Hester May Murray Leggatt was a vital contributor to MI5's 1943 Operation Mincemeat - see there for the full story.
Born in India, her family brought her back to the UK before WW1. She attended Tormead School in Guildford and then Wycombe Abbey in High Wycombe 1920 - summer 2024. She then attended Secretarial Training at St James’ Secretarial College, London. About 15 years are then unaccounted for.
Then, 3 June 1940 - 31 July 1945, she worked as a ‘Grade 2 administrative assistant’ in section B1a, the division of MI5 responsible for running their Double Cross agents during the war. She would have been based at 57-58 St James’s Street and then in 1940 probably relocated with most of the staff to Blenheim Palace.
The phoney 'Captain William Martin' required a believable backstory. It was decided that letters from 'Pam', his fiancée, should be placed in his jacket pockets. According to the book The Man Who Never Was by Ewen Montagu, the intelligence officer in charge of Operation Mincemeat, ‘asked a girl working in one of the offices whether she could get some girl to do it. She took on the job, but never would tell us the name of the girl who produced the two magnificent letters.’ A subsequent book Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre identified Hester as the secretary who had herself written the letters.
Leggatt never married. After the war she worked at the British Council and retired to Chilton Buckinghamshire. She died in a nursing home, aged 89.
Sources include: Wycombe Abbey.
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