I hate this time when we’re just waiting for the telephone and everyone pretends they’re not and then when it rings there’s suddenly an icy feeling of tension and everyone stops breathing.
Barbara Bertram
Not all country houses requisitioned in the war were large. The minimum size designated in 1939 was a property with four rooms downstairs. In the event, many smaller properties were taken over for a variety of purposes and used at times for any number of functions from anti-aircraft bases – such as a private house in Elsworthy Road, St John’s Wood, which had a secret dug-out passage for the ARP onto Primrose Hill, with its spectacular view over London, to offices for the Ministry of Food in Aylesbury High Street. But it was a modest manor house in Sussex with an unusual wartime story that caught my eye. Bignor Manor had four bedrooms, a sitting room, dining room and kitchen. Over the course of three years during the war the house often had to accommodate up to fifteen overnight visitors, and sometimes for more than one night, and on top of that they had to do it secretly. Once, the house was crammed to bursting with twenty-one overnight guests. This was a clandestine safe-house for French Resistance couriers on their way from London to France and back via Tangmere airfield near Chichester.
The French were in a different position from the other countries represented in London. The Czechs, Poles and Norwegians, to name but three who were involved in SOE, had governments-in-exile. France did not. It had an organisation that grew from scratch in the summer of 1940 headed by General Charles de Gaulle, a man of extraordinary vision, drive and height. He stood at six feet seven and had a distinguished record from the First World War. During the battle for France he led an armoured division which launched a counter attack against the invaders and he was appointed Under-Secretary for War. However, when France fell he refused to accept his government’s decision to sign the armistice with Germany and, in danger of arrest, he escaped to London on 17 June 1940. It had not been an easy decision and he knew many in the French army saw it as a betrayal. This strengthened his resolve to stand up for France and to prove that he had a belief in a free France. He met Churchill on the afternoon of his arrival and the next day made a broadcast on the BBC when he urged people not to be demoralised and to fight the occupation.
From that day onwards he worked tirelessly to expand his Free French forces, starting from a tiny base in St Stephen’s House in Victoria. He was a difficult guest for the British government as he was frequently at odds with what they expected of him. Churchill supported him from the outset in his aims to rally the French but their relationship was constantly under pressure as de Gaulle never really trusted the British to treat him as an equal. He said once of their relationship: ‘When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other most of the time.’1
By 1942, when the story of Bignor Manor comes into play, the Free French had established themselves as the legitimate representative for France in London and had moved to 4 Carlton Gardens. They had greatly expanded in strength and were in the business of building intelligence to help establish resistance networks on the ground. Much as he would have liked to function without the help of the British, de Gaulle realised he could not. He required the assistance of SOE, the RAF and all the infrastructure in between to get his agents safely into and out of occupied France.
Bignor Manor’s story involves a chief conducting officer for the Free French; his wife, a partially deaf mother of their two young boys, Tim and Nicky; a goat called Caroline; Duff-the-dog, a Dalmatian; Peter the cat; two rabbits; a dozen hens and two beehives. The visitors were known as the ‘Hullabaloos’, named by Tim and Nicky who could not understand the excited French language they would hear in the house. All had a role to play – apart from the cat.
Barbara and her husband Major Anthony (Tony) Bertram had lived at Bignor Manor since their wedding in 1929. It was his wartime work that shaped the life of his family between 1942 and 1944. Barbara wrote an account of this time immediately after the war and it was finally published in a slim volume in 1995. It is an account of three years of activity working for the French Resistance, in which she provided sustenance, great kindness, beds for the night and endless practical help to hundreds of French men and women who were strangers to her. The book, written in 1946, is a carefully constructed narrative that gives a vivid picture of the facts and a little sense of the drama.
Barbara’s was a strange role. Although she was not herself in danger, the agents she welcomed as guests were some of the most high profile of the Free French and their lives were at permanent risk from discovery by the Gestapo. Barbara Bertram was aware of this and she felt a sense of responsibility towards their security. The need for absolute secrecy and therefore a great deal of lying to friends, family and neighbours on her part, put her under pressure. Barbara also wrote a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ memoir, presumably in preparation for the book itself, which gives a breathless account of the same story but punctuated with moments of raw emotion: terror, despair, dread of being found out and thus putting agents lives at risk, combined with the pressure of hard work, little sleep, working round the rations and then, occasionally, the odd moment of joy and respite. It is the freshness and honesty of this account that makes it so compelling.
On the outside Madame Barbara, as the French agents called her, appeared calm and under control but the memoir shows that inside her head there were swirling emotions, some understandable, others irrational, copious lists and anxious thoughts as she tried to cope: ‘Why am I always smoking?’ ‘I must dig up leeks – Oh it’s not good just thinking, I must write it down after breakfast.’ Or ‘What can I wear? I wish I didn’t hate myself in trousers then I needn’t wear stockings.’ It offers a vivid picture of the little things that mattered to women in wartime that remind us that they were human, despite playing a key role in the war machine, whatever their exact job.
Tony Bertram, in the foreword to his wife’s published memoir, made it clear that it was she who had been on the front line, that her life had been shaped by the vicissitudes of his work as a conducting officer within the French Resistance and it was she who had been brave. Barbara, for her part, put it down to the fact that she found lying easier than her husband. Once, an elderly lady, new to the village, was collecting for the Red Cross and called on the Bertrams. As she walked up the garden path a French agent opened the window and fired his pistol. Barbara was sent out to offer an explanation and started an apology when the lady said, ‘Don’t worry my dear, don’t worry. I know that anything can happen in a war.’ With that she collected her pennies and walked away, never mentioning the incident again. Barbara knew that people wondered what was going on at the manor. She wrote of her neighbours: ‘Poor Armstrongs they would love to know all about what we are doing. It’s awful the way I tell lies so easily and they believe me. I wonder if anyone guesses what we’re doing.’2 The only people who were consistently frustrated at being put off by her excuses when they wanted to visit were a cousin who sold savings stamps and her mother, who came to think that her daughter had become very rude since the war began.
Barbara Bertram had grown up in Bignor, a stone’s throw from the manor house. She was born in Chichester in 1906 and was just nine months old when her father died and her mother was left with little money and seven children under the age of ten. A friend lent the family a cottage in Bignor Park for half a crown a year (approximately £50 now), so they at least had a roof over their heads. At seven, Barbara was sent to Lincolnshire to live with a family who wanted a girl to be a companion to their daughter and to share the lessons from the governess they appointed. Barbara and two of her sisters received their education in this way, each in different families, and she said it was a great success. The sisters spent school terms with their hosts and returned to Bignor for the holidays. Barbara eventually went to school for three years at the age of thirteen and then became the stay-at-home daughter to look after her mother. She had a bicycle and as her mother was very sociable she had a good life with plenty of company. In 1919 she contracted scarlet fever and a severe ear infection meant that she had to have a mastoid operation that left her partially deaf. In the early 1930s she met Tony, nine years her senior, at a tennis party. He was a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer with special interests in the arts. During the First World War he was badly injured in the Battle of Cambrai and his life was saved by a German prisoner who saw him lying on the ground. The prisoner happened to be a doctor and realised Tony would die without immediate medical help so he and two other Germans got permission to carry him to a field dressing station where he was successfully treated.
