Special Operations Executive

Hi,
I was recently granted access to the file of Arthur Howard Titchener (my mother’s cousin) who was based at Aston House from 1942 onwards, the file said "special training course", unfortunately I am doing this at work and don't have the copies of the paperwork with me so may have got the wording wrong, will check tonight and correct. Just a little eager on my part to try and find out more.

Sadly, there was no information on the file as to his actual, if any, “duties/excursions” (for want of better words) and I was wondering whether anyone would know how to, other than going back to the FOI, obtain more in-depth details/information.

I know it is an incredibly long shot but if anyone out there had a relative who was at Aston House during this time and should have known him / mentioned him I’d love to be in contact. Although, his name was Arthur he actually used his middle name and went as Howard.

I know this might sound daft but this is all new to me so the acronyms don't mean anything to me so what does "PF" stand for?

GfL

 

GfL, PF is personal file, i.e. the file you've had opened at Kew through FOI.

The PFs can be very detailed or very sparse. There's unlikely to be any more personal information available about your relative other that what you have in his file.

Usually there's a small piece of paper on the first page of the file with a list of dates on it, like when he entered service with SOE, when he signed the Official Secrets Act (OSA), etc. At the top of that sheet of paper there should be a number followed by more acronyms like "D/F.1". That/those symbols will give an indication to what section/s he belonged to in SOE.

Aston House was where special devices were manufactured.

Lee

 

Hi Psywar.org,

Thanks for you help.

PF - Personal File, hmm perhaps I should have engaged brain LOL

If you were stationed at Aston House does that mean you were not likely to be sent anywhere, an excursion/job?

The File reference I had was: HS9/1471

The information on the sheet you refer to was:

D/CCO followed by his name
P.T.C. 1/10/42
No Trace 5/10/42
O.S.A. 8.11.42 (which I now know is the Official Secrets Act, thank you)

It then says:

1.10.42 - P.T.C. with a view to taking special training course at school
6.10.42 = D/CCO advised: 8543 started training at Stn. XII

The only other form gave personal details of his family etc.

Can you shed any light on what the above means?

Thank you for any help.

Kind regards
GfL

 

Hi GfL,

I need to look up the D/CCO symbol and will get back to you on that one.

Also I forgot the meaning of PTC but it is to do with when the applicant was vetted. (Something "check" I think it is).

"No Trace" refers the MI5 security check. It's saying that MI5 have no trace of the applicant, meaning they do not have any information against the applicant which would prevent their employment in SOE. Sometimes you'll see "NRA" instead of "no trace" which means "Nothing Recorded Against".

So basically he was vetted/interviewed on 1 October 1942 to make sure he was suitable for taking this "special training course".

Then he started training at Stn XII (Station 12, i.e. Aston House) on 6 Oct 1942.

Lee

 

This is going off at a bit of a tangent perhaps. I believe some members of the British Resistance Organisation were also SOE or MI9 liaising with overseas operators.

Is there likely to be an Emily Rosalind Bennet nee Wallis mentioned anywhere? I have the merest hint she may have been BRO -- or at least associated with them.

Geoff

 

From 1944 when the BRO stood down many of its members were recruited by SOE, SAS, etc for operations in Europe.

 

Hi Lee,

Thanks for your help.

As that was all that was on the file I guess there's no way of knowing what the course was or what he did - what a shame.

Thank you for looking into what D/CCO means for me.

Another thing crossed my mind, how would people get picked out ? I dont know if Arthur was in the army and spotted there but if he wasnt it isn't as if it were a normal run-of-the-mill job that you'd just apply for?

Thanks.

Sarah

 

Hiya Sarah! I'm wondering just the same thing. My mum was a fire watcher during the war. When she died at the end of last year I found a 1973 letter saying she'd been to France with a party of the BRO to meet French Resistance vets.

Now, could she have been recruited because she had already volunteered for a dodgy job? Who knows? Helluva job trying to find out. Watch this space . . . for a very long time.

Geoff

 

Hi Lee,

Thanks for your help.

As that was all that was on the file I guess there's no way of knowing what the course was or what he did - what a shame.

Thank you for looking into what D/CCO means for me.

Another thing crossed my mind, how would people get picked out ? I dont know if Arthur was in the army and spotted there but if he wasnt it isn't as if it were a normal run-of-the-mill job that you'd just apply for?

Thanks.

Sarah

Interesting, what I've turned up for D/CCO so far is that the symbol was allocated to Major David Alexander Wyatt, who died on 19 August 1942. So it looks as if Arthur may have been his replacement.

Wyatt's SOE P/F is available at the National Archives (TNA) and might be worth checking out. TNA Ref: HS 9/1626/3

I'll continue searching for what activities the D/CCO symbol covered.

