Today you can give a Spy School Experience gift voucher to a loved one, or learn to be a spy as part of a fun team-building exercise at work. There are spies in our favourite films and TV programmes and in the books we read. As a nation, we are obsessed with a romantic idea of espionage. During wartime, what did it take to become an agent ready to be parachuted into occupied Europe?

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret organisation established in 1940, to train agents in “ungentlemanly warfare.” SOE trained agents from across a broad social and political spectrum, both male and female. From the daughter of a Polish count, Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, known as Christine Granville, the first female agent to serve in the field, to the retired burglar who ran the SOE lock-picking course, people were drawn from all walks of life.

To be chosen for agent training a person needed an ability with languages, to be motivated to fight Nazism without being reckless, to be courageous, to be prudent and to have a reflective nature. MI5 would run a check on them too to determine their loyalty.

Potential agents were sent to one of a dozen country houses around the Britain for an initial two- or three-week course focusing on physical fitness, elementary map reading and basic training with pistols and sub-machine guns. There was usually a well-stocked bar to see how potential agents behaved after a few too many drinks.

Those that passed were sent to Arisaig, in Scotland, for further training at the Group A schools. Here they did in-depth fire arms training with pistols, rifles, machine-guns and sub-machine-guns. They learnt about stance, how to be quick on the draw and to fire two shots rapidly – “the double tap.” They had to be able to maintain their weapons and to strip and load them in the dark. Potential agents also learnt unarmed combat and how to kill silently. Students practiced demolition with live explosives and railway sabotage, intensive map reading and did cross-country work. They also learned basic infantry tactical training like how to lay an ambush and how to storm a house.

Those that passed this stage were moved to the Group B schools near to Beaulieu, in the New Forest. The SOE Manual from 1943 that students were given at Beaulieu has been published and is fascinating reading. Here potential agents were taught how to achieve SOE’s four main objectives:

• To destroy the enemy’s materials, communications and means of production.
• To strain the enemy’s resources of manpower.
• To undermine morale of the enemy.
• To raise the morale of the occupied population.

Potential agents had to learn how to live in character in an occupied country and not give themselves away. They learnt about the local police services in the occupied countries and how to deal with “snap police controls” – the need to produce papers or answer questions at any time. They were woken up in the night and interrogated by men dressed as Gestapo or Abwehr (German military intelligence), to give them practice of stressful cross-questioning situations. They were taught how to recruit in occupied territories and propaganda methods. They were taught to be careful of every word they said. A slip of the tongue could endanger not only themselves but an entire network of operatives. Those that talked in their sleep were weeded out, either by listening devices or by “Fifi” a stunning blonde SOE agent who was a skilled provocateur.

Students were taught what we think of as spy-craft too. They learnt message and report writing and elementary coding. They studied how to drop a prearranged password into conversation, how to pass over a note unobtrusively in public, how to spot if you were being followed in the street and how to shed a follower. Some of these skills my characters learn in Murder In Her First Degree as part of a covert spy school in the 1930s.

For those that passed the practical passing-out exam, there were further technical courses on offer including; parachuting, printing, lock and safe-breaking, industrial sabotage, clandestine wireless techniques and advanced coding and cyphers.

SOE did well to train an agent for ten months but sometimes due to the pressures of wartime, an agent might only have ten weeks training before being deployed in occupied Europe.

Lizzie Bentham is the author of the Red Brick Mystery Series, published by Sharpe Books, including: Murder In Her First Degree, Murder By The Book and Dying To Get To The Truth set at the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Reading in the 1930s.