Joan Bright Astley

Joan Bright Astley, OBE (27 September 1910 – 24 December 2008), born Penelope Joan McKerrow Bright, was a British intelligence officer and organizer during World War II. After 1939, she was directly involved in the planning and oversight stages of nearly every important action of the European Theatre of the Second World War. She worked directly for the director of paramilitary operations, Jo Holland, and later for the Chief of Staff for Defence, Hastings Ismay. She was one of the co-founders of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). She organized the Special Information Centre (SIC) for Winston Churchill during World War II. Her ability to keep secrets made her in exceptionally high demand as a personal assistant, and she was regarded by Winston Churchill to be exceptionally intelligent. She briefly dated Ian Fleming and is believed to be one of the three or four women whose attributes were used by him for the character of Miss Moneypenny. She held a high-ranking position for the British missions to the Yalta Conference, the Tehran Conference, the Second Quebec Conference, and the Potsdam Conference, among others.

Biography

Early life Joan Bright Astley was born in Monte Caseros, Corrientes, Argentina. Her father was an English accountant; her mother, a Scottish governess. Described as a difficult teenager, she attended a number of schools, including Mrs Hoster's Secretarial College, where she learned shorthand and typing, and went on to working as a secretary at the British legation in Mexico. In 1936, she was offered a job, which she declined, in Nazi Germany, teaching English to the family of Rudolf Hess.

Career as Military Intelligence officer In 1939, she was told by a friend that she might have a chance of work if she went to a certain London Underground station one day, wearing a pink carnation. She did so and was guided to an office in Whitehall where she was met by a colonel, who had her sign the Official Secrets Act and warned her not to be seen by a certain person standing outside the building when she left. She was hired by the Department of Military Intelligence (Research), or simply MI(R), a section of the War Office concerned, among other things, with disrupting the flow of Romanian oil to the Third Reich. She was in fact the first hire at MI(R), when it was still called GS(R), serving under John Charles Francis Holland as his secretarial typist during the research phase of the department. Notably, on one occasion, she had to duck when Holland absentmindedly threw a book across the room out of frustration with his superiors at the War Office. The Cabinet War Rooms underneath London, where Astley was in charge of the Secret Intelligence Centre. In 1940, when MI(R) was merged into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Bright stayed-on at the War Office. The following year, in 1942, Wavell requested that Bright be sent to India to establish a similar secretariat. Ismay refused the request.

During the war, she dated Ian Fleming, and said of him, "I thought he was awfully attractive and fun, but elusive. I think he was a ruthless man – he would drop somebody if he didn't want them any more. That would be it." In 1949, she married Colonel Philip Astley, first husband of Madeleine Carroll, whom he had divorced in 1940. Colonel Astley died in 1958. In 1971, Joan Astley wrote of her wartime life in a memoir, The Inner Circle: a View of War at the Top, and in 1993 co-authored a book on Sir Colin Gubbins.

She died on Christmas Eve 2008 aged 98.