Vera Leigh

In 1985, SOE agent and painter Brian Stonehouse, who saw Leigh and the three other female SOE agents at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp just before their deaths, painted a poignant watercolour of the four women which now hangs in the Special Forces Club in London.

On 13 May 1944, Leigh together with three other captured female SOE agents, Andrée Borrel, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden, were moved from Fresnes to the Gestapo’s Paris headquarters in the Avenue Foch along with four other women whose names were Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman and Odette Sansom, all of whom were F Section agents. Later that day they were taken to the railway station, and each handcuffed to a guard upon alighting the train. Sansom, in an interview after the war, said:

Some time between five and six in the morning on 6 July 1944, not quite two months after their arrival in Karlsruhe, Borrel, Leigh, Olschanezky and Rowden were taken to the reception room, given their personal possessions, and handed over to two Gestapo men who then escorted them 100 kilometres south-west by closed truck to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France, where they arrived around three-thirty in the afternoon. The women’s arrival was apparently unexpected as was the order by one of the women’s escorts that the four women were to be executed immediately.

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 Dericourt. She arrived with Juliane Aisner (an old friend of Dericourt 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.

She spent time with SOE agent Aisner in an imposing building in a courtyard off the Place des Ternes from which she ran her husband’s business, an effective cover for Leigh’s activity as Déricourt’s courier. Leigh frequently met other agents at a café on the other side of the Place des Ternes, a short walk from the Place de l’Etoile in the Seventeenth. It was there in the Chez Mas, on 30 October 1943, in the company of Jones’ bodyguard, that she was arrested. The INVENTOR network had been betrayed by double agent Roger Bardet, and subsequently collapsed. Taken to the bleak Fresnes Prison several kilometres outside Paris, she was registered as Suzanne Chavonne and placed in Cell 410 of the Troisième Section Femmes. She had been taught in training to hold out for 48 hours after capture to give fellow agents a chance to vacate any premises and destroy any records she might be forced to reveal, but is almost certain she had no need to do so. There was nothing her captor didn’t already know about her activities.

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.

When Paris fell in 1940 she left for Lyon to join her fiancé of seven years, a M. 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.

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.

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

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.