Lee

 

Hi Geoff,
It's amazing what you sometimes find in their papers when family members pass away. Hope you manage to find the answer, hoping I can find mine too !

Sarah

 

Hi Lee,

I don't think Arthur could have been the Major's replacement as he would only have been 18 years old at the time the Major died. The Major was only 30 when he got killed.

Yesterday, I googled Major Wyatt and stumbled across a site, www.specialforcesroh.com, which gave the following info:

SOE Liaison Officer with Combined Operations HQ
Buried in the Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery,France L.9.
Other info:
parent unit Royal Engineers
born 9.10.1911 South Africa
resided London SW
appointed as above December 1941
KIA Dieppe

I didn't find out what D/CCO meant.

Sarah

 

Sarah, you're right it does not look as if Arthur was Wyatt's replacement.

The D/CCO is an SOE symbol or code number either assigned to a particular individual or to a department. The head of the department would usually share the same symbol as the department itself.

For example, X section was the German section of SOE. The head of the German Section also used the symbol X. Other members of the department would have their own symbol like X.1, X.2, etc.

D/CCO is a symbol for a department that was probably headed by Wyatt at some point. Arthur was then probably recruited to join that department as well.

So far I have not been able to find which department D/CCO refers to.

Lee

 

Possibly Camouflage and Concealment Operations

 

Possibly Camouflage and Concealment Operations

No wonder I couldn't find it!

 

Jed / Lee,

thank you

Sarah

 

Heir hunt reveals fascinating story

Cookson

By JANIS BLOWER
Published on Thursday 14 April 2011 15:45

AN astonishing tale of service in two world wars by a Jarrow doctor and his family was uncovered when genealogy detectives set out to trace the benefactors of an inheritance.
Dr John Hanafy, who lived in Croft Terrace in the town, may still be remembered by older Jarrow folk.
But what they may not know are the fascinating stories of heroism and espionage that the death of his daughter, Joyce Hanafy, revealed when her case was taken up by a team of heir hunters.
I’m grateful to reader Vin Mullen in Jarrow for drawing my attention to this amazing saga,
Joyce Amina Hanafy died, aged 84, in 2006, at a nursing home in London. There was no known family – but there was a substantial inheritance in the shape of a property worth £1m.
Every week, the Government publishes lists of unclaimed estates. When Joyce’s turned out to be among them, her case was taken-up by Fraser & Fraser, one of the oldest heir-hunting firms in the country.
They discovered that Joyce had been born in Jarrow in 1922, the daughter of an Egyptian-born doctor, Mohammad Zaky Hanafy, and his wife Agnes May (nee South). They already had a son, John Theodore, whose own story would prove equally as compelling.
Dr Hanafy would later become known as John Hanafy. He qualified as a doctor, in England, in 1914 – just in time to be confronted by the horrors of the First World War, many of whose casualties he ended-up treating at King George Military Hospital in London. He was subsequently awarded the OBE for his services,
Dr Hanafy’s wife, Agnes, died in 1936, and he subsequently married her sister, Florence. Joyce herself would eventually become a reclusive, rather eccentric figure at the end, despite having led what appeared to have been rather a glamorous life in the 1960s, working in Soho nightclubs.
But most fascinating of all was that, originally, she had trained as a teacher at Durham University where, during the Second World War, she was approached to become a spy for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
This was the organisation that trained people for resistance work behind enemy lines, although the SOE’s file on Joyce shows that her recommendation didn’t ultimately go ahead. Eventually, heirs of Joyce, descended from Dr Hanafy’s sister, were traced to Cairo.



Heir hunt reveals fascinating story - Cookson Country - Shields Gazette

 

Man who stashed war weapons in Wimbledon Southside House was WWII spy Malcolm Munthe

10:35am Thursday 21st April 2011

• By Craig Burnett »

