Jean Argles, who has died aged 97, served in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Fany) during the second world war, as a code and cipher officer for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). At the age of 18, she was promoted to be shift leader in the SOE headquarters in Baker Street, London. Later, during postings to Egypt and Italy, she deciphered communications from partisan rebels fighting in Greece and Yugoslavia.
It was a family contact who tipped Jean off about a possible role in the Fany, a small, elite uniformed female service established in 1907, which made a name for itself in the first world war and resisted full integration with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the ATS, the female army) in the second.
In 1943, shortly after her 18th birthday, Jean was selected as part of a 2,000-strong band of Fanys recruited to provide “housekeeping” for the SOE’s resistance network behind enemy lines. Equipped with a couple of basic coding methods and paper and pencil, Jean began unravelling the messages that arrived from agents in the field.
In keeping with the SOE leader Colonel Colin Gubbins’s observation that the best coders and signallers were “girls straight from higher education who had not lost the classroom”, Jean quickly discovered she had a knack for identifying and decoding “indecipherables” – rushed messages typed in the field that contained mistakes – and soon became a shift leader. Within months she was selected to serve overseas, an opportunity then unavailable to the vast majority of servicewomen and one that required her mother’s permission (given reluctantly).
Jean was promoted to officer rank, and her first foreign posting was to Cairo, Egypt, where she received and decoded messages from underground agents working with the Greek communists. Then came a transfer in mid-1944 to southern Italy, the most proximate coordination point for Balkan resistance, in particular for Josip Tito’s partisans. Jean was handling messages detailing ammunition and medical supplies, food drops and personnel movements. “There were casualties and they had to be brought out in a hurry. It was often very tense.”
In letters sent to her elder sister, Pat, a wireless interceptor based on the English coast, Jean referred to the impact of another early promotion, which, “as I have only just joined the shift and am the youngest, is a bit of a strain, like being a prefect”, and the excitement of meeting resistance fighters: “A partisan officer saluted me once and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do to them, it was a little overwhelming.” Although she was a talented member of Britain’s undercover SOE operation, Jean was also a teenager just out of school.
Born and brought up in Newland Hall, rural Lancashire, Jean was one of the three children of Dorothy (nee Daniel) and Carey Owtram. Her father worked in the cotton business – his family owned a mill in Bolton – until the outbreak of war, when he served with the 137 Field Regiment Royal Artillery, rising to the rank of colonel. Jean was still a boarder at Wroxall Abbey, a girls’ school in Warwickshire, when her father’s regiment left for the far east in September 1941. Within six months he was taken prisoner, news which increased Jean’s desire to leave school and sign up. Preferring the piano and sport to academic endeavour, she initially wanted to follow Pat into the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens), but the limited roles available led her to try for the Fany.
Throughout her life, Jean remained awestruck at how much she was exposed to at such a young age. Signing the Official Secrets Act, she “felt more important than I had ever felt before”, and getting off the bus one stop before Baker Street HQ was high excitement: “If asked, I was to say I worked in ‘personnel relations and training’.” But accompanying the highs were crashing lows and her frank letters to Pat revealed the strain she was under. Work was stressful, the sudden death of male colleagues gut-wrenching and, as a heavily outnumbered servicewoman, managing unsolicited advances onerous. At the same time, public debate was raging in Britain over the ethics of directing thousands of women overseas to support the allied army in Europe.
Jean was equally mindful of the paucity of choices facing women after the war. “Being a Fany in England after this would be grim [but] to sit in an office or in a bank somewhere would be hell”. On news of her father’s return home from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in late 1945, she briefly went back to Lancashire, but within a year had secured a return to Italy. There she worked as a clerk in the Allied Control Commission, then with displaced refugees in Austria as part of the Central Mediterranean Forces and subsequently Unesco. On her eventual return to Britain she became a social worker in Dumfries and later Lancashire University’s first careers adviser. She married the university librarian Michael Argles in 1968. They both retired from the university in 1980.
I got to know Jean in the last decade of her life when writing Army Girls (2021), about the women who fought in the second world war. Latterly she and Pat became renowned for their close relationship and wartime story-telling, appearing at live events and on television and radio, and publishing their own bestselling book – Codebreaking Sisters. Jean, the more rebellious of the pair, was a wonderful foil for the more serious Pat.
Michael died in 1988, and Jean’s younger brother, Robert, also predeceased her. Jean is survived by Pat, and three stepchildren, Gill, Anthony and Judith.
• Jean Argles, wartime code and cipher officer, born 7 November 1925; died 2 April 2023
