Odette Hallowes: From a Wrong Envelope to the Gestapo Churchill Bluff

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Odette Hallowes, also known as Odette Sansom and Odette Churchill, was born in Amiens in 1912; her father, a bank manager, died at Verdun in 1918, and as a child she was blind for three and a half years and bedridden with polio. By 1942 she lived in Somerset with her husband Roy Sansom and three daughters. Answering an Admiralty appeal for photos of the French coast, she mailed her Boulogne pictures to the War Office by mistake, bringing her to Colonel Maurice Buckmaster of the Special Operations Executive. Instructors called her impulsive and temperamental, but she was sent to France by boat near Cassis in November 1942 under the code name Lise. Her Burgundy mission collapsed, and she became courier for Peter Churchill's Spindle network in Cannes.

Abwehr officer Hugo Bleicher posed as an anti-Nazi Colonel Henri; London warned her he was dangerous, but at 2 a.m. on April 16, 1943, he arrested her and Churchill at a hotel in Saint-Jorioz. At Fresnes prison the Gestapo questioned her 14 times, burned her back and pulled out her toenails, while she claimed Peter was Winston Churchill's nephew, her husband and ignorant of her work. Condemned to death on two counts in June 1943, she replied that she could only die once. Held in solitary at Ravensbrück, she survived, and in 1945 commandant Fritz Suhren drove her to the Americans; she later testified against him and he was executed in 1950. She married Peter Churchill in 1947, later Geoffrey Hallowes, and died in 1995 at 82.

• A burglar who stole her George Cross in 1951 mailed it back with a note calling her a dear old lady.
• A courier for the Spindle network had lost a list of 200 potential supporters to the Germans.
• Her bluff shielded radio operator Adolphe Rabinovitch from the Gestapo.
• About 20 former associates signed a manifesto questioning what sabotage she and Peter Churchill had done.
• She was the first woman to receive the George Cross while alive, and Suhren's pistol is now in a museum.