She met an Englishman, Roy Patrick Sansom (1911–1957), in Boulogne and married him in Boulogne-sur-Mer on 27 October 1931, moving with him to Britain. She had a convent education and was considered difficult, perhaps because of her illnesses. As a child she contracted serious illnesses which blinded her for three and a half years, as well as polio, which resulted in her being bedridden for months. Odette Marie Léonie Céline Brailly was born on 28 April 1912 at 208, rue des Corroyers in Amiens, France the daughter of Emma Rose Marie Yvonne née Quennehen and Florentin Désiré Eugène 'Gaston' Brailly, a bank manager, killed at Verdun shortly before the Armistice in 1918 and posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and Médaille militaire for heroism.
Her wartime experiences and endurance of a brutal interrogation and imprisonment, which were chronicled in books and a motion picture, made her one of the most celebrated members of the SOE and one of the few to survive Nazi imprisonment. She spent the rest of the war imprisoned in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. She and Churchill were arrested there on 16 April 1943 by spy-hunter Hugo Bleicher. In January 1943, to evade arrest, Churchill and Sansom moved their operations to near Annecy in the French Alps. Sansom arrived in France on 2 November 1942 and worked as a courier with the Spindle network (or circuit) of SOE headed by Peter Churchill (whom she later married). SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Germany. She was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross by the United Kingdom and was awarded the Légion d'honneur by France. Odette Sansom GC, MBE (28 April 1912 – 13 March 1995), also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Hallowes, code named Lise, was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France during the Second World War. Member of the Order of the British EmpireĬhevalier de la Légion d'honneur (France)
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