Noreen Riols

Noreen Riols – wow

Noreen Riols is a hell of a lady. First of all, she is 87, and she spoke with great elegance, grace and clarity for over ten minutes with no notes.

Secondly, this woman used to train spies during the Second World War.

The stories that she told were absolutely incredible. She was originally going to join the Wrens (the Navy) because they had nice hats, but because she was able to speak in four languages to an interviewer (which she mentioned as if it were nothing), she was recruited to the SOE.

She never told anyone her story until 2000, and her own mother never knew that she had worked there.

I can’t sum her story up like I can the others, because she worked there for four years. And because it involves so many people, and was so emotional and intense, I don’t want to pretend that I have done it justice. I will just bring up three stories that touched me.



1. One of the first things that she did was to work in Baker Street on sabotage operations. One evening she was speaking to a man who was about to go out to work in France, and he was a radio operator: the most dangerous job of all. Those men’s life expectancy was four weeks. This man and her were good friends (“nothing more than that – he was so old: over thirty!”), and near the end of the night he pulled out a velvet box and gave it to her.

Inside was a little necklace. As you can imagine, Riols tried to give it back; she felt bad about taking something so valuable from someone that she didn’t know very well.

But the man who gave it to her was a Jew. And he said to her, “my wife is dead, my children is dead: my whole family is dead. If I don’t give it to you, who shall I give it to? I want someone to be able to look at it. I want to know that someone is thinking about me back home.”

And he never came back.



2. After this, she was moved down to the New Forest, where she spent the majority of the War. Her job there, along with three other women, was to ‘work with’ the men at the final stage of training, who were going to the “spy school” in a place called Buley (I don’t know how to spell it). By ‘work with’, I mean that they would track them down in the local towns (Bournemouth or Southampton) and try to get them to break their cover. Most of them, she said, succeeded. One told her that he was a toothpaste salesman (which she pooh-poohed, because no one used toothpaste in the War – but it was enough).

She recalled one Dane who was extremely good looking and with whom she was having tea in a hotel in Bournemouth. In front of us, she sighed, and then she told us that this man broke his cover and told her who he was. And weeks later, back in London, he and their joint boss (whom she nicknamed Willibanks) were sitting in a room, and WB called her in. And as soon as the Dane saw her, his face clouded over with shock, then fear, then anger, and he stood up, spat at her, and said, “you bitch!”



3. Nearer the end of the war, Riols met a man with whom she fell in love, and who fell in love with her. Their romance was like the clicking of two parts together, and within three months they were thinking about marriage. He was an excellent saboteur, and had been on a number of dangerous missions. He was the top spy of the department, and he was being sent on one final mission.

Riols described their last meeting before he went off. Because they weren’t married and didn’t live together, their parting consisted of lunch together in a restaurant, and then she walked him to the bus stop. They didn’t even say goodbye properly, because of course, there were people around. But as she walked into the office, she turned around, and she saw that he was standing there looking straight at her – as if he was trying to fix the image of her in his mind; something to cling onto while he was away.

But he never came back.



At the end of her talk, one or two people clapped, but she quickly interjected, “Oh no! Please, don’t applaud me! Don’t clap for me – clap for those who… who didn’t come back.”

She received a standing ovation.