On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Pippa Latour, spying soap seller
After evading the Nazis and maintaining silence, a WWII spy has been caught by Jude Dobson. Kevin Norquay reports.
Jude Dobson is skilled at prising information out of a reluctant spy; she plies them with cheese and date scones, and they sing like a bird. Dobson, a familiar TV face turned author, has finished a book on the exploits of WWII spy Pippa Latour who for decades has been tight-lipped about her exploits in Nazi-occupied France.
Until then Latour, who died in Auckland last year aged 102, had never spoken – even to her family – of her undercover work with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), which had more than 3000 woman agents.
She parachuted into France in the dark, posed as a ‘‘schoolgirl” soap seller riding the roads of Normandy, then reporting German positions to the Allies as they prepared for the D-Day invasion.
When her secret emerged late in life – exposed online by a military researcher in 2000 – she was reluctant to tell her version of it, Dobson says.
“I said to her ‘Do you think you’ll ever tell your story Pippa? She goes ‘No. I don’t think so, I think it’ll die with me’,” Dobson tells the Sunday News. “I went, OK, well, if you ever do … you know.”
When Dobson tried the animation route, saying Latour could just speak and retain her privacy, the answer was “I don’t think so,” so Dobson left it.
And then Latour called back. “She said ‘I want to get my feelings out, and to leave a record after I die.’”
Out of that came a book that outlines the exploits of a brave woman, fluent in several languages, who lived in constant fear of the Gestapo, or exposure by the French, surviving several close calls and a rape.
She was searched more than once, and brought in for questioning, but the Germans did not find the code concealed in her hair tie. Her 135 coded messages helped guide bombing missions.
Danger was a constant. Twelve of the 41 SOE female agents to serve in France were executed by the Germans. One died when her ship was sunk, two of disease in prison, and one of natural causes.
Latour worked as a wireless operator in Normandy from May until August 1944. Once, two German soldiers almost caught her typing a transmission.
She closed her wireless pretending it was a case she was packing, and told them she had scarlet fever so was getting ready to leave the village. The soldiers did not hang around.
Dobson says her interviews were with an older woman who liked her own company and dog, aeons away from her story of the dangers of life during wartime.
WWII moulded her civilian life. For decades she had nightmares, lived by her
mantra ‘trust no one’, and still referred to one of her undercover bosses in France as “the bastard”. She never returned to France.
“Mostly I saw a little old lady, who I would bring a cheese scone or a date scone or something to eat,” Dobson says. “But a very straightforward little old lady, quite strong. She was sharp.”
And sometimes sharp in a “you naive dummy” sense, as she related her story about parachuting into France.
“Oh, well, I jumped,” she told Dobson. “We had to find a paddock full of white blobs in it. You know, because that’s livestock. I needed to jump into where the livestock was,” Latour told her ghost writer.
When Dobson asked why not land in a vacant paddock, she immediately felt foolish: “She goes ‘well, they’re mined, you want to go into a paddock with livestock otherwise, they’re mined.’”
While it is a story from another era, Dobson says she learned a great deal.
“What she taught me and she could teach other people, one thing is resilience,” she says. “And the other thing is being brave, and doing something hard when the world is turning to shit.
“Right now, these are quite good lessons for people that actually want the world to be a certain way. Well then, do something about it. That generation did it, and I think we are a little insulated from that.
“When ordinary people are put in those situations, you sink or swim, don’t you?
Because of the childhood she had and also just the tenor of the time, she just jumped in.”
Latour was born in South Africa, then lived in the Belgian Congo and Kenya. Neither parent survived her childhood. Her father, a French doctor, was killed by a lynch mob intent on destroying the hospital he worked in, and her mother died of a haemorrhage.
Dobson is not a military historian; she says she simply loves telling stories. She used military sources and cross-checked details Latour told her, finding her recollections to be reliable. And she was wary of painting war in a positive light.
“These are horrible things, but we should remember and we should commemorate people that actually faced that,” she says.
“I’m not glorifying it for a minute. I think that it’s terrible that political decisions are made where Joe Average on the street or Josephine Average ends up wearing it.”
Nor did Latour glorify her role. If anything she appeared to be rid of it, so she never spoke of it until her bravery emerged, and showed little interest in war movies, even those about the D-Day invasion she laid the groundwork for.
“She wanted to forget about the war, I thought she just wanted to go back to Africa and live another life,” Dobson said.
But total escape was impossible.
“She had nightmares. She said they got less over the years,” Dobson says.
Sessions were usually just Latour and Dobson, as more than that made the former spy uncomfortable.
“There was a time when (two others were there) and she said ‘oh no, this feels a bit strange to have you here, it feels a bit like an interrogation’. So I said, ‘well, we won’t do that again’.”
But she was not rattled when recalling those dreadful days when she could trust no-one, apart from a few French Resistance colleagues. Animals, she would get emotional about. People? Not so much.
Once the book is out, Dobson will be looking for another project.
“I loved my time with Pippa. I cried when I heard she died. She was very strong-willed and she had to be to do what she did. It’s Pippa’s story and any sales for this go to her estate.
“This is the way it should be. It’s her story, it’s just at 102 she was not really able to write it.”