COUNTY NEWS: '˜Courageous' teen war spy was Churchill's adviser

After the success of the film Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan may be looking for a sequel '“ and he could not find a better plot than the life of a West Sussex grandfather who recently passed away.

As a teenager, John Potter was setting up resistance groups in Nazi-controlled France and became a trusted adviser to Winston Churchill.

And after the Germans surrendered, he witnessed first-hand the horrors of the concentration camps and was involved in the Nuremberg trials.

After this eventful start, John went on to have a long and happy life and passed away on July 17.

Mildred Potter, 79, with a photo of her husband

His widow Mildred, from Ringmer Road, Worthing, paid tribute to her ‘courageous’ husband: “What he did at 18 was so brave. I couldn’t have done it. He lived to be 93, and he did a lot in those 93 years.”

Born with a club foot, John could not fight in the Second World War when he turned 18. He asked for deferment from military service so he could study – but was headhunted to be an agent in Winston Churchill’s ‘secret army’, known as the Special Operations Executive.

A French teenager called Henri Dufour died during an air raid in Lille, and his parents offered to host an Allied agent to assume their son’s identity. And with his fluent command of French and German thanks to his private education, John fitted the bill – even down to them both having a corrected club foot on their right leg.