Diana Rowden
Diana Hope Rowden served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive in France during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to recruit resistance groups and supply them with arms and material in order to carry out sabotage against Nazi Germany. From June to November 1943, Rowden was a courier for SOE's Acrobat circuit in occupied France. She was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943. In May 1944, along with several other captured women agents, she was transported to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Germany. She was executed there by fatal injection on 6 July 1944.
Early life
Born in England, Rowden was the daughter of Major Aldred Clement Rowden and his wife, Muriel Christian Maitland-Makgill-Crichton, whom he married on 16 July 1913 at St Mark's, North Audley Street in London's fashionable Mayfair district. The marriage was not successful and her parents separated when she was still a young child, whereupon she moved with her mother and two younger brothers, Maurice Edward Alfred and Cecil William Aldred, to southern France as a small income went farther there than in England. She and her brothers spent much of their time there on the beach, fishing and boating, swimming and gliding.Rowden's cousin, Mark Chetwynd-Stapylton, remembers playing games of hide and seek with the Rowden children when they came to visit and bicycle rides on Berkhamsted Common. Sixty years later he was left with a faint impression of Rowden as "a bit of a tomboy", reddish-haired, freckled, with slightly protruding teeth.
Her mother was apparently an eccentric who was remembered by her nephew as "amusing even if possessing a somewhat caustic – and biting – wit and not much worried about what she said and to whom". When living in France Mrs Rowden was known to locals, according to her sister, as "the mad Englishwoman".
Rowden attended schools in Sanremo and Cannes on the French Riviera, but her family soon returned to England, settling at Hadlow Down, near Mayfield, East Sussex, where she continued her education at Manor House School in Limpsfield, Surrey, as Mrs Rowden was, according to her nephew, mindful enough of her parental responsibilities to finish off the haphazard schooling Rowden had in France with a proper English education.
The Manor House was set beneath a low line of hills. A girl who shared a room with Rowden, remembered the place later in terms of "the smell of ink and chalk dust, the lazy drones of bees around the flower beds, goal posts pointing bleak and white towards a winter sky." Elizabeth, who would later write a book about Rowden, remembered how bitterly Rowden resented the restrictions of life at school. "She was of it, but never part of it. She was", she thought later, "too mature for us. We were still schoolgirls in grubby white blouses concerned with games and feuds and ha-ha jokes. She was already adult, and withdrawn from our diversions; none of us, I think, ever knew her."
Elizabeth was amazed to learn years later from Mrs Rowden about Diana's early years "as a sea urchin", napping on the deck of the Sans Peur with a line tied around her big toe to wake her if a fish bit, gutting her catch "with a cheerful confidence, marketing, carousing, sailing a small boat with reckless skill. "It seemed to Elizabeth that the change in Rowden's personality from spontaneity to reserve was explained by the change of scene to a manor in Surrey where she longed for the life she had led in France, "for the yacht and the sea and the warm sun of the Mediterranean and her raffish, careless, unpredictable companions."
In 1933, when Rowden was considered sufficiently educated, if not entirely finished, she returned to France with her mother and enrolled at the Sorbonne, and tried her hand at freelance journalism.
Red Cross to WAAF (1940-43)
When Germany invaded France in 1940 she volunteered to serve with the French Red Cross, being assigned to the Anglo-American Ambulance Unit. The Allied collapse in May 1940 prevented her evacuation from France and she remained there until the summer of 1941 when she escaped to England via Spain and Portugal.In September 1941, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, working at the Department of the Chief of Air Staff as Assistant Section Officer for Intelligence duties, before being posted in July 1942 to Moreton-in-Marsh, where she was promoted to Section Officer.
During a brief hospitalisation in the West Country to recuperate from a minor operation, Rowden met a convalescing pilot who had been working for the French Section of SOE. She first came to the attention of the Special Operations Executive when Harry Sporborg, a senior SOE staff member, saw her file and requested that she be appointed his secretary, but she had already joined the WAAF and began military training. Simpson worked part-time for SOE and with whom she discussed her desire to return to France and take part in resistance work and caused him to tell some of his colleagues in Baker St.
