It was a grey Saturday in April, the pavements still wet from a shower. My daughter — still too young to read — had stopped dead under a blue plaque on a quiet side street. "What does it say?" she asked, pointing at the white letters. The plaque said: NOOR INAYAT KHAN GC 1914–1944 SOE Agent codename 'Madeleine' stayed here. I read the name out loud. "Who's the lady?" I opened my mouth to answer and realised I knew almost nothing about her. A name. The word "spy", filed somewhere at the back of my mind. That was all.
I gave her the pre-school version: a very brave lady who sent secret messages and never told the bad people anything. That evening, once everyone was asleep, I went looking for the rest. What I read that night is the reason for these ten portraits — published four days before VE Day, eighty years after the war in Europe ended.
The timing is not an accident. In March, the government set out its plans for four days of VE Day 80 commemorations — starting on the early May bank holiday. Among them was "a nationwide call for families to delve into their lofts and discover their own Second World War stories". Some of the most extraordinary of those stories belong to women whose work was, by design, never meant to be seen.
All ten women below served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) — Britain's wartime secret service for sabotage and subversion. Every date comes from a source you can open yourself (English Heritage, The National Archives, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the National Army Museum, the Imperial War Museums). Where those sources disagree, I'll tell you.
Why were the women of SOE so easy to forget?
The women of SOE were trained to be invisible — and for decades, many of them stayed that way. According to the National Army Museum, SOE operatives usually wore civilian clothes, which meant they could expect to be shot as spies if captured. Women recruits were often enlisted in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) to disguise their secret work. The museum adds a striking detail — "They were the only women permitted a combat role during the Second World War".
The numbers are small and brutal. The National Army Museum puts the number of women trained by SOE's French Section (F Section) at 39. Its page for a talk by the historian Kate Vigurs sums them up — from "housewives to grandmothers, shop assistants to princesses". The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) is blunter. On its blog on SOE and the liberation of Europe, it writes that "15 out of the 39 female agents put into the field by the SOE lost their lives". Many have no known grave. Six of them, Violette Szabo among them, are commemorated on the Brookwood 1939–1945 Memorial; five, including Noor Inayat Khan, on the Runnymede Memorial.
There is a quieter reason too. Much of this work — carrying messages, coding telegrams, keeping a radio alive in a rented room — did not look like combat. And some survivors, Odette Sansom first among them, chose to speak for their dead comrades rather than for themselves. A list of medals tells you who was put forward, not who fought — worth remembering whenever you read one. The gap between what a woman did and the credit she received reaches well beyond SOE: fifteen other women's stories, from nuclear physics to the Olympics, tell the same tale.
Violette Szabo: the shop assistant from Stockwell
Violette Szabo was an ordinary Londoner — until the war turned her into something else. Born in Paris to an English father, Charles George Bushell, and a French mother, Reine Leroy, she moved with her family to 18 Burnley Road in Stockwell in 1935. When war came, English Heritage's blue plaque biography tells us, she was working in the perfume department of the Bon Marché store in Brixton. In 1940 she married Étienne Szabo, a French officer of Hungarian parentage who left almost at once with the Free French for north Africa. Their daughter Tania was born in June 1942; that October, Étienne was killed in action (at El Alamein, according to the National Army Museum).
After his death, Violette joined SOE's French Section, enlisted in the FANY as cover. Known as a crack shot, she was sent into occupied France twice — in April 1944, and again two months later. On the second mission, she was parachuted in just after D-Day. Her task was to help the Resistance sabotage German communications — including efforts to delay the 2nd SS Panzer Division on its way to Normandy. On 10 June she was stopped at a German roadblock and captured after a gunfight.
Interrogated at Fresnes prison in Paris, she was deported by train to Germany. When British aircraft attacked the train, the CWGC recounts, Violette and another woman prisoner took water to the male prisoners, at great risk to themselves. She was executed at Ravensbrück in early 1945. Her plaque in Burnley Road reads: "SHE GAVE HER LIFE FOR THE FRENCH RESISTANCE". She was awarded the George Cross posthumously and, as English Heritage records, the medal was presented to her infant daughter, Tania. Her story reached a wider audience through the 1958 film Carve Her Name with Pride, part of which was filmed in Burnley Road itself.
