Phyliss Latour Doyle: the Knitter Was a Spy by Linda Harris Sittig

The knitter was a spy, or the spy was a knitter?

Phyliss Latour Doyle belongs to a unique group in history — steganographers, who hide secret data within ordinary pieces of everyday life, like a knitted scarf.

While the term steganography is a more modern term, the practice is not. There are references to spies in the American Revolution using codes written in routine correspondence and female spies who transmitted coded data inside the skeins of yarn in their knitting baskets.

For Phyliss Latour Doyle and other women who participated in WWI or WWII as resistance fighters, part of their value were the messages they knitted into their yarns and then stowed away within their knitting baskets to be transmitted without the enemy’s knowledge.

In WWI, Madame Levengle of France would knit while sitting in front of her window watching enemy troop movement below. As she knitted, she tapped her feet, sending coded messages to her children, supposedly doing their homework in the room directly beneath her. The children then copied down the encrypted message, which found its way to the Allies.

In Belgium, a grandmother also knitted at her window, watching the trains pass on the nearby railroad. She would knit a bumpy stitch for one train and then drop a stitch making a small hole for a different type of rail car. The coded scarf message of which trains were passing through was then carried by a Belgian resistance worker to help with the defeat of the German armies.

But, back to Phyllis Latour Doyle. She was a British spy who parachuted into Normandy in 1944 prior to the D-Day invasion. Pretending to be a poor French girl selling soap, she bicycled throughout the area, chatting with the German soldiers. Then she returned to her quarters, knitting Morse code messages into her yarn. The yarn was put into her knitting basket and delivered through Resistance channels back to the British to help pave the way for D-Day.

How does one knit in code?

There are only two basic stitches in knitting: a purl stitch and a knit stitch. The purl makes a stitch looking like a horizontal line or small bump. The knit stitch is smooth and looks like a low V.

By using a single purl stitch and then three in an alternating row together, one can transmit in Morse code of a dot and then a dash. Other knitters tied small knots into the yarn with each knot’s placement denoting a unique code.

While this sounds deceptive, it was. But it was also a risky activity.

All wars since the beginning of man have had spies. And in all wars, the punishment for being discovered as a spy was usually death.

Just because a spy was a woman, did not guarantee she would not be executed. Although in the American Civil War, many of the female spies like Rose Greenhow were left to rot in prison. (She was eventually released).

Women were often recruited as spies because they could move more seamlessly through society and not appear as suspicious as a man might appear.

Louise DeBettignies was a spy in WWI whose masterful techniques became legendary. She eluded the Germans in France during her leadership of the Alice Network but was eventually captured. However, during her time in the network, it is surmised that her group of female spies were able to save the lives of over 1000 British soldiers.

If this topic interests you, then be sure to read Kathryn Atwood’s Women Heroes of World War I or the historical fiction The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. Both books will open your eyes to riveting stories of female spies from the Great War, called that because no one would have believed that only 20 years later another world war would occur.

Thank you to blog follower Cort Johns from The Netherlands for suggesting I research the knitting spies!

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If you would like something more in-depth, then look for my “Threads of Courage Series” consisting of three novels: Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows. All of the books are available from your favorite bookstore or online. Each tells the unforgettable story of a woman who refused to be silenced.

Happy Reading!

linda