A FORMER wartime secret agent and Evening Advertiser correspondent has died.

Ivy Curzon, who worked for the Adver in the 1970s and '80s died on December 8, aged 79.

Unknown to all but her closest friends and family, Mrs Curzon, of Faringdon, played a vital role in the Second World War, as a secret agent for military intelligence.

Working from Government offices in Whitehall, London, Mrs Curzon, who spoke fluent German, helped bring scores of downed British aircrew and escapees safely back home.

The highly secretive unit - named MI9 - was commanded by Airey Neave, himself a Colditz escapee, who was killed by the IRA in 1979.

Mrs Curzon was signed up while she was working in railway offices in Liverpool.

Her ability to solve crosswords made her a candidate for the war work.

Although Mrs Curzon was in constant contact with resistance workers across Europe, names and other personal details were never discussed.

Her son Peter, 44, of Newhall Street, Swindon, said his mother kept all sensitive details relating to operations to herself.

He said: "The airmen themselves would rarely see or meet any key agents in their passage along an escape line they were regarded and referred to as 'parcels.'

"My mother was a modest person and would not discuss her own war exploits although a few of her friends realised."

After the war Mrs Curzon returned to the railways and in the mid-1950s she met her future husband Louis an ex-Army cavalry officer.

She went to work as a secretary in his import and export company.

After marrying they settled in Chelsea and had sons Peter, John, 43, and David, 42.

Six years later, the family swapped the capital for life in Uffington. There, Mrs Curzon discovered a passion for local history. One of her biggest achievements was tracing the family tree of the Uffington writer Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, whose roots dated back to the Welsh Tudor kings.

In 1970 she moved to Faringdon and, over the next 20 years, she worked for both the Advertiser and its sister paper, the Gazette and Herald. Throughout the 1980s she served on her parish council.

In 1992 she suffered a stroke, and in 1999 she was widowed. Although in a wheelchair, Peter says his mother never failed to smile. "The stroke robbed her of speech but she was still charming. She would beam at people," he said.

Kevin Shoesmith