Noor Inayat Khan: the children's author who became a radio operator
Noor Inayat Khan was, in English Heritage's words, "the first female radio operator to be sent into occupied France during the Second World War". She was born in 1914 (in Moscow, according to the CWGC). Her mother, Amina Begum, was an American poet; her father, Inayat Khan, an Indian musician and Sufi teacher. Noor spent much of her life in Paris. She studied child psychology at the Sorbonne and was building a career as a children's writer when war broke out. Despite a pacifist Sufi upbringing, she and her family chose to join the fight, leaving France days before the fall of Paris in June 1940.
She enlisted in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) on 19 November 1940, trained as a wireless operator, and was interviewed by SOE on 10 November 1942. In the spring of 1943, from her mother's home at 4 Taviton Street, she wrote to her brother: "I am a busy little girl now, and life is just full of activity and interest". On the night of 16 June 1943 she was flown to France. Her codename, 'Madeleine', was the name of a character in one of her own stories.
Soon after she arrived, mass arrests destroyed her network. Noor chose to stay. She was now the only transmitting agent left in Paris and, moving constantly and changing her appearance, kept messages flowing for three and a half months. Betrayed in October 1943, she was taken to Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch. She escaped at least twice — and was recaptured each time — before being sent to Germany, where she was kept in isolation at Pforzheim prison, mostly in chains. On 11 September 1944 she was taken with three other women agents to Dachau, where she was shot. She had revealed nothing, not even her real name. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star in 1946 and the George Cross on 5 April 1949.
Odette Sansom: the George Cross who came home
Odette Sansom survived Ravensbrück — and came home on VE Day itself. Born Odette Brailly on 28 April 1912 in Amiens, she lost her father at Verdun in 1918. In 1931 she married an Englishman, Roy Sansom; by 1933 they had moved to London, where she raised three daughters. Her route into SOE began with a mistake. In early 1942, the Admiralty appealed for holiday photographs of the beaches across the Channel. Odette answered — but sent her letter to the War Office by mistake, and was interviewed by Selwyn Jepson, who was recruiting for F Section.
On 3 November 1942 she landed from a small fishing boat near Cassis. Codenamed 'Lise', she became the courier of Peter Churchill's network, first in Cannes, then near Annecy. Both were arrested on 16 April 1943. To protect him, she claimed they were married and related to Winston Churchill. Tortured at Fresnes, she gave nothing away — among the people she protected was Francis Cammaerts, who went on to run one of the most successful circuits of the war. Sent to Ravensbrück and condemned to death, she survived. As the Allies approached, the camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, drove her to the American lines — hoping her supposed family connection would save him. Her evidence later helped to convict him.
Odette returned to London on 8 May 1945. The London Gazette of 20 August 1946 records that, as a prisoner, "she displayed courage, endurance and self-sacrifice of the highest possible order". On one point the sources disagree. Elmbridge Museum calls Odette the first woman to be awarded the George Cross; English Heritage says the same of Violette Szabo, "the first British woman to be awarded the George Cross". A film, Odette, starring Anna Neagle, followed in 1950. She never let the medal be about her alone, as her biography by Elmbridge Museum recalls: "My comrades, who did far more and suffered more profoundly than I, are not here to speak. Because of this, I speak for them".
Andrée Borrel and Yvonne Rudellat: the first to go in
Andrée Borrel and Yvonne Rudellat were among the first SOE women sent into France — and neither came home. Yvonne Rudellat, born in France, joined SOE after a life of marriage, separation and money worries, according to the CWGC. Deployed in July 1942 under the name Jacqueline, she organised drop zones for agents and supplies and took part in sabotage. She was captured with her colleague Pierre Culioli in June 1943, badly injured. Moved from prison to prison, she ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus and dysentery on 23 or 24 April 1945 — just after the camp's liberation. Her fate was confirmed only in July 1946.
Andrée Borrel, born in Paris in November 1918, left school at 14 to help support her family. She worked on the Pat Line, which smuggled Allied airmen and others out of France, then crossed the Pyrenees to England herself. On the night of 24 September 1942, she became the first woman parachuted into France, alongside Lise de Baissac. As courier for Francis Suttill's 'Prosper' network she impressed him so much that he wrote to London, in March 1943, that "she is the best of us all". Arrested in June 1943, she gave her captors nothing. On 6 July 1944 she was killed at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, with Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden.
Nancy Wake: the White Mouse
Nancy Wake was, according to The National Archives' story of her life, "the most wanted woman in France". Born in New Zealand in 1912 and raised in Sydney, she ran away from home at 16. With £200 inherited from an aunt, she travelled to New York and then London, where she trained as a journalist. Married to a French industrialist, Henri Fiocca, she was living in Marseilles when war came and worked for the escape line later known as the Pat O'Leary line. The Gestapo nicknamed her the 'White Mouse' and put a price of 5 million francs on her head. Her husband was captured, tortured and killed after she escaped to England; she learnt of it only at the end of the war.
