Pearl Cornioley 1914-2008

[Troy Tempest]

Pearl Cornioley was a Special Operations Executive agent in France who posed as a cosmetics firm representative and commanded 3000 resistance members before D-Day. Cornioley, who has died at 93, was born Cecile Pearl Witherington in Paris, the eldest of four daughters of an expatriate English couple. "I had no childhood" was her grim assessment of her early life. She did not attend school until she was 13 and, after her father succumbed to drink, worked as a secretary to ensure the family had food. When Germany invaded France in 1940, she was a shorthand typist at the British embassy. She decided to evacuate her family, through Spain to Gibraltar, whence they sailed to Liverpool. Witherington joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. There she became increasingly frustrated by her pen-pushing post at the Air Ministry and presented herself at the Special Operations Executive headquarters in London, demanding a job. Having parachuted from a RAF Halifax in September 1943, she landed near Chateauroux, in southern Loire, joining a Resistance group and being given the codename Wrestler, her nom de guerre in France was Pauline.

False papers declared her the representative of a cosmetics firm. Her role was to act as a courier carrying coded messages. Once she cycled 80 kilometres to deliver a message, only to find that a bridge she had to cross was heavily guarded. Carrying her bicycle on her shoulders, she waded across the freezing river Cher. There were narrow escapes, such as when a German soldier on a train took an alarming interest in her papers, and when the Gestapo came to the house from which her team was transmitting by wireless. Her work was a chance to rekindle her relationship with Henri Cornioley, a Frenchman to whom she had become close before the war. They wished to marry but Henri's well-off family were opposed. Now Cornioley, who had been captured while serving in the French Army but had escaped, was working with Pearl in the Resistance. On 1.5.1944. the leader of her network, Maurice Southgate, was captured and she assumed control of 1500 resistance members, (later 3000) in the Sologne area of the Loire Valley. As D-Day approached, the network blew up railway lines and disrupted supply routes. More than 18,000 Germans gave themselves up on her territory. Germany put a price of 1 million francs on her head.

Pearl and Cornioley narrowly escaped being captured or killed when Germans attacked a guardhouse from which they worked. Thirty-two colleagues were never seen again. Soon afterwards the couple made it to England, where they married in October 1944. Pearl Cornioley was recommended for a Military Cross but, as a woman, was deemed ineligible. She was offered a civil MBE, which she refused: "There was nothing civil about what I did; I didn't sit behind a desk all day." She was appointed a military MBE in 1945. In 2004, at the British embassy in Paris, the Queen presented her with a CBE, declaring: "We should have done this a long time ago." Two years later, and six decades after she had jumped from the Halifax, she was awarded her Parachute Wings, the insignia of the Parachute Regiment. In the late 1990s the Cornioleys moved to Chateauveux, Loir-et-Cher, where they lived at a home for elderly people who had contributed to French national life. Her husband died in 12999, and she is survived by their daughter.