A war hero’s secret weapon stash sparked a bomb scare in Wimbledon Village last Friday.
It was discovered in a hidden room at Southside House – the former home of Major Malcolm Munthe, who worked behind Nazi lines in occupied Europe as a special forces soldier.
Excavations following a fire at the house in November uncovered the secret basement, accessed by moving the hearthstone in a dining room fireplace to reveal wooden steps.
Southside House curator Richard Surman, who is overseeing the work, said: “We’ve had an archaeologist in who’s found extraordinary things we were not aware of.”
He said the chairman of the family trust that owns the house had opened a trunk in the recently discovered room to find guns and ammunition including a Colt 45 istol, Sten submachine gun and magazines for an M1 carbine rifle.
Police were called and workmen and residents evacuated from the building and nearby homes on Friday, April 15.
Officers cordoned off the area at about 1pm, but re-opened it at about 2.30pm after the weapons were removed.
Mr Surman said he hoped the items could be lent to a museum in Scotland that is preparing an exhibition about Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a spy and sabotage unit of which Major Munthe was an early member.
Mr Surman described him as “a modest, but very great war hero”.
The exhibition at the museum of the Gordon Highlanders in Aberdeen – Major Munthe’s first regiment – already has an engraved sword presented to him by Italian philosopher Benedetto Crocce, who was rescued from Nazi forces in one of the most daring raids.
The major’s other wartime-exploits included blowing up a munitions train just miles from his family’s ancestral home in Sweden.
He was eventually put in charge of SOE operations in southern Italy – where he dressed as an elderly, overweight lady to smuggle a radio transmitter past Nazi lines and co-ordinate resistance efforts in the occupied zone.
After the war, Major Munthe remained in the army teaching behind-the-lines warfare.
He unsuccessfully attempted to enter politics with the Conservative Party, and died in 1995.
Southside House was badly damaged in November when fire broke out during a candle-lit violin concert at the Woodhayes Road building, which is thought to have been built in the 17th century.
About £15m of art – including paintings by Sir John Reynolds – had to be carried from the building by firefighters.
It is expected to re-open to the public on September 1.



Man who stashed war weapons in Wimbledon Southside House was WWII spy Malcolm Munthe (From Your Local Guardian)

 

This is fairly interesting as several other fairly SOE members have had concealed weapons caches discovered in their homes down the years, and after they have passed away - it may be that they could have been involved in a post war Auxiliary Units type organization or that SOE was making its own preparations for WWIII - I know various items were cached at the end of WWII before they merged into SIS

 

Britain 'masterminded French resistance'

France is only belatedly accepting the extent to which Britain masterminded its wartime resistance operations, according to one of Winston Churchill's last remaining French secret agents.


Maloubier, left, pictured during the war, lead a team of agents that sabotaged numerous targets Photo: AFP







By Henry Samuel, Paris 5:11PM BST 05 May 2011

Captain Robert (Bob) Maloubier was an agent of the French section of the Special Operations Executive Section, or SOE. Churchill's "secret army" was created to "set Europe ablaze" by encouraging and facilitating espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines during the Second World War.

Mr Maloubier, then only 20, took part in a string of daring missions in occupied France as a weapons trainer and demolitions expert, helping blow up a power station, a steel plant, and a submarine tender as well as preparing the ground for D-Day.

He gives his first full-blown account of his wartime operations in "Winston Churchill's Secret Agent", released in France today.

"The French are a bit jingoistic; they think they freed themselves all alone. One always hears about the French resistance," Mr Maloubier, 88, told the Daily Telegraph. "The influence of the SOE, experts who came over to train the French, has had very little coverage in France.

"We were very few in number after the war, how could we compete with political post-war resistance movements? We didn't have our place."



On Friday Mr Maloubier, one of three remaining French SOE members, will commemorate alongside the Princess Royal the 70th anniversary of the air drop of the first SOE agent at Valencay, central France, and the 104 agents who died in the line of duty.
Between Georges Bégué's first drop, in May 1941, and August 1944, more than four hundred F Section agents were sent into occupied France.
After escaping France aged 17 for Tunisia then Algiers, Mr Maloubier joined the SOE's Special Detachment and spent six months in Britain learning how the arts of sabotage, killing and avoiding capture.
In one chapter, he provides an account of his narrow escape from German field gendarmes in Rouen on 20 December 1943.
On his way to pick up equipment and stores from a night parachute drop on a motorbike, he was stopped by German police. His companion, a forger, ran off, but "Bob" was ordered to remount his cycle with a German sitting behind him pressing a revolver into his neck.
In the final straight before the police station, he managed to throw off his German passenger, hurl the bike at him and run. As he fled, the Germans shot him through the lung but he managed to cross a field and dive into a frozen ditch to put the dogs off his scent.
"I said to myself, you're dead. Nobody gets shot through the intestines and lung and survives". However, in agonising pain, he managed to walk several miles back to his Rouen home and up six flights of stairs.
After clandestine surgery, he was flown back to England weeks later by an SOE "moonlight squadron" bomber, and was back in France by June.
After the war, Mr Maloubier's life of action continued when he joined the fledgling French special services. He went on to found the French equivalent of the US Navy Seals, and designed the legendary Fifty Fathoms diving watch worn by Jacques Cousteau.
France has in recent years been reassessing the role of its citizens during the war, amid claims post-war historians exaggerated the number of French who joined the resistance.



Britain 'masterminded French resistance' - Telegraph

 

Attached is a flyer for a talk by Shrabani Basu author of Spy Princess at Beaulieu on 27th May 2011 at 7pm cost £6 proceeds to Noor Memorial Fund