Gazette 9/3/1921 - Arrived on 1st Appointment - Asst. District Commissioner - 21/2/1921

KAD 1922 - Administration Cadet, Kisumu

https://grahamthomasauthor.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/the-le-chene-family-and-the-special-operations-executive/ In September 1904, fourteen year old H Le Chêne was noted in the admissions register as joining Lord Williams’s Grammar School (LWGS) as a boarder. This was an independent school located on the outskirts of Thame, a small town deep in the English countryside and not one that had a history of taking foreign pupils. So what was a French boy doing here?

His full name was Henry Paul Le Chêne, both his parents were French but, and this is the reason why, his father was a naturalised British citizen. The family had first come to London some fifty years earlier when Henry’s grandfather took the decision to emigrate. He arrived in 1851 claiming to work in insurance but then changed trades and worked as a decorative artist meaning that he painted interiors with lavish and detailed designs and became naturalised in 1876. He was also a rogue: his second wife divorced him after fifteen years of marriage as he gave her a venereal disease. His first wife had died in France.

The family lived in north London where Henry’s father was a senior civil servant working for Her/His Majesty’s Customs office. 

After four years as a boarder Henry left LWGS and, from the start of 1908, he studied for one further year at the Strand School an institution that specialised in preparing pupils to enter the civil service. He stayed for one year and then in the 1911 Census is noted as a student living at the family home, 12 Clairview Road, Streatham (a larger late Victorian semi-detached. They had a live-in servant too suggesting that his father was now better-off.). Whether Henry’s occupation as ‘student’ was connected with the Civil Service or a university is not known but eventually it was with the former where he worked.

The next record is from early 1914 a record suggests that he emigrated to Canada to take up farming at a time when the country was encouraging mass immigration but while this is recorded on a ship’s passenger list it does not fit comfortably within his life’s story. What is clear is that with the outbreak of War he joined the first 21st London Regt. who were a territorial battalion based in Camberwell near to where he lived, and then the King’s African Rifles as a lieutenant. He served in the East Africa campaign fighting principally in German East Africa. At War’s end Henry returned to England and married Marie-Thérèse Ragot (a distant cousin) in London, after which electoral records show that the couple lived with his parents in Streatham.

After the War he continued to work as a civil servant and, in 1921, he and his wife sailed to Mombassa, Kenya where initially he was what was called a ‘Cadet’ in the Administrative Service. This was only for a transition period. After three months he assumed the role of Asst. District Commissioner in the Kisumu region of the country – found on the north east side of Lake Victoria and an increasingly important transport hub. 

At an unknown date he and his wife Marie-Thérèse moved to France which is where this story becomes particularly interesting.

After the outbreak of the 2nd World War, he returned to England and joined the South Staffordshire Regiment in July 1940 as a 2nd Lieutenant. He was in his early 50s so it can be assumed he joined with the express purpose of becoming an operative. He was then moved to a UK’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) training school but which one is unknown, and in 1942 he was sent to France to become organiser of the SOE’s SPRUCE network in the Lyons area to undertake sabotage, picking up information, finding places for aircraft to land and to act as drop zones, and the distribution of anti-German propaganda. After arriving in Lyon he decided it was unsafe and changed his area to the less populated areas to the west between Clermont-Ferrand and Périgueux. Here, by moving and splitting his network into two he could use either town as his new headquarters.

This change of plan worked well. He found there was much more support for spreading propaganda in the smaller towns and villages, and he was able to recruit elderly women into the network, who made the best couriers as they aroused less suspicion. The Michelin Rubber Works could be found in Clermont-Ferrand and Henri used the workforce for distributing propaganda leaflets and encouraged them to manufacture inferior tyres for the Germans. These then needed steady replacement or repair, which kept the workmen employed thus avoiding forced labour in Germany.

His wife Marie-Thérèse le Chêne was also an agent for SOE. Aged 52, she was trained at an SOE school on the Beaulieu estate, one of the first batch of women to arrive and where one of the instructors was Kim Philby, who would later become a notorious spy – of course. le Chêne was described at the time as ‘excitable and talkative’ by her instructors and they worried that she might inadvertently give some secrets away. This did not stop them continuing her training and she became the oldest female operative sent to France where she served from November 1942 until 19 August 1943 as a courier, working alongside Henry, and her brother-in-law, Pierre Le Chêne. 

On the night of 3/4 November 1942, Marie-Thérèse landed by boat at Port Miou, near Cassis. She arrived with fellow agents George Starr, Mary Herbert and Odette Sansom and, as noted above, worked alongside her husband as a courier and later as a distributor of political pamphlets and anti-German leaflets. Towards the end of her period in France, she also conducted a sabotage mission on a canal and railway line.

In January 1943, with the Gestapo closing in and Pierre [Henry's bro, (also an SOE agent) captured, Henry fled France via the Pyrenees, the most popular land escape route at the time. Marie-Thérèse was unable to join him and hid in friends’ houses until the SOE evacuated her from a field in Angers on 19 August 1943. Back in Britain, she eventually rejoined her husband. However her tendency to gossip brought her into trouble with the authorities and she was severely reprimanded. They noted that she was an agent who knew a lot more than many about the SOE, its schools and the agents in France where she operated, probably knowing some 20-30 agents and 10 circuits where they operated.

After the War they initially lived in London but then opened a hotel in Sainte-Menehould in north-east France. Marie-Thérèse was awarded the MBE and CdG, and Pierre the OBE and CdG. In 1964 Pierre applied for compensation under the Nazi Persecution Claims Compensation Agreement set up for those British citizens who had been brutalised by the Nazis.