Odette Sansom

Agent of the Special Operations Executive and the first woman to receive the George Cross (20 August 1946). Born on 28 April 1912 in Amiens as Odette Marie Céline Brailly. Her father was killed at Verdun in 1918. In 1931 she married an Englishman, Roy Sansom, and moved to Britain. In 1942 she answered an Admiralty appeal for holiday photographs of the French coast; her pictures led to an SOE interview. In November 1942 she landed in France and worked as courier to the Spindle network under Peter Churchill, around Cannes and Annecy. On 16 April 1943 she was arrested with Churchill at St Jorioz. Under interrogation she maintained that they were husband and wife and that Peter was a relative of the Prime Minister. Historians judge that this invention saved both their lives: the Germans came to regard them as prisoners worth keeping for exchange. She was tortured at Fresnes prison and gave nothing away about her network. Condemned to death, she was sent to Ravensbrück and held in solitary confinement. At the end of the war the camp commandant drove her to the American lines, intending to use her as a bargaining counter in his own surrender. After the war she married Peter Churchill and later Geoffrey Hallowes. She died on 13 March 1995. This woman appears in the archive under two records, as Sansom and as Hallowes; which should be canonical is referred to the archive owner.