WWII heroine and her dagger hidden in pen
IT looked like an ordinary fountain pen hidden away among the stationery on her desk.
But when the executors of Beatrice Jackman’s estate took off the lid, they were stunned to uncover a dagger – still as sharp and deadly as when it was given to her 70 years ago.
The astonishing find has cast new light on the story of one of Britain’s most extraordinary – but modest – wartime heroines.
Mother-of-one Mrs Jackman was given the covert blade while she served as a spy in Nazi-occupied Denmark.
Now the James Bond-style gadget is to be sold at auction after lawyers dealing with her estate found the weapon at her Surrey home.
Mrs Jackman was born in England but was living in Denmark at the outbreak of the Second World War, and worked for the local resistance before being recruited as a Special Operations Executive agent. She risked her life by hiding Allied airmen
Evening dress made from a Nazi flag
and Danish Jews, and was involved in attacking the Nazi HQ records department in 1942.
She also acted as a translator until she was forced to flee for Sweden in 1943 when she came to the attention of the Gestapo. She stayed in Sweden until the end of the war.
Her brown fountain pen, which is British made, is a testament to the danger she faced as she carried out her operations.
The pen unscrews to reveal a three-inch double-edged leaf-shaped blade, with a raised central rib.
After the war, she returned to live in England and married Squadron Leader Edward Jackman, with whom she had a daughter. She died in 2012 aged 91.
But the dagger wasn’t the only memento the remarkable Mrs Jackman kept from the war.
In 2011, she sold a red evening dress which she made from a huge Nazi flag that was seized from the Reichstag by her fiance in 1945.
Auctioneers Bosleys of Marlow, Buckinghamshire, are expecting the pen, which will be sold on July 6, to sell for up to £500.
It may have been made by MI9, the wartime department which produced concealed weapons. Among their other creations are shoes with a compass in the heel and pencils with a hidden knife.
An auction spokesman said: ‘It shows the lengths the Allies would go to in order to have an advantage over the enemy.’ The SOE was a secretive British body formed to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers.
Few people were aware of the SOE’s existence, and many of their agents have taken the secrets of their operations to the grave.