U.K. spy held sway in Africa

others:
http://news.scotsman.com/obituaries/Obituary-Daphne-Park-Baroness-Park.6186737.jp
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7078662.ece
photo from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7076407.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7521495/Baroness-Park-of-Monmouth-the-Queen-of-Spies-dies-aged-88.html

Daphne Park, aged 23, in 1944 in her FANY uniform

PARK--Daphne Sybil Margaret Desiree, Baroness Park of Monmouth CMG OBE died on Wednesday, 24 March, 2010, aged 88. Revered, respected and loved by friends, family and colleagues in the UK and around the world. Funeral on Tuesday, 6 April at 2:30pm, Somerville College Chapel, Oxford. Memorial Service to be announced later.
Published in New York Times on March 30, 201


Daphne Park 1921-2010


From THE TIMES OF LONDON

Daphne Park was once called the greatest woman intelligence officer in the world. It was just the sort of remark to make her angry, not because she disliked being acknowledged as a spy but because of the female tag.

"Why woman intelligence officer?" Ms. Park would ask. Within Britain's Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, where she worked for 30 years, Daphne Margaret Sybil Désirée Park became a legend. Ms. Park, who died March 24 at age 88, retired in 1979 after a career in which she avoided summary execution on several occasions by quick thinking. She then forged new careers as Principal of Somerville College, Oxford and as a member of the House of Lords.

As an SIS officer, she enjoyed extraordinary influence, especially in Africa. Ms. Park was raised in Africa and won a scholarship to Oxford. In 1959, SIS posted her to the Belgian Congo, the year before it became independent. She once escaped death after being seized by soldiers who claimed that a tape in her handbag was a smuggled recording of Patrice Lumumba, one of the Congo's new leaders, who was then in jail, calling on his people to rise up.

Librarian at the House of Commons

Another interesting obit from London's Daily Telegraph.

Roseanne O'Reilly, who died on February 6 aged 84, was a librarian at the House of Commons for 40 years and the first executive woman servant of the Palace of Westminster.

Newly elected members would be astonished to find her at the centre desk of the Reference Room, with all references to their pre-parliamentary speeches in the press already copied and filed ready for use. Experienced members knew that the most obscure references in Hansard could be identified in seconds, even before the computer era, thanks to her encyclopedic knowledge of the labyrinthine filing systems.

[I've added a hyperlink to Hansard: the traditional name for the printed transcripts of parliamentary debates in the Westminster system of government.]

Ever ready to take up inquiries which went far beyond her official remit, she coped with demands over the years from hundreds of MPs who often were impatient and nearly always in a hurry. On one occasion an irascible Liverpool MP put his head around the door and shouted for the text of The Magnificat. Then a Liberal MP demanded the words of The Raggle Taggle Gypsies before a Scottish socialist interrupted them to demand the ages of Joseph and Mary at the time of the Nativity in order to learn whether the Holy Family would have been entitled to supplementary benefit. All were attended to with unflappable calm.

[Magnificat: — also known as the Song of Mary — is a canticle frequently sung (or spoken) liturgically in Christian church services. Raggle Taggle Gypsies is a Scottish traditional folk ballad.]

Mary Roseanne O'Reilly was born into an old Roman Catholic family in Surrey on New Year's Day 1926. Her father was a colonel in the Indian Army and her uncle flag officer of the battlecruiser Invincible, which sank at the Battle of Jutland; other relations had entered the service of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 18th century and been elevated to the nobility.

After schooling by Sacred Heart nuns at Hove, Roseanne O'Reilly joined the Wrens and was posted to Bletchley Park. But she referred to her job only 50 years later when a book on wartime code breaking was published with a photograph showing her standing, back to the camera, in front of a vast Heath Robinson apparatus described simply as "the computer".

On her demobilisation, her godfather, Hilary St George Saunders, the Commons Librarian, offered her a post in the Library at £2 10s a week. The appointment caused a mild sensation. Roseanne O'Reilly was much amused after a few weeks when a member put his head around the door and then backed out in horror, exclaiming: "Good God, they're not putting a girl in here, are they?"