Her SOE training reports, now public, are a pleasure to read. One calls her "a good mixer with a cheerful and persuasive personality", with "a marked sense of humour". Her weapons instructor was briefer — "Very good and fast shot". On the night of 29–30 April 1944, codenamed 'Hélène', she parachuted into the Allier as part of an SOE team. In June 1944, after a battle between 500 maquisards and a German force of thousands, she cycled 500 kilometres to warn the other groups to withdraw and disperse.
The National Archives describes her as "one of, if not the most, highly decorated woman on the Allied side". Her medals included the George Medal, the US Medal of Freedom, the Légion d'honneur and three Croix de Guerre. Her autobiography, The White Mouse, came out in 1985. She died on 7 August 2011, aged 98, and her ashes were scattered in the woods near Montluçon where her maquis had its headquarters.
Virginia Hall: the agent with a wooden leg called Cuthbert
Virginia Hall ran an SOE circuit on an artificial leg — one she had nicknamed 'Cuthbert'. Born in Baltimore in 1906, she lost her lower left leg after a shooting accident, which ended her hopes of a diplomatic career. After driving ambulances in France in 1940, she joined SOE in April 1941 and was sent to France that August, with cover as a reporter for the New York Post. The National Archives calls her "only the second woman SOE agent dropped into France, and the first to undertake an ongoing active field role".
Based in Lyon under the codename Diane, she founded the Heckler circuit. She also helped escaping Allied airmen — they were told to ask for 'Olivier' at the US consulate. On 15 July 1942, she organised the escape of the twelve SOE and Resistance prisoners held at Mauzac prison. The Germans called her "the limping lady" and put her on their most wanted list. When the net closed, she crossed the Pyrenees on foot through a 7,500-foot pass, walking up to 50 miles a day. Before leaving she told London she hoped Cuthbert would not be 'bothersome'. SOE, missing the joke, replied: "If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him". She later returned to France with the American OSS and worked for the CIA until 1966.
Christine Granville: Britain's longest-serving female agent
Christine Granville, born Krystyna Skarbek in Warsaw on 1 May 1908, was Britain's longest-serving female agent, according to English Heritage. She was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) at the start of the war. Her recruiter reported: "She is a flaming Polish patriot, an expert skier and great adventuress". From the winter of 1939–40, she skied in and out of occupied Poland, smuggling money, arms and intelligence (once on microfilm hidden in her gloves). Arrested by the Gestapo in Hungary in January 1941, she bit her tongue to fake coughing blood. An X-ray showed old lung scarring — and she was released as a likely TB case.
On 7 July 1944, SOE parachuted her into southern France as courier to Francis Cammaerts — the same man Odette Sansom had protected. Her most famous exploit was talking the Gestapo into releasing Cammaerts and two other agents awaiting execution. She did it with a 2 million franc bribe and a bluff — the Allies, she said, were about to arrive. She received the George Medal, the OBE and the Croix de Guerre. After the war she struggled to find settled work; on 15 June 1952, she was stabbed to death by a man who had been stalking her. Her blue plaque is at 1 Lexham Gardens in Kensington, the former hotel where she lived from 1949.
Yvonne Cormeau and Lilian Rolfe: two voices on the wireless
Yvonne Cormeau and Lilian Rolfe were SOE wireless operators, the link between a circuit in France and London. The CWGC's blog on SOE puts it plainly — "The average life expectancy for volunteer radio operators in the field was just six weeks." One of these two women beat those odds for more than a year. The other did not come home.
Yvonne Cormeau had lost her husband in an air raid on London in 1940. According to the Imperial War Museums' seven stories from SOE, she was parachuted into France in August 1943 and sent 400 transmissions in 13 months — "the highest of any SOE wireless operator". Her circuit leader, George Starr, turned out to have known her husband; speaking to the IWM in 1984, she recalled that he felt a 'double responsibility' to look after her. When the pair were stopped at a roadblock with guns pressed to their backs, it was Yvonne who convinced the soldiers that her radio set was an X-ray machine. For six months she even broke the usual rule of moving on, transmitting from a remote village with no running water. The Germans knew a woman was transmitting in the area, but they were convinced no Englishwoman would stay in such a place.
