Jude Dobson February 2024. Picture supplied / Neil Gussey
Jude Dobson February 2024. Picture supplied / Neil Gussey
The New Zealand flag flapping out the front of the house, a deep swimming pool in blue sunshine shimmering out the back, and in between a darkly timbered mansion with about 17,500 rooms – to visit Jude Dobson, gameshow chatterbox turned exquisitely sensitive bestselling author, is to experience the NewZealand way of the good and patriotic life. She lives in the Seymour-Goldsmith-Eggs zone of Auckland. A low electronic gate slowly opened at the middle and spread its wings; it gave a little creak, almost like a sigh, a summery whisper.
It had just gone 4pm and the hostess declared it was gin o’clock. The beautiful weather of February 2025 shone on two green-grassed volcanoes seen from the house. There was an oval window in the kitchen, gorgeous leadlight, steps and stairs and wooden ladders. Quite a lot of her opening chat was about the previous owner, an elderly Freemason, and how she had taken care to return a priceless photo of him to the Henderson Masonic Centre. It was a nice story and it set the theme for our interview – the nobility of service and the maintenance of history.
Dobson has told Pippa Latour’s incredible memoir as a wartime spy in The Last Secret Agent, the biggest-selling New Zealand book of 2024, not counting Chelsea Winter’s recipes for vegetarian stodge in her cookbook Tasty. The Last Secret Agent ought to have been considered for this year’s Ockham national book awards – no other non-fiction title was anywhere near as profound or beautiful – but was ruled ineligible because the manuscript wasn’t submitted until after Latour’s death. “I met her,” said Dobson, enjoying being able to recite an amazing sentence, “when she was 101.” She died on October 7, 2023, aged 102.
I said, ‘Your job’s to stay alive while I’m going to France. We’ve got to finish the book.’ And she said, ‘It is and I will.’
At a mere 58, it feels like Dobson has been around forever. Over 30 years of television fame does that: she is one of the great old armchairs of New Zealand public life, a familiar presence, always sunny and cheerful, a kind of Mumsy of the nation. As Jude Kirk, she was the first local personality to make the cover of that index of New Zealand celebrity, Woman’s Day magazine, in 1989, when she was made co-host of Sale of the Century. The show aired every day of the working week at 5.30pm. Contestants could win a hand-knitted rug. Her co-host, Steve Parr, howled, “Let’s go shopping!” It was a strange Bronze Age of trash and sexism. Her Woman’s Day cover story noted her weight and height (54kg, 173cm) and that she had broken off her two-year romance with an Auckland business executive; in 1992, she was on the cover again, in an exclusive photo story of her wedding to Air Force pilot Graham Dobson. Nothing dates as deeply as fame. A coverline of the same 1992 issue screeched “SCOOP PHOTOS. ROD AND RACHEL SIZZLING IN SYDNEY”.
The years since have been kind. Happily married mother of three beautiful children, veteran of infomercials (Family Health Diary, Chubb Life Funeral Cover)and documentaries (A Cot Death Inquiry, The Liberation of Le Quesnoy) – and now, fair to describe as an unexpected twist, an author.
Her experience in the book trade up until The Last Secret Agent was precisely zero. She looked like a fish out of water even among the provincial literati when I first met her at last year’s Queenstown Writers Festival. But within minutes I regarded her as my new best friend in New Zealand publishing. She stares right into your eyes with an open, friendly face, and the immediate impression she gives is of someone deeply empathetic, which is really only ever an intellectual way of saying she likes people. It inspires trust. That word came up 21 times in our interview, like a motif, the same satisfying piano key prodded 21 times; trust meant everything to her and I thought of it as the essence of her relationship with Pippa Latour and why it was that the wartime heroine chose Dobson to share the story she had concealed even from her own family. But it wasn’t as plain as that.
One of them forcibly kissed me on the lips – and from that day forward I have never allowed anyone to kiss me on my lips. He ruined that for me.
Latour was parachuted behind enemy lines in Normandy in 1944. The Last Secret Agent captures the tension and drama of her life as a spy engaged by Churchill’s Special Operations Executive. She was 23 and instructed to act as a 14-year-old girl selling soap to Nazis: “It gave me the perfect opportunity to find where the German army was located and to overhear conversations.” She sent 135 coded messages that called in their position. The book smells of soap and war, danger and bicycles; it includes a harrowing passage about rape. Two German soldiers took her into a barn. “One of them forcibly kissed me on the lips – and from that day forward I have never allowed anyone to kiss me on my lips. He ruined that for me.”
Secret agent Pippa Latour, a 23-year-old who posed as a 14-year-old schoolgirl and worked behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France.
