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The secret world of the elite forgers who kept British spies safe from Nazi capture has been revealed for the first time.

More than 275,000 forgeries, including passports, ration cards and cash, were created by the team at Briggens, a country house near Roydon.

Their work during the Second World War financed and fed resistance movements and agents, including the legendary Violette Szabo, and helped spies work undetected behind enemy lines.

The Official Secrets Act kept the truth about Briggens hidden for decades, but now declassified documents and first-hand testimony mean the story can finally be told.

The forgers were first assembled in 1941 as part of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a “ministry of ungentlemanly warfare” Churchill had created to “set Europe ablaze”.

At first the team comprised just three Polish resistance fighters — only one of whom spoke English — but they were soon joined by Morton Bisset, a Scottish printer who rallied his fellow tradesmen.

(Image: Pen News/Des Turner)

Before long, Briggens boasted a staff of 50 including printers, draughtsmen, technicians, a Scotland Yard handwriting expert and a team of women from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) volunteers.

Speaking to Des Turner, author of the newly-released book, Briggens: SOE’s Forgery and Polish Agent Training Station, the late Captain Bisset described the pressure to make sure the forgeries would pass inspection.

He recalled: “With this team of highly skilled craftsmen we were able to forge all types of documents for the various resistance movements.

“We went to infinite pains to ensure that they were as authentic as possible, as we knew that our agents’ lives might depend upon them.”

Newly-discovered images show their mock-ups of exit visas to Spain and Portugal, fiscal stamps from Germany and Hungary, and identity cards from Poland and France.

Often the forgers raced against the clock, with their work based on real documents that had to be smuggled back into Nazi-occupied Europe before their absence was noted.

“A genuine original document would be smuggled out of France,” Captain Bisset said. “Possibly transported by a Lysander aircraft, submarine or a fast motor torpedo boat.

(Image: Pen News/Des Turner)

“Then it would be delivered to us as quickly as possible. We had to copy it and produce the forgery and return the original in a similar manner and just as quickly.”

But they handled the pressure well — on one occasion issuing forgeries of a new French ration card on the same day that the genuine article came out.

One Nazi study of Briggens’ work lamented that “the forged ration cards are such deceitfully good copies that single coupons cut from them cannot be recognised immediately as forgeries”.

Sergeant Major Arthur Gatward, a handwriting expert tasked with forging signatures, saved a whole spy ship when he fooled a close comrade of the Nazi he was imitating.

The late Pauline Preston, a secretary at Briggens, recalled: “We heard that a German officer had boarded and requested the documents for the usual signing.

“He noticed the previous signatory was a friend of his — he actually recognised his signature!”

In one illustration of their skill, the Briggens team even mocked up a passport for Hitler, jokingly listing his occupation as “painter” and recording his “little moustache” as a distinguishing feature.

(Image: Pen News/Des Turner)

It was stamped twice, once with a red “J” used on Nazi-era German passports to indicate Jews, and once with a Government of Palestine stamp declaring him an immigrant.

Mr Turner said: “It shows they could do anything. I think they had a great sense of humour — the British have always been pretty good at that.”

For all the jokes, however, the Briggens team were deadly serious about the job — many took their wartime secrets to the grave, hiding them from even their own families.

Jerzy Maciejewski, one of the original Polish forgers, only revealed the truth to his loved ones shortly before his death in 2004, having already disposed of a number of historically valuable documents.

Another forger, Dennis Collins, left just this clue: he’d kept a 1949 newspaper report detailing the existence of SOE, with passages highlighted to show the work he did.

One highlighted passage describes the forged documents SOE created for Violette Szabo, the agent immortalised in the film Carve Her Name With Pride.

(Image: Pen News/Des Turner)

She was ultimately captured and killed after a gunfight with the Nazis.

Another agent who used Briggens documents was Edward Yeo-Thomas, “The White Rabbit”, whose George Cross citation notes that he “narrowly escaped arrest” six times before he was betrayed in Paris during his third mission.

The forgers also counterfeited currency, including Polish zloty, which was used to aid resistance fighters. A total of 43million zloty flowed into occupied Poland in 1944 alone.

It’s particularly ironic that this was happening at Briggens — home of the 4th Baron Aldenham, a respected man of the city who was chairman of Westminster Bank.

Briggens also doubled as a training base for the Polish resistance, receiving the cream of the crop from a preliminary training facility in Inverlochy, Scotland, and preparing them to lead guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines.

It didn’t always go to plan, however – a practice assignment to blow up part of a disused railway track wrongly targeted the London to Cambridge mainline instead, delaying trains for 12 hours.

(Image: Pen News/Des Turner)

And practical jokes had to be banned completely after someone used their newly-acquired explosives training to rig up a toilet, costing a comrade their hand.

The complete history of the facility has now been compiled for the first time in historian Des Turner's book — the product of 11 years of research.

Mr Turner said: “The agents couldn’t have survived without the correct papers. They couldn’t have done it.

“They took on false identities and needed all the papers to back it up, and they had to be reliable because otherwise it wouldn’t have worked.

“And if you haven’t got the agents out there you’re not getting the intelligence.”

He added: “They were good at dirty tricks and deception. I mean, we fooled Hitler so many times.

“He made so many mistakes because of our misinformation that it won the war. If we hadn’t have done that, we’d have lost it.”

Briggens: SOE’s Forgery and Polish Agent Training Station is priced at £19.99 and available from the National Archives and via desturner@aol.com