In 1940, Tony Bertram was forty-three and Barbara thirty-four; their two sons, Tim and Nicky, were born in 1934 and 1936 and they had in addition three evacuee boys from Portsmouth who had been with them since September 1939 and were quite a handful. Over the course of the Phoney War, Barbara had increased the size of the kitchen garden and acquired her farmyard of domestic animals, which helped supplement the boys’ diet.
Tony was in the Officers Emergency Reserve and was called up to join the Durham Light Infantry as he had been in the York and Lancaster Regiment in the last war. This did not suit him at all. He wanted to be with a local regiment so he could be close to his family. However, what he dreaded most was the prospect of spending the war in a depot doing some tedious desk job when others were putting themselves at risk and in harm’s way. A young officer in his regiment saw that Tony was itching to do something more active and wrote to his brother-in-law who was working for the French in London: ‘We’ve got an old man here. He’s very bored and speaks fluent French. Can you use him?’3
Tony was interviewed by MI6 for an unspecified task but one that would involve secrecy. He told the interviewer that he did not relish the idea of ‘all that lying’. The officer replied: ‘Do you like all that killing?’ On balance Tony felt that lying was probably better than killing and besides, he loved France and admired the French in their struggle against the occupying forces. He agreed to become a ‘conducting officer’ and in this role to escort couriers from the intelligence section of the French Resistance while they were in Britain. Conducting officers played a special part in SOE throughout the war. They were responsible for one or more agents and their overarching responsibility was the welfare of the men and women who were in their charge. They spoke their language and knew about the logistics of travel in Britain and the occupied country, providing practical help as well as emotional support. Tony wrote: ‘The agent is a soldier, but with a difference. His work is individual and the constant strain on his nerves is not eased by the support of mass participation . . . Mind and body must always be on the alert. The price of carelessness is torture, and I have never met a man who would not prefer to go with others into the most desperate attack than face torture alone.’4 The ideal conducting officer was a returned agent who understood these strains but they were few on the ground initially.
Some of the men and women who were entrusted to Tony were working as secret radio operators or gathering intelligence on the ground in France and bringing it back to the Free French in London. They were not involved in sabotage or special operations duties but their roles were equally dangerous. Other were going out to France from London either with specific deliveries or the delicate but singularly dangerous job of managing landing grounds for incoming operations. Their lives depended on trust and impenetrable secrecy.
Tony was asked if he knew of a small house in West Sussex, not too far from Tangmere aerodrome, that they could use as a hide-out for French agents. Barbara wrote: ‘He suggested our house, knowing I had had quite enough of evacuees and would welcome the chance to do something for the French.’5 She knew nothing of the specifics of Tony’s new job but she accepted that it was something secret as she was invited to London to be vetted by MI6. When asked in 1999 what instructions or information she was given, she laughed heartily and said: ‘None. None at all. All they said was “go and get ready”. They never told me anything.’6 The only thing the officer who interviewed her over ‘a very nice lunch’ told her was that she should give up all her other war work and be prepared. So she dropped her Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) activities which had involved finding blood donors, and she sent her evacuees away to a new billet. She wrote later: ‘How different the beginning of the war was. I prefer the French to evacuees, they don’t bite and they don’t wet their beds and they’re much more interesting.’7
For three weeks she sat and waited anxiously to see what would happen next. She was worried that people in the village would ask why she had got rid of her evacuees and was apparently doing nothing to help the war effort. The story the Bertrams told friends locally was that they had been asked to provide a convalescent home for injured French servicemen. For show, two Frenchmen who had broken their legs during parachute training were sent to Bignor at separate times for a few days. ‘They hopped about in plaster and looked most convincing,’8 she wrote.
When Tony finally told her what their work was about she was both relieved and afraid: ‘I discovered that we were working with the Intelligence Section of the French Resistance. Not SOE, the saboteurs, who went out to France to blow up bridges and later to fight in the Maquis, but with men and women who went backwards and forwards from the autumn of 1941 to the liberation of France in September 1944 getting information.’9
Such was the need for secrecy that in 1943 they had to have a ‘scrambler’ fitted to the telephone so the operator at Sutton post office would not be able to listen in to and understand the messages. There was the fear that if someone were to find out that the Bertrams were hosting French agents on their way to and from France there could be Nazi infiltration into resistance cells. The reprisals were well-known and rightly feared, as the revenge killings following Heydrich’s assassination proved only too clearly. The French Resistance, being the largest in Europe, was constantly under attack from the Gestapo. The Germans employed double agents to try to break the links between Britain and France. On the continent they succeeded in penetrating cells, most notably in the Netherlands, so the Bertrams were justified in thinking they had to keep their work under wraps at all times.
As far as security for the French at the manor was concerned, Tony had been right to reassure the War Office that the house was remote. Bignor village lies in the middle of the South Downs, six miles south of Petworth and fourteen miles north-east of Chichester. It had a wartime population of less than a hundred and comprised fewer than forty houses. It is, however, far from insignificant. The handsome thirteenth-century Church of the Holy Cross is mentioned in the Domesday Book and its font dates from the eleventh century. Just up the road is a Roman villa which was excavated in the early nineteenth century and has been open to the public since 1814. The villa is said to contain some of the finest, most intricate and complete floors in the country.
Bignor Manor is located on the edge of the village with the churchyard on one side, farm buildings on the other and open fields behind. The front garden was some sixty metres long, leading down to a wall topped with a beech hedge which protected the house from the road. Nothing that took place in the house or garden could be seen by casual passers-by and, as the house itself was approached down the farm drive, there would be little risk of accidental visitors. While the location was perfect, the size of the house was not. It had four bedrooms, three of which were large enough to fit two beds but the fourth was a single room. The drawing room and dining rooms were large but the kitchen was tiny and equipped for four rather than fourteen. The one bathroom and one toilet were inadequate for so many guests and the water supply was not good: ‘It was pumped up from a stream at the bottom of Bignor Hill. The stream was fed, in turn, by a spring. As we were the highest point in the village we were the first to suffer when it went wrong.’10
After the anxious wait it all began with a bang. Barbara wrote about her first experience of her mysterious role: ‘Without warning, at about seven o’clock one evening an English officer, Captain John Golding, turned up with three Frenchmen and a girl driver.
“We want dinner punctually at seven-thirty,” he said.
“What on earth do you think I’m going to give you at a moment’s notice?” I gasped.
“I don’t know. That’s your job,” he replied, cheerfully.’
With that he took the agents upstairs and left Barbara to concoct dinner for five in just thirty minutes. She rustled up a meal and placed it in front of them in the dining room. After dinner the phone rang and she was told the operation was off. What the operation was she had at that stage no idea. All she knew was that the conducting officer and the driver departed the next morning after breakfast and she was left with a bordello owner who had a chain of brothels in the south of France, a young man passionately interested in geology and an ex-prisoner of the Germans who had somehow escaped. She never asked and was never told how. In fact, she almost never knew the surnames of her guests and often she just knew the men and women by their code names.
From that moment on she was never without the wherewithal to prepare a full evening meal for any number of men and women at any time with almost no notice during the so-called ‘moon period’. This was the two weeks when there was sufficient moonlight for aeroplanes to fly at night over the channel to drop their charges in France. The French couriers travelled in groups of three. Each group was escorted by a conducting officer, usually John or Tony, and a female driver to Bignor and on to the airfield. The drivers were from the Mechanised Transport Corps, a civilian women’s organisation set up in 1939 to provide drivers for, amongst others, foreign dignitaries whose drivers were not used to driving on British roads. They looked after the maintenance of their cars, usually Chryslers, themselves. Some were married and one girl was already a war widow.
