Wartime Resistance Heroine.In August 1940 Marguerite Vourc'h,as she then was,returned home from boarding school in Paris to find her home village of Plomodiern,in western Brittany,occupied by German troops.Though the Resistance was virtually non-existent at the time,her father, Antoine,the local doctor,sought out sympathisers on his rounds;meanwhile Marguerite,in pretended innocence, established from her friends where their families' sympathies lay.When her brother Jean returned home from the war,she helped him and some friends escape to England disguised as fishermen.They soon returned to Brittany, trained and with a couple of radios.For days on end she would cycle round the local coastline,gathering intelligence on soldiers boats and mines,which was duly relayed to MI6.Increasingly,her work brought her into contact with the Resistance as she helped deliver false identity cards to the networks.No one took a 14-year-old schoolgirl on holiday for a spy,and she managed to continue her work even after part of the family home was commandeered to billet Gestapo and Wehrmacht officers in January 1941.During term time Marguerite continued to study in Paris,but at half-term and holidays she would resume her spying.School provided her with perfect cover for carrying messages and parcels between her local Resistance network and another in Paris.When she returned to Paris,hidden among her school books were folders bulging with military information.As the war progressed, Marguerite became involved in helping Allied airmen escape to Britain by hiding them in lobster boats.As the war approached its denouement Marguerite and her mother were joined by Jean-Claude Camors (code-named Raoll),a Resistance friend of her brother.Together they planned an operation to repatriate some 40 Allied airmen who were then hiding in Brittany.The successful escape of the airmen,however, was to be the undoing of Marguerite as, when the men arrived in Britain,the BBC broadcast a coded message that the "fourth son of a doctor of Brittany" had arrived.It was too obviously a reference to Marguerite's family,and the Gestapo soon came calling once again.Marguerite was at school at the time and her mother was visiting the Breton town of Quimper.Warned by friends not to come home,they hid in a run-down apartment in Paris.A few months later Paris was liberated.After the war she went on to study Architecture at the Beaux Arts in Paris,but cut her studies short when she met James Garden, a Scottish army surgeon visiting Paris on holiday.She followed him to Scotland against the wishes of her father, and they married in 1949,eventually settling in Lanark, where her husband became a prominent orthopaedic surgeon. A keen amateur naturalist,Marguerite was a prime mover in founding the Corehouse Nature Reserve,which is now run by the Scottish Wildlife Trust,and supported many other conservation projects in South Lanarkshire.She served for many years in the Red Cross and worked tirelessly in collecting funds each year for the Poppy Appeal for the Royal British Legion.After the war she received a handwritten letter of thanks from the Air Chief Marshal for her help in securing the freedom of many of his men, but for many decades her story went untold for the simple reason that she had remained true to her orders to remain silent.In 2003, however, her contribution was recognised belatedly by the French government and she was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur.In the same year she was nominated for a "Woman of the Year" award, and in 2004 her story formed part of a BBC2 documentary, Crafty Tricks of War.Marguerite husband predeceased her in 1992, and she is survived by her seven children.