Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson
Allen&Unwin
Otago Daily Times, July 7th 2024
A couple of months ago, I watched a British TV series called Churchill’s Secret Agents. An exercise in ‘living history,’ it recreated, in reality-show format, the training programme used to assess the suitability of civilian recruits to one of the most secretive branches of the British secret services during WWII – the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Nicknamed ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’ (or, in the words of one academic, ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’), the SOE was composed of specially selected civilians who, after brief but intensive training, were parachuted into occupied Europe to carry out a programme of espionage, sabotage and propaganda. I was fascinated to learn about this heretofore unfamiliar branch of the British war effort and had no idea of any New Zealand connection. But it was not until I read Pippa Latour’s account of her experience as an SOE agent in occupied France that the enormity of what these amazing men and women did truly struck home.
Born in Durban in 1921 and orphaned by the age of four, Pippa spent her childhood in Africa before moving to Paris to finish her education, thence to Scotland to work for the Admiralty, joining the WAAF in 1941. In 1943, she was invited to interview for a position in what would turn out to be the secret SOE training school. Four months later, she parachuted into Nazi-occupied Normandy where, posing as the fourteen-year-old granddaughter of French farmers, she travelled the countryside collecting intelligence and sending information on German troop movements to London via a series of concealed transmitters spread across the region. It was a perilous job – the average life expectancy of a male wireless officer in France was six weeks – and the fact that Pippa survived for six months before returning to England in October 1944 is as much a testament to her courage and skill as luck. Yet it is something for which Pippa neither takes nor seeks credit. Even her own family knew nothing until her sons uncovered information about her on the internet when she was in her 80s.
This memoir, narrated to Jude Dobson shortly before Pippa’s death at the age of 102, is intended to correct the historical record and honour the memory of her fellow operatives, many of whom never made it home. Pippa does not shy away from the hellishness of the experience (often sleeping rough and so short of food she lost 11kg in 5 months, and survived everything from Gestapo interrogation to rape). But rather than paint herself as a hero, she emphasises that she was, like many others, simply doing what needed to be done. Her matter-of-fact narrative is more vivid and distressing than a more dramatic presentation would be.
Pippa moved to NZ in 1959, and although recognised and adopted by NZ special forces, this is the first time many of us will have heard her name. Her story, and that of her fellow SOE agents, is a final, invaluable gift from an extraordinary woman.
Leave a Reply