Gradually her confidence grew – though nobody spoke to her for the first year. She was appointed MBE in 1971, and by the time she retired in 1986, there were no fewer than 87 women working in the Library (as well as 41 men).

There were glowing tributes to her in Hansard from both sides of the House. After devoting some time to family affairs, a chance meeting with Betty Boothroyd led to Roseanne O'Reilly being recalled to assist her in her duties as the first female Speaker.

For eight years Roseanne O'Reilly put at Madam Speaker's disposal all her considerable organisational and diplomatic skills. With the election of a new Speaker, she retired a second time. When her colleagues in the Library gave her a farewell lunch, she noted that she had seen 12 prime ministers and nine Speakers since joining the House in Clement Attlee's time. "Such fun", she said, "Lovely place. I haven't been bored once."

Another obit from a London newspaper, this one from the Times.

From The Times: February 27, 2010
Gladys Skillett : wartime deportee and nurse


Gladys Skillett was the first of the Channel Islands’ wartime deportees to give birth in captivity. It was an event that started an enduring friendship with a young German woman about her own age and in the 1950s paved the way for the start of a special relationship between Guernsey and the Swabian town of Biberach an der Riss where the deportees were held in the nearby Lindele internment camp.

A fact not often noted: the Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis.

In September 1942 just over 2,000 Channel Islanders were selected for deportation because either they or their spouses or a parent had been born in the UK. Gladys, with her English husband Sidney and their year-old son Colin, was among 834 men, women and children from the Bailewick of Guernsey to go. It should have been 836 but a retired major, one of 11 deportees from Sark, killed himself by slashing his wrists and his wife, who had survived their suicide pact, was taken to hospital.


When she left Guernsey, Skillett, a former nurse, was already five months pregnant with her second child. By the time she was ready to give birth, the four months since her departure from Guernsey had embraced a first British land victory at El Alamein, increased RAF night bombing and, above all, a major defeat looming for the German Army at Stalingrad. In the maternity ward of the small hospital in Biberach where the Guernsey woman arrived in labour most of the other beds were occupied by women who had husbands in uniform. They wanted nothing to do with this lone Englander — with one exception.


Maria Koch had a man in the Wehrmacht. Julius, a forester in civilian life, was then serving in a signals unit in the Netherlands. But Koch was a practising Catholic and when a midwife asked her if she would mind sharing her room with the English patient, confined to a bed in a draughty corridor, she instantly agreed. Shortly afterwards and within about an hour of each other both women had produced healthy boys.


At first their mothers communicated almost entirely by sign language, but they were soon getting on well enough for Koch to persuade a visiting relative to buy her companion a Kinderschöppele, a baby’s milk bottle. Before long the two babies, who would be christened David and Heiner, were each sucking on identical bottles and Koch taught Skillett a new German word: Milchbrüdern — milk brothers.


They were soon separated, but a fortnight after his son was born Julius Koch was granted home leave. When Maria told him about Heiner’s milchbrüder he arranged through a friendly guard to visit the Skilletts in the Lindele camp, which was just outside the town on a plateau from where on a clear day its inmates coulds see the peaks of the Swiss Alps. Earlier it been a prisoner-of-war camp and the source of the most successful mass British escape of the war when four out of 26 officers who had tunnelled their way out made home runs to the neutral border 40 miles away.


The Kochs could not actually enter the camp any more than the Skilletts could leave it. Instead, the British and German families stood either side of the barbed wire holding their new-born sons aloft and, unable to say very much to each other, smiled a lot. Such spontaneous celebrations of common humanity in the midst of the 20th century’s second Anglo-German war were, to say the least, unusual.


Gladys Eileen Dillingham was born in Guernsey in 1918 some six months before the end of the first one. Her father, Sergeant Ernest Dillingham, a regular soldier from Camden Town, North London, was fighting in France at the time with the garrison artillery.


Ernest had met her patois-speaking mother, whose maiden name was Ingrouille, during a prewar posting to Castle Cornet in St Peter Port, and when, in 1924, he retired from the Army the family settled permanently in Guernsey. The pace was still distinctly rural. One of Skillett’s earliest memories was the thrill of weekly pony and trap rides to market with her maternal grandmother at the reins. Later, looking back on her childhood, her biggest regret was that neither her grandmother nor her mother bothered to teach her the Norman French that they used.

