Anne Dawson

Anne Dawson MBE (29 October 1896 – 8 October 1989) was a British secret agent in occupied Belgium in the First World War. She worked for the GHQ Wallinger London unit in 1917–18, reporting to Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick who was based in Rotterdam. Dawson was one of only two known British female agents operating behind German lines in Flanders, the other being Edith Cavell who had been a long time resident of Belgium before the war. Early life Dawson was born in Camberwell County, London on 29 October 1896. Her birth certificate shows her (Dutch) given names to be Anna Henderika. Her father, Francis Dawson was British and her mother, Catherine Dawson (née Steffer), was born into a Dutch family that had migrated from Eastern Europe to Holland around the middle of the 19th century. They appear to have settled in The Hague, where the birth of Catherine's older sister Jaantje Steffer was registered in 1865. The family was most likely of Jewish descent, but if so there is no evidence that it any longer observed any religious or cultural practices. Catherine had left Holland to move to England, where she married Francis in the mid-1890s. The Dawsons had three children, Anne, Frank Gerard and Catherine Mina. Catherine spoke Dutch to her children. After the birth of the third child, her husband - who was a partner in a timber business with his brothers - left the family and never returned. He died in 1948. Anne, as the eldest child in a fatherless household, grew up assisting her mother to care for her younger siblings. Catherine's sister, Jaantje Steffer (by then Oudshoorn) appears in the 1911 Census as a Dutch visitor to the Dawson household, together with her daughter. When Anne left home for her war duty she was twenty and her siblings in their later teens. She appears never to have lived in England again. Her mother became ill in England in the late 1920s and returned to Holland, where Anne had settled in Roosendaal. Anne took care of Catherine until the latter's death in 1929.