So if one contingent turned up that was five mouths to feed. Six Resistance couriers meant ten people staying, and sometimes there were nine French guests which severely tested Barbara’s patience, accommodation and crockery. Fifteen people could just be squeezed into Bignor Manor. A snippet from her unpublished memoir gives an idea of the organisation required:
Beds: Tony said it should be a double to begin with but you never can tell. That’s six French, two drivers, Tony and probably John. Six and two’s eight and two’s ten and me eleven. That’s three in our room, three in the guest room, the drivers in the drivers’ room, us in the boys’ room and John in the drawing room. No, I think I ought to be kind and put two French in each room and Tony and I can muck in with John in the drawing room, there won’t be much night anyway.11
When arranging the accommodation she always gave the three large bedrooms to the French. The women drivers camped out in the little bedroom, which was fine unless there were three of them, in which case they were very cramped. She, Tony and John slept in the sitting room, John on the sofa, which became known as ‘John’s bed’, while she and Tony were on camp beds – ‘uncomfortable cold things’ she wrote with feeling. Occasionally they would receive a guest known only to her as a ‘high-up’ and he, for it always was a he, would be offered the sofa and John was relegated to a third camp bed. When Tony’s boss came to stay Barbara was never told his name. He was simply referred to as KC.
At first Barbara slept in her own bed on evenings when agents were due in but one night she fell down the stairs when the phone rang so ever after that she slept in the sitting room on the sofa during the moon periods: ‘I hated being woken by the telephone so, if I could, I always set my alarm clock for a little before the time the Lysander [aeroplane] was expected back . . . the Conducting Officer used to tell me when that was. The telephone was such an important and anxious thing that I still panic when it rings and rush to the instrument as though the house were on fire.’12
About half an hour after ringing up, they would arrive. I always went to the front door to greet them and risked the light showing. It was lovely to welcome old friends who had been through the house before and I prided myself on always remembering them. In the later years of the war men would arrive and greet me by name – Madame Barbara they always called me – and ask after the boys by name. I would think that they had been before and that I had forgotten them and I would try to pretend I hadn’t. Then they would laugh and admit that they had never been before but had been told all about the set-up at Bignor, while waiting in France for the Lysander.13
As the accommodation at the manor was barely adequate to accommodate parties of incoming and outgoing agents, Barbara and Tony decided to send their sons to weekly boarding school. It pained her to see them go away at such a young age. In 1942 Tim was just eight and Nicky six, but there was nothing she could do about it if she needed their bedrooms. During the holidays or at weekends the boys would be farmed out to friends and family at short notice. After some time the War Office realised that the Bertrams needed more space and built a Nissen hut in the farmyard. Barbara was delighted and thought immediately that she and Tony could use part of it for a bedroom. However, the cold reality of a winter’s night in the hut soon sent her back to the warmth and safety of the fuggy sitting room. The Nissen hut was useful as a spillover for dining and recreation and did good service as both.
The RAF squadron devoted to the safe delivery of courier and agents into France was 161 Squadron, based at Tangmere, and like everything else to do with the Free French couriers, it was secret. The pilots were not allowed to use the Tangmere mess and ‘mingle with the fighter boys, lest over a noggin of beer we were pumped too much and the odd secret allowed to slip.’14 They had a building outside the perimeter fence of the aerodrome called ‘The Cottage’. There they were looked after by the area security officer provided by the RAF and under the eagle eye of Squadron Leader John Hunt, who in peacetime was a concert pianist and friend of the Bertrams. He spoke fluent German and another of his roles during the war was that of interrogator. The cottage was a small house used as a reception centre, to plan missions and as accommodation for the pilots who did not have rented rooms elsewhere. It had six bedrooms upstairs with any number of beds for RAF personnel. One of the pilots, James Atterby ‘Mac’ McCairns, who flew agents to France, wrote a memoir immediately after the war and shortly before his death in a flying accident in June 1948, and described the cottage as being ‘rather like a cheap Turkish hotel’15. It had a kitchen and two living rooms, one of which was the operations room and the other a dining room with trestle tables. The cottage was run by two flight sergeants, Steve Blaber and Bill Booker, of the Royal Air Force Service Police, who were described as Jeeves-like in their amiable adaptability. They were so successful in keeping the nature of the work secret that when the scrambler was fitted on the telephone at the cottage the grumpy engineer from the post office muttered: ‘Mr Churchill’s got one of these; Mr Anthony Eden’s got one of these. I don’t know why you young buggers want one of these.’16
Mac described how they were looked down on by the RAF and civilians alike for flying Lysander aircraft: ‘For years during the war when we said that to friends we were greeted with upturned noses. Our Lysander unit was so carefully camouflaged and guarded that not even in the RAF did one person in 10,000 know of its existence and true functions. Lysanders were associated with the lowest of aerial occupations: target-towing, or at best, air-sea rescue.’17
A Lysander could carry up to a maximum of three passengers, so occasionally, if there were larger groups of couriers and three Lysanders were too much of a risk, a larger aircraft like a Hudson would be used. The Lysander, or Lizzie as it was known, had been designed originally for daylight operations in co-operation with the army and had been built to be able to land on short airstrips on rough ground, which made it ideal for the purpose for which it was now adapted, namely as a ‘passenger’ aircraft for the French missions. It was painted matt black in the belief that this would make it invisible at night. While that was true from the ground it was not the case from above and the night fighters’ view on a moonlit night was of a dark silhouette flying below them against low cloud, so Group Captain Hugh Verity had the upper surfaces camouflaged in dark green and pale grey. The Lysander had a long-distance range of 1,150 miles at its cruising speed of 164mph, though at top speed it could make 180mph. A photograph of a cockpit at Tangmere RAF Museum has over sixty labels to describe the instruments, levers, dials and other functions the pilot would have to be familiar with.
Tangmere was a major RAF base during the war and it is remarkable that the activities of Squadron 161 succeeded in remaining completely secret for more than three years. Group Captain Hugh Verity wrote a book about his time as commander of 161 entitled We Landed by Moonlight, in which he described the highs and lows, fears and joys of being involved in the delivery of agents into occupied France. This is his description of a tense moment of landing one of these planes in France by moonlight and with the help of nothing but three flares on the ground in the shape of an inverted ‘L’ and a brief Morse code exchange with a fourth flare to confirm the pre-arranged signal:
On my third approach I was lined up . . . Apart from the pinpricks of the torches ahead everything was black. I switched on my landing lamps. In their bright beams the slanting rain was lit up like a bead curtain, almost obliterating my view of the flare-path torches . . . A moment of doubt, a bump and we were rolling on the meadow . . . I did a U-turn just past the end of the 450-metre flare path, and taxied along it wondering if our fat rubber tyres would sink into the rain-sodden meadow . . . Another U-turn by lamp ‘A’, pre-take off checks, and I could relax until takeoff.18
The Lysanders were on the ground for the shortest possible time, sometimes as little as ninety seconds, such was the risk of discovery by the Germans of the precious passengers and material that they were dropping off and collecting. Verity and the other pilots were entirely dependent on the agents in France finding suitable fields for them to land in. This training was done in Britain.
