Daphne Park

Daphne Park, the so-called “Queen of Spies” (1940, Modern Languages), appears never to have had a dull moment in a life and career that culminated in her becoming Controller Western Hemisphere of MI6, the highest position ever attained by a woman in the Secret Intelligence Service at that time. She later returned to Somerville as Principal where she oversaw the first conversations about admitting men to the college.

Daphne Margaret Sybil Désirée Park was born in Surrey on September 1st 1921. Weeks later, her father, John Alexander, a former WWI Intelligence Officer and aspiring gold prospector who never actually married her mother, took the family to Africa. Daphne pegged her first gold claim aged three, finding a single nugget which she then lost. 

The rugged conditions of life (including hungry lionesses, tsetse fly and malaria) were enough to induce Daphne’s mother Doreen Park to lease a coffee plantation in the Kenyan hills. Here, the family home was a mud hut without running water or electricity. As she knew that she herself was going blind, her mother gradually she taught Daphne to read at a very early age.

Having taught Daphne via a correspondence course for five years, in 1932 her parents decided that they could not teach her any more and so her mother scrimped and scraped for the fare for her to come home to England. At the age of 11, Daphne walked three days to the nearest road and hitched a lorry ride “through a cloud of locusts” to Dar es Salaam. There she “switched on my first electric light and pulled my first loo chain” and sailed back to England to attend the Rosa Bassett school in Streatham, South London. Her Monmouth grandmother and London great-aunts became her guardians. She would never again see her brother, David, who died aged 14. She was not to see her parents again until 1947, when she was 26 years old, as war-time communications made it impossible.

Money was extremely tight throughout her school and university years. Daphne thus remained grateful all her life to the Surrey County Council official who, after meeting Daphne and being impressed by her refusal to fudge her reasons for attending university in order to gain a £75 loan, created a special scholarship for her. Daphne arrived in Oxford from London just as the Battle of Britain was occurring, which had a profound effect on her: “The very month that I went up, the docks were set ablaze and the Battle of Britain took place. One was thinking about something much, much bigger than oneself.” She wore secondhand clothes all through Oxford and was always short of money, but the wartime absence of young men gave her extra chances. She became president of the Liberal Club and was only the second woman to speak at the Oxford Union. She never really looked back.

On graduating in 1943, Park turned down jobs in the Treasury and the Foreign Office to make a direct contribution to the war effort. She was summoned for interview at FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – which had evolved to undertake unconventional tasks among the Services). There, by providing an over-elaborate answer to a question about ciphers, she attracted the attention of the head of coding at the Special Operations Unit, who put her on his staff. It was the beginning, as she admitted, of her “very interesting war”.

After a period instructing a range of agents in the use of codes, Daphne Park was promoted to the rank of sergeant and sent to Milton Hall in Leicestershire, where she helped to train the Jedburghs, special teams formed to support the Resistance in Europe. She was, however, sacked for insubordination after she told a senior officer he was incompetent, and in 1944 went to work as a briefing and dispatching officer in SOE (Special Operations Executive) in North Africa.  When she got there, she was looked up after by Barbara Lucy Keeley (who was also in the SOE) who was PA to Colonel Anstey (later Sir John) who ran Massingham (the SOE codename for Algiers operation) and SPOC (the Special Projects Operations Centre in Algiers based at the Villa Magnol which planned resistance support operations in to Southern France and the Southern France landings in August 1944). There are a number of references to Daphne Park in Algiers in 1944 in Margaret Pawley’s book Obedience to Instructions, including the recollection that on one occasion after a visit to a restaurant, Daphne was left in charge of some prisoners, armed with a sten gun, while her dinner companions including the local gendarme went to retrieve their stolen jeep.

By the end of the war, Park’s wartime activities in SOE had left her deeply compromised in Europe and disqualified her from entry into the Diplomatic Service. Instead, bitterly disappointed and still a FANY officer, she was sent to Vienna in 1946 to set up an office for FIAT (Field Intelligence Agency Technical), directing the search for Axis scientists who had been involved in interesting projects during the war and were wanted for interview by the British. Her work in Vienna strongly influenced her career. Witnessing the kidnap of scientists by the Soviets and the disappearance of Poles and Czechs she had trained during the war made Daphne Park determined to discover more about the communist regime. Her assistance to the intelligence services secured her an interview back in London. She was duly offered a job and entered the Service in July 1948, the time of the Berlin airlift.

