THE remarkable wartime courage of two north Lancashire sisters and their father is to be celebrated at a book launch tonight (Thursday, February 15).

Ninety-two-year-old widow Jean Argles, who lives in Wray village, joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry on her 18th birthday and was posted to Cairo, Egypt, then Bari, in southern Italy, as a code and cypher operator.

She trained with the Special Operations Executive in London’s Baker Street and although her work was fraught with danger Mrs Argles told the Gazette: “I loved it. It was very exciting to be abroad in the middle of the war. I couldn’t wait to get back at the end of the war.”

While the teenaged Jean was communicating with British agents in France, Belgium, Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania, and sending coded despatches to the Foreign Office, her older sister Patricia was serving with the Women’s Royal Naval Service, intercepting German submarine Enigma Code messages at Bletchley Park’s secret coastal Y radio out-stations.

Meanwhile their father, Colonel Cary Owtram, was being held as a Japanese prisoner of war in the Far East – and his daughters have at long last published the diaries he kept secretly and at great personal risk in the Far East.

His eloquent and modest memoirs – 1,000 Days on the River Kwai – are to be launched this evening at Waterstones book shop in Lancaster.

Wartime veteran sisters Mrs Argles and Patricia Davies, now 94 and living in London, will be discussing the book and answering questions about their beloved father, Second-in-Command of 137 Field Regiment RA, who was captured at the fall of Singapore in February 1942.

Transported to the notorious 258-mile Burma Railway – known as the Death Railway – he was made British Camp Commandant at Chungkai, one of the largest PoW camps. His handwritten notebooks were kept hidden in bamboo poles, then buried in a bottle in a grave at Chungkai Cemetery, and they now reside at London’s Imperial War Museum.

The daily perils faced by father and daughters were a far cry from the rural idyll of pre-war family life at Newland Hall, near Dolphinholme, north Lancashire. There, Jean, Patricia and brother Bob had enjoyed lessons with governesses, pony rides, summer weekend tennis parties and winter shoots. Colonel Owtram oversaw the family’s cotton-spinning mills, while his wife, Bunty, ran the country house with its tenant farms, and became an ARP warden when war broke out.

Mrs Argles told the Gazette she and Patricia had both signed the Official Secrets Act and it was many years later before they told each other or anyone else what their secret war work had been. The handsome father they remember “with much love and gratitude” went on to become High Sheriff of Lancashire, Deputy Lieutenant and an OBE, and died in 1993.

- Doors open at Waterstones, King Street, Lancaster at 6.30pm tonight for a 7pm start. Attendance is free but please register your interest by calling 01524-61477 or email lancasterkingst@waterstones.com

- Look out for a full-length feature on Jean Argles in the April edition of The Westmorland Gazette’s magazine, Living.