How a musical’s fandom tracked down a WWII secretary who turned the tide of history

Picture the scene. You’re the son of the late Archbishop of York, and constables have discovered you in Hyde Park “violating public decency” with one “Miss Thelma de Lava”. You give a fake name. Sadly this doesn’t work, because just four years ago you were the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, recognised by every copper in London. Bribery fails too, so at trial you run the doomed defence that you were reporting for a book about vice.

Sir Basil Thomson fell from considerable grace when unsurprisingly found guilty in 1926. He had quit Oxford to train as a farmer in Iowa, improbably learnt Fijian to become the colonial prime minister of Tonga, was a barrister and prison governor, before taking over domestic intelligence at the Met’s special branch. He interrogated Mata Hari, and ran counter-espionage operations against Irish and Indian nationalists. Yet his criminal conviction made him a pariah, leading him to start writing detective stories in that genre’s golden age.

Thomson’s novels aren’t remembered for their literary merit: the books benefit from a real policeman’s experience, but the prose is fairly leaden. His lasting legacy comes from famous fans: he inscribed two books to Kathleen Pettigrew, who was secretary to both Thomson’s friend, Sir Hugh “Quex” Sinclair, and Quex’s successor as head of MI6, Stewart Menzies.

Kathleen Pettigrew went on to be the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s “Miss Moneypenny” (thanks are due to whichever editor vetoed “Miss Petty Pettaval”, the character’s name in the first draft of Casino Royale).

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When Fleming was hired by the director of naval intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, in 1939, he likely authored Godfrey’s “Trout Memo” proposing 51 ideas for deceiving Nazi high command into moving troops out of Sicily ahead of an Allied invasion. Number 28 – “A Suggestion (not a very nice one)” – credited a Thomson novel called A Milliner’s Hat Mystery with the idea of planting fake documents on a dead body, which might wash up on enemy shores as though drowned at sea. This is the origin story of Operation Mincemeat.

There was a fictionalised film about this escapade in 1956 under the title The Man Who Never Was, inspired by the book written by Commander Ewen Montagu, who ran the deception. Operation Mincemeat has more recently been popularised through an exceptional book by Ben Macintyre, a sturdy and dignified movie with Colin Firth, and now one of the best pieces of musical theatre you will ever see, on a twice-extended run at the West End’s Fortune Theatre until 4 November.

MI5 really did plant fake invasion plans for Sardinia and Greece on the body of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless man from Aberbargoed, who had died after eating bread laced with rat poison. They dressed him in a Royal Marines uniform, put letters and plans in his briefcase, and added “pocket litter”: a receipt for an engagement ring; letters from his fiancee, father and bank manager; and other paraphernalia which would make the Nazis believe he was “Major William Martin” (known as “Bill” to his dear fiancee “Pam”).

He was floated towards the Spanish coast at Huelva by the submarine HMS Seraph in April 1943. The Nazis believed the documents were real, Hitler moved his troops, and so the Allies were able to launch the successful invasion of Sicily with minimal resistance on 10 July 1943, exactly 80 years ago this week.

Unless you are Stephen Sondheim, musical theatre usually involves a lot of misses before you finally hit. A team of four comedic writers with no prior experience of creating a musical should not usually expect to reach the M25, let alone a West End theatre – but that is exactly what has happened to the SpitLip quartet.

Somehow, this absurd story of immense historical import converts almost naturally into a high-speed farce. Indeed, the pace only makes the pathosof death and loss in war hit harder when the brakes are applied. Operation Mincemeat manages to not only be the funniest and best-executed musical in decades, but also a reliable tearjerker.

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Five brilliant actors play multiple parts each, but two leading characters are based on real-life secretaries at MI5. One of them, a teenager called Jean Leslie, had provided a photo of herself for “Bill” to keep in his breast pocket, to give “Pam” a face. The other, an older woman called Hester Leggett who ran the secretarial unit during WWII, wrote the two letters by “Pam” to her dear fiance that were the masterstroke in MI5’s making of a man: “Darling, why did we go and meet in the middle of a war, such a silly thing for anybody to do.”

We know about Jean Leslie, interviewed by historian Ben Macintyre for his book. But we know very little of Hester. Jean described her as “skinny and embittered” and recalled that her young staff had nicknamed her “The Spin” because she was unmarried. The 2021 movie had Hester played by Penelope Wilton, an actor then in her mid-70s.

In response to a fan, SpitLip confirmed on Twitter that they had been able to find very little on the real-life Hester. Why did we know nothing of a woman who had been so useful in the plan that won WWII? Was it due to the secrecy of MI5? Or a failure to acknowledge the war work of female secretaries?

Fandom in musical theatre can often be cultish, and Operation Mincemeat fans are at the distant end of the spectrum. They have a bingo card for understudy combinations (all have seen the show many times). They have a ludicrous ongoing debate about whether a lung featured in the show is a left lung or a right lung. They make costumes. But rarely have fans been quite so obsessive and effective as when “Mincefluences” put their minds to the task of finding the real-life “Hester”.

For three weeks, since SpitLip’s tweet, fans have been scouring the National Archives at Kew, conducting open-source investigations, and electronically door-knocking potential relatives. A month-long rollercoaster of original historical research is being done on a private Discord server, linking individuals who have never met. The fans are #FindingHester.

Search for “Hester Leggett” with an ‘e’ before the ‘tt’s, and you won’t uncover much at all. A woman born in 1878 in Texas; an 1896 birth in Camberwell that proceeds to a death certificate by March of the same year; an 1866 birth in Kensington, who would have been in her 70s by WWII; Hesters who took the surnames of the Mr Leggetts they married. None of these was the Hester of Operation Mincemeat.

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Hester had to have been an unmarried woman of working age – old enough to run the secretarial unit, but not yet pensionable – living in London during WWII, with prior experience as a secretary. Only MI5 will be able to definitively confirm whether the “right” Hester has been found, but there is one promising lead.

Hester May Murray Leggatt spelled her surname with an “a”, although not everyone since has been quite so obliging. She was born in India in 1905, to a family with a tradition of service in the military (particularly the Royal Navy), the civil service, and legal professions. She went to Tormead and Wycombe Abbey schools. She passed her piano exams as her brother Donald served on HMS Barham in WWI. In WWII, her brother Bill commanded the 11th Regiment of the Honorary Artillery Company in North Africa, and that regiment were first guns ashore in the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily.

She worked as a private secretary to Osbert Sitwell from at least 1933 to 1939, then for the British Council from 1946. She assisted Owen Rutter (later in the Ministry of Information) with a book on the 1789 mutiny on HMS Bounty, for which he thanked her in an Introduction that also mentioned his consulting with Sir Basil Thomson, whose life had turned to crime writing. There are handwriting samples which largely seem to match the “Pam” letters, and photographs of a 1928 wedding where she was a bridesmaid (though she was never a bride). A distant cousin now sits on the UK Supreme Court. She would have been just 37 at the time of Operation Mincemeat. She died in 1995, aged 89.

Operation Mincemeat succeeded because it took only a few well-curated scraps of paper to induce the Nazis’ imagination and make them project onto a fake man an entire human life. Now a musical based on that history is inspiring its fans to discover the full life of a real woman from the few documents and artefacts that have survived.

Many heroes were decorated after WWII: medals, statues, plaques, and letters after their correctly-spelled names. “Hester” deserves at least some recognition: perhaps just a small plaque, without misspellings. And she deserves to be remembered by us. Because just as it was important to know that Glyndwr Michael was The Man Who Never Was, justice demands that we find an overlooked Woman Who Always Was: Hester Leggatt.