Vera Leigh

Vera Leigh (17 March 1903 – 6 July 1944) was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive during World War II.

Leigh was a member of the SOE's Donkeyman circuit and Inventor sub-circuit in occupied France until she was arrested by the Gestapo.

She was subsequently executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Vera Leigh was born Vera Glass on 17 March 1903 in Leeds, England.

She had been abandoned as a baby and adopted while still an infant by H. Eugene Leigh, a well-known American racehorse trainer with an English wife, who renamed his adopted daughter Vera Eugenie Leigh.

After Mr Leigh's death, his wife married Albert Clark, whose son Victor Alexander Dalzell Clark became Leigh's step-brother and friend.

When it came necessary to name a next-of-kin, Leigh chose Clark.

Vera grew up around the stables of Maisons Laffitte, the training centre and racing course near Paris.

Clark later remembered that, as a child, she wanted to be a jockey when she grew up.

In fact, she moved from the world of racing to the equally fashionable one of haute couture.

After gaining experience as a vendeuse at the house of Caroline Reboux, she went into partnership with two friends to found the grande maison Rose Valois in the Place Vendôme in 1927, when she was only 24.

In the pre-war decade, she moved into the sophisticated social scene of le Tout Paris.

When Paris fell in 1940, she left for Lyon to join her fiancé of seven years, a man called Charles Sussaix, the managing director of a Portuguese-owned film company.

She had intended to find a way, with his help, to get to England, but she became involved with the underground escape lines, guiding fugitive Allied servicemen out of the country, and it was not until 1942 that she herself took the route over the Pyrenees into Spain.

As with many who made this journey, Spanish authorities put her in the internment camp at Miranda de Ebro, about 65 kilometres south of Bilbao.

Through the efforts of a British embassy official, she was released, and helped to make her way to England via Gibraltar.

Leigh arrived in England at the end on 1942, with the intentions of offering her services for the war effort, and was soon identified by SOE.

She struck her recruiter as "a smart businesswoman".

The interviewer noted further, "It is clear that commerce is her first allegiance", but the authorities saw no reason to doubt her motives, while her pre-war life in Paris and her perfect French seemed to make her a natural for the job.

She agreed to break off contact with Sussaix and began training.

Her preliminary training report described Leigh as supple, active and keen, confident and capable, "a very satisfactory person to teach" and one with "a very pleasant personality".

Her commandant's report said she was "full of guts", had kept up with the men and was "about the best shot in the party".

He found her "dead keen" and noted that she was greatly respected, had an "equable nature", and according to him was a "plumb woman for this work".

One of her instructors later remembered that she had a hard time dealing with maps and diagrams, but was "extremely good with her fingers; she could do fiddling jobs with charges and wires and all that remarkably quickly and neatly".

He speculated (correctly) that she might have been connected with the fashion business before the war.

"She was very interested in clothes, and hated her hideous khaki uniform".

Leigh was 40 years old when she returned to France as Ensign Vera Leigh of the FANY, as it was common for such women to be nominally employed by the FANY while actually being SOE agents (as was Andrée Borrel and many other female SOE agents).

Leigh returned to France on 13/14 May 1943, arriving in a Lysander at a field near Tours, and was one of four new arrivals that night who were received by F Section's air movements officer, Henri Déricourt.

She arrived with Juliane Aisner (an old friend of Déricourt who would be a courier in his pick-up operation codenamed Farrier), Sidney Charles Jones (an organiser and arms instructor) and Marcel Clech (a W/T operator).

Leigh was to be a courier and three of them (Leigh, Jones and Clech) were to form a sub-circuit known as Inventor, to work with the Paris-based Prosper circuit, and would later serve as the liaison officer of the Donkeyman circuit.

Circuits were also known as networks.

Leigh's codename among fellow agents was Simone, and Almoner for radio communications with London; while her assumed identity in France was Suzanne Chavanne, a milliner's assistant.

With papers in her assumed name, she moved around Paris and as far away as the Ardennes in the northeast, carrying messages from Jones to his various wireless operators and to Henri Frager (who headed a sub-circuit of the Prosper circuit).

The reports she sent to her superiors in London were described as "extremely cheerful".

She moved into an apartment in the elegant Sixteenth Arrondissement, made rendezvous routinely at cafés frequented by other agents, and took up life as a Parisienne again.

Paris was remarkably calm under the German occupation with life continuing much as it had before despite rationing and the psychological stress many suffered in private, with few acts of resistance due to the savage reprisals the German invaders would inflict in response and the large number of Parisians willing to enrich themselves by becoming informants for the Gestapo.

It caused Leigh to be less careful than she should have been, as evidenced by her decision to frequent the same hairdresser she had used before the war.

She came across her sister's husband and at first pretended not to know him, then threw her arms around him.

This chance encounter led to the discovery that he, too, was involved in clandestine activity for the Allies by hiding fugitive Allied airmen and passing them on to an escape line that would try to get them over the Pyrenees across the frontier into Spain.

In her spare time, she began escorting some of these downed fliers, who spoke no French, through the streets from the safe-house to their next point of contact on the escape line.