Leyton & Leytonstone

Historical Society

Peggy Knight, The Leyton Typist with Nerves of Steel (continued)

By the nature of her job she would been listening to confidential information and opinions, and it was important to the ASEA company that she did not talk about this to others, particularly other employees.  To that extent Peggy had proved herself able to keep secrets before she was recruited to the SOE.)

The SOE sent 50 women agents into France.  Of these 15 were caught by the German authorities and of those only 3 survived*.  This was better than the 50% survival rate predicted for all SOE agents, but still a terrible loss.  It is not immediately obvious why Britain sent women to operate radio receiver-transmitters, and pass messages in person between Resistance groups.  Could not French people with a genuine identity perform such tasks ?  Did Britain place such little trust in the politically divided Resistance that it could not believe Resistance members’ reports on their own activities ?  

Roger Bardet was tried and convicted as a double agent working for the Germans.  He was released from prison in 1955.  Perhaps he betrayed Fraget to the German security forces because Fraget was working too closely with the British SOE.  

The women agents were young, and SOE may have hoped they would get better co-operation from male Resistance members.

Peggy Knight was one of a hundred British service men and women decorated with the Croix de Guerre by the French Ambassador in London in 1947.  She received the British honour of the MBE.  She truly deserved her awards.  Having been flown at risk of enemy attack over the Channel and about 230 miles across occupied France, she threw herself from the plane into the night, and landed safely despite her single practice jump, only to suffer a hostile reception.  In the months that followed, her life depended upon a handful of men who believed there were traitors within their group betraying their movements to the enemy.  If Peggy was arrested by the security forces her captors would try to force her to tell them everything she knew, with death a very real threat if she did not.  Even when the Allied troops arrived Peggy was asked to cycle through the confused German lines and report back.  Those trips would have been physically exhausting and intensely nerve-wracking.

* Marcus Binney in The Women Who Lived For Danger, The Women Agents of SOE in the Second World War