For most of her life, Pippa Latour harboured an astonishing secret. She told no one – not even her husband or four children when they became adults – of her incredible feats, working behind enemy lines in France during World War II and being the last surviving female Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent from that war.
It was a part of her life that she intentionally never revealed, until TV personality and historical “storyteller” Jude Dobson struck up a friendship with the straight-talking centenarian. With trust established, Pippa chose Jude to write her memoir.
Week after week, the pair would spend a couple of hours at Pippa’s West Auckland home. They would nibble on cheese scones and go over Pippa’s needle-sharp recollections.
Tells Jude, “Initially, I said, ‘When would it suit you for me to come and do these chats?’ And she replied, ‘Well, I’m quite busy during the week, so probably just the weekends.’ So I slotted in between when she fed her doves at 11am and 6pm every day.
“She’d always set me homework too,” laughs Jude. “I’d go away and my head would be spinning. I would be thinking, ‘How on earth will I find that out?’ But I always did.
“Some tasks that she set for me were, however, impossible, like getting ‘poppycock’ about her removed from the internet.”
Then there were their impromptu photos sessions.
“We did selfies every time and she got good at them. She’d say, ‘No, you’re like a giant Jude, you’ve got to move back!’ Or I’d show her our photo and she’d say, ‘That’s no good! You’ve got to get nearer to me.’ She was quite hilarious and became like a grandmother to me.”
Born in South Africa to a French father, Pippa – who died last October aged 102 – initially had to be convinced to share her remarkable untold story. And she certainly didn’t want to be propelled into the spotlight.
“Our first recorded conversation was quite classic,” remembers Jude, 57. “She warned, ‘There’s something you should know before we start. The doctor’s told me I have an aneurysm sitting dormant, so I could live on or have a stroke. Or I could drop dead before I finish this sentence. So we just need to get onto this. But I’m telling you, I don’t want to be here when my memoir comes out.’”
Pippa explained that without the advent of the internet – something she couldn’t have foreseen in 1945 – her wish for secrecy would likely have remained intact.
“I’d signed an oath not to disclose anything about my war service with SOE,” she told Jude. “That pledge was something I knew I must honour and that meant not telling a living soul – not even my family.”
But in her eighties, her adult sons found out about her clandestine life online and couldn’t believe their mother’s extraordinary secret past.
“Pippa told me the reason she decided to write the book was because she wanted to get her feelings out,” says Jude. “She was proud of being a woman in what was very much a man’s world. Of the 430 SOE agents in France, only 39 were women and 14 of their group never returned.”
In June 1940, the SOE was established by England’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill to wage a secret war using an underground army in enemy-occupied Europe. Its purpose was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe.
In 1941, aged 20, Pippa became a balloon operator in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in England. But the British SOE chose her to become a covert agent because of her fluent French. She went through vigorous mental and physical training before parachuting into a field in Nazi-occupied Normandy in 1944.
“I was not a James Bond-style spy,” she told Jude. “I was a secret agent whose job it was to blend into the background and cause quiet chaos.”
Jude adds, “Some of the explosives were disguised in things like cigarettes and cow dung. Knives and guns could be concealed up your sleeve, and, for the ladies, daggers disguised as hat pins.”
Small in stature but with a formidable spirit, Pippa was lauded for her fluency with languages and her coding abilities. She put these attributes to use when posing as a poor teenage soap-seller, often selling her wares to German soldiers and sending back information via code to England.
Incredibly courageous, Pippa knew she could be instantly shot if her cover was blown.
She used her knitting paraphernalia to conceal secret codes on a piece of silk that she threaded through a shoelace and wore as a hair tie.
Tells Jude, “I asked her, ‘How often would you get to one of those safe houses?’ She said, ‘Never.’ It was too dangerous for the people who were there and Pippa didn’t want to expose them if the Gestapo spotted her.
“So she bicycled around the region, sleeping rough and foraging for turnips to eat.”