All of it told to her amanuensis, Jude Dobson of Sale of the Century and Chubb Life Funeral Cover fame, who had the gravitas of her own lived experience of military service – her father was an Air Force pilot, as is her husband. She brought out their folded uniforms during the interview and touched them lovingly. “Graham served under the Queen and my dad served under the King.” She also brought out a photo of her with Pippa Latour of the last time they were together. Latour was in hospital. Dobson was about to head to France to research the book. “That’s when I said, ‘Your job’s to stay alive while I’m going to France. We’ve got to finish the book'. And she said, ‘It is and I will’.”
“No. She wanted to die. She’d run her race and she was wasn’t going to be able to go home.”
“What was she like?”
“I really enjoyed her. I felt like I could be a younger voice of hers really. She was quite pragmatic and straight up and I am too. She lived up a long driveway with the birds. I could only ever go between the bird feedings. That was the rules of engagement. She had these beautiful Barbary doves that she domesticated. I mean, they’re wild. They could fly away at any time. But she spent quite a lot of her pension on bird food and would feed them twice a day and they were used to that at a certain time. So she didn’t want to let them down.”
“Was she eccentric?”
“No, there was nothing too odd about her apart from the fact that she lived in the middle of nowhere and on her own, which wise people don’t at 101.”
I asked, “What’s it like to function as a ghostwriter?”
“Weird. I’d never done this before. So, before I started, I went to an Auckland Writers Festival session on ghostwriting. I don’t know anyone in this game, but I bought a ticket and I sat beside a publisher. She turns to me, and goes, ‘Oh, why are you here’?
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I thought it might be an interesting thing to do one day'.
“And then the woman who took the session was amazing.” She meant Margie Thomson, who ghosted Ruby Tui’s massive bestselling memoir and the more artful, more honest memoir of Stan Walker. “She said some people will want to go to you. Some people want you to go to them. Some people want a lot, some people don’t want much. But she said the biggest constant was trust. If you don’t have trust and they don’t think that you can be their voice, you’ve got nothing.
“So Pippa trusted me to get the voice. She was only interested in someone she trusted and I think that’s the essence of it really.”
I said, “I think you’re someone who inspires trust.”
“I don’t know. I hope so. Probably there are people who see me and think, ‘Oh there’s that nice Jude'. They don’t know that I swear like a sailor.”
“But you actually are nice. I don’t think there’s any kind of front or artifice. ‘Good old Jude’, you know.”
“Good old Jude. But yeah. I think I’m nice.”
There was that motif again – trust – but there were other things at play during those 40, 50 hours of interviews in the Waitākere Ranges birdland. They shared the same values of service and loyalty. Dobson felt an admiration bordering on awe for Latour’s wartime courage. From The Last Secret Agent: “In France, with new identities and forged papers, we agents covered hundreds of kilometres on foot, by bike, or on trains, all the time under the constant threat of arrest by the Gestapo should our identity be blown or the work we were undertaking be discovered. It was exhausting work, with the ongoing threat of possibly being betrayed by double agents and traitors … Our job was to disappear – to fit in and not be noticed.”
Only a few people knew that she had operated as a spy. When it came time to tell Dobson her story, she was glad of the publishing advance. “One of the motivations for her was she lived on the smell of an oily rag. Like really. Which annoys me. You know, she did that service and got nothing for it. Okay, money doesn’t make you happy, but it makes things a lot easier. You don’t need a lot of it, but you do need enough to – I mean, her power of attorney was sorting out stuff like superannuation grants for heat pumps, and the SAS would go there twice a year and chop down the trees and clean up the entire section and pick her up every Anzac Day. So she was known in those circles. And revered, 100% revered.”
Corporal Willie Apiata pictured with Pippa Latour in 2011. Photo / Richard Robinson
Dobson, too, revered her, but the secret power of The Last Secret Agent wasn’t as simple as that, either.
She is about to travel through France for further research on the places where Latour risked her life in 1944. She is writing a feature film of the story and is determined to get it made: “I want to go see it at my local Lido cinema and walk out crying.” It’s a film that writes itself. This scene, from The Last Secret Agent as Pippa Latour prepares to parachute into occupied Normandy: “In turn, all nine crew members came in from their various stations and kissed me – quietly and without fanfare – on the forehead. I was indeed a precious cargo for them … I pushed myself forward, through the hole, into the night sky, immediately feeling a rush of bracing cold air on my face. I felt the reassuring pull of the static line from the aircraft, opening my parachute almost immediately. We were flying at a low level, about 500 or 600 feet, and I knew I would be on the ground within 30 seconds or so, which would reduce the chances of me being spotted in the moonlight. The fall was very brief, and before I knew it I could see the ground coming up below me.”
Jude Dobson, producer of a major motion picture – why not? The story is gold. It’s easy to imagine The Last Secret Agent given a Hollywood or Netflix treatment, a vehicle for WWII aficionado Sir Peter Jackson … Still, the prospect of Dobson walking the red carpet at some world premiere would constitute quite a dramatic and far-fetched second act in the life of a beloved figure in New Zealand light entertainment. Even the peak of her fame was very Kiwi, very tawdry.
