School for sabotage: How arson, bridge-blowing and silent killing was on the curriculum at Churchill's school for secret agents

By Barbara Davies
Last updated at 12:14 AM on 8th May 2010

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As a pretty young teenager in war-torn London, it was the prospect of wearing a smart hat that first attracted Noreen Riols to the idea of joining the Wrens.

'It was either the armed forces or working in a munitions factory,' she says. 'And I thought I'd look really smart in one of those lovely hats.'

It was 1941, and 17-year-old Noreen had no idea that her fluent French - she'd been schooled at the Lycee in London - meant she had already been earmarked for a task so secret she could not even tell her mother about it.
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Wartime preparations: Beaulieu was a remote country estate in Hampshire where Churchill's most elite secret agents were being put through their final paces

Hastily asked to sign the Official Secrets Act, she was dispatched to a remote country estate in Hampshire where Churchill's most elite secret agents were being put through their final paces.

Today, Beaulieu is the home of the Montagu family and a major tourist attraction in the depths of the New Forest in Hampshire. But 70 years ago it was the last point of call for secret agents being sent into occupied territory, and at the centre of some of the most extraordinary wartime preparations made to beat Hitler.

Away from prying eyes, trainee agents were taught the arts of silent killing, housebreaking, bridge-blowing, arson, forgery, disguise and sabotage, as well as how to resist interrogation and torture.

'Security was very, very tight. It was like being in a very enclosed family,' says Noreen, now 84 and living outside Paris.

'I knew I had to keep my mouth shut and not ask questions. My mother thought I was working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.'

In all, about 3,000 Special Operations Executive spies passed through Beaulieu's gates. Nearly half never returned, but those who did often owed their lives to their training.

'Beaulieu was no holiday camp,' says Noreen. 'The instructors would dress as Gestapo officers and hammer on the doors in the middle of the night, and if agents answered in English by mistake, they'd be shoved in a room and have lights shone in their faces.'
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Noreen Riols

Former agents: Bon Maloubier and Noreen Riols

A gamekeeper from the Queen's estate in Sandringham taught students how to move across a field in moonlight without being seen. A former safe-blower taught them how to pick locks. Two former Shanghai policemen showed them how to kill silently. Even the Soviet double agent Kim Philby was there, sharing the arts of 'black propaganda' - passing false information to the enemy.

A regular visitor to Beaulieu was Vera Atkins, a Sorbonne-educated intelligence officer, who joined the French section of SOE in February 1941 and became one of its most senior members.

'She helped agents put together their cover stories before they went to France, rehearsing them so that if they were arrested, their story came out pat,' says Elspeth Forbes Robertson, a historian and SOE expert.

'She passed on all the most minute details: you didn't take a bicycle on a train because in France, you had to book in advance and give an address. You didn't ask for a café au lait because there was no milk.'

Atkins was trying to give the agents the best possible start, and so too, in her own way, was Noreen, although the role she played as a decoy at Beaulieu was rather less straightforward. Agents coming to the end of their training would be taken for dinner at a hotel in Bournemouth by one of their officers.

'A gamekeeper from the Queen's estate in Sandringham taught students how to move across a field in moonlight without being seen. A former safe-blower taught them how to pick locks. Two former Shanghai policemen showed them how to kill silently'

The usual scenario was that Noreen would spontaneously appear and after being greeted like a long-lost friend by the officer, would be invited to join their table. The officer would then be called away by a phone call, promising to return but never doing so. 'Then it was up to me,' says Noreen. 'The hotel had a balcony overlooking the sea, and if I could get the man out there on a moonlit night that always helped.'

In most cases, she insists, the agents didn't talk. 'But if they were very young and far from their country and their families, they might,' she says. If they did, Noreen had to report it.

Retired Flight Lt Bob Large, a former Spitfire fighter pilot, volunteered to fly the agents into and out of France. Today, aged 88 and a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Legion D'Honneur, he clearly recalls his 'little trips'.

'I would always have to land in a field, somewhere not surrounded by trees so I could make the approach. The field would be lit up by three lights in an L-shape by an agent on the ground. And you always kept the engine running.'

Those who returned safely were whisked to London to be debriefed. Noreen Riols witnessed some of these sessions.

'Some of them came back with their nerves shattered,' she says. 'They'd be smoking non-stop, their hands would be trembling. Others, who might have had much worse experiences, would be as cool as a cucumber. It made me realise you can never judge what people's reactions are going to be. No one knows what they can endure until it happens to them.'

Churchill's Spy School is on the Histor y Channel on 17 May at 9pm

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