Odette Marie Léonie Céline Hallowes, GC, MBE (née Brailly; 28 April 1912 – 13 March 1995), also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Sansom, code named Lise, was a French-born British agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France during the Second World War. She was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross by the United Kingdom and was also awarded the Légion d'honneur by France.
Early Life
Odette Marie Léonie Céline Brailly was born on 28 April 1912 in Amiens, France, to Emma Rose Marie Yvonne (née Quennehen) and Florentin Désiré Eugène "Gaston" Brailly, a bank manager. Her father was killed at Verdun shortly before the Armistice in 1918 and was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and Médaille militaire for heroism. As a child, Odette contracted serious illnesses that blinded her for three and a half years, as well as polio, which left her bedridden for months. She had a convent education.
She met Englishman Roy Patrick Sansom in Boulogne and married him on 27 October 1931, moving with him to Britain. The couple had three daughters: Françoise Edith (b. 1932), Lily Marie (b. 1934), and Marianne Odette (b. 1936).
Second World War Service
Recruitment by SOE
In spring 1942, the Admiralty appealed for postcards or family photographs taken on the French coastline. Hearing the broadcast, Sansom wrote that she had photographs taken around Boulogne, but mistakenly sent her letter to the War Office instead of the Admiralty. This brought her to the attention of Colonel Maurice Buckmaster's Special Operations Executive (SOE). She was enrolled in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry as cover and left her three daughters in a convent school to be trained for clandestine work in occupied France.
Service in France
Sansom landed on a beach near Cassis on the night of 3/4 November 1942 and made contact with Captain Peter Churchill, who headed the Spindle network based in Cannes. Her code name was "Lise." She initially posed as "Madame Odette Metayer" and worked as a courier, finding food and lodging for other agents and tending to supply drops.
In January 1943, feeling vulnerable to German capture, the Spindle team moved north to the Italian-occupied Annecy area in the French Alps. Churchill and Sansom took up residence at the Hotel de la Poste in Saint-Jorioz.
Capture
On 16 April 1943, Sansom and Churchill were arrested by Abwehr spy-catcher Hugo Bleicher, who had infiltrated their network by posing as an anti-Nazi German colonel named "Henri." Sansom had been warned by London that "Henri" was highly dangerous, but Bleicher returned with Italian soldiers before she and Churchill could escape.
Imprisonment and Torture
At Fresnes prison near Paris, Sansom was interrogated fourteen times by the Gestapo. She was tortured — her back was scorched with a red-hot poker and all of her toenails were pulled out. She refused to disclose the whereabouts of other agents and maintained a fabricated cover story that Churchill was the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and that he knew nothing of her activities. This was calculated to keep them alive as potential bargaining tools.
In June 1943, she was condemned to death on two counts, to which she replied: "Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed, because I can only die once."
Ravensbrück Concentration Camp
Sansom was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was kept in a punishment block cell on a starvation diet. After the Allied landings in southern France in August 1944, all food was withdrawn for a week, all light was removed from her cell, and the heat was turned up. Despite a camp doctor's report that she would not survive, she was found unconscious but endured. Her conditions improved slightly in December 1944 when she was moved to a ground-floor cell near the crematorium.
As the Allies approached Ravensbrück, camp commandant Fritz Suhren forced Sansom into his car and drove to surrender to the advancing Americans, hoping her supposed connections to the Prime Minister might allow him to negotiate his way out of execution. Sansom removed Suhren's pistol, which is now held in the Imperial War Museum.
Post-War Life
Sansom testified against prison guards at the 1946 Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials, which resulted in Suhren's execution in 1950.
Her marriage to Roy Sansom was dissolved in 1946, and she married Peter Churchill in 1947. They divorced in 1955. In 1956, she married Geoffrey Hallowes, a former SOE officer.
In 1955, she co-founded the annual Women of the Year Lunch with Tony Lothian and Lady Georgina Coleridge.
She died on 13 March 1995 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, aged 82.
Awards and Honours
- George Cross (gazetted 20 August 1946) — the first woman to receive it while alive; all other female awards to date have been posthumous.
- Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)
- Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (France)
- 1939–45 Star, Defence Medal, War Medal 1939–45, Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal, Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal
Legacy
- Her wartime record was the subject of the 1950 film Odette, starring Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard.
- She served as a technical advisor on the film Carve Her Name with Pride about fellow SOE agent Violette Szabo.
- On 23 February 2012, the Royal Mail released a postage stamp featuring Hallowes as part of its "Britons of Distinction" series.
- On 6 March 2020, Great Western Railway named a Class 800 train after her.
- A Blue Plaque was unveiled in her memory in May 2025 by English Heritage at 6 Lawrence Road, South Ealing, London.
