Seventy years ago, the barn was home for a few hours for Special Operations Executive agents before they flew on nights with a full moon into Nazi-occupied Europe.
Inside, men and women, including some Irish, made last-minute checks of maps, weapons and caches of money for the Resistance before climbing onboard aircraft that took some to their deaths.
One of those who left from the barn – which still stands today in a field in Gibraltar Farm, near Tempsford in Bedfordshire – was Patricia Maureen O’Sullivan from Charleville Road, Rathmines, the daughter of a journalist, John and his wife, Adelaide.
“Her prime motive appears to be sheer love of adventure,” wrote one of her senior officers on her return from a mission in France, “She has self-confidence which could carry her through a lot.”
In the beginning, the Special Operations Executive – created by Winston Churchill “to set Europe ablaze” – had not been quite so impressed by the wilful Dubliner, who was better known as “Paddy”.
Though intelligent, purposeful and determined, she “requires a lot of attention from others”, but was “not sufficiently level-headed to warrant any undue confidence”, officers noted – an opinion that changed in time.
If keen on adventure, O’Sullivan was not keen on weapons, “does not show any enthusiasm for firing” and while she showed a “moderate” interest in the theory behind bomb-making “the noise upsets her”.
However, courage she had aplenty. In March 1944, she was one of a number flown from Tempsford – which is soon to honour the women of SOE with a memorial – parachuting into Occupied France, near Limoges.
Weighed down with a large sum of French francs, O’Sullivan hit the ground hard, believing for a moment that she had broken her back before she passed out.
“She awoke with something breathing on her face and was terribly scared until she realised it was a friendly French cow,” she told a reporter in Calcutta a year later – in an interview that infuriated some senior officers.
She had come bearing gifts: 22 containers of weapons and equipment for a Resistance unit that then had nothing more than two pistols and a couple of torches.
However, she first had to overcome misogyny from a British officer, who “was furious because London had sent him a girl”, though he later refused to send her back when a man became available.
For seven months, she served as a wireless operator for the Resistance, along with delivering and collecting messages from colleagues for 50km around Limoges.
“Though handicapped through imperfect technical knowledge and the consequence of a serious illness, she nevertheless by patience, perseverance and devotion to duty, made a success of her work: in two months she became a first-class and fully reliable operator,” according to a citation later when she was awarded an MBE.
“She lived most of the time in conditions of unusual squalor, without complaining and it was due in large measure to her persistent efforts and untiring devotion that the [Resistance unit] achieved its success,” it went on.
Danger lurked everywhere. Cycling one day with her radio-set covered in a basket, she was stopped by a German check-point, unable to turn around to escape them.
Approaching the soldiers confidently, she chatted animatedly with one, who quickly asked her on a date – to which she agreed if he could find a place where she would not be recognised by locals.
Intending to open the suitcase containing the radio set, he was stopped only by the arrival of an officer, who said jokingly: “Ah, Mlle, vous ressemblez a une Fraulein”, according to a debriefing record now held by the National Archives in Kew.
“She replied that her mother was German (which was not true) and had died when she was a baby. So, he in German and she in a mixture of Flemish and German conversed for half-an-hour, during which time he made a date with her for the next day, and they forgot to look in her suitcase.”
On another occasion, shortly after D-Day in June 1944, she was stopped at a check-point by the Vichy paramilitaries, the Milice, who were by then even more vicious than the Nazis. One of them rummaged carefully through her purse, she remembered later, coming just millimetres away from secret codes that would have condemned her, if found.
Facing betrayal and capture, O’Sullivan had been told to pass herself off as a Parisian who had fled the city to stay with relatives in the country, where food was more plentiful. However, she chose to use her own cover-story, “that she was an ex-pupil and a friend of the school-teacher’s wife who had met her in Alsace”.
On her return to Britain, O’Sullivan was the subject of debate at war’s end about a suitable recognition for her work, with officers disagreeing about whether she deserved a Mention in Despatches, or an MBE. In the end, she got the higher award after a senior officer intervened at the last minute, saying “I think an MBE should be standard for these girls.”
Named in the Sunday Express in March 1945 as "one of the women who had parachuted into France" by an indiscreet former colleague, O'Sullivan's position was at risk for a time.
However, in the end, the authorities accepted that she had nothing to do with the disclosure, agreeing to her application to be sent into Germany or the Far East despite the risk that her identity was known.
By October 1945, now the holder of both the MBE from the British and the Croix de Guerre from the French, O’Sullivan was stationed in Calcutta with the Royal Air Force. However, bureaucratic trouble was again not far from her door after she gave an interview to a journalist, speaking openly about her time with the French Resistance since she believed it had been sanctioned.