Lilian Rolfe, the daughter of a British accountant living in Paris, spent the first years of the war in the press section of the British Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, where part of her job was tracking German ships. She reached England in 1943, joined the WAAF, then SOE, and trained as a wireless operator. Her CWGC story records that she was dropped near Tours on 5 April 1944 and sent 67 messages to London, helping SOE drop arms to the Maquis before D-Day. Captured at Nangis on 31 July, she was sent to Ravensbrück. With Violette Szabo and Denise Bloch she volunteered for a work party at Torgau, where the three tried to escape. Brought back to Ravensbrück, all three were shot there in early 1945. Lilian Rolfe is commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial.
Where to find the stories of SOE women: plaques, memorials and archives
The easiest way in is through places. In London, English Heritage blue plaques mark three of these lives. Violette Szabo's is at 18 Burnley Road, Stockwell; Noor Inayat Khan's at 4 Taviton Street, Bloomsbury; Christine Granville's at 1 Lexham Gardens, Kensington. The CWGC's Brookwood 1939–1945 Memorial and the Runnymede Memorial carry the names of the SOE women who have no known grave.
For reading and watching, three starting points stand out:
- Nancy Wake's autobiography, The White Mouse (1985).
- Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), the film of Violette Szabo's life, partly shot in Burnley Road.
- Odette (1950), with Anna Neagle as Odette Sansom.
Then the archives. The National Archives holds the SOE personnel files and has published extracts online: Nancy Wake's file is HS 9/1545, Virginia Hall's HS 9/647/4. If a relative's name turns up in the loft this bank holiday, those catalogue references show you what an SOE file looks like. It's a concrete way to go beyond family legend.
Eighty years on, the question of whose courage gets remembered — and whose name goes up on a wall — is still a feminist one. For the wider picture, read our look at where feminism really stands today; for the workplace, the 2025 figures on gender equality at work in the UK show how far there is still to go.
Frequently asked questions
How many women did SOE send into France?
Thirty-nine women passed through the training of SOE's French Section, according to the National Army Museum. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission writes that 15 of the 39 female agents put into the field by SOE lost their lives. That count includes two women sent to Yugoslavia and Slovakia rather than France.
Which SOE women were awarded the George Cross?
Three SOE women received the George Cross. Odette Sansom's award appeared in the London Gazette on 20 August 1946; Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan received it posthumously. Elmbridge Museum calls Odette the first woman to receive it, while English Heritage gives that title to Violette Szabo as the first British woman. Christine Granville and Nancy Wake received the George Medal.
Why did SOE women join the FANY or the WAAF?
Enlisting in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) or the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) gave SOE's women a cover for their secret work. On paper they held posts in these services; in reality, as the CWGC puts it, they were agents doing underground work for SOE.
Where can I see memorials to SOE women?
English Heritage blue plaques mark the London homes of Violette Szabo (Stockwell), Noor Inayat Khan (Bloomsbury) and Christine Granville (Kensington). Women with no known grave are commemorated by the CWGC on the Brookwood 1939–1945 Memorial and the Runnymede Memorial.
Which film or book should I start with?
Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) is the classic film about Violette Szabo. For a first book, Nancy Wake's autobiography The White Mouse (1985) is told in her own voice.
Was Virginia Hall British?
No — Virginia Hall was American, born in Baltimore in 1906. She served with Britain's SOE in France in 1941 and 1942, then joined the American OSS and later the CIA.
How can I talk to a young child about these women?
Start from something concrete, such as a blue plaque or a street name, and tell a name, a job and a refusal, without violent detail. Harder facts can wait until the child asks. This is a parent's approach, not official teaching guidance; matching the words to the child's age is the same principle as in our age-by-age guide to talking with children about consent.
Sources
- GOV.UK — Plans unveiled to mark VE Day 80 (March 2025)
- Commonwealth War Graves Commission — Legacy of Liberation: Espionage and SOE operations (2024)
- National Army Museum — Special Operations Executive
- National Army Museum — The George Cross
- National Army Museum — A cool and lonely courage: the women of SOE F Section
- English Heritage — Violette Szabo blue plaque
- English Heritage — Noor Inayat Khan blue plaque
- English Heritage — Christine Granville blue plaque
- The Elmbridge Hundred (Elmbridge Museum) — Odette Hallowes
- CWGC — Lieutenant Andrée Raymonde Borrel, SOE operative (2024)
- CWGC — Ensign Yvonne Claire Rudellat
- CWGC — Section Officer Lilian Rolfe, SOE operative (2025)
- The National Archives — The story of Nancy Wake
- The National Archives — The story of Virginia Hall
- Imperial War Museums — Seven stories from Special Operations Executive