The FANY Agents — Vera Leigh

image-Photograph of Vera Leigh King's Commendation for Brave Conduct

Codename(s): Simone / Almoner

This brief biography has been extracted from Flames in the Field, copyright © 1995 by Rita Kramer.
I am most grateful to her for agreeing to contribute to the web site.

Vera Leigh (née Glass) was born in Leeds on 17th March, 1903. She was adopted in infancy by Eugene Leigh, a racehorse trainer, and grew up around Maisons Laffitte, the fashionable racetrack near Paris, a world that led her quite naturally into the milieu of the haute couture.

After gaining experience for a time in a leading fashion house, she joined with two friends to found a designer dress house of their own in 1927 in the elegant Place Vendôme, where she moved in the sophisticated social scene of pre-war Paris. When Paris fell in June 1940 she joined the exodus south from the city as far as Lyon, where she joined one of the underground escape lines rescuing downed Allied pilots and servicemen who had been left behind at Dunkirk and guiding them out of the country.

In 1942 she crossed the Pyrénées herself and landed in the infamous Spanish internment camp at Bilbao. Released through the efforts of a British embassy official, she made her way via Gibraltar to England, where she was identified by SOE as a native Parisian who, with her perfect command of French, was a natural for training as a French Section agent.

Her trainers found her "keen, confident and capable" and "full of guts," a good shot who had no problem keeping up with the men. She was forty years old when she returned to France as Ensign Vera Leigh of the FANY-ATS, landing in a Lysander in a field near Tours in mid-May of 1943. She was to serve as courier in the sub-circuit Inventor, part of the doomed Prosper network. Her field name was Simone and her cover identity was that of Suzanne Chavanne, a milliner's assistant who travelled in and out of the city carrying messages for various wireless operators. Her adherence to the strict security measures that were taught in training seems to have been rather lax as she moved around the Paris she had known and where she was likely to be recognised, but in the end it made little difference. The SD and the Abwher were already closing in inexorably on the Prosper organisation and on 30th October they arrested Vera Leigh and another member of the circuit at a café in the Place des Ternes.

image-Sketch of Vera Leigh She was taken to Fresnes, the bleak prison outside Paris, where she remained until May 1944, exactly a year after she had arrived in France, when she was brought to the SDS headquarters on the Avenue Foch along with Andrée Borrel, Diana Rowden, Sonia Olschanezky and four other women, all F Section agents. One of them, Odette Churchill (later Hallowes) actually managed to have them served tea in the elegantly appointed former mansion. They left in high spirits, released from the dank prison into springtime Paris, as they were driven to the railroad station and placed, in handcuffs, on a train they assumed would take them to some kind of work camp. Later accounts reported that "throughout the journey, Miss Leigh's own courage never failed, and she was continually cheering her companions by her implicit faith in an Allied victory."

Their actual destination proved to be a civil prison at Karlsrue in Germany, where through the high barred windows of their cells they could hear the sounds of the Allied bombers overhead. It was clear that the end of the war was near, and they could anticipate being released by the liberating Allies before long. They did not reckon with the determination of German officialdom to leave behind no witnesses to their activities in occupied Europe.

Early in the morning on a day two months after their arrival at Karlsruhe, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel and Sonia Olschanezky were awakened, ordered into a closed truck, and driven to the concentration camp at Struthof known as Natzweiler. There they were taken down the steps through the camp, where they were furtively observed by several of the prisoners among the all-male population and recognised by at least one who had Andrée Borrel in their escape-line work. The four women were placed in a cell block next to the crematorium, and later that same night, one by one, they were given lethal injections and their bodies were cremated.

In the crematorium at Natzweiler a plaque bears the names of the four F Section women who were murdered there on 6th July 1944, a month after the Allied landings in Normandy began the liberation of occupied France.

Vera was 41 years old at execution.