Did England really use 90-year-old spies?
Seemed to be one of the most unbeliveable aspects of the entire film.
shareI don't know how old "Miss Froy" was supposed to be, but Dame May Whitty was born in 1865. You do the math.
They used a teenaged Audrey Hepburn during WWII, and she did what Miss Froy did-- passing messages. She smuggled some in he shoes, and passed some orally because she was multi-lingual. She was even involved in one real cloak-and-dagger operation, passing rescue information to a downed British pilot in Holland, because she spoke English.
Merely passing information was something many civilians were pressed into, as it allowed the government to take advantage of creative means of communication. Miss Froy using music as a code may not have been real, but it was the type of creative thing the government did. During the US Civil War the North had Deaf spies who passed information in sign language. They may have done the same thing during WWII, although I don't know for sure. The US did use Navajos, speaking a modified version of Navajo language (modified for a better 1:1 English word translation) to pass information during WWII.
The main goal was that the code not be detectable, and second, that if it was, it not be understandable. People were unlikely to suspect Deaf people as spies in the first place, and to record and decipher American Sign Language in the second place. Germans were unlikely to think that the US government would trust secret work to an "inferior" race in the first place, and to have anyone who could understand a non-European language in the second place.
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