Neighbors didn’t know much about the lady they called “Eileen the Cat Woman,” for her penchant for taking in strays. They didn’t know of any family or friends. She kept mostly to herself.

So authorities began to go through her belongings to try to figure out who she was.

And among those belongings, they found a cache of French documents and currency, British military citations for bravery, and a medal signifying her as a  Member of the Order of the British Empire.

As it turned out, the elderly cat lady was Eileen Nearne, a legendary World War II secret agent known as “Agent Rose.”

The story of her death had sparked a minor media spectacle in England. Nearne rendered the U.K. an important service in one of its darkest hours and paid a steep personal price. Yet she died alone, with seemingly no family or friends to claim her body, with no money for a proper funeral. That a war hero might be headed for a common grave paid out of a meager city council fund seemed to strike at heart of something lacking in modern society.

AGENT ROSE

Eileen “Didi” Nearne and her older sister Jacqueline were an espionage department’s dream: British-born but raised in France, fully loyal to the King but fluent in the language and culture of the French. They arrived in London in 1941 after escaping the Nazi occupation by fleeing through Portugal.  

Didi and Jacqueline immediately volunteered with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and  were assigned to the “F Section,” reserved for operatives sent into France. After months of training, Jacqueline was sent in 1943. Eileen was ordered to follow in March 1944, parachuting into Occupied territory in March 1944, just a couple weeks short of her 23 birthday.

Over the next 4 1/2 months, under the cover of a simple Parisian clerk named “Mademoiselle Rose du Tort,” Eileen helped set up the communication network for the D-Day invasion in June and sent more than 150 coded messages back to England. "She primarily arranged drops of arms from London to resistors in eastern Paris and around Lille  where they made the French rail network practically unusable by the Germans during the fighting in Normandy," writes SOE scholar Michael Foot.     

Her life in Paris was lonely, but the work was exhilarating. “When I put my hand on the signal keys, there came a feeling of patriotism. I was pleased that I was doing something,” she said in one of her few interviews. “It was perhaps a little emotional.”

She was arrested by the Gestapo on July 25, 1944 as she was trying to send an urgent message across the Channel. She rushed to burn the message and hide the transmitter as they began to break in her room, leaving her no time to escape. Moments later, she was on her way to the SS headquarters on the Rue des Saussaies.

Eileen was beaten and harangued. She was taken to a basement room and plunged repeatedly into a tub of cold water until she almost passed out. She did not break cover. She half-convinced her torturers that she was just an innocent young girl duped into sending secret messages by a member of the Resistance. But they were not convinced enough to release her. In late summer, she was put on a convoy train for the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbruck.

The SOE F Section sent 39 female operatives into France during the war. At least half were eventually captured, and most were sent to to camps at Dachau, at Bergan-Belsen, at Buchenwald,at Ravensbruck, and other, smaller camps. Aside from the routine humiliations, filth and starvation of camp life, many of them endured further torture and sexual assault by guards. Thirteen died in captivity, either of sickness or execution.

Like other SOE agents, Eileen resisted where she could, refusing to work in the camp factory until threatened with summary execution. Asked later how she survived the ordeal, she responded: “The will to live. Will power. That's the most important. You should not let yourself go. It seemed that the end would never come, but I have always believed in destiny and I had a hope. If you are a person who is drowning, you put all your efforts into trying to swim.

In December 1944, she was shipped off to another work camp near the city of Leipzig. She and two French girls manged to escape their guards, slipping into the woods as they were marched through the night. She made her way into Leipzig and threw herself on the mercy of a local priest, who hid her in the church’s belfry until the German surrender in April 1945. In the confusion, she was held and interrogated by the Americans for several weeks, on suspicions she might be a German spy.

Returned to England in the early summer of 1945, Eileen spent decades trying to recover from her ordeal. She suffered an complete emotional collapse in the years immediately after her release, spending time in a metal hospital and producing paintings of torture and death.

Over time, she rebuilt her life and worked as a nurse. She cared for her sister for many years before Jacqueline’s death in 1982.

While it was many years before she could be around those who had shared her experiences, later in life she was a regular figure at reunions of the Club de la France Libre in Paris and the SOE Bastille Day dinner. In the 1980s, she joined the Special Forces Club, an organization for surviving SOE members, but resigned in 1992 because they did not permit dogs in their London lounge. In 1993, she joined surviving SOE women in Ravensbruck for the unveiling of a memorial plaque, honoring five of her peers who were put to death by firing squad or the gas chamber in the final weeks of the War.  

“LEST WE FORGET”

Guy Walters, columnist and “junk-history” crusader for the London Telegraph writes that much of the coverage of Nearne’s lonely death has been “rot.”

“Because she ostensibly had no family to mourn her, much play was made of how she was a ‘forgotten’ agent, whose courageous activities were ignored, and how her life was hidden in a shoebox etc etc.”

He argues that her story was well-known among historians, and she figures in several books, both academic and popular, covering the activities of the SOE, all of which “makes the notion that Nearne was forgotten even more ludicrous.”  He recommends that when these stories hit the news, journalists “phone a historian to see if the news really is, er, news.”

He’s right -- to an extent. Nearne and her accomplishments were known among that subset of people who know something about the clandestine services in World War II.

But let’s face it: most of us do not fall into that subset. We’re hearing for the first time, and we’re rightly impressed by her bravery, both in surviving the war and surviving its aftermath. We’re saddened that such a person could end up dying such a lonely death. We believe such a person should be granted a proper send-off.

That’s exactly what has happened.

Veterans’ groups and individuals rushed in to assure she was given a grand funeral. Hundreds turned out to the her requiem mass service yesterday at Church of Our Lady Help of Christians and St Denis in Torquay. Unformed men and VIPs crowded the front pews. British Legion members lowered flags as her coffin, draped with both the British and French standards, was carried into the church. Buglers from both the British Marines and the French army and a fife-and-drum corps played tunes.

Among the mourners was French Consul General Edouard Braine, who said “We are here to show our gratitude to someone to whom we owe the freedom of our country. Without efforts like hers, France would not have been liberated.”

The Revend Jonathan Shaddock, who had known Nearne as a faithful congregant for years, said "Her story of fidelity, humility, faithfulness and suffering mirrored the cross of Christ."

Eileen’s niece, Odilie Nearne, alluded to how jarring it all was. “She never wanted to speak about what she did during the war and she never wanted to be famous. People like her just want to forget and not relive the sufferings. Because of what she had been through she wanted to be left in peace. She did many good deeds like collecting for Animals in Distress and helping people in need. She was a devoted Roman Catholic and her faith saved her when she was tortured. At the same time she was very modest. She was altogether very much loved.”