Seven decades on, the complaints made subsequently by the military seem peevish: “It seems unnecessary, for example, to mention that she had been trained to pick pockets,” one letter held in her files records. That same letter went on: “There is implied in the statement that she declined to use the clothing provided for her because it “looked too English to be safe”, a criticism of the efficiency of HQ.”
Born in January 1918, O’Sullivan’s mother had died within months of her birth, which led to her leaving Ireland when she was just seven after spending two years in St Louis’ Convent, Dublin.
From there she went to a Belgian convent and the Athené’e Royal school in Ostend before she returned to spend a year in the Rathmines Commercial College and a later period in the Ursuline Convent in Dublin. In November 1945, she married Walter Alvey in Calcutta, returning to live with him in Ilkley in West Yorkshire, where the couple raised two sons, John and Robin. She died in 1994.
Since January this year, a group of Tempsford villagers, led by surgeon Tazi Husain, has worked on plans to erect a memorial in the village to women who “by the full moon we flew”.
“These were brave people. They were driven to the barn with the windows curtained so they didn’t know where they were taking off from – so they couldn’t reveal it if they were caught and tortured.
“Often, they only knew that they were going if they got two eggs on their plate for tea,” said Husain, as he peered at floral tributes left this year, as every year, in the barn.
In St Peter’s Church, across the road from the Wheatsheaf pub – one of three used by the 2,000 staff who worked at Tempsford during the war years – a list of the pilots and crew of 138 and 161 Special Duties Squadrons who died ferrying the agents runs into the hundreds, most aged in their early 20s.
However, if there was danger, there was love, too. Irishwoman Mary Herbert operated as Agent Claudine for nearly two years in Bordeaux from October 1942 to November 1944.
In the beginning of the war she had worked at the British Embassy in Warsaw before escaping to London, where she applied to join SOE. At 40, she was older than most recruits. Once in Bordeaux, Herbert met the local Resistance leader, Claude de Baissac, “an attractive, forceful man, the son of one of the richest and noblest families in Mauritius”, according to a book on SOE. Soon, she was carrying messages, along with radio-sets on incredibly dangerous rail journeys from Paris to Bordeaux, during which she would place them under empty seats.
Struggling to bear the weight of one suitcase, she was stopped leaving Bordeaux’s station by a German naval officer who carried it to the nearby tram-stop for her.
In time, the Resistance group run by de Baissac was betrayed by a lieutenant who was given the choice by the Gestapo of betraying friends, or seeing his wife killed.
By May 1943, de Baissac and Herbert had become lovers, and she gave birth to a daughter by a Caesarian section in December in a nursing home, fearful that she would reveal secrets under sedation.
She quickly disappeared, though two months later the Gestapo found her in Poitiers. They believed she was de Baissac’s sister, not his lover, though she was taken away for questioning after a surprisingly civilised exchange, according to her own 1945 account of it.
Despite searching the flat, the Gestapo failed to find letters linking her to de Baissac, while she also had the chance to hide English chocolate before she was taken away.
Questioned, Herbert was told she had “a queer accent” – she remembered later in a debriefing, though she blamed it on having lived in Alexandria in Egypt and speaking numerous languages.
However, she hid her knowledge of German from her interrogators, believing it gave her an advantage – which it did since it gave her the chance later to make sure that her story tallied with another prisoner.
During one interrogation, there was an air raid, which prompted a clerk to ask the Gestapo commander if they should go to the shelter. “He replied that it did not matter very much because they would all be dead shortly,” she remembered.
In the end, Herbert was released, but her fellow Resistance member was taken to a concentration camp in Germany when her story did not match that of her husband’s.
Having recovered her baby from a convent, Herbert went to ground, which led her family to press for information from SOE, which was itself not entirely clear where she was.
Eventually, the family – not SOE – learned that she had given birth, which prompted the family’s solicitor, a Mr Heston to say that he “wanted very much” that SOE should send him to France: “I told him that this would be quite impossible,” an officer recorded with a degree of exasperation in her personnel file.
Back in Tempsford, Husain is creating the mosaic of a white dove that will form the centre-piece of the memorial, which will, appropriately, be unveiled on an evening with a full moon.
“They deserve to be remembered in their own right,” says local historian, Bernard O’Connor, who has done much to bring Tempsford’s history back to life for a new generation of locals.
While one memorial is emerging, however, another is finding uses. Having survived for 70 years, the last surviving of the three runways used on Gibraltar Farm by SOE on so many other nights with full moons, is today being used by contractors to store aggregate for use on the construction and repair of roads nearby.
