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

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

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.