Major Tony Bertram spent half his time at RAF Tempsford near Sandy in Bedfordshire and the rest of it between London, Bignor and Tangmere. Tony, who felt he should practice what his agents were to learn, learned to parachute but he broke his pelvis on his fourth jump and spent almost a month in hospital in Manchester. Two weeks in every month was devoted to training agents, one of whose jobs after being parachuted into France was to find and send descriptions of likely landing grounds. This was necessary because on early flights some of the fields had turned out to be unsuitable and there were a number of near-misses. From April 1942 onwards, the Air Ministry refused to lay on any landings unless the agent in charge of the field in France had been trained by 161 Squadron’s own pilots. Mac described what Tony’s agents were looking for: ‘Roughly speaking, they had to find grassland, reasonably level and free from stones and slopes, which would give approximately 600 metres in all directions, or at least into that of the prevailing wind. Our light, parasol-winged monoplanes did not like being landed cross-wind. Once the field was located they had to send a coded description of it by radio, which was not at all an easy matter.’19
The design for the Lysander landing strip was always the flare path of an inverted ‘L’ shape pattern of three lights, which had been drawn on a tablecloth at Oddenino’s restaurant in London’s Regent Street by an agent, Philip Schneidau, code name Felix, and Flight Lieutenant Farley for the first pick-up by Lysander in 1940. It was so simple but successful that it was not improved during the war.
Those nights when agents arrived from France were exhausting but exhilarating for Barbara. After all, a safe arrival was something to be celebrated. She would prepare what became known and loved as ‘reception pie’. Sometimes it was a pie, as the name indicated, but other times it was bacon and eggs or a stew. For the incoming guests it was hot, welcome and always delicious. Sometimes she felt self-conscious serving the French with anything but haute cuisine but they never seemed to mind, she said. Most of them had been living on minimal supplies and welcomed the wholesome, home-made food that Barbara provided.
After they had all gone to bed Barbara would wash up and then turn in to steal a few hours of sleep before getting up the following morning. The day after the night before began slowly. The French would arrive downstairs in ones and twos between nine and noon to find a delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs and fresh coffee. To men and women who had been drinking acorn or barley coffee, this was a feast. One agent came into the kitchen when Barbara was grinding coffee beans, picked one up carefully in his fingers, sniffed it and ate it with a look of dreamy satisfaction in his eyes.
After breakfast was over there were debriefing meetings, ‘incoming men or women would go into huddles with French high-ups or others,’ she wrote. Those who were not involved would sit on the doorstep and clean their dirty boots. As they had been picked up in French fields they were often extremely muddy. Barbara would collect that mud together and grow mustard and cress on it ‘so that I could offer salad grown on French soil to the next moon’s French.’20
Barbara took great trouble to make the French feel welcome at Bignor. Every new arrival was greeted with a cup of tea and then shown their bedroom. In each room there were beds with fresh sheets and a bunch of flowers on the window sill or table. Cigarettes, matches and a fresh bar of soap were also provided. It was not always easy to find enough cigarettes and she worried constantly about supplies but she seemed to have a knack of having everything in place on the night. She was only too aware that those arriving at Bignor were in a state of extreme stress and excitement. Some of them dreaded their missions while others could not wait to get on with it and strode impatiently around the house in anticipation of the flight. She felt it was her responsibility to provide some normality and comfort for them. It was never easy but it was made less difficult by the fact that they were all so very grateful to her. They brought presents: wine and books for Tony, scent, silk stockings and sometimes flowers for Barbara. She remembered being deeply touched by a young man called André who, returning from France, laid a bunch of lily-of-the-valley on her plate on May Day morning: ‘They had been picked in France the night before, following the charming French habit of giving Our Lady’s tears on the first of her month.’21 It always amazed her that people on the run and in tremendous personal danger would take the time and trouble to bring her something as a thank-you present.
The War Office paid Barbara £5 a week for rent (around £200 now) and £2 a week in salary (roughly £80). In addition, they supplied camp beds, sheets and blankets, but refused to send any crockery. The Bertrams were frequently short and had to wash up between courses, a job often undertaken by her guests. Barbara explained how it worked: ‘One washed, two dried and the rest stood at strategic points between the sink and the cupboard in the dining room where the plates were kept. The plates were thrown from one to the other. Nothing was ever broken but I was always terrified as we had no spare crockery, in fact not nearly enough.’22
Bignor Manor was an important link in the chain between London and Tangmere because agents could be held there for hours or days, sometimes even more than a week, until a weather window opened up and made it possible to fly. The airfield was some ten miles from Bignor and the route took the drivers through very few villages, making the movement of agents comfortably inconspicuous.
Barbara would receive a phone call from Tangmere airfield on the evening when her agent-guests were due to fly out. There were two messages: C’est On or C’est Off. That would tell her whether she would be keeping the current group of agents or whether they would be leaving and she could expect a consignment of incoming agents from France. She wrote of this moment when she came back from the phone with the message ‘C’est on’: ‘I hate giving out rum just before they leave, it’s so grim, like an execution. At least, I don’t really hate it, I feel like an Anglo-Saxon matron, which is nice.’ Even if the group at Bignor left it did not mean necessarily that they would actually fly. The weather might change, the situation on the ground become dangerous or the Air Ministry might have some intelligence that would lead to missions being cancelled at the eleventh hour and without warning. Changing sheets in preparation for incomers was left to the very last minute in order to reduce Barbara’s workload. On the other hand, if the message was negative she knew they would all be disappointed and on edge:
It can’t be off, it can’t be off, it can’t be off . . . it is, c’est off. I can see by Tony’s face. How awful for them. I do hate these last-minute cancels. We shall have to try and be gay tonight. They’re amazing how well they take it, it must be an awful strain. Thank goodness I haven’t put the rum bottle out, we’ve only enough for about two ops. This means lunch, dinner and reception pie tomorrow anyway and if c’est off again lunch and dinner perhaps for days. I shall have to go to Chichester.24
Barbara wrote: ‘In 1940 . . . moonlight began to govern our way of life and brought the war, not merely into our lives but into our home.’25 She knew that from the beginning of the new moon’s cycle she was on standby and was ready to receive a phone call from London from a conducting officer to say: ‘I’m coming with three.’ Or ‘I’m coming with nine’.
