both wars women workers faced considerable opposition and discrimination