Door de Graaf, who has died in Holland aged 90, helped run the Dutch section of SOE during the Second World War and married two of its most celebrated agents.
Door de Graaf in 1938
Dodie Sherston, as she was then, was working as a clerk at the Ministry of Economic Warfare in Berkeley Square when, in 1943, her Aunt "Outoo" took her to see The Silver Fleet, a film about the Dutch Navy. The outing was followed by dinner in Chinatown, where they shared a table with a young Dutch pilot, Jos Sipkes.
He introduced Dodie to the "Oranjehaven", a club established in 1942 in Bayswater, where escaping "Engelandvaarders" (young Dutchmen who had fled to England to join the Allies) were looked after. Dodie befriended Sally Noach, a Jewish boy who taught her Dutch, and began working at the centre, welcoming the exiles and making them feel at home.
She soon fell in love with Peter Tazelaar, a dashing Dutch sailor who would become involved in carrying out secret assignments for Queen Wilhelmina. He was later celebrated for a mission in which he was dropped at the Dutch coast by submarine wearing a dinner jacket, managing to get past German patrols by pretending to be a drunken reveller (an incident said to have inspired the opening scene in the James Bond movie Goldfinger). They married in secret, Dodie fearing her father's disapproval since Tazelaar was part Indonesian.
The marriage did not last. In January 1944 a Dutch resistance fighter, Kas de Graaf, arrived in London to warn that the SOE network in Holland had, for more than two years, been under the control of German counter-espionage in an operation known as Das Englandspiel, and that agents dropped over Holland were jumping straight into the arms of the Gestapo. De Graaf became second-in-command of a reorganised SOE Dutch network, in day-to-day charge of its agents, and ably supported by the department's new assistant, Dodie Sherston.
At the end of the war, she followed de Graaf to Holland, where she continued working for special forces for a year before being demobbed. They married in 1946 and, while bringing up their four children, Door (as she was now known) found work as a translator, first at Royal Dutch/Shell, then at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and finally as senior linguist at the Dutch Foreign Ministry.
She was born Dorothy Sherston at Dallam Tower, her mother's family home in the Lake District town of Milnthorpe, on March 1 1920, into a family of empire builders. Her great-grandfather, General AH Bamfield, had been Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab and South Africa. Her great-great-uncle, Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, VC, was a former Governor-General of India and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army.
Her grandfather, Colonel Jack Sherston, aide-de-camp to Roberts during the second Afghan war, was killed by friendly fire at Talana Hill in one of the first engagements of the Boer War. After this incident, Dodie's father Geoffrey and his siblings were installed with their mother in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court Palace; the following year Geoffrey's brother Reggie was a page at the coronation of King Edward VII.
Two days after Dodie was born her mother succumbed to puerperal fever and her father, who managed a Lancashire cotton mill and subsequently became a land agent, soon married Monica Barrett, his late wife's first cousin, with whom he had three more children.
Dodie, who was educated at Felixtowe College, grew up in country houses managed by her father, whom she idolised. Her happiest memories, however, were of holidays spent with her paternal aunt Ethel "Outoo" Dugdale, mistress of Sezincote in Gloucestershire, a noted suffragette and the mother of John Dugdale, later shadow colonial secretary under Hugh Gaitskell. Outoo's upper-class iconoclasm inspired the young Dorothy and provided some respite from the staid conservatism of her normal social circle.
When the Second World War broke out, family members threw themselves into the war effort, Dodie's father as a colonel in the Home Guard; his brother Reggie as an brigadier; and Dodie at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where her job involved checking shipping cargo dockets for signs of deception and concealed weaponry – which she never found.
Later, after the collapse of her second marriage to Kas de Graaf in the 1960s, Door de Graaf became involved, in a gentle way, with the Dutch women's movement and helped to found a Vrouwenschool – where women could develop their personal, professional and artistic interests.
But a more enduring legacy arose out of her frustration at being unable to find the right kind of support for her eldest son, who had mental health problems. In the early 1970s she teamed up with other parents in a similar position to establish the Cliëntenbond, an association that is now an established element of mental health provision in the Netherlands.
