Women: Special Operations Executive

Lord Bew Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, on securing the debate tonight and give my strong support for the sentiments expressed in her speech.

An interesting thing about our intelligence services is the way in which they have been more open to the employment of women than other departments of the government machine. It is striking that, during the war, the report by Sir Neville Bland was clearly designed to encourage employment by women in the SIS. Indeed, before the end of the war, the director of production at the SIS said that it was now accepted policy that women should be employed in those appointments for which their qualifications and experience suited them. That was long before such views were widespread in other parts of Whitehall. My colleague at Queen’s University, Belfast, Professor Keith Jeffery, author of the recently published, magisterial volume on MI6, tells me that he believes that there is a seepage of those relatively progressive attitudes from SOE. The great historian of SOE, the great wartime practitioner of those arts, Michael Foot, has confirmed to me, for example, that Colonel Gubbins, later Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins, head of SOE, had no problem with the employment of women. You could not say of Gubbins that he necessarily had the concept of being an equal opportunities employer at the heart of his being or considered himself a feminist, but necessity is the mother of invention and, in 1942, the necessity was pressing to find new recruits, hence the foundation of F Section, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the women of SOE, partly because of the good book by Sarah Helm on Vera Atkins, which has already been mentioned and, undoubtedly, the public dismay following the sad circumstances surrounding the death in Torquay of Eileen Nearne. We can all recall that embarrassing newspaper headline “Forgotten World War II spy tortured by the Nazis, died penniless after her British pension was halted without explanation”. In 1946, Eileen Nearne was declared 100 per cent disabled by a special pensions tribunal as a result of exhaustion and neurosis, but over the next several years, her pension was whittled away and she seems to have received little help with the anguish which was the inevitable legacy of her experience of World War II.

Those are things that make us very uncomfortable. It is clear to me that the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, tonight are important. I very much hope that the Minister will respond as warmly as possible to the sentiments uttered by the noble Baroness.