Anne Ponsonby, SOE wireless operator who went on to join MI6 – obituary

Anne Ponsonby, who has died aged 98, was a wireless operator with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who first heard of the Allied landings in Normandy when one of her secret agents burst into plain language.

She was born Anne Veronica Theresa Maynard in Peshawar, India, on December 23 1924, the youngest of three daughters of Brigadier FH Maynard CB, DSO, MC, of the Indian Army. Aged 12 she was sent to England 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, and she left New Hall with little more education than typing, cooking, first aid and French.

Her father, who as a retired officer had been by then been commissioned into the RAF, paid for a tutor to enable her to pass the school certificate and found four months’ work for her as a clerk at RAF Cranwell. There, she heard of a friend who was joining the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and in August 1943, sponsored by her father and the prioress of Newnham Paddox Convent in Warwickshire she signed up too, hoping to learn to drive.

But by the Second World War the FANY, first formed in 1907 as a horse-riding, nursing auxiliary, had become a recruiting ground and cover for suitable young women as agents in the field and as wireless operators. Within a few weeks, Anne found herself in a large gloomy house near Banbury, where, after signing the Official Secrets Act, she and her fellow recruits were told about the Special Operations Executive.

The SOE, sometimes referred to as the “Stately ’Omes of England”, occupied a number of such houses and used them as training centres, research and development sites, and offices. Over the next two or three months at Station 53b, as Poundon House in Oxfordshire was known, Anne Ponsonby practised for eight hours a day until she could send and receive at 30 words a minute, a word being a block of five coded letters and a space in Morse.

She served much of 1943 to 1945 at STS 53a, Grendon Hall near Aylesbury, where her task was to listen on specific frequencies at scheduled times (known as “skeds”) for wireless Morse-code transmissions from agents in the field. As the agents were frequently in danger and operating under stress in the presence of the enemy, Anne Ponsonby had to receive the coded messages accurately, first time, and not ask for repetitions.

Astonishingly, while she was on watch on June 6 1944, ready for a “sked”, she heard an uncoded transmission (“en clair”): “Vive la France, vive l’Angleterre, vive les Allies,” repeated over and over again. Calling others to listen, they realised that it must be D-Day, the start of the Allied landings in France. They celebrated with warm beer and Spam sandwiches.

She was discharged from the FANY in August 1945 and returned to India to see her sisters, who were married with children, and she worked briefly in the Viceroy’s office. Back in England, she was recruited to MI6 and in 1948 she was posted to Egypt, where she met Myles Ponsonby, a former Green Jacket who had joined the Foreign Office. They married in 1950 and his postings included Cyprus, Beirut, Indonesia, Nairobi, Rome, and as Ambassador in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

In 2015-16 Anne Ponsonby successfully lobbied to correct a long-standing wrong and, with many of her FANY colleagues who had also been denied, was belatedly awarded the 1939-45 war service medal. In 2019 she was also appointed to the Légion d’honneur by the French government.

Anne Ponsonby’s husband, and a son, Air Vice-Marshal John Ponsonby, predeceased her and she is survived by two daughters, Belinda, a diplomat’s wife, and Emma, who with her husband Bryn Parry founded Help for Heroes.

Anne Ponsonby, born December 23 1924, died October 3 2023