Sigismund Payne Best

Captain Sigismund Payne Best OBE (14 April 1885 – 21 September 1978) was a British Secret Intelligence Service agent during the First and Second World Wars. He was captured by German Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) men on 9 November 1939 in what came to be known as the Venlo Incident.

Although he used the surname Best, his actual surname was Payne Best. So when he published his memoirs in 1950, for example, he published under 'Best, Sigismund Payne', while his second and third wives bore the official name of Margaretha Payne Best Van Rees and Bridget Payne Best.

He was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the son of the physician George Payne Best and his wife Catherine Sophia (née Allison). His father was the grandson of a relationship of an Indian maharajah with a British woman. After studying science in London, Payne Best first worked as a businessman. In 1908 he went to study violin at the Music Academy of Lausanne. He then studied economics and musicology at the University of Munich, graduating in both in 1913. In Munich, he acquired an excellent knowledge of the German language. Back in England, he went as a volunteer into the army. His first wife, Dorothy Hallwood Adams, died in 1918.

Captain Payne Best served in the First World War as an intelligence officer; first as a member of the Intelligence Corps, and later as the second officer of the GHQ's Wallinger London bureau. In 1917 Major Ernest Wallinger sent him to Rotterdam, Netherlands to handle and set up intelligence networks in German-occupied Belgium. The Wallinger service was linked to several Belgian resistance groups. A well-known recruit of Wallinger was the Belgian resistance heroine Gabrielle Petit. In Rotterdam, Best got into a conflict with Richard Tinsley, local station chief of MI6. In November 1917 he was recalled to London after he was caught sleeping with the wife of an influential Belgian resistance leader. He was replaced by Lieutenant Ivone Kirkpatrick. Later Best would accuse Tinsley of scheming against him.

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