The outgoing agents with their driver and conducting officer would arrive at about teatime. Barbara was irritated that John Golding was often late whereas Tony was always punctual. She wrote later that she ‘kept up an affectionate quarrel’ with Golding throughout the war but was careful not to reveal his identity in her memoir. The visitors would be given a cup of tea and then the strict checking would take place. Every pocket had to be gone through, every item of their clothing searched for tell-tale signs of incriminating evidence that might give them away as having been in England – no bus or cinema tickets or a letter with a British stamp could be left in their pockets. The search had to be thorough, but even so an occasional slip was made. Barbara recounted the consequence of an oversight:
One Frenchman was in the Metro in Paris one morning, standing in the usual squash of passengers, when he found that a copy of the previous day’s Daily Telegraph was sticking out of his overcoat pocket. He waited until he was nearly at his station then he slipped it out of his own pocket and into the pocket of a German officer standing next to him and quickly got out. This was an oversight easily made as the searching took place in the drawingroom when the coats were hanging up in the hall. I am glad to say that Tony was not the conducting officer in charge that day. It was even thought dangerous for men to go out with hairs from our dog on their trousers, so a clothes brush always had to be handy for them to use at the last minute.26
Once the checks had taken place the agents were sent upstairs for their final briefing. There they would be given their fake papers – a fake ID card, a fake ration card and a large amount of French cash – ‘Fake for all I knew’ Barbara wrote. They were given a small revolver, if they wanted it, a cosh they could hide up their sleeves and a fountain pen-type object that squirted tear gas when the agent pressed a little button. Barbara explained: ‘They were all rather sceptical about these. One day, some of them let one off in the bathroom and without telling me what they had done, asked me to fetch something from the bathroom cupboard. My state, when I rejoined them in a fury with my eyes streaming, was enough to convince them that it was very effective.’27
Barbara never got to see the handover of material or to hear the briefing instructions. However, she did have a hand in providing some of the other items they were given, such as toothbrushes and razor blades without ‘Made in Britain’ stamps. Early on her job was to find and buy these precious items. Once she found two dozen unmarked toothbrushes and bought the lot. She was worried lest the shopkeeper, who knew she only had two children, asked her what she needed them for. Fortunately he did not. Then there was the question of soap. Barbara kept all her bars of soap once the name had worn off but British soap was found to lather too well and that would be noticed in French public lavatories. She was not happy taking that risk so in future the War Office supplied all such vital items. Soap with grit arrived at Bignor Manor alongside blank razor blades and toothbrushes. After the war Barbara met a friend who had worked in a company that made and packaged razor blades. She said she had always wondered why, every so often, a consignment of blades without the Made in England stamp was wrapped in different packaging and sent to a different despatch department. Even imitation Gauloises cigarettes had to be supplied by the War Office. ‘There was a difficulty about the imitation Gauloises: the gum used on the packet was too good so that it did not disintegrate as soon as opened, as the real ones did. This too was remedied.’28
While the agents were being briefed, the driver and Barbara had to go through their luggage to see if they had purchased anything in London that might incriminate them were they caught by the Gestapo. She explained how she dealt with this:
If they had bought a new suit, the buckle on the back of the waistcoat had to be cut off and the straps sewn together . . . Hats were confiscated, they are stamped on the leather band inside and you cannot remove that without making the hat too big. We had nine hats at the end of the war. Gloves had the button wrenched off. Shirts were easy. We rubbed the mark very hard with Milton and it either rubbed out the word, or it rubbed a hole in the shirt.29
Generally the agents were happy to let Barbara get on with her erasure but on one occasion she picked up a pair of pink silk pyjamas and was about to give them the Milton treatment when the owner snatched them back with a howl of protest. They were a precious purchase in pre-war Paris and he was not going to have them ruined by bleach.
In addition to vital supplies, the agents were given the exciting tools of their trade that everyone associates with a proper undercover operation: magnifying glasses, maps printed on fine silk, cards printed in microscopic letters, tiny compasses, knives and pencils. All of these had to be stashed away in the Manor House. The accidental discovery of such a cache by a visitor during the dark moon periods would have been difficult to explain but once again they were fortunate in the old house’s idiosyncrasies:
Luckily there was a secret cupboard over the fireplace which was covered in a plywood board from the pre-war days when books on shelves above the fireplace had become damaged. So when they needed a locked cupboard they simply put a lock on one of the shelves behind the plywood. The dart board was mounted on the ply and the surround made a good background for bad shots.30
Besides the spy kits, the agents frequently requested small, everyday items and Barbara prided herself on her growing collection of odds and ends that she picked up whenever she spotted something at a market, in a shop or even on the floor of the village hall that might be of use in future. These could range from safety pins and hair pins to string, nails, scissors, bags and empty tins. They all had to be unmarked, of course, and she was surprised at some of the requests she had for what she regarded as unusual items but she never asked what the agent needed them for. That was their business, not hers. One couple borrowed their typewriter and a pair of metal knitting needles; the typewriter was returned, but the knitting needles disappeared with the agent and were never seen again. She had no idea what they might have been used for – it is possible they were just for knitting.
The agent’s baggage consisted of personal cases and sacks of money and the courier messages he or she was carrying back to France. They also had vivres – chocolate (imitation French), butter, cigarettes and other little treats that were useful for ‘paying’ helpers on the ground. Sometimes a sack of vivres would be left at Bignor either by mistake or because it would make the luggage too heavy. ‘When that happened I always put it in the larder hoping that the conducting officer would forget all about it. The chocolate and butter were especially welcome,’31 Barbara wrote.
Every ounce of baggage counted and the weight limit was strictly enforced. The first things to be jettisoned when the bags were weighed at the cottage at the airfield were personal belongings such as presents or little luxuries. One agent who was an artist left a nearly new box of oil paints behind. These were entrusted to Barbara personally. The artist was caught and shot in France. The box was a painful reminder of this loss but when a local painter lost his materials in a disastrous fire Barbara gave him the Frenchman’s oils believing that he would have approved of supporting a fellow artist in distress.
While the agents were being cared for by Barbara Bertram, the ‘Lizzie Boys’ at Tangmere were trying to come to terms with their risky job. Mac McCairns described a pep talk he was given by Squadron Leader Guy Lockhart before he became a Lysander pilot:
There is the mental stress to consider. Ops are on, ops are off, Air Ministry can never tell you until the very last minute, so much depends on the final wireless signal from the operator in France. Sometimes you are actually strapped in the plane before news of cancellation comes through. Worse still, it sometimes happens that the message is not decoded in time, and you spend hours stuffed in a turbulent, obstinate aircraft, peering out in the darkness, trying by the light of the moon, if you are lucky enough to fly on a cloudless night, to map-read your way hundreds of miles into France, searching for some miserable plot of land which from the air looks no bigger than a pocket handkerchief. No. It is not a pleasant job, and I would not recommend anyone to try it. Do not be deceived by the glamour.32
Glamorous or not, when Commander Hugh Verity arrived at Tangmere to join the Lysander flight in late 1942 he found ‘there was an atmosphere of cinematic stunt-riding about the whole thing’.33 This began to change as early lessons had been learned, the resistance networks in France had expanded and the need now was for a safe and reliable service that could perform methodically and as predictably as the weather, their main enemy, would permit.
Everything about the operation was secret, dangerous and completely at the mercy of the weather. Unloading of outgoing agents plus sacks of courier material, and reloading incoming courier and agents was executed at great speed. On one occasion early in the missions a bag of courier material was left in France, which was a complete waste of the risky flight. So thereafter the luggage was always loaded first and the number of bags marked in chalk on the side of the plane. The agents had to pile in and find a seat as best they could while the pilot taxied across the field for take-off. Very occasionally just a courier bag came back, without agents. One day in 1944 an unaccompanied sack arrived at Bignor Manor. It was heavy and full of knobbly bits which turned out to contain all the pieces of a V1 rocket. That was quickly sent up to London for inspection.
There was supposed to be a maximum of two passengers in a Lysander but this was ignored and three would sit where the rear-gunner had sat in the back, two on the single seat and one on the floor with everything piled on top of him. Mac explained:
The gun had been removed to make way for a small box-seat for two and to give additional luggage space. We could take an extra 600lbs of luggage: general supplies for the agents and in particular delicate radio apparatus which did not survive parachuting. Our bomb spats and front-firing Brownings had also been removed to lighten the machine’s weight so that on all missions we were completely unarmed except for a .38 revolver strapped to our waists.34
The pilots from No. 161 Squadron were told that they should under no circumstances ask anything about the mission and ideally they should not know the names of the agents or even what they looked like. They referred to them as ‘Joes’. However some had become friends during training at Tempsford. Tony explained how this personal contact ‘gave them such an insight into the importance, difficulties and dangers of the agents’ work, that they fully realised the responsibility of their own.35 The pilots flew in civilian clothing but wore RAF escape boots: ‘ordinary black fleece-lined flying boots, with a zipper front; but when the uppers were detached, one was left with a fine sturdy pair of black civilian shoes.’36 They were told that they were not allowed to be taken alive by the Gestapo.
