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

Satisfied that they had done their best and that there was nothing to give any clues about her next of kin, the police were on the point of giving up the search when they came across some French coins, old French newspaper cuttings and medals. These included the British 1939–1945 Defence Medal and the War Medal 1939–1945, which were awarded to many people during the Second World War. The police took more notice when they came across the France and Germany Star, which was awarded only to those who had done one or more days’ service in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands or Germany between 6 June 1944 and 8 May 1945 – D-Day and VE Day. They were even more surprised when they discovered an MBE and the French Croix de Guerre. Eileen Nearne in her later years may have been a rather solitary, eccentric figure but in her youth she had clearly done something special. With the clue of the medals, it didn’t take long for them to find out that she had worked for the Special Operations Executive, the secret organization that had sent agents to occupied countries during the Second World War and which had been tasked by Prime Minister Winston Churchill with ‘setting Europe ablaze’.

Her neighbours were flabbergasted. Damian Warren said that he recalled seeing a letter addressed to Eileen Nearne MBE. He said that he had asked Eileen about it and that she had dismissed it as being a mistake. 1 Another of the residents, Iain Douglas, who lived at the opposite end of the crescent, said of her:

She was indeed a very strange lady, and quite reclusive. She would walk around all day with some large bags in tow and I used to wonder if she could only go into her flat at a certain time. I did wonder if she was part vagrant sometimes. She would sit outside waiting for ages. She had long, grey, unkempt hair. She would scurry away from anyone who approached her and on the sole occasion I said hello to her, she looked so shocked and horrified that I never attempted [to] again. It was a huge surprise to us when her past surfaced following her death. 2

Yet another neighbour, Steven Cook, declared: ‘We thought she may have been in the French Resistance from rumours and hearsay over the years. I was very surprised at the extent of her heroism. You would never have thought it, as she never spoke of it.’ 3

Soon the story reached the local and then the national newspapers. Some articles said that she had been a spy; others claimed that she was just like Charlotte Gray, the eponymous heroine of Sebastian Faulks’s novel. Neither claim was true. She had in fact been a wireless operator, sending and receiving messages for the leader of a Resistance circuit in Paris, and so was clearly neither a spy nor anything like the fictional Charlotte Gray. Similar reports were given on national radio and on the television news bulletins, but still no relatives appeared.

John Pentreath, the Royal British Legion’s manager for Devon, was reported as saying: ‘We will certainly be there at her funeral. We will do her as proud as we can … She sounds like a hugely remarkable lady and we are sorry she kept such a low profile, and that we only discovered the details after her death.’ 4

By the time the international newspapers had taken up the story of the death of the courageous old lady, genealogists and probate researchers Fraser & Fraser had begun searching for any heirs. They soon discovered that Eileen was one of four children and that she had never married. Her sister was deceased and had also remained single, but her two brothers, who had both died in their early 50s, had married and each had had a child. The elder brother had had a son who had died in 1975 but the younger of the two brothers had had a daughter, and Fraser & Fraser believed that she was still alive.

One of the company’s researchers managed to find Eileen Nearne’s niece, Odile, in Italy. She had married an Italian and was living in Verona. A telephone call was made to her and she was informed that her aunt had died. Since everyone believed Eileen was alone and unloved, her niece’s reaction to the news was, perhaps, not quite what they had expected: Odile was distraught.

Over the years Odile had regularly come to England with her family to visit Eileen and had last seen her aunt six months before her death. Eileen Nearne was a very important figure in her niece’s life and Odile was devoted to her. She was not only inconsolable when she learnt the details of her lonely death but also horrified to discover that her aunt had been destined to have a pauper’s funeral, with no one to mourn her loss, and quickly made plans to come to England. After her arrival she took over the funeral arrangements and was able to answer many of the questions about her aunt’s life that had been puzzling the people of Torquay and reporters from around the world. And as she answered them, it soon became clear that almost everything that had been believed about Eileen Nearne was incorrect, and the true story of her amazing life, along with that of her elder sister Jacqueline, who was also an SOE agent, began to unfold.

Eileen Nearne was born at 6 Fulham Road, west London, on 15 March 1921, the youngest of the four children of John and Mariquita Nearne. When her father registered her birth two days later, he gave her name as Eileen Marie. It seems to have been the only time in her life that her middle name was spelt this way, as all other documents refer to her as Eileen Mary – a strange choice, as Mary was also one of her sister’s names. In any case, Eileen was known to all, friends and family alike, as Didi. The name stuck and those who knew her well called her Didi for the rest of her life.

John Francis Nearne, Didi’s father, was the son of a doctor also named John 1 and so, to avoid confusion, was known as Jack. He was a 23-year-old medical student when he married French-born Mariquita Carmen de Plazaola at Marylebone Register Office on 6 November 1913. Mariquita, then 26 years old, was the daughter of Spanish Count Mariano de Plazaola and his French wife, the Marquise of La Roche de Kerandraon. 2 By the time Jack and Mariquita’s first child, a boy they named Francis, was born on 16 July 1914, the couple had moved from their London address, 70 Margaret Street, Marylebone, to Brighton.

With the onset of the First World War in 1914, Jack became a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Mariquita remained at the family home, 32 West Hill Street, a neat Victorian terraced house just a short walk from the beach. It was here that on 27 May 1916, their second child, Jacqueline Françoise Mary Josephine, was born.

After Jack’s military service ended he gave up being a doctor and became a dispensing chemist. The family left the seaside and returned to London, setting up home at 58 Perham Road in Fulham, another Victorian terraced building, and, on 20 January 1920, their second son, Frederick John, was born. The family was completed the following spring with the arrival of Didi. As the baby of the family Didi was rather spoilt and, according to her own account, she was a very naughty child. 3

In 1923, with Europe still in turmoil as a result of the war, Jack and Mariquita decided to leave England and move to France. Mariquita’s parents owned several houses and apartments there, and offered the family an apartment in Paris, to which they moved with their young family.

Of all the children Francis, the eldest, was the one who had the most difficulties in adjusting to the move. He was nine years old and had already completed nearly four years of schooling in England. He couldn’t speak French but was sent to a French school in the rue Raynouard, on the right bank of the river Seine, in the hope that he would soon settle down there and learn both his lessons and the language. The school was close to his mother’s birthplace at Auteuil in the capital’s wealthy 16th arrondissement , a pleasant area his mother knew well. But Francis was not happy at school. He found the lessons complicated and difficult and, despite his mother speaking to him in French in an effort to help him, could understand only a few words. It was a good school but Francis did not do at all well and was very disheartened by his lack of progress. A shy, sensitive boy, he found it difficult to make the friends who might have made his assimilation into the French education system a little easier. He had to endure this unhappy situation for a year before his parents took him away. They looked for another school that might suit him better and enrolled him in one in Le Vésinet in the north-west of Paris where, for six months, he received intensive coaching to bring him up to the standard required for a boy of his age. It was an unfortunate start for the poor little lad, and his lack of early success damaged his self-confidence to such an extent that he never really recovered. The feeling of failure was exacerbated when his younger siblings managed to fit in at school with far fewer difficulties than he had had and he was too young to understand that it was because they had been brought to France at an earlier age than he, so their transition to the French way of life was much easier.