When Churchill set up the Special Operations Executive (SOE) after the fall of France in 1940, he told its political head, Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare, “Now go and set Europe ablaze.” He had in mind the sabotage and subversion its agents in occupied Europe would wreak, but SOE could not function without speedy and secure communications with those in the field. Anne Maynard, as she was known before marriage, was one of SOE’s speediest (and at 19 one of the youngest) wireless telegraphists, and is believed to have been the first to hear the jubilant messages from the French Resistance on D-Day.
Anne Veronica Theresa Ponsonby was born in Peshawar, India (now Pakistan), in 1924, the youngest of three daughters of Brigadier Francis Herbert Maynard CB, DSO, MC, an officer in the Indian Army, and Ethel (née Bates). Anne had little education until at the age of 12 she was sent to board at New Hall, a convent school in Essex. She did not see her parents again for two years, until they returned to England on her father’s retirement in 1938.
When war broke out the following year, her father tried to rejoin the army, but at 58 was deemed too old. The RAF, less hidebound then than the army, offered him an administrative job at Cranwell (the RAF’s Sandhurst) as an acting pilot officer.
Ponsonby left school the same year to live with her parents at Cranwell. A retired teacher helped her pass the school certificate and she was looking for work when a friend told her she was joining the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Officially, the FANY, whose origins in the Boer War were solely medical, had been renamed the Women’s Transport Service, and was an auxiliary organisation, uniformed but civilian, and her friend expected to train as a driver-mechanic. However, along with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the FANY was a fertile recruiting ground (and cover) for SOE, both for agents in the field and telegraphists.
Ponsonby applied too, and after passing her interview arrived at what she called in her privately printed memoir a “large gloomy house” near Banbury. The next day, having signed the Official Secrets Act, she and her fellow recruits were told about SOE, and that they had been selected for training as Morse operators and coders.
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They practised eight hours a day for three months. Being musical Ponsonby picked up the rhythm quickly, and on passing out of training and posting to SOE’s wireless station at Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire she could send and receive at 30 words a minute, a “word” being a sequence of five Morse letters. The need for speed had become increasingly important because the Germans in France had perfected direction-finding through triangulation, using two fixed-point interceptors and a third mobile. Fifteen minutes was on average all it needed to fix the transmitting point on a map. An agent therefore had to be able to send messages as fast as possible without Grendon Underwood asking for repeats. Any lapse of concentration or faltering by the receiving telegraphists might be a matter of life or death.
Messages to and from agents were always encoded and passed between Grendon Underwood and SOE headquarters in Baker Street, London, by teleprinter. On D-Day, however, June 6, 1944, Ponsonby was astonished to receive Morse in clear (not encoded): “Vive la France, Vive l’Angleterre, Vive les Allies, repeated over and over again.” She called to her section officer, who confirmed it was the start of the invasion. “We celebrated with warm beer and Spam sandwiches,” she recalled.
After the war she returned to India to see her sisters, who had both married and had children, and for a while worked for the viceroy during preparations for independence. Returning to England after partition, she joined the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and in 1948 was posted to Egypt, where she met Myles Ponsonby, a former Green Jacket who had just joined the Foreign Office. They married in 1950 and as a diplomat’s wife she lived in Cyprus, Beirut, Indonesia, Nairobi and Rome, and finally, as ambassador’s wife, Ulan Bator in Mongolia. Myles died in 1999. She is survived by two of their three children (the son, Air Vice-Marshal John Ponsonby having died last year); Belinda, a former diplomat’s wife, and Emma, who with her husband Bryn Parry (obituary April 12, 2023) founded Help for Heroes.
In 2019 Ponsonby received the Légion d’honneur. Presenting the medal on behalf of the French government, the commandant of the FANY, Philippa Lorimer, said: “I am sure at the time it did not seem that the work you were doing was vital to the liberation of France or the successful outcome of the war, but history tells us otherwise.”
Anne Ponsonby, SOE coder and telegraphist, was born on December 23, 1924. She died on October 3, 2023, aged 98