Mac described life at the picturesque cottage at Tangmere as isolated but smooth. ‘We would breakfast about 10am, proceed to do air tests on our individual aircraft and then, if ops were on, the fun would really start . . . The afternoon was spent on telephone calls, map-cutting, the study of photographs, flight plans and, most important, the almost hourly consideration of the meteorological information . . . Towards evening the tension would increase’37 If the forecast was fair and all the myriad individual pieces fell into place, the op was on and the moment for the Lysander pilot to complete the final stage of preparation was there. In a ritual that never changed, the pilot would climb up into the cockpit and would be strapped in by his ground crew. Then they would hand him his pistol, thermos and the precious maps which he had so carefully prepared. When he was confident everything was set he would give the ‘All Clear’ – ‘Contact” ’ and start the engine. ‘As the engine was ticking over in its warm-up, the car with the Joes would arrive and after a last hurried farewell they would be bundled in the back, the rear hood fastened and the pilot was given the OK to open the throttle.’38 Mac wrote:
I always felt that it was this moment that was the most impressive of all – in fact a perfect picture. The black Lysander, dimly lit by the moon overhead, the ghostly pilot caught by the weak orange rays of the cockpit lights, and the belching exhausts stubs of the motor as each magneto was in turn tested at full throttle. The old Lizzie used to stand there quivering like a horse before the race, waiting for its master to give the word of command. The thought that in a few hours’ time the aircraft would be touching down on some little strip of land in German-held France never failed to thrill me.39
It was inevitable that things would not always go as smoothly as Mac would hope. Occasionally missions had to be aborted if the visibility over France was too bad. Sometimes the reception committee was not at the appointed place or the wrong letter was flashed in Morse. The pilots could not risk landing under those circumstances as they might be flying into a German trap. Once or twice the line book at the cottage gives hints of other problems: cows on the field or deep mud. In February 1943 a Lysander was bogged down in a ploughed field. It was dug out by fifty local people with the help of two oxen but had to be torched as it could not take off. Two months later Mac flew his Lysander into a tree but succeeded in landing and returned safely to Tangmere with the damaged plane. Verity wrote in the cottage line book, where pilots put down their thoughts, ‘It’s not part of the Verity Service to collect firewood.’40 It was Verity who also quipped: ‘Birds and fools fly by day, but only bats and bloody fools by night.’41
Once they entered British airspace the pilots on the return flight would be asked by the conducting officers whether the mission had succeeded or not. There was a colour code: red meant they had had a successful round trip, blue meant it had not gone off as planned. When Mac was asked what colour he rated his mission on the night he hit the tree he answered ‘pale green’. The Lysanders were not as delicate to handle as a Spitfire, Mac wrote. They reminded him more of a bomber: ‘as I dropped the speed before landing, the automatic slats and interlinked flaps burst out with a mighty rush, most terrifying to the novice. Many passengers returning to England have told me that at the moment of landing they thought they were going to be plunged to death after the supposed snapping and breaking-up of a wing.’42
On landing at Tangmere the agents would be taken to the cottage where Blaber and Booker would greet them with a drink before sending them onwards to Barbara for reception pie and a good breakfast the following morning. The incoming French would leave Bignor for London the day after their arrival and Barbara would await the next consignment. In what she called the ‘dark periods’, those weeks between the moons, she would tidy the house and expand her stores so that she was as prepared as she could possibly be for the next moon period. There was time for some relaxation during those weeks. In the quiet periods Squadron Leader John Hunt, who of course knew about the Bertrams’ war work, would come to a neighbouring house and perform private concerts for a group of friends. Barbara wrote ‘These were lovely interludes in wartime life.’43
One of the concerns she had was for her kitchen garden and her animals. The cat was self-contained and could go out mousing whenever he wanted. Duff-the-dog needed walking and that fell to her when Tony was away at RAF Tempsford or in London. The great benefit of having guests staying for several days owing to fog or bad weather was that Tony took them on long walks or horse rides in the countryside and Duff was always included in these excursions. Some of the French came to love Duff and treated him almost as their own. One agent told her when he met her in Paris after the war that as he was being tortured by the Gestapo he tried to visualise where the spots were on Duff’s coat to take his mind off what they were doing to him.
The chickens ate dried nettles and scraps from the kitchen, the bees produced honey for the table which was popular with everyone. It was Caroline the goat who was Barbara’s biggest concern. She needed milking daily and feeding large quantities of grass. She had to be kept tied up as she could not resist roses or the fruit trees. Her favourite was the peach tree and she would make a beeline for it if she ever had the opportunity to slip her collar. Barbara had to take her to the billy and that involved a long walk down the country lanes, an exhausting exercise with an overexcited, greedy goat on a lead. But Caroline was a great favourite with the men. Barbara wrote:
She became a well-known character. Often the pilots would come over in their Lysanders if an op. was cancelled and swoop down much too low over Bignor, even once or twice flying under the telephone wires. This always alarmed Caroline – but not so much as it did me – so when she was expecting a kid, an order was put up in the Flight’s headquarters at Tangmere forbidding any low-flying over Bignor until Caroline was safely delivered.44
Later in the war Caroline achieved lasting fame when an operation was named after her. The BBC used to broadcast Les Messages Personnels every night to France and among them were coded messages for the resistance workers. One time they introduced Operation Caroline. In order to inform those listening out for news, they would use the word ‘blue’ in conjunction with the name Caroline to let the Resistance know that a mission was on. So for several nights messages were read out such as:
‘Caroline is well.’
‘Caroline went for a walk.’
And finally: ‘Caroline has a blue dress.’ 45
After the war, when Barbara and Tony were in Paris, some of the former Resistance members would ask her how Caroline was. These were men and women who had never been through Bignor Manor and Tangmere but knew of Operation Caroline. It always amused Barbara that her goat had gained such notoriety in France.
Barbara would get occasional consignments of whisky, gin, tins of butter and ‘horrible Grade-3 salmon’ from the War Office. Her large vegetable garden and fruit orchards were a great bonus but it was not enough to feed hungry mouths, especially when there were large numbers of guests. The War Office turned her into a catering establishment, like a hotel, so that meant innumerable monthly forms to be returned:
They explained to me that as all my ‘visitors’ were in the Forces they were entitled to a higher ration than the civilian one, so they told me that if I could not get enough food I could cheat on my Food Office returns but I was not to let the Food Office know I was cheating. One got rations one month for what one had eaten the month before, so it worked out in the end – but not at the time. My returns were like a fever chart. When the boys were at school and in the dark period it would be one, one, one for every meal, and then suddenly, at the beginning of a moon period, twelve or thirteen for three main meals a day. Very cautiously I would add a few here and a few there and get a little extra but I was terrified of the Food Office who sent someone every month or so to sign the books. I would sit biting my nails, hoping they would not ask awkward questions while they went through the forms. After the war I went to the local Food Office and asked the head woman if she had found my forms very muddled and confused. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I was told never to look at them. I only signed them.’ If only I had known . . .46
One or two of the agents were keen shots and would go rough shooting on the days they spent waiting for their missions. They would come back with a brace of duck or some rabbits, which were always a welcome addition to the pie. Going shopping for food was difficult because Barbara had to spread her purchases out so that the shopkeepers would not get suspicious, despite her catering licence. When she had a bigger contingent to cater for she would go to Chichester where she could sometimes find food off the ration. After one fruitless trip she was returning empty-handed when she came across a local gamekeeper who was carrying a rack of rabbits. She bought the lot and he never asked her why she wanted so many. He became a useful source of meat when there was insufficient to be had elsewhere.
