Odette Hallowes, GC, MBE, wartime heroine of the Special Operations Executive, died on March 13 at her Walton-on-Thames home aged 82. She was born in Amiens on April 28, 1912.
Of all the women who took part in wartime special operations in France, Odette - as she was universally known in spite of having borne three married surnames in her lifetime - perhaps best symbolised the indomitable spirit of resistance to the horrors of Nazism. Captured by the Gestapo in France in 1943 and consigned, after being cruelly tortured in Paris's notorious Fresnes prison, to Ravensbruck concentration camp, she emerged emaciated, weak and gravely ill at the end of the war.
But in the years that followed, her undiminished mental and moral energy, combined with a complete absence of bitterness towards her tormentors and the nation that had spawned them, became a beacon to others who had suffered disfigurement, pain or bereavement. Indeed, the theme of her postwar working life, with its service to various charities and help for the underprivileged, was the healing of those wounds, both physical and mental, which had been inflicted upon individuals by the war.
Her George Cross, she always maintained, was not to be regarded as an award to her personally, but as an acknowledgement of all those, known and unknown, alive or dead, who had served the cause of the liberation of France. Her wartime experiences had taught her two great truths: that suffering is an ineluctable part of the human lot, and that the battle against evil is never over.
Fame came to her - notably through the film Odette which celebrated her life - but she never sought it. In her entry in Who's Who she styled herself simply: housewife.
She was born Odette Marie Celine Brailly in Picardy, the daughter of Gaston Brailly, who was killed towards the end of the First World War. She was educated privately and at the Convent of St Therese in Amiens.
She always said that she had been determined at the outset to marry an Englishman, after a series of young British officers were billeted on the family house during the First World War. At any rate, when the son of one such man, whom her mother had nursed back to health, visited the family after the war to improve his English, romance soon blossomed. She married Roy Sansom, who worked in the hotel industry, in 1931 and settled in London, where she had three daughters.
British domiciled she might be, but her heart remained French. After the catastrophe to French arms in the early summer of 1940, she longed to do something more active than looking after her young ones. By a stroke of luck she got in touch with the independent French section of the Special Operations Executive.
Yet when she was first interviewed there were some doubts about her suitability as a clandestine SOE courier. Would she be able, as a mother of three young daughters who might be constantly on her mind, to undertake missions requiring steely nerves and an ability to concentrate on the task in question to the exclusion of all else? On the other hand, from certain points of view she seemed an ideal candidate. She was young, attractive, vivacious. She knew France; she had a winning manner. Furthermore, she had a burning desire to redeem by direct action the disgrace her country had suffered in its capitulation of June 1940.
Accepted, she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (since membership of a service organisation was a prerequisite of working for SOE and the FANY provided basic training in such matters as driving, wireless operation, etc) and did well in all her courses. She returned to France secretly, by small boat from Gibraltar to Antibes, on the last night of October 1942, with orders to join a new circuit in Burgundy. There she got on so well with Peter Churchill, SOE's organiser on the spot, that he secured London's leave to keep her on the Riviera.
Within a fortnight, the Germans and Italians overran all southern France. Churchill and Mme Sansom continued to try to provide contact between London and a large - as it turned out, a purely imaginary - secret army that was supposed to be organised by a friend of Churchill's codenamed "Carte", the father of Danielle Darrieux the film star. Unfortunately quarrels among "Carte's" friends became so acute that next February Churchill took Mme Sansom and his wireless operator, Adolphe Rabinovitch, away to St Jorioz near Annecy in the French Alps. Churchill then returned to London for instructions.
While he was away, Odette was approached by a "Colonel Henri", who represented himself to be a German officer who wanted to defect to the Allies. She was highly suspicious of "Colonel Henri" - with some justification since he was in fact Sergeant Bleicher of the Abwehr. But one of the more impetuous of the "Carte" members was taken in by him and imparted some names and numbers of the members of the circuit in and around Annecy. Churchill returned to France by parachute on April 14-15, 1943, and was met by Odette, with whom he returned to St Jorioz.
He had already been warned against "Colonel Henri" in London. But their operation had been fatally undermined by the indiscreet disclosures of their "Carte" comrade. After dark next evening Bleicher and a detachment of Italian troops arrived at the hotel in St Jorioz where Odette and Churchill were staying. He arrested her in the hall and going upstairs, where he found Churchill sound asleep in bed, arrested him too.
Churchill and Odette passed themselves off as married, and as relations of Winston Churchill (he claimed to be Churchill's nephew). They were, therefore, for a time treated with a mixture of savagery and deference. Odette was sent to Paris where, at the notorious Fresnes prison, she endured excruciating torments including having her toenails pulled out (for a year after her homecoming she could not wear shoes and had to walk on her heels until several operations restored her to normal mobility).
Both she and Churchill were eventually sent to the vast concentration camp at Ravensbruck, north of Berlin, where, in June 1943, Odette was condemned to death. That sentence was not carried out but for the remainder of her stay there her lot was one of alternate molly-coddling and beating which is the traditional procedure of the interrogator. Neither of them, however, made any admissions of importance. Meanwhile Rabinovitch, who had evaded arrest, escaped to England only to be dropped back by an unhappy staff error straight into the arms of the Gestapo next year.
At the end of the war, when the Red Army's advance approached Ravensbruck, Fritz Suhren, the camp commandant, drove in a sports car with Odette beside him into the American lines, in the hope that he could use her charm to save himself. She at once denounced him and he was hanged after trial.
Odette became a national heroine, subject of innumerable newspaper articles, a book by Jerrard Tickell and the film Odette (1950) which starred Anna Neagle in the title role. She was appointed MBE in 1945 and in the following year awarded the George Cross. In 1950 she was made an officer of the Legion d'Honneur.
She believed that the George Cross had been given to her, not because she had been especially gallant, but because she had had the good fortune to survive; unlike 11 other women in her section who had died in German hands, some of them shot within earshot of her cell.
Her first husband died and she married Peter Churchill in 1947. In 1956 that marriage was dissolved and she married Geoffrey Hallowes, a wine importer, who had also served - in another section - with the SOE in France. He was a constant support to her throughout the years when her life was lived in the glare of often unexpected bursts of publicity, not all of them welcome; there were, for example, criticisms of the effectiveness of SOE's operations in southern France.
But there was also publicity of a more light-hearted kind. On one occasion her mother's house in Kensington was burgled, the thief making off with some silver spoons and Odette's George Cross and Legion d'Honneur. Distraught at the loss of her daughter's treasures, Mme Brailly appealed through the press for their return. The thief, evidently a humane soul, obliged. His letter accompanying the decorations read: "You Madame, appear to be a dear old lady. God bless you and your children. I thank you for having faith in me. I am not all that bad - it's just circumstances. Your little dog really loves me. I gave him a nice pat and left him a piece of meat - out of fridge. Sincerely yours, A Bad Egg."
Odette was active in many organisations: she was on the committee of the VC and GC Association; she was a vice-president of the FANY; an honorary member of the St Dunstan's Ex-Prisoners of War Association; and President of 282 (East Ham) Air Cadet Squadron.
Last year, though already frail, she revisited Ravensbruck. For her it was the first time since 1945. The occasion, the unveiling of a plaque remembering the courage of the SOE women who had died there, was for her a profoundly moving experience.
Her husband and the three daughters of her first marriage survive her.
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