Codebreaker Jean Argles shares an encryption-key poem

As soon as Jean Argles, nee Owtram, turned 18 in 1943, she knew exactly what she had to do. It was the height of World War Two and among her birthday cards was a letter from the FANY – the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – asking if she was interested in joining up.

“Was I ever!” Jean exclaims as she remembers her excitement at the invitation. A couple of days later, she travelled to London for an interview. “I’d been told by a friend that I should dress plainly. No make-up and definitely no nail polish. I had to make it clear that I was a serious person.”

The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry was looking for a very particular sort of young woman. Founded in 1907, the FANY was formed to deliver first aid in the battlefield. The very earliest recruits were expected to be excellent horsewomen and trained in cavalry work. During the First World War, they drove ambulances to the front line. As it happened, Jean was an experienced rider but at her interview she was surprised when the officer in charge suddenly asked if she was any good at crosswords instead. “I wondered what on earth was going on,” Jean says. “I thought they were just filling time. I told them that of course I liked crosswords. There wasn’t much else to do in the evening at home in Lancashire. I thought nothing more of it.”

As she describes in the book, Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War, she has written with her sister, Jean passed the selection process and, shortly afterwards, she returned to London to undertake basic training at the FANY headquarters in Wilton Place. There, she quickly learned why her proficiency at crosswords was so important. She was to be trained to be a code and cipher officer, attached to the SOE (Special Operations Executive).

The SOE was formed under Churchill’s instructions to coordinate espionage and reconnaissance operations in Europe and southeast Asia. It was known as Churchill’s Secret Army or The Baker Street Irregulars. It operated out of a plain building on Baker Street and Jean was told she should avoid giving away the SOE’s “top secret” position by getting off the bus a stop earlier or later than she needed. “If anyone asked, I had to say I was working in personnel,” Jean says. “But all the hush-hush business didn’t work. As I was getting off the bus one morning, the conductor shouted, ‘Any more spies?’”

Jean worked in a bare office that had once been a grand drawing room, using just a pencil and a pad to decipher messages coming in from the field via teleprinter. The messages were coded using a “one-time pad” system. The agent in the field had one pad with pages of encryption keys to be used by date. The SOE kept another identical pad to decrypt the messages the agent sent. “Occasionally, an agent would know that he had been compromised and would corrupt the pad’s code to keep it from being unscrambled by the enemy,” Jean explains. “Those messages were known as ‘indecipherables’ and I was rather good at working them out. It was very satisfying indeed to begin to see the words take shape. Far more fun than a crossword.”

But the fact that the one-time pad system could be easily intercepted by the enemy was a serious issue. Famous poems and passages from the bible were also used as encryption keys but the problem was that the passages were often too easily recognisable. It took a former antiquarian bookseller, Leo Marks, to come up with a better means of creating ciphers for the agents in the field.

Marks persuaded the SOE that rather than using well-known verses, they needed their very own poets, who could write entirely original poems to be used instead. In doing so, Marks himself created a poem that has become a classic.

Jean recalls how it happened: “I knew of Leo Marks, of course, since he was the head of my department. He was quite young – in his early twenties – though to 18-year-old me he seemed very old indeed. It was almost Christmas. I was very much looking forward to going back to Lancashire for a few days. I was in the office, chatting to colleagues as I tidied my desk for the night. Suddenly, Marks came in. He seemed to bring the cold air in with him. We wished him a happy Christmas. But he did not respond in kind. Instead, he told us that it wasn’t a happy Christmas. He said, ‘Europe is burning. People are dying out there’ and launched into a great long speech. By the time he left, we were all in tears.”

Jean continues: “Later, we learned that Marks had been on the roof of the building because he had just heard that his sweetheart had been killed in an air crash.”

That night, Marks wrote a poem for Ruth Hambro, the young woman who had tragically lost her life. It was called “The Life That I Have”.

As Jean remembers how it came to be written, her older sister Patricia, who served in the Second World War as a Wren (Women’s Royal Naval Service), recites the poem by heart, beginning with the famous verse: “The life that I have is all that I have/ And the life that I have is yours.”

“The poem is very melancholy,” Jean says. “But it perfectly describes Marks’s undying love.”

As it happened, Marks’s very personal poem became the encryption key used by Violette Szabo, an SOE agent in France. A former shop assistant from Brixton who had become a land girl at the start of the war, Szabo had a French mother and was married to a French soldier, hence her fluency in the language. After her husband was killed, she joined the SOE and was parachuted into France as a field operative and courier. Her first mission was a success but on her second mission she was captured by the Nazis and imprisoned. She died in Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Szabo was posthumously awarded the George Cross. Her story and her beauty captured the imagination of the nation and a film was made about her life, Carve Her Name With Pride, in which her code poem, “The Life That I Have”, was attributed to her husband. The film made the poem famous. “I understand that it’s often used as a reading at weddings these days,” Jean says.

But “The Life That I Have” always takes 95 year old Jean back to that night before Christmas 1943, when she was just 18, and Leo Marks’s speech moved her to tears and fired her determination to do her bit to help bring the Second World War to an end.