Although British, the Channel Islands are very close to France. Norman French, a curious term.

In the summer of 1940, now a trained nurse, she almost got away before the Germans arrived. On Friday, June 28, her bags were packed and she had a ticket to board the last Weymouth-bound mailboat for the next five years. Then, in late afternoon, came the Luftwaffe’s first and only attack on the island, killing 33 people at the harbour, one of them her mother’s brother, a grower trying to load his tomatoes. Many more were wounded.

Skillett unpacked her uniform and cycled to an emergency hospital together with Sidney, her boyfriend of four months, who without the slightest medical training found himself assisting a couple of hard-pressed surgeons in the operating theatre. All those who had received morphine had their foreheads crossed with Nurse Dillingham’s lipstick so that they would not be overdosed. The young couple worked throughout the night. When they emerged it was daylight and Skillett had missed her boat. Three months later they were married and living for five shillings a week rent in a house that had been evacuated by its owners and left in charge of neighbours. There they might have seen the war out had not Heinrich Himmler needed civilian internees. The SS chief wanted to trade them for German citizens, particularly the 500 or so technicians who in 1941 had been rounded up in Iran when Anglo-Soviet forces deposed its pro-Nazi Shah. (By an odd coincidence one of Skillett’s old beaus, serving in Iran as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, played a large part in tracking them down.) Anyone born in the UK qualified together with spouses and children even if they were native Channel Islanders.

Pro-Nazi Shah?

The London-born Sidney Skillett was an obvious candidate but he was in the building trade and doing essential harbour maintenance work, which convinced the Germans that he should be exempted. There seemed little chance that his father-in-law, the retired soldier, would enjoy the same luck and this greatly troubled Gladys because her mother had recently become very deaf and unwell. So she persuaded her husband that they must convince the Germans to accept them and their son as substitutes which he duly did.

What this selfless daughter had no way of foreseeing was that her parents would soon be much better off had they gone to Germany. As the war progressed, regular Red Cross parcels made living conditions for the internees infinitely superior to those in Guernsey where a tightening Allied blockade starved occupiers and occupied alike. By 1945 the German civilians living around the camp also had much cause to envy them.


Skillett never forgot Maria Koch’s kindness to her and, after Julius’s return to the army, there had been other meetings at the barbed wire and sometimes an exchange of small gifts. On April 23, 1945, St George’s Day, the Lindele camp was liberated by General Leclerc’s French colonial troops and the Guernsey woman sought out her German friend. Before her she pushed a rickety pram containing her latest child, three-month-old Gloria. Beneath the baby was an assortment of Red Cross goodies for Mrs Koch and David’s Milchbrüder, Heiner. Julius was missing, last heard of at a headquarters near Berlin.

A pensive Skillett, holding Heiner, stares out of a photograph taken with the Skilletts and their infant sons as they sit on a grassy bank outside the camp. It was photographed during this interlude between the Skilletts’ liberation and repatriation and Julius’s astonishing homecoming, having evaded Russian and Allied patrols.


But this was by no means the end of their story. Indeed, in many ways, it was still at the beginning with regular meetings in Guernsey and Germany, particulary at birthdays, between the Milchbrüdern Heiner, who became a school teacher, and David, a police inspector. When they became 60, David and Heiner marched, as tradition demands for Biberach’s sexagenarians, in the annual Schützenfest accompanied by her younger sister Gloria, now a deputy in the Guernsey States of Deliberation.


Sidney Skillett died in 1980, having made a fortune by building and running highly successful self-catering holiday chalets. Gladys Skillett is survived by seven children.


Gladys Skillett, the first of Guernsey’s wartime deportees to give birth in captivity, was born on May 2, 1918. She died on February 11, 2010, aged 91

3 obits

Colin Ward obituary: Writer, social theorist and anarchist who believed in self-sufficiency, allotments and better town planning (UK Guardian)


Peter Spiro obituary: Other lives: A Holocaust survivor who came to Britain on one of the kindertransport trains at the age of eight, he went on to become a community activist

Bill Gordon: Designer of famous Arecibo telescope.