Special Operations Executive (1943-44)
In early March 1943, she received an invitation to a preliminary interview with an officer of SOE F Section, during which the interviewer was favourably impressed. It was duly noted that she was "very anxious to return to France and work against the Germans", and after she had been seen by other members of F Section staff, it was decided that she would be given the chance she had been looking for. She was officially posted to Air Intelligence 10, actually seconded to SOE, on 18 March 1943, and immediately sent off to training.Her training report described her as "not very agile", but with "plenty of courage", and "physically quite fit". One of her best subjects was fieldcraft, in which she "did some excellent stalks". She was "a very good shot, not at all gun-shy. Grenade throwing, very good". Her instructor found her "very conscientious" and "a pleasant student to instruct". Her commandant's report described her as a "strange mixture. Very intelligent in many ways but very slow in learning any new subject". She had trouble with technical details and her signalling was described as a grief to herself and others, not worth while persevering with as it only discourages her. She hates being beaten by any subject, so must have got through a lot of hate down here." He concluded, "I think she has enjoyed the course and could be useful."
On 9 June 1943, Rowden received orders for her first mission, and a week later, on the night of 16/17 June, she stepped out of a Lysander on a moonlit meadow in the Loire Valley a few miles north-east of Angers. Within minutes two other agents, Cecily Lefort and Noor Inayat Khan, had landed. The three women, who had been sent to operate as couriers for the organizers of various circuits in different parts of France, were met by a reception committee organized by F Sections' air movements officer, Henri Déricourt, and quickly spirited to their destinations. Rowden was bound to the area of the Jura Mountains south-east of Dijon and just west of the Swiss border to work for the organizer of the Acrobat circuit, led by John Renshaw Starr. Her papers were in her cover name of Juliette Thérèse Rondeau. Her name in the field among fellow agents was Paulette while her code name in messages to London was Chaplain. She lived in a small room at the back of the Hôtel du Commerce with access to a roof if she had to leave in a hurry without being seen.
Her primary job was acting as a courier delivering messages to other agents and members of the underground, and she would travel constantly, mostly by bicycle over the neighbouring roads bordering the Pines, but would also deliver instructions to agents as far afield as Marseille, Lyon, Besançon, Montbéliard, and even Paris, and bring their messages back to the W/T operator for transmission. Young was a Scotsman who spoke poor French, so Rowden's duties included escorting him around so he would not have to speak French. On one of her trips to Marseille the German police boarded the train and began inspecting identity papers, so she locked herself in the watercloset until they had passed through her car. Rowden got to know the local maquis who described her as without fear – sans peur.
She went out at night to meet local members of the resistance in the moonlit fields, setting flares and shining flashlights to guide in the planes with parachute drops of arms, ammunition and explosives. Some of these explosives were used to sabotage the Peugeot factory at Sochaux, near the town of Montbéliard, which had been turning out tank turrets for the Wehrmacht and engine parts for the Luftwaffe. A raid by Allied bombers had failed to damage the factory and caused hundreds of civilian deaths in the town, so Harry Rée approached the local director of the factory and convinced him to facilitate sabotage at the factory as the alternative was another bombing raid that could cause many more deaths.
Barely a month after her arrival, Starr was arrested, betrayed by a double agent who had infiltrated the circuit, so Young and Rowden were on the run. Rowden briefly sheltered in a little bistro and shop at Epy. After three weeks at Epy she joined Young in what would be their last hideout thanks to the help of the Janier-Dubry family, which consisted of an elderly widow and her son and daughter-in-law of the family name, and her two daughters and their husbands, the Juifs and the Paulis. Together they owned a local sawmill outside Clairvaux-les-Lacs, a village about 15 kilometres from the town of Lons-le-Saunier. In August Rowden and Young were established in the house of the Juifs.
Since her description had likely been distributed, Rowden dyed her hair and changed the way she wore it, got rid of the clothes she had been wearing and borrowed some others. She also dropped the codename Paulette and assumed the name Marcelle. She helped around the house while the Juif children loved her as she joined in their games and went tobogganing with them down the log slide outside the house, and to Madame Juif she seemed as tough as a man and as tireless as a child.