Barbara had an excellent eye and even agents in disguise could not slip past her unrecognised. One agent who flew out of Tangmere several times was Gilbert Renault-Roulier, known to her at that time only by his code-name, Colonel Rémy. Renault, a film director, escaped to London in 1940 and joined the Free French. His first task had been to collect up-to-date maps of France to send back to Britain but he did more. He built up an impressive spy network called the Confrérie de Notre Dame covering much of occupied France and Belgium. As a result of his outstanding intelligence the British launched successful commando raids on the north-west French port of Bruneval, when they captured the German radar system and its operator, which led to TRE being moved to Malvern in 1942, and the raid on St Nazaire the same year. He was one of General de Gaulle’s best secret agents and was decorated after the war by the French, British, Belgians and the Americans. On one visit he arrived with a pot plant for Madame de Gaulle and on another he took the head of a damaged sculpture back to France to have a new body carved. Towards the end of the war he had become well-known to the Germans so he had to disguise himself. ‘After his appearance had been altered he walked past his wife and children in the Park, who knew nothing of his plans, and they did not recognize him, so his disguise was considered good enough.’47 Barbara, however, spotted him immediately when he walked down the path towards the Manor House and greeted him by name. The conducting officer looked horrified and asked if she had been told in advance he was coming. She explained that she had not but that, being partially deaf and needing to lip-read, she looked at a man’s mouth more than any other feature of his face. Rémy had changed everything about his face except his teeth, which he refused to have modified, and that was how she recognised him. The two of them agreed that she should keep that to herself for fear he would lose confidence in his disguise.
There were times of intense distress and sadness, such as when an agent was captured. The worst phone call of all was when they heard, often during dinner, that someone had been arrested. A chill settled over the dinner table. ‘They could not know if he had talked under torture and had made it unsafe for them to go. Those were terrible evenings.’ Barbara wrote: ‘All the way through the job the knowledge that those arrested would be tortured was a horrible thought at the back of our minds; seldom mentioned but always present. I was told afterwards that, on the whole, it was the highly intelligent, sensitive ones that withstood torture best, not the “tough guys”.’48 She was reminded of the threat of torture and death when the agents asked her to sew a little capsule of poison in the cuffs of their shirts. It always brought her up short, in the same way as when she had to offer them a last drink. She wrote: ‘I hope the thought of France won’t always make me feel sick and “The Marseillaise” won’t always make me cry.’49
One evening at dinner, Barbara asked the agent sitting next to her to bring back some French stamps next time he came over, as Tim, her son, had just begun collecting. The man, called Lestanges, promised he would and left on a flight that night. There was an accident. The plane he was in overshot the mark and landed in a ploughed field. It turned over on impact and burst into flames. The pilot was killed and two of the three passengers were thrown clear and unhurt. The reception party rushed to pick them up and dash for safety before the Germans arrived at the scene.
Remarkably, Lestanges managed to crawl out of the burning plane and found himself alone in a ploughed field in a part of France he did not know. Both his arms were badly burned and he knew he needed help. He followed the instructions they all received for such eventualities and made his way to the nearest village and sought out the priest. The priest took him in and realised he needed urgent medical attention. Knowing his local community well the priest was aware that the local doctor was a Nazi sympathiser so that was not an option. He put Lestanges on his bicycle and pushed the injured man five miles to a convent that ran a nursing home. The mother superior immediately took him into her care and locked him in a room for his own safety. She alone nursed him and started a rumour that one of her nuns was having a baby. That was enough to ensure complete secrecy. Meanwhile, the priest got in touch with Lestanges’ friends in Paris who in turn notified London. Barbara takes up the story:
We laid on an op. to bring him home three weeks after his accident. He spent those three weeks desperately ill with his burns. We had an ambulance waiting at Tangmere to take him to East Grinstead hospital. As he got in he handed the Conducting Officer an envelope to be given to me. In it were the stamps I had asked for. Of course, I went to see him at East Grinstead and when I thanked him for the stamps I found he did not remember anything about them at all. I could not, of course, give them to the boys until after the war. I am glad that, after the war, Lestanges returned to the village where the Convent nursing home was and told people what had really happened in the locked room.50
Other operations had a different outcome. A safe landing did not of course mean a safe onward passage. On the night of 16/17 June 1943 three female agents, Cecily Lefort, Noor Inayat Khan and Diana Rowden, and one man, Charles Skepper, were flown into France from Tangmere. All had been trained by SOE in Britain and knew what they were due to do on landing. Cecily Lefort was married and had escaped from France with her husband in 1940. She was in the WAAF and was on her way south with Skepper to meet Francis Cammaerts. After just three months she was captured and brutally tortured before being sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp from where she went to Uckermark and died in the gas chamber sometime in February 1945. Diana Rowden was also a WAAF officer and was part of the ‘Acrobat Network’ where she worked as a courier delivering messages to agents in Marseilles, Lyon and Paris. She was captured in November 1943 and eventually executed at Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in July 1944 through a lethal injection of phenol. The third agent was Noor Inayat Khan who had trained as a corporal wireless operator in the WAAF. She was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century Muslim ruler of Mysore and became the first woman radio operator in Paris. Hugh Verity described her brief operational career as ‘exceptionally gallant and she was awarded a George Cross and MBE [posthumously].51 She too was arrested and interrogated after being betrayed. Despite interrogation and torture she revealed nothing but unfortunately had kept copies of all her secret signals which the Germans used to trick London into sending agents into the waiting hands of Gestapo.’ She tried to escape twice, only to be taken to Dachau where she was executed in September 1944. Verity wrote: ‘Looking back on the operational supper at Tangmere Cottage with our cheerful passengers just before take-off it was almost impossible to imagine that a group of [three] such as this would all have such terrible fates.’52
A great tragedy that touched Barbara and Tony personally was when the son of very close family friends was killed. Barbara had known Stephen Hankey since he was a baby and adored him. The night of the accident, 17 December 1943, she had gone to the airfield for the first and only time in the war. On every other night she stayed at Bignor to prepare for the incoming party but on this occasion there was a new driver who did not know the way from the village to Tangmere so she went with her to give directions. It was a triple operation; three Lysanders each flying three agents and their courier sacks. Stephen was the pilot in one of the planes. ‘When they had taken off – three great dragonflies of the night – I was taken back to the cottage for a drink and then driven back to Bignor to prepare reception pie.’53 Once she had finished cooking and tidied up the kitchen she went to bed in the drawing room and set her alarm clock. The phone didn’t ring and the later it got the more anxious Barbara became. Finally, sometime around seven o’clock in the morning Tony rang and she knew at once from his voice that something terrible had happened. He told her he would be coming with two. Two from a triple op and why I’m coming when there were three officers and three drivers? Barbara wrote. When he arrived he could not tell her anything so they all ate the reception pie in silence and went up to bed. As soon as they were alone Barbara questioned him. He was lying on the camp bed, utterly exhausted. He said: ‘Stephen’s been killed, and MacBride and Berthel54 and Cazenave55. I’ll tell you later.’56 With that he immediately fell asleep and Barbara was left reeling. She learned later that the weather forecast had been wrong.
