Person    | Male  Born 24/9/1920  Died 15/1/2001

Leopold Marks

Categories: Espionage

Jewish writer, screenwriter, and cryptographer. Leopold (Leo) Samuel Marks, MBE, was Chief of Codes at Special Operations Executive (SOE) in WW2. He was a key trainer of secret agents sent to defeat the Nazis.

Born in London, the son of an antiquarian bookseller in Charing Cross Road (whose shop Helen Hanff wrote about  in '84 Charing Cross Road').

Already interested in cryptography he was conscripted in January 1942 and immediately sent on training in the subject. As head of SOE he had a staff of 400. One of his responsibilities was to provide agents with the ciphers, initially based on poems, with which to send information to London by radio. To ensure the poems were unknown he took to using ones he had written himself. One famous and moving example is 'The Life That I Have' given to Violette Szabo. This was a poem he had written following the death of his girlfriend in a plane crash.

After the war, Mr Marks became a playwright and screenwriter, often writing scripts that  drew on his war-time experiences. He wrote the script for the controversial 1960 film Peeping Tom.

In 1998 Marks published an account (written in the 1980s) of his work in the SOE, 'Between Silk and Cyanide'. It seems that this aggrandises his own contributions and criticises everyone else.

Died London.

Sources: Find a Grave, Wikipedia 

Comments are provided by Facebook, please ensure you are signed in here to see them

This section lists the memorials where the subject on this page is commemorated:
Leopold Marks

Commemorated ati

Leopold Marks

Jewish cryptographer, Leopold (Leo) Samuel Marks, MBE, lived in flat 410 Park...

Read More

Other Subjects

Violette Szabo, GC, CdeG

Violette Szabo, GC, CdeG

British secret agent in WW2. Born in Paris as Violette Bushell of a French mother and English father who met in WW1. With 4 brothers she was a bit of a tomboy. From Violette Szabo Museum "The Bushe...

Person, Espionage, Execution, France

War dead, WW2
6 memorials
Hester Leggatt

Hester Leggatt

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 T...

Person, Espionage

1 memorial
Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe

Playwright and poet, for definite. Spy? Atheist? Homosexual? Shakespeare? Baptized on 26th February at St George's Church, Canterbury. Educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His plays inclu...

Person, Espionage, Poetry, Theatre

3 memorials
Sir John Vanbrugh

Sir John Vanbrugh

Playwright and architect. Born in the parish of St Nicholas Acons, London, of Flemish descent. Worked in the English Baroque style, sometimes with Hawksmoor, on Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. L...

Person, Architecture, Espionage, Theatre

6 memorials
Special Operations Executive (SOE)

Special Operations Executive (SOE)

Spies, basically (but see below), working for the UK in WW2. Formed by Churchill and variously known as "Churchill's Secret Army", "The Baker Street Irregulars", the Pythonesque "Ministry of Ungent...

Group, Armed Forces, Espionage, France, Germany

10 memorials

Previously viewed

Fred Britcher

Fred Britcher

Born St Pancras. Private. Killed in action, France and Flanders, 15/9/16. High Wood (Somme). Pte Britcher is buried in the Delville Wood Cemetery, Longueval, Somme, France. Our colleague Andrew Be...

Person

War dead, WW1
1 memorial
Maria Volkova

Maria Volkova

The National Gallery leaflet describes Volkova as Anrep's sister in law. But this Imago photo of Anrep and Volkova at the completed 'Awakening of the Muses', is captioned: "Maria Volkova - the only...

Person, Craft / Design

1 memorial
Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister

Born in Upton, Essex. Died in Walmer, Kent. Pioneer in the use of antiseptics in surgery. The medical historian, Ruth Richardson, has an interesting piece in the Lancet reporting on how Agnes his w...

Person, Medicine

3 memorials
W. A. Botwright
War dead, WW1
1 memorial