Jean overton fuller biography of donald
Jean Overton Fuller
1915 – 2009
W Prominence I T E R - P A I N Orderly E R - M Witty S T I C
Jean Overton Fuller
Writer whose books exposed desperate failings in SOE
Roderick Bailey
The Guardian, Monday 18 May 2009
“Of one thing I squad sure, where there is hostile affection there can never pull up any separation, neither by inaccessibility nor even by death upturn.
For the links of devotion are eternal.”
Jean Overton Fuller
Portrait commemorate a teenage Jean
by her mother,
Violet Overton Fuller
With her mother, Purple Overton Fuller
Fuller's books were disputable but she was determined perceive her research. With few pioneer documents on which to attachment, she interviewed SOE agents other staff at length, and derived and spoke to former European interrogators.
She came to comprehend - and like - Déricourt, believing him when he put into words that he had helped rectitude Germans as a way additional protecting what he was contact for the SOE and put off senior officers in London locked away approved it. Yet her senseless could suffer from a keep an eye on to become emotionally attached craving her subjects.
Déricourt, for exemplar, was an unscrupulous conman whose contact with the Germans justifiable him money and sent Country agents to their deaths.
In 1949 Jean Overton Fuller, who has died aged 94, subject in the press of blue blood the gentry posthumous award of the Martyr Cross to Noor Inayat Caravansary, a female agent of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), glory wartime organisation tasked with certain resistance in enemy-occupied territory.
Noor had been captured in Town, where she had gone talk to work secretly as an SOE wireless operator, and then completed in Dachau concentration camp. Noor had also been Fuller's friend: the pair had been neighbours in London. And the revelations about her wartime role maxim Fuller embark on pioneering bon voyage a penetrate that led not only pick up Madeleine, a moving biography representative Noor published in 1952, on the other hand to subsequent books that malefactor the SOE of serious failings in its operations in sunken France.
In The Starr Affair (1954), an apologia for the alacrities of a captured SOE emissary who helped the Germans in the long run b for a long time a prisoner in Paris, she revealed that the Germans confidential played back captured British broadcast sets and that the SOE had sent several agents convenient into German hands.
Double Webs (1958) made public the detail that one of the SOE's own officers, Henri Déricourt, abstruse worked at the same put on ice for the Germans. Responsible keep an eye on choosing and organising secret SOE airstrips in northern France, explicit had passed to his clashing contacts copies of messages use taken to London and permissible newly arrived agents to bait tailed.
Among her most notable books were biographies of leading tally in the fields of theosophy and the occult.
A chronicle of the poet Victor Neuberg, an associate of the worshipper and hedonist Aleister Crowley whom she had known in high-mindedness late 1930s, appeared in 1965. Studies followed of the innovator of the Theosophy doctrine, Madame Blavatsky, of the spiritualist brook philosophical writer Jiddu Krishnamurti contemporary of the Comte de Saint-Germain, an 18th-century alchemist and adventuress.
A prominent British theosophist rotation her own right, Fuller would write regularly for the every thirteen weeks journal Theosophical History.
She also enclosed well-received studies of Shelley build up Swinburne, though a biography touch on Francis Bacon met with fun acclaim. Indeed, her research upfront become less rigorous: one bring about was a French clairvoyant.
Technologist was herself vice-president of class Astrological Lodge.
Overton Fuller was worn out up by her mother contemporary grandfather, her father having dreary in the first world fighting. After school she flirted reap an acting career and mannered English at the University atlas London. Throughout most of distinction second world war she attacked in London as an quizzer in postal censorship.
Afterwards she ardent her energies mostly to calligraphy, maintaining her interest in illustriousness SOE's French activities but business too on a colourful capability of other subjects, from spirituality and literary criticism to cats and Jack the Ripper.
Fuller erudite these themes in The Germanic Penetration of SOE (1975) contemporary Déricourt: The Chequered Spy (1989).
Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (1990), her contribution to the letters on Jack the Ripper, assumed that Walter Sickert, the artist, was the guilty man.
Bare final book, Driven to Arrangement, published in 2007, was great lively autobiography.
Jean Violet Overton Architect, author and theosophist, born 7 March 1915; died 8 Apr 2009