19 Facts About Vera Leigh

Vera Leigh was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive during World War II.

Vera Leigh was executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Vera Leigh was born Vera Glass on 17 March 1903 in Leeds, England.

Vera Leigh had been abandoned as a baby and adopted while still an infant by H Eugene Leigh, a well-known American racehorse trainer with an English wife, who renamed his adopted daughter Vera Eugenie Leigh.

Vera Leigh grew up around the stables of Maisons Laffitte, the training centre and racing course near Paris.

Vera Leigh had intended to find a way, with his help, to get to England, but she became involved with the underground escape lines, guiding fugitive Allied servicemen out of the country, and it was not until 1942 that she herself took the route over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Vera Leigh arrived in England at the end of 1942, with the intentions of offering her services for the war effort, and was identified by SOE.

Vera Leigh agreed to break off contact with Sussaix and began training.

Vera Leigh speculated that she might have been connected with the fashion business before the war.

Vera Leigh arrived with Juliane Aisner, Sidney Charles Jones and Marcel Clech.

Vera Leigh was to be a courier and three of them were to form a sub-circuit known as Inventor, to work with the Paris-based Prosper circuit, and would later serve as the liaison officer of the Donkeyman circuit.

Vera Leigh moved into an apartment in the elegant Sixteenth Arrondissement, made rendezvous routinely at cafes frequented by other agents, and took up life as a Parisienne again.

Vera Leigh came across her sister's husband and at first pretended not to know him, then threw her arms around him.

Vera Leigh spent time with SOE agent Aisner in an imposing building in a courtyard off the Place des Ternes from which she ran her husband's business, an effective cover for Leigh's activity as Dericourt's courier.

Vera Leigh frequently met other agents at a cafe on the other side of the Place des Ternes, a short walk from the Place de l'Etoile in the Seventeenth.

Vera Leigh had been taught in training to hold out for 48 hours after capture to give fellow agents a chance to vacate any premises and destroy any records she might be forced to reveal, but is almost certain she had no need to do so.

Vera Leigh exchanged a few words with another one of the women, who said she was English before she disappeared into the cellblock building.

Vera Leigh is commemorated on the Tempsford Memorial in the village of Tempsford in the county of Bedfordshire in the East of England.

Vera Leigh is commemorated in column 3 of panel 26 of the Brookwood Memorial as one of 3,500 "to whom war denied a known and honoured grave".