During her time in Normandy, Pippa sent 135 secret messages, conveying crucial information on German troop positions in the lead-up to D-Day. The young spy continued her mission until the liberation of Paris in August 1944.
Following the war, she married Australian engineer Patrick Doyle, eventually settling in Auckland and raising their four children.
Throughout Jude and Pippa’s time together writing The Last Secret Agent, Jude was sensitive to the fact that recalling events of the war might trigger Pippa’s post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Like many others, she hadn’t come through the war unscathed,” tells Jude. “Flashbacks started soon after she returned to England and stayed with her for life.
“She told me anything could set her off – a smell, a baby crying… Sometimes flashbacks would come in her sleep and she’d wake up in a sweat.
“When Pippa told me she was raped, I asked, ‘Do you want to talk about that in the book?’ And she said ‘Yes. But maybe we can’t because I don’t know the name of the man who did it. It’s in a file somewhere, but a lot of the files are burnt.’
“She thought that if we didn’t have a name, readers might not believe her, which was sad.”
Last year, Jude travelled to France and England to discover more about Pippa’s past.
Using her “fifth form French”, the former broadcaster visited the library in the village Pippa had her original safe house. While there, she happened to meet Daniel, a man who used to be the mayor in the neighbouring village, where Pippa’s “pseudo grandparents” lived.
“He was in tears – it was so serendipitous,” tells Jude. “The librarian showed me a 1970s book written by the leader of the local resistance. It had Pippa’s name in it. The book turned out to be a fantastic resource and I couldn’t have written Pippa’s memoir had I not gone to that village.
“Pippa was so excited when I showed her videos of what had been her base at RAF Tempsford. It took her back there in an instant.”
Jude says she last saw Pippa in hospital in September last year. It was just before she and her husband Graeme left for France to see the Rugby World Cup. Pippa died on October 7.
“Her good friend Lyn rang me moments after she passed. I asked her to lean down and whisper goodbye from me and thank her for the time we spent together. She was a very private woman and had a private funeral.
“I formed a close bond with Pippa and she left such a lasting impression on me,” says Jude tearfully. “I learned from her resilience, bravery and doing something that’s beyond yourself. What she did was for a greater good.
“I feel incredibly grateful for our friendship on this journey together and to have been able to be her voice. I loved talking to her. She was very straight-up, but so am I, so we were quite a good little pair.
“And Pippa got her wish – she is not here to see her memoir go to print.”
Jude has been researching, producing and directing award-winning World War I and II content for the past six years.
As she chats to the Weekly, the ex-columnist and a video editor are putting the finishing touches on her new documentary, All Blacks at War. The doco will screen at midday on TVNZ 1 this Anzac Day and stream on rnz.co.nz.
“Thirteen former All Blacks died in World War I,” says Jude. “So I wanted to bring their stories to life through military historian Dr Chris Pugsley and former All Black Andrew Mehrtens, who lives in Paris.
“I gave Andrew a call and said, ‘Fancy a trot around the graves?’ And he said he’d love to. In the end, a couple of kind philanthropists funded it. They wanted Kiwis to know about our war history and to know we’ve got our new museum in Le Quesnoy, France.
“I also wanted to connect those 13 All Blacks back to their schools here. For example, Frank Wilson went to Auckland Grammar and Dave Gallaher went to Katikati Primary School.”
The mum-of three’s Anzac legacy projects are almost completed. Jude is now looking forward to heading to America and spending time with her older two children. Ella, 28, and Jack, 25, live together in New York.
Youngest daughter Rosie, 20, is still at home while she studies for a conjoint Bachelor of Global Studies and Bachelor of Science at the University of Auckland.
“I’m also going to [music festival] Coachella, which a California-based friend bought me a ticket for as a birthday present,” tells Jude. “Rosie asked, ‘What are you going to wear, Mum?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea!’ So that’s my next project. Or maybe I am Rosie’s project!”
