GEOFFREY HALLOWES served in the latter part of the war with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Europe. But before then he had endured a testing time on the run from the Japanese in the Far East immediately after the surrender of Singapore in February 1942.

In the 1950s he married, as her third husband, the celebrated wartime SOE heroine Odette. She had survived capture, torture in Fresnes prison and incarceration in Ravensbrück concentration camp, and was awarded the George Cross.

Hallowes had served with the 2nd Battalion The Gordon Highlanders in the final stage of the unsuccessful struggle to establish a defence of Malaya against the Japanese offensive. Despite the numerical superiority of General Percival’s British, Australian, Indian and Malay troops, the Japanese prevailed. The 2nd Gordons and 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were the last units to cross into Singapore before the causeway was blown.

When the island surrendered on February 15, 1942, he was one of four officers sent in pairs to carry the ceasefire order to the garrisons of the outlying islands of Balang Mati and Pulau Brani. The officers were told that, after delivering the order, they were at liberty to try to escape if they could avoid the Japanese. Hallowes and Major “Nick” Nicholson, of the Royal Engineers, found a 14-foot dinghy with two paddles. Their progress was slow, especially after Nicholson’s paddle snapped, but they found four British soldiers on a nearby island with a barely serviceable boat and two oars.

After they had rowed for five days with loops of rope deputising for the missing rowlocks, the dinghy ran aground on a reef off the east coast of Sumatra and sank. Unaware that the Japanese had landed on the south west of the island, the six men followed a river bed and crossed the western range of hills to the small port of Padang on the west coast. There they spent a week in a fruitless search for another boat, but rescue came in the form of a Royal Navy destroyer calling to refuel, after having taken part in the Battle of the Java Sea. This took them to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), from where they were flown to India.

On reaching Bombay in May 1942, Hallowes was employed as a staff captain dealing with administrative matters in the local headquarters. He escaped this by volunteering for the Special Operations Executive and attending the special forces training school at Haifa. He then joined the Yugoslav section of SOE’s Force 133, based in Cairo.

It is uncertain whether it was owing to his being surplus to requirements in Yugoslavia or his ability to speak French that resulted in his move to Peterborough, where the “Jedburgh” SOE teams were training. Each team comprised one British or American officer, a French officer and a radio operator. In all, 94 such teams were dropped by parachute into France in the days and weeks after D-Day. With few exceptions, their role was to try to guide the sabotage carried out by the various factions of the French Resistance, along lines helpful to Allied plans.

The Jedburgh led by Hallowes, codenamed “Jeremy”, comprised himself, Lieutenant Henri-Charles Giese and their radio operator, Sergeant Roger Leney. Fifteen such teams were sent by sea to Algiers and flown from there to parts of southern France beyond the range of aircraft from Britain. Team Jeremy was dropped on the night of August 24, 1944. It was met on the dropping zone by the remarkable Virginia Hall, nicknamed “La dame qui boite” (the limping lady).

Hall was a highly respected SOE operator. An American citizen who had lost the lower part of her left leg in a shooting accident, she had entered the Vichy-controlled zone of France by boat in 1941 and established the SOE network in the Haute-Loire. Leaving Leney with her to establish a radio link with London, Hallowes and Giese set out for Le Puy, the local headquarters of the Gaullist Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). He called for an arms drop for this group, estimated to be some 1,500-strong. But when the drop took place there were weapons for only 100 men, giving Hallowes some difficulties on their distribution.

With the FFI concentrating their efforts on liberating towns and villages already vacated by the Germans, Hallowes turned his attention to delaying the escape of German units across the Rhône that were trying to head eastwards for home. In this he was partially successful, persuading the Haute-Loire FFI commander to move those of his men who were armed, by this time the majority, northwards to Vichy.

On return to England in late September 1944, Hallowes was sent to join SOE’s Special Planning Unit 22, examining the feasibility of infiltrating German-speaking Poles and selected former German prisoners of war into German-held territory and Germany itself. He was responsible for the German ex-prisoners part of the operation, working from liberated Brussels and later from Hamburg.

Some useful work was achieved in the form of short-range intelligence gathering on behalf of the British 21st Army Group as it advanced into Germany in early 1945 and, later, investigating the activities of the Soviet Army in occupied Germany. Hallowes was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his services in France in 1944 and was mentioned in dispatches on his return from Germany in 1945.

Geoffrey MacLeod Hallowes was born in 1918, the son of Edward P. Hallowes of the Dry Monopole champagne importers Twiss, Browning & Hallowes of London. He was educated at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz in Switzerland and Jesus College, Cambridge, although he did not take a degree.

Joining the family company on demobilisation after the war, he became a founder director of International Distillers and Vinters in 1962 and was the first chairman of IDV Europe on its formation in 1972. He remained on the IDV board until his retirement in 1983.

He married, in 1956, Odette Sansom, GC, MBE, née Brailly, who had also been appointed to the Légion d’honneur by France. She was the former wife of Captain Peter Churchill, also of SOE. Odette died in 1995. There were no children of their marriage.





Geoffrey Hallowes, wartime officer of the SOE, was born on April 15, 1918. He died on September 25, 2006, aged 88.