Commander Hugh Verity, one of the three pilots that night, had managed to land his Lysander with the help of the controller who brought him safely down from five miles out, though he did not see the landing lights until 300 feet above the ground. He made his way straight to the control tower, anxiously watching as the fog thickened. He wrote: ‘Under normal circumstances in a situation such as this I would have had no hesitation in ordering the pilots to bale out, but in this situation it was out of the question as they had passengers on board – agents they had picked up in France – and they didn’t have parachutes.’57 By the time the second Lysander came into land the visibility was down to five hundred yards and the fog was getting thicker and thicker. The pilot made two attempts to land but aborted both at the last minute. On the third attempt he came down too soon and crashed on the run into the airfield. The pilot, McBride, was killed, but miraculously his two passengers survived. The third plane, which Stephen Hankey was flying, was diverted to Ford airfield nearby but the fog was too thick there and the plane crashed, killing Stephen and both passengers.
Tony had had to drive out to Ford to identify the charred bodies before returning to Bignor to face his wife. They had to keep up the appearance that nothing was wrong as there was a French agent at the house who was due to fly out the following night. For Barbara it was her personal low point of the war and she felt Stephen’s loss keenly.
Another episode also touched her but in a different way. Pierre Delaye, known to Barbara as Pierre-le-paysan, was a remarkably successful agent who spent an extended period with the Bertrams at Bignor Manor and became a firm favourite with both of them. He came from Marchampt in the Rhone region north of Lyon and was married with a wife and ten year old son. He ran a sawmill and had a few vines. His wife worked as a hairdresser to boost the family’s income. Delaye volunteered for the French army but was captured by the Germans near Dunkirk. He was imprisoned first in Poland and later in Russia where he languished in a large prison outside Moscow until 1941. He was freed after the German invasion of Russia and arrived into London Euston several weeks later to be welcomed by Free French officers. He was one of eleven men out of over 700 volunteers who were chosen to be trained as radio operators. He was unusual in that he was already forty-one and most other radio operators were in their twenties. Tony described him as ‘A lumbering man, slow to move or think, with a wide sudden smile and large hands that hung clumsily between his knees when they had no work to do. But for the war, I do not imagine he would ever have left his home.58 When he completed his signals’ training he still wasn’t fast enough so he was sent to Bignor to work on it. He installed his transmitting set in the attic and studied hard, practising daily until he improved his speeds. When he had finished his work in the attic he asked Barbara if there was anything he could do in her garden. ‘I did not insult him by telling him what needed to be done, I just showed him the tool shed. I have never had my garden so beautifully cared for. When he could do no more he scythed all the long grass he could find and stacked it for Caroline-the-goat and also stinging nettles for both Caroline and the chickens.’59
He did not read for pleasure and he was not a great conversationalist so he played out wool for Barbara and told her how to bottle peas and make eau de vie. With time he became a first-class transmitter and was sent to France. He left in a hurry and was miserable that he did not have time to buy Barbara a present, so he gave her ten shillings. He flew out with Squadron Leader Guy Lockhart in August 1942. According to the records, the operator on the ground was drunk and had laid out the flare path in the worst manner possible. The plane crashed into a ditch. Delaye was the only passenger. He and Lockhart were unhurt and Lockhart later said that Delaye had been completely unfazed. While Lockhart burned the plane and escaped back to Britain, Delaye made his way to Macron, near Loyettes, where he carried out four successful operations, providing safe landing sites and impeccable radio messages to London in January, February, March and April 1943. In May the Germans were closing in on him. He managed to relay his message to London while the Gestapo were circling around the house. Knowing he must not be taken prisoner he jumped out of a window and onto his bike. He pedalled just a few metres before he was shot. ‘The day he was buried in the little village, not his own . . . all the inhabitants stood at their doors holding flowers.’60 Tony Bertram said of Pierre Delaye later, ‘War had not changed him. It had dragged him across Europe and put his hands to the most unlikely work, but he accepted and coped with that situation as he would have accepted and coped with a diseased tree.’
A visitor who came more than once was the successful agent Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. ‘She came several times and never looked the same twice running – sometimes red-haired and sometimes black, but always elegant and lovely . . . She told me of all the horrors of torture. She became the head of one of the biggest reseaux. Her book Noah’s Ark is one of the very best of the many books written about the French Resistance.’61 Marie-Madeleine gave her underground agents animal names hence the title of her book: her nickname was ‘hedgehog’. She was caught twice by the Gestapo and imprisoned. The first time she and her staff managed to escape. She somehow got on a plane to London and continued to run the network from there. Later in the war she flew out from Tangmere, via Bignor Manor, and was captured for the second time. This was much more harrowing and she was tortured. Miraculously she managed to escape from her prison cell by stripping naked and squeezing her slim figure through the bars on her window. She joined the Maquis in the last few days before France was liberated. Madame Fourcade survived the war but many members of her Alliance network were captured and executed at Natzweiler-Struthof. Her book, Noah’s Ark, was dedicated to the 429 men and women who died on service in her Alliance.
There are no exact figures of how many men and women were flown into and out of Tangmere by Lysander, but Hugh Verity estimated that out of 279 operational sorties 186 were successful – that is to say that they landed in France – while others were aborted on account of the weather or other factors. He believed they flew 293 passengers into France and brought out 410. By the time France was liberated in August 1944, Barbara Bertram had had some two hundred French men and women to stay. They came from all walks of life and from every corner of France. She listed their professions in her memoir: ‘priest, seminarian, doctors, nurses, artists, writers and journalists; school masters and mistresses, dressmakers, a perfume manufacturer, a Champagne grower, housewives, peasants, diplomats, members of parliament; lawyers, policemen, motor mechanics and garage owners, soldiers, sailors and airmen, a duke, a princess and a brothel-keeper.’62
She cared for them all with equal kindness and was as supportive of them as she possibly could be. In turn they loved and respected her. She represented a beacon of light, hope and comfort in their difficult and often terrifying lives. In the first volume of his memoirs published in 1946, Colonel Rémy – he of the disguise that did not fool Barbara – paid her a rich tribute:
Off we went to spend the night in a charming house nearby, belonging to an English lady, Mrs Barbara Bertram who had volunteered to act as hostess to us birds of passage. Mrs Bertram was to become immensely popular with all the secret agents leaving for France or arriving back . . . I didn’t envy Mrs Bertram her life. She saw the people arriving from France for only a few hours (oh, how they gazed in amazement at the fried eggs and bacon, the creamy milk, the cakes). The ones who were leaving were mostly there for two or three days; but they were nervous, short-tempered, impatient, and let’s face it, scared stiff. Difficult guests, but so good was she with them that I have often heard them say, ‘Our best memory of England was the time we had to spend in Mrs Bertram’s house’. She won the hearts and the gratitude of all the French who passed through it; and though I am sure that she never said a word about what they were doing – that subject, under her roof, was taboo – many left her with their courage renewed.63