“I do remember there was a terrible thing,” she said. “I went over to Mum and Dad’s place one day in Mangere Bridge and popped into the dairy to go and pick up some jetplane lollies or something. The old family dairy. So I go in and the cover story of Truth – I’ll never forget it – was “HEY JUDE! WORD IS YOU’RE GOOD IN BED”.
“They’d interviewed a body-language expert who had studied the way I looked and spoke. I thought, ‘What the hell’? And then I actually bought it from the guy behind the counter. He was like, ‘That’s so terrible. I’m sorry I’m even selling it, Judith/.
“I thought, ‘I’d better go show and Mum and Dad'. I said to them, ‘Look at this rubbish but don’t worry about it'. Because what can you do?”
Jude Dobson and Steve Parr on Sale of the Century. Photo / Fremantle/Grundy Australia
And then she told an equally steamy story. I asked whether she knew Paul Holmes back then. Sale of the Century and Holmes debuted on the same day. She recounted how Holmes phoned her at home. Her flatmate took the call. He said, “It’s Paul Holmes here. I just wanted to see if she wanted to go out for a drink tonight.” Her flatmate said, “Hang on a minute.” Dobson (then Jude Kirk) was in the shower. Steamy! The flatmate said, “Oh. My. God. Paul Holmes phoned. Are you going to go out for a drink with him?”
And the punchline was that she said, “No, I don’t think so. I like Paul. But no.”
She has always had good sense. But she told another story, before she was famous, of herself as someone sensitive and vulnerable. After she left Epsom Girls' Grammar, she studied nursing and was thinking of taking up midwifery, but her plans were interrupted when she won a modelling contract (54kg, 173cm) in Tokyo.
“So then when I came back [to New Zealand], I just didn’t know what I was doing with my life. My boyfriend at the time said I was just sort of crying a lot and he was like, ‘I think I’m going to take you back to your parents' place. I think you need to go back home for a bit'.
“I just wasn’t in a great space for a couple of months. But I don’t think that’s so unusual, especially in your 20s. It feels terrible at the time. Like, ‘What am I doing in my life? I’m lost'.
“So I went home and it was brilliant. Mum and Dad were just so good with me. Dad would say, ‘Right, get up in the morning and go down the driveway’ – we had a really long driveway – ‘and get the milk. Come on’. And he’d say, ‘You know, I think we should look for houses to buy. You’ve made some money in Japan. Let’s see what it would cost for you to put a deposit down and I can lend you some money'. And Mum made dinner, fed me. They were so lovely.”
I said, “I’m guessing that you hadn’t really felt like that ever before and possibly not since. Not that lost.”
She said, “Oh, I still don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just scaffolding one thing to another.I’ve just lived a solitary sort of existence. I just do my own thing. I work from home. I wrote the book on that couch there. I don’t know why I chose the couch. That’s stupid. I have an office upstairs! But that’s where I listened back to all the interviews. Hour after hour.”
Jude Dobson: "I want to go see the film of The Last Secret Agent at my local Lido cinema and walk out crying.” Photo / Neil Gussey
She grabbed her phone and played a few minutes from one of her last recorded interviews with Pippa Latour. An old, raspy voice with a thick South African accent (she was born on a boat in Durban harbour, in 1921) filled the room. Dobson looked out the window, thinking back to all her visits to the little old war hero in her little old home in the Waitākeres, often bringing her freshly baked cheese or date scones.
I said, “How does it feel listening back?”
“Lovely. It’s one of our last conversations. I’d got to know her very well by then. We talked about the rape. I said, ‘I’m so sorry, Pippa. This should never have happened to you'. I gave her a hug and said, ‘Do you want to talk about it’? She said, ‘I do. People need to know what happened’. So yeah. And then I sat on that fricking couch going, ‘You’ve got to get this right'. Yeah.”
“Where were you when she died?”
“A pharmacy in France,” she said. “I had a cold and I was looking for some medication. It was just before lunch, so it was about 11 at night here. It was her best friend. I saw Lynn’s number come up on my phone. Graham was with me and I think he could tell by the look on my face.
“And I said, ‘How long ago’?
“Lynn said, ‘Not long’.
“I said, ‘Can you put the phone down to her ear’? Because I wanted to talk to her.”
I had got confused and said, stupidly, “Could she talk to you?”
She replied, “Oh, no. She’d died. But we don’t know how long the soul hangs around, so I talked to her.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Oh, Pippa. Oh my God. I’m sorry to see you go, but you know what? I’m going to do the right thing by you. Godspeed, Pippa. You know, you’ve lived a wonderful life. Thank you for your service'.”
She told the story through a flood of tears. We had got to the truth of the book, of its secret power and of the essence of the relationship between Pippa Latour and Jude Dobson, more than trust or reverence, more than the stirrings of patriotism.
