Door de Graaf

Dorothy "Dodie" Sherston (1 March 1920 - 2 January 2011), later known as Door de Graaf, was a British-Dutch resistance member and translator who worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Dorothy Sherston, often affectionately called Dodie, was born on 1 March 1920 on the Dallam Tower estate in the village of Milnthorpe, Westmorland, now part of the county of Cumbria in north-west England.

Geoffrey remarried shortly after the death of his wife, to her first cousin Monica Barrett and they had three children: Heather, Jill and Jack Sherston, half siblings to the young Dodie.

She joined the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where she checked notes of lading for signs of fraud or hidden weapons, but reportedly never found any.

[2] It was through this work that she met and married her first husband, Peter Tazelaar, a member of the Dutch resistance, whose exploits (such sneaking past guards in a tuxedo) are thought to have inspired elements of the James Bond stories.

[1][2] Kas de Graaf was also a member of the Dutch resistance and arrived in London in January 1944 to warn the SOE that their network in Holland had been under the control of Das Englandspiel, a German counter-espionage operation, for more than two years.

After her marriage Door de Graaf worked as a translator, first for Shell, then for the International Court of Justice in The Hague and later for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Frustrated by the shortcomings of the bureaucratic, process-driven mental health care available at the time, in the early 1970s she founded Cliëntenbond (the Clients' Union), with other parents dealing with similar challenges.

[1] In 1980 de Graaf-Sherston started providing psychotherapy training based on anthroposophical principles, such as: Het kind in jezelf (The child in you), Vrede op mensenmaat (Peace on a human scale) en Oefengroep Authenciteit (Authencity Exercise Group).