Odette Hallowes

Odette Marie Léonie Céline Hallowes, GC, MBE (née Brailly; 28 April 1912 – 13 March 1995), also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Sansom, code named Lise, was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France during the Second World War. She was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross by the United Kingdom and was awarded the Légion d'honneur by France. The following information relating to her war service uses 'Sansom' as this was her surname during this period.

The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

Sansom arrived in France on the night of 3/4 November 1942 to work as a courier with the Spindle network (or circuit) of SOE headed by Peter Churchill (whom she later married). In January 1943, to evade arrest, Churchill and Sansom moved their operations to near Annecy in the French Alps. She and Churchill were arrested there on 16 April 1943 by spy-hunter Hugo Bleicher. She spent the rest of the war imprisoned in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Her wartime experiences and endurance of a brutal interrogation and imprisonment, which were chronicled in books and a motion picture, made her one of the most celebrated members of the SOE, and one of the few to survive Nazi imprisonment.

Odette Marie Léonie Céline Brailly was born on 28 April 1912 at 208, rue des Corroyers in Amiens, France; the daughter of Emma Rose Marie Yvonne née Quennehen and Florentin Désiré Eugène 'Gaston' Brailly, a bank manager, killed at Verdun shortly before the Armistice in 1918 and posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and Médaille militaire for heroism. She had one brother. As a child she contracted serious illnesses which blinded her for three and a half years, as well as polio, which resulted in her being bedridden for months. She had a convent education and was considered difficult, perhaps because of her illnesses.

She met an Englishman, Roy Patrick Sansom (1911–1957), in Boulogne and married him in Boulogne-sur-Mer on 27 October 1931, moving with him to Britain. The couple had three daughters: Françoise Edith, born 1932 in Boulogne; Lily Marie, born 1934 in Fulham; and Marianne Odette, born 1936 in Fulham. Mr. Sansom joined the army at the beginning of the Second World War, and Odette Sansom and the children moved to Somerset for their safety.

In the spring of 1942, the Admiralty appealed for postcards or family photographs taken on the French coastline for possible war use. Hearing the broadcast, Sansom wrote that she had photographs taken around Boulogne, but she mistakenly sent her letter to the War Office instead of the Admiralty. That brought her to the attention of Colonel Maurice Buckmaster's Special Operations Executive.

As cover for her secret work, Sansom was enrolled in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which supplied SOE with support personnel. She left her three daughters in a convent school, and was trained to be sent into Nazi-occupied France to work with the French Resistance.