Reviewed as part of the Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival 2025
Your reviewer has to admit that she arrived at this talk knowing nothing about the subject except that it was something to do with spies in World War Two. She left both entertained and well informed. The SOE (Special Operations Executive) was a British organisation formed in 1940 with the goal of helping to bring down the Nazis, using sabotage and subversion, aiding local resistance groups – or in the words of speaker Dr Kate Vigurs “to set Europe ablaze”.
In her book Mission Europe: The Ordinary Women Who Did Extraordinary Things, Dr Vigurs tells the stories of some of the 39 female agents of the SOE. The talk highlights four of these women. Edith Bonnesen, a Danish woman who started as a contributor of underground resistance magazine De Frik Danske and moved into wireless training, getting captured and taken to Gestapo HQ Shell House in Copenhagen, which she escaped by walking out the door as drunken soldiers celebrated her arrest. Olga Jackson, a Belgian woman who fed demoralising messages to German officers via their mistresses before requisitioning an MG and disappearing in the South of France. Trix Tereindt, a Dutch air stewardess who survived concentration camps Ravensbrüch and Mauthausen. And Hannah Szenes, a Budapest born Jew executed by Hungarian Fascists aged just 23.
The talk is well researched with Dr Vigurs regularly referencing a PowerPoint of photographs and scans of SOE files displayed behind her. She has an easy way of presenting her materials, throwing in asides and keeping her audience engaged through a whistle stop series of vignettes. She is unflinchingly feminist, and even while acknowledging the men in the organisation, clearly just wants to see these women equally celebrated for their bravery and contribution to the war effort. Dr Vigurs is both a passionate and compassionate speaker, who talks to her audience as if they are old friends (as one of them somewhat is, being her old history teacher). She tells these four women’s stories as if gossiping over cream tea at Harrogate institution Bettys Tea Room, making what could be a dense and upsetting topic exciting and accessible. These are women previously lost to history, whose stories deserve to be told. As such, it seems only fitting to end this review as Dr Vigurs ended her talk, with a quote from a poem by Hannah Szenes herself, presciently left to be read in the event if her death:
“Blessed is the match consumed in the kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.”
Reviewed on Saturday 18 October 2025