These were stops on a journey of discovery during which Door de Graaf undertook training in Gestalt therapy (a form of psychotherapy that emphasises personal responsibility), became an adherent of anthroposophy (a spiritual philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner), and developed an interest in Dr Timothy Leary's "circuit model" of consciousness.
Such interests brought her into contact with the Belgian psychologist Nand Cuvelier, a pioneer of new approaches to interpersonal and social skills training, and in 1980 she joined the faculty of Cuvelier's newly-founded Relatiestudio psychotherapy institute in Ghent where, for the next two and a half decades, she created her own series of group psychotherapy courses, including Het Kind In Jezelf ("your inner child"), Vrede Op Mensenmaat ("peace on a human scale") and Oefengroep Authenticiteit, which translates loosely as "practising how to be real".
Also in 1980 she met the artist and Steiner schoolteacher Frans Reuvers, who became her partner for the last three decades of her life. He died in May last year, six months after Door had moved from their communal apartments in Zutphen to Huize Valckenbosch, an anthroposophical retirement home near Utrecht.
Door de Graaf, who died on January 2, is survived by her daughter and two sons.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/8357926/Door-de-Graaf.html
Her grandfather, Colonel Jack Sherston, aide-de-camp to Roberts during the second Afghan war, was killed by friendly fire at Talana Hill in one of the first engagements of the Boer War. After this incident, Dodie's father Geoffrey and his siblings were installed with their mother in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court Palace; the following year Geoffrey's brother Reggie was a page at the coronation of King Edward VII.
Two days after Dodie was born her mother succumbed to puerperal fever and her father, who managed a Lancashire cotton mill and subsequently became a land agent, soon married Monica Barrett, his late wife's first cousin, with whom he had three more children.
Dodie, who was educated at Felixtowe College, grew up in country houses managed by her father, whom she idolised. Her happiest memories, however, were of holidays spent with her paternal aunt Ethel "Outoo" Dugdale, mistress of Sezincote in Gloucestershire, a noted suffragette and the mother of John Dugdale, later shadow colonial secretary under Hugh Gaitskell. Outoo's upper-class iconoclasm inspired the young Dorothy and provided some respite from the staid conservatism of her normal social circle.
When the Second World War broke out, family members threw themselves into the war effort, Dodie's father as a colonel in the Home Guard; his brother Reggie as an brigadier; and Dodie at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where her job involved checking shipping cargo dockets for signs of deception and concealed weaponry – which she never found.
Later, after the collapse of her second marriage to Kas de Graaf in the 1960s, Door de Graaf became involved, in a gentle way, with the Dutch women's movement and helped to found a Vrouwenschool – where women could develop their personal, professional and artistic interests.
But a more enduring legacy arose out of her frustration at being unable to find the right kind of support for her eldest son, who had mental health problems. In the early 1970s she teamed up with other parents in a similar position to establish the Cliëntenbond, an association that is now an established element of mental health provision in the Netherlands.
These were stops on a journey of discovery during which Door de Graaf undertook training in Gestalt therapy (a form of psychotherapy that emphasises personal responsibility), became an adherent of anthroposophy (a spiritual philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner), and developed an interest in Dr Timothy Leary's "circuit model" of consciousness.
Such interests brought her into contact with the Belgian psychologist Nand Cuvelier, a pioneer of new approaches to interpersonal and social skills training, and in 1980 she joined the faculty of Cuvelier's newly-founded Relatiestudio psychotherapy institute in Ghent where, for the next two and a half decades, she created her own series of group psychotherapy courses, including Het Kind In Jezelf ("your inner child"), Vrede Op Mensenmaat ("peace on a human scale") and Oefengroep Authenticiteit, which translates loosely as "practising how to be real".
Also in 1980 she met the artist and Steiner schoolteacher Frans Reuvers, who became her partner for the last three decades of her life. He died in May last year, six months after Door had moved from their communal apartments in Zutphen to Huize Valckenbosch, an anthroposophical retirement home near Utrecht.
Door de Graaf, who died on January 2, is survived by her daughter and two sons.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/8357926/Door-de-Graaf.html
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