The Nurse Who Became a Spy

The life story of the working-class woman from Manchester, England, who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism in two major wars.

Madge Addy left her job and her husband to serve in the Spanish Civil War as a nurse with the Republican medical services. In Spain, she was wounded in a bombing raid, fell in love with another foreign volunteer who became her second husband, was made a prisoner of war, and was the last British nurse to leave Spain, witnessing the horrors of Franco’s Fascist regime before she left. She was caught up in the “Fall of France,” and lived in Marseille with her Norwegian husband.

From 1940 to 1944 Addy was first an amateur resister and later a full-time secret agent, working with the likes of Ian Garrow, Pat O’Leary, and Guido Zembsch-Schreve. She also acted as a courier, flying to Lisbon to deliver and receive secret messages from British intelligence. In addition, she became romantically involved with a Danish secret agent and married him after the war. Ultimately she was recognized by the British with the award of an OBE and by the French with the award of the Croix de Guerre.

Chris Hall brings Addy’s story to life in this biography, using archive material and photographs from Britain, France, Spain, and Norway. Her Spanish Civil War experiences are vividly described in a mass of letters she wrote requesting medical aid and describing the harrowing conditions at her wartime hospital. Her activities in the Second World War show a woman with nerves of steel and a bravery at times bordering on recklessness. As she herself said, “I believe in taking the war into the enemy camp.”