Park rose rapidly through the ranks of MI6. In 1954, after a stint learning Russian at Newnham College, Cambridge, Park was notionally appointed second secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow, but in fact served as station head for the Intelligence Service.

She arrived in the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War. Stalin had died the previous year, Beria had been shot and the Bulganin-Khrushchev thaw was beginning. The Soviet Union was opening up, and she travelled widely, reporting on all aspects of Soviet life.

Once, during the Suez crisis, when Britain was under attack at the UN, demonstrators swarmed angrily up to the British embassy. As the riot unfolded, the embassy’s military and naval attachés, in full uniform, approached a Russian officer who was observing the destruction. They saluted him and said: “The ambassador would be obliged to know when this demonstration will end, as he is having guests for luncheon.” According to Daphne Park, the reply came: “This spontaneous demonstration of the people’s wrath will end at a quarter to one precisely.”

Her tradecraft was impeccable. SIS had taken on the case of a Russian spy in Canada who had been turned by the Canadians but then recalled to the Soviet Union. There were fears that he had been compromised, and he was instructed to appear, alone, in a particular Moscow street at a particular time carrying a shopping bag in his left hand. Daphne Park was sent to the rendezvous. When he arrived with the bag in his right hand, and in the company of a woman, she correctly surmised that he was indicating that he had indeed been compromised.

Daphne Park’s next posting (1959-61) was as Station Controller in Leopoldsville in the Congo, during the granting of independence that was to prove one of the principal crises of the Cold War. She subsequently served as Station Controller in Lusaka in Zambia, Hanoi, capital of the North Vietnamese government, during the Vietnam War and Ulan Bator in Mongolia. All these postings were highly eventful. They were also characterised by Daphne’s fearlessness, which was legendary despite the fact that she liked to convey the impression of being a grandmother rather than a spy. Indeed, her preferred modus operandi was to build relationships rather than engage in underhand dealings. Specifically, Daphne refused to bear weapons and famously countered an attack from an armed mob by getting out of her car, opening the bonnet and exclaiming, ‘Thank goodness you’ve come along – I think I have a problem with my carburettor.’ The men promptly laid down their weapons and offered their assistance.

Her career was not without controversy, however. It is alleged that she claimed privately to have been involved in the 1961 abduction and murder of Patrice Lumumba during the Congo Crisis. The true nature of her work was publicly revealed only in 1993, when an edition of BBC’s Panorama named her as a senior MI6 officer.

Daphne Park was recalled to London in 1973. Her career in the Secret Intelligence Service culminated in her appointment as Controller Western Hemisphere in 1975, the highest post ever occupied by a woman at that time. She retired from the SIS in 1979, having been elected Principal of Somerville College, Oxford.

As Principal of Somerville, Park oversaw the college’s first conversations about whether to admit men to the college. She also worked tirelessly for the College Appeal, raising much-needed funds by making frequent visits to the USA, the Gulf States and the Far East. A member of the British Library Board, Chair of the Legal Aid Advisory Committee and Governor of the BBC, Park was also a Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University. In 1990 she was created Baroness Park of Monmouth.

Daphne Park retired from Somerville in 1989 and was succeeded by ex-diplomat Catherine Hughes. In 1990, during Margaret Thatcher‘s final year as Prime Minister, she elevated Park to a life peerage, as Baroness Park of Monmouth. She took the Conservative whip. According to Lord Rooker, Park chose ‘Monmouth’ in her title not in reference to the market town where she had family history, but to honour Monmouth House, a building in which her friends in the Secret Intelligence Service worked.

Did you know? Daphne Park’s first appearance in the Somerville records is as one of the undergraduates who volunteered to take part in a mock Blitz organised by the City Council to test Oxford’s preparedness, where her ‘realistic impersonation of a hysterical foreigner deprived of house, sense and all coherent speech had shown up some weak spots in the city organisation’.

This profile is indebted to the following biography, which contains a full account of Daphne Park’s fascinating life and career. 

Watch an interview with Baroness Park reflecting on her wartime career

We wish to express our thanks to the Royal British Legion for allowing the use of the above film.