Life
Wartime secret agent, cabaret legend, crochet artiste extraordinaire, and Ireland’s oldest punk...
Agnes Elizabeth Bernauer was born 7 March 1923, the child of Rudolph Bernauer, a Jewish Hungarian, and his second, Protestant wife.
She and her father fled from Berlin in 1936 to the United Kingdom, her mother later making a dramatic escape from Berlin after the SS had put pressure on her to work for them.
There, Agnes spent 3 years at school, once the war came she found a niche with the Freier Deutscher Kulturbund (Free German League of Culture), a refugee organisation where her senior colleagues included the artist John Heartfield.
In 1938 Bernelle was the OSS wartime 'Black Propaganda' radio announcer codenamed 'Vicki' famous for demoralizing a German U-Boat Captain into surrendering with one of her targeted broadcasts.
Romantically, she was pursued by men as diverse as King Farouk and Claus Von Bulow. A whirlwind romance with spitfire pilot Desmond Leslie led to a security ‘flap’ when he penetrated the OSS secret operational HQ. Desmond had tailed Agi, convinced he was being two-timed. Desmond swept aside family objections to marrying a Hungarian by pointing out the Leslie descent from Attila the Hun. Film footage of their wedding on the first day of peace (VJ Day) shows Churchill and the King waving from Buckingham Palace whilst church bells toll and delirious Londoners dance in the streets.
Agnes balanced motherhood and her life in the theatre, gradually becoming better known as a singer; she was one of the early performers at Peter Cook's night- club The Establishment, and in 1963 presented her first one-woman show there, in which she sang songs by Brecht and other writers of the 1920's.
In 1963, at the time she was expecting her third child, she and Desmond moved to Glaslough, where she ran Ireland’s first discotheque in the Hunting Lodge, as well as a cottage industry of her ‘couture’ crochet designs. Her home, Castle Leslie was shared by three siblings, with long visits from their father.