Margery Booth

Margery Myers Strohm (née Booth; 25 January 190611 April 1952), also known as Margery Kallus, was a British opera singer, who having married a German and emigrated to Germany, became a British spy during World War II, meeting Adolf Hitler and singing at a British prisoner of war camp.

Life Margery Myers Booth was born on 25January 1906 at 53 Hodges Street, Wigan, Lancashire, the daughter of Levi Booth’s first marriage to Florence (née Tetley) Booth. His second wife, Ada (née Sidebotham), was also a local opera singer. After her parents' divorce in 1920 the family later moved to Southport. Booth trained in Bolton with R. Evans, in Knightsbridge with Eileen D'Orme, and then the Guildhall School of Music, where she won a scholarship in 1925, then the Opera Scholarship and Liza Lehmann Prize. She made her professional debut at the Queen's Hall, Wigan, on 4 October 1935. She then moved back to London to continue her career in Covent Garden London in 1936, but her marriage to Dr Egon Strohm, from a brewing family in the Black Forest, took her to Germany.

In early 1944, she was arrested by the Gestapo as a suspected spy, and although tortured, did not reveal any information. On release she made her way west, and was liberated in Germany by the advancing US Army. After the war, information she provided was used to convict both Lord Haw Haw and John Amery, both of whom were hanged for treason.

Death Emigrating again to New York, she was reportedly diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, which claimed her life in New York on 11 April 1952, aged 46.