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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      Jacqueline had no idea about Buckmaster’s admiration for her ‘delicate bone’; she was just delighted that she had been given a second chance. She promised herself that she would work as hard as she possibly could and prove to everyone that Lieutenant Colonel Woolrych’s comments on her finishing report had been completely wrong.

      Preparations now began for her departure for France. She was given a new name, Josette Norville, and told that her cover story would be that she was a sales representative of a pharmaceutical company, Pharmacie Bienfait of Lyons,⁷ travelling extensively around a large area of France in the course of her work. Her cover had similarities to her own life. The new name gave her the same initials as her own and the fake occupation was virtually the same as her real employment had been, although she would be selling different commodities. She had two code names, one of which was Designer. The choice of the other was bizarre: she was to be known as Jacqueline. This was the same name as that adopted by Yvonne Rudellat, one of the first female agents to be sent to France in July 1942. (She too had received a bad training report and, at a time when political correctness would have been regarded as an alien concept, her instructor referred to her as ‘the little old lady’.⁸ She was 45 years old.) Jacqueline’s code name was not only already allocated to someone else but was also her real name, thus rendering it useless as a security measure. Not wanting to make a fuss, she accepted this absurdity without comment, assuming that Buckmaster knew what he was doing. Before long she was introduced to a man called Maurice, for whom she would be working in France as a courier.

      Maurice Southgate (Hector) was born in Paris. It was said that his British parents had spent their honeymoon in the French capital and had liked it so much that they decided to stay, although they and their son remained British citizens. Southgate grew up in France and, like Jacqueline, spoke the language fluently without a trace of an English accent. Three years older than his new courier, he was married to a Frenchwoman, Marie Josette Lecolier – known as Josette – and, until coming to England to join the Royal Air Force, had lived in Paris, where he ran his own successful business, designing and manufacturing furniture. When he arrived in England his main desire was to become a pilot, but the Air Ministry declared him to be too old and had other ideas for his employment. Because of his language skills he, now Sergeant Southgate, was sent back to France as an interpreter for the RAF members of the British Expeditionary Force. He was still in France when, at the beginning of June 1940, Operation Dynamo ended its mission to rescue the BEF from the clutches of the Germans and Operation Ariel, a mopping-up exercise and the follow-on to Operation Dynamo, began.

      Southgate, along with several thousand troops and British civilians, boarded HMT Lancastria, one of the ships at anchor in the Charpentier Roads, around 10 nautical miles from St Nazaire, on 17 June. Brought out from St Nazaire in smaller boats, the passengers were desperate to get away from the advancing German troops and back to Britain, but the master of the Lancastria, Captain Rudolph Sharp, wanted to sail across the Channel in convoy with the other ships. While they waited for these to be boarded, the Lancastria took on more and more passengers herself. Originally built to carry 2,200 people, by the time she was ready to sail on that June day she was seriously overloaded. Estimates of the actual passenger numbers varied from 4,000 to 9,000, with many being forced to travel in the ship’s holds, well below the waterline.

      Just before 4 p.m. that afternoon several German bombers – Junkers 88s – appeared overhead and dropped bombs on the waiting ships. The Lancastria was hit four times and within 20 minutes she sank. Of all the thousands who had wearily climbed on board that day, there were only 2,477 survivors. Maurice Southgate was one of them. He spent hours trying to keep afloat in water that was covered with wreckage, dismembered bodies and burning fuel oil. Eventually he was rescued and, exhausted, was brought to England, landing at the Cornish port of Falmouth two days after his ordeal. He recorded what had happened to him in a diary:

      I disembarked in Falmouth 19th June 1940, covered in a blanket and shoeless. I was taken by ambulance to a nearby camp, where I was able to take a shower and lose my watch. Then came a coach journey, a magnificent trip in the English countryside, to Plymouth RAF Station where I met with several of my squadron companions in the Sergeant’s mess. I was met with open arms, cries and lots of beer.

      Next morning, in ill-fitting uniform, I left for London and arrived at my parents on the evening of 20th June 1940, my birthday. Both parents crying, as they had no news for several days, whilst the evacuation was taking place. I was listed missing and have had a lot of trouble establishing my credentials at the finance department of the ministry.⁹

      The sinking of HMT Lancastria was, and remains to this day, the worst ever British maritime disaster. The total number of lives lost in the debacle was more than the combined number of deaths in both the Titanic and the Lusitania, yet the full circumstances of the tragedy were never properly reported, as Prime Minister Churchill was concerned that it was one catastrophe too many for the British public to bear and ordered a ban on the reporting of the ship’s demise. The news was eventually broken in America, with a few subsequent reports in British newspapers several weeks later.

      Despite his narrow escape from death, Southgate was anxious to return to France as soon as he could. By now resigned to the fact that he would never become an RAF pilot, he was determined to do something to help defeat the Nazis, but it took him nearly two more years before he was able to join the SOE. Once he had been identified as a possible agent, however, things began to move fast. He was given an RAF commission and attended training courses, from which he emerged with glowing reports.

      When he and Jacqueline Nearne were introduced to each other in the early autumn of 1942 it was the beginning of what would become a close and highly efficient working relationship. The pair had a huge task in front of them. They would be building a circuit that stretched from Châteauroux, capital of the département of Indre in central France, to Tarbes in the south-western département of Hautes-Pyrénées, only 100 kilometres away from the Spanish border. Their circuit, named Stationer, would cover almost half the entire area of France and for a time Jacqueline would be its only courier.

      With their departure for France imminent, Jacqueline and Southgate were given clothes made in the French style and bearing French labels. Jacqueline had two suits, two blouses and skirts, two pairs of pyjamas and two pairs of shoes. The pyjamas СКАЧАТЬ