Jessie Jordan
Jessie Jordan (23 December 1887 - 1954) was a Scottish hairdresser who was found guilty of spying for the German Abwehr on the eve of World War II.
Early life
Jordan was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1887, the daughter out of wedlock of Elizabeth Wallace, a domestic servant.[1] Later in her life, Jordan would claim that her father, a William Ferguson, had abandoned her mother to go to America, but there is no name on her birth certificate. Her mother married a widower named John Haddow, with whom she had five more children, and for a time Jessie lived with her mother and stepfather in Lanark and later in Perth. [2] Although she had adopted her stepfather's surname, Haddow, by the 1901 census, she ran away from home at the age of sixteen and found work as a maid in a number of towns in Scotland and England.[2] In 1907 she met a German waiter, Frederick Jordan, who she would marry in 1912. Jordan lived in Germany almost exclusively until 1937, becoming a German citizen by marriage. She returned to Perth briefly in 1919 after her husband was killed on the Western Front (World War I) in 1918, but was back in Germany in 1920 when she married her husband's cousin, Baur Bamgarten.[1] By 1937 that marriage had ended in divorce, at which time she returned to Scotland.
Jordan had two children: a son, Werner Tillkes, and a daughter, Marga. [2] Marga became an actress and singer, and became Marga Wobrock when she married Hamburg merchant Hermann Wobrock.[2]
Return to Scotland
Several causes have been attributed to Jordan's decision to return to Scotland. Her marriage had failed and she saw herself as an "unwanted child" of Scotland as well as Germany,[3] and as her legal counsel would later claim during her trial, "the name of Jordan had in Germany a Jewish significance."[2] In her 2014 article on Jordan, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones noted that the hairdressing business that Jordan ran in Hamburg was suffering owing to the predominance of Jewish customers.[2] The implementation of the Nazi's New Order caused another contributing factor to Jordan's move back to Scotland: her daughter's marriage also fell apart in the 1930s, and when Marga attempted to return to her acting career she was required by German authorities to provide proof of an "Aryan" descent on her mother's side.[2] In July 1937, Jordan told the Glasgow Police Alien Registration Department that she was returning to Scotland to reconnect with her family and to find proof of Marga's aryan descent.[2]
Espionage
Back in Scotland, Jordan set up a hairdressing business in Dundee, spending a significant amount of money refurbishing her new premises.[2] By this time she had already been recruited by the Abwehr, and her motivations for agreeing to spy have been the subject of much debate.
One suggested motivation has been her ties to Germany as her adopted home: Jordan claimed that by the time she had returned to Scotland she had spent so many years in Germany that she no longer spoke English, fluently[4] [2] but she also claimed later that that she had been ordered to spy for Germany, and that she "had no passion for any country".[5]
References
- ^ a b Ewan, Elizabeth, ed. (2006). The biographical dictionary of Scottish women : from the earliest times to 2004 (Reprinted. ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. p. 188. ISBN 0748617132.
{{cite book}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help) - ^ a b c d e f g h i j Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2014). "Jessie Jordan: A Rejected Scot who Spied for Germany and Hastened America's Flight from Neutrality". The Historian. 76 (4): 766–83.
{{cite journal}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help) - ^ "Nazi Spy is Jailed in Scotland". The Schenectady Gazette. May 17, 1938. Retrieved 13 April 2016.
- ^ Knightley, Phillip (2003). The second oldest profession : spies and spying in the twentieth century (Fully rev. ed. with two new chapters ed.). London [u.a.]: Pimlico. p. 106. ISBN 9781844130917.
{{cite book}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help) - ^ "Dundee salon was post box for Nazi spy ring". Herald Scotland. 20 April 2000. Retrieved 13 April 2016.