Eileen Nearne, 1921–2010

When Eileen Nearne, an 89-year-old recluse, died friendless and destitute, officials in the English seaside town of Torquay assumed they would have to bury her in a pauper’s grave. But when police searched her apartment, they found an extraordinary trove of World War II memorabilia, including a Croix de Guerre awarded by the government of France. Nearne, they discovered, had been one of Britain’s most valuable wartime spies—and had told virtually no one about her experience.

Born to an Anglo-Spanish family, Nearne grew up in France, before fleeing to England ahead of the 1940 Nazi invasion. There she went to work for the Special Operations Executive, a British wartime cloak-and-dagger agency, where she learned to operate a shortwave radio. In March 1944, she parachuted into France with a radio transmitter in a suitcase, said The New York Times. Under the code name Agent Rose, she worked from safe houses in Paris, “operating a secret radio link that was used to organize weapons drops to the French Resistance.”

“Leading a secret life and frequently moving between secret transmitting places,” Nearne sent 105 messages over five months and had several narrow escapes before being captured by the Gestapo, said the London Daily Telegraph. The Nazis tortured her, beating her and submerging her naked in frigid water until she almost drowned, but she stuck to her cover story that she was a “little shopgirl” hired by a local businessman to send messages she didn’t understand. In April 1945, she escaped while being transferred to a new prison camp, and hid in a church in Leipzig, Germany, until American soldiers liberated the city. After her return to England, Nearne lived “an austere, solitary life,” working as a nurse and speaking of her wartime experiences only to family members and a few historians, said the Toronto Star.

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The Royal British Legion, a veterans’ organization, paid for Nearne’s funeral, which was attended by 350 people, including representatives of every branch of the British armed forces and the French consul general.