THE workings of a little-known, top-secret WWII espionage unit and its links with courageous Carve Her Name with Pride heroine Violette Szabó are to be revealed at a military festival.

Charles Pither will be discussing his novel Ipseity at this year’s inaugural Hereford Military History Festival and revealing Violette’s brave role.

Violette, who was played in the 1958 biopic by Virginia McKenna, has a museum dedicated to her life and bravery in Wormelow, north of Monmouth, where her uncle lived and she frequently stayed.

Following the death of her French husband at the Battle of El Alamein in the autumn of 1942, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was trained in the cloak-and-dagger crafts of undercover missions in occupied Europe.

As a fluent French-speaker, she co-ordinated with resistance fighters in France and trusted her life on the documents provided by a top-secret crack team of forgers back in London.

These were meticulously designed and printed by a team of eccentric, but brilliant, artists and printers at the SOE Station XIV, based at Briggens House in Essex: ‘the Bletchley Park no one has ever heard of.’

There, experts in all the printer’s skills painstakingly copied authentic paperwork, travel passes, and personal IDs issued by the authorities right across occupied Europe, to ensure those who carried these forged documents stood the best chance of evading detection.

But the intricate forgeries did not stop there. Utilising all the dark arts of misinformation and counter intelligence to destabilise the enemy from within, the team at Briggens House created everything from bogus foreign stamps and bank notes, to false ‘Wanted’ posters for leading Nazi officials and ration documents that were dropped in their millions all over the Third Reich to cause chaos in its food supply and distribution networks.

Mr Pither’s detailed research has uncovered a fascinating archive which forms the background to his lively illustrated talk.

Those attending will learn how code poems, such as The Life that I Have, was utilised to send and decrypt agents’ messages, as well as discovering the personal identities of the small, but now wholly forgotten, team, without whose work no SOE mission or operation could have stood any chance of success.

Charles Pither’s talk takes place at Hereford’s Green Dragon Hotel at 12.30pm on Saturday, September 27.

Further details and ticketing information about this and all the festival events can be found on the festival website: herefordmilitaryhistoryfestival.com.

The poem The Life That I Have was written for Violette by Leo Marks, head of the top-secret codes office during WWII.

The life that I have

Is all that I have

And the life that I have

Is yours.

The love that I have

Of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have

Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years

In the long green grass

Will be yours and yours and yours.