A BRITISH SPY who ended up living in Wexford and is buried in an unmarked grave in Crosstown cemetery is the subject of a fascinating new book, Snow: The Double Life Of A World War II Spy.

Co-written by Welsh author Madoc Roberts and the renowned espionage writer Nigel West, it tells the story of how Arthur Graham Owens, later known as Arthur Graham White, became a double agent and played a significant role in Britain winning the war. His life and death in Wexford remain shrouded in mystery.

Born in Pontardawe in Wales in 1899, Owens was an unsuccessful inventor who ran up debts investing in a new system for improving batteries.

In 1935, he walked into the German Embassy in Belgium and offered his services, leaving as the German spy code-named Johnny O'brien.

As they secretly prepared for war, the Germans were keen to know how secure Britain was against attack, and Owens, with contacts in the British Army, was the perfect informant.

However, he also began feeding information to the British secret service MI5, a turn of events which helped to give Britain an edge in the espionage war. To MI5, he was known as 'Snow'. Owens even helped to crack German's Enigma military codes.

Following a mission to Lisbon in 1941 when Owens claimed the Germans had discovered his links with the British, MI5 decided they could no longer trust him.

He spent the rest of the war locked up in Dartmoor Prison, where he supplied information to the authorities that he gleaned from German inmates.

After the war, Owens fled to Wexford in 1948 with his second wife Hilda and his two-yearold son Graham. He lived in Kilrane for a while before moving to a house in Barrack Street.

A chemist by trade, he made soap and brought it in his son's pushchair on the train to Wexford to sell, according to Graham, who lives near Oylegate with his wife Norma (née Rothwell).

He opened a shop on Commercial Quay (where the rear of Shaws is now), repairing radios and batteries, and when the occupants living upstairs moved out, the Owens family moved in over the business.

Arthur died on Christmas Eve 1957 at the age of 58, not long after reading an article about German spies in the John Bull magazine which featured a drawing of a man with an amazing resemblance to himself.

Arthur suffered from cardiac asthma and Graham still wonders whether he was so shaken by the publication that it contributed to his fatal decline in health.

Graham only found out about his father's extraordinary early life after he died.

When his mother told him the story, his reaction was one of 'extreme amusement'. He was 11 years old at the time. ' To me he was just dad,' he said. Graham was interviewed for the book a few years ago by the author Madoc Roberts after his son Paul began researching information about his grandfather on the internet and was contacted by Roberts.

The relatively recent release by MI5 of suppressed documents and records relating to Arthur's spying activities was a big help to the authors.

' There is one reference to him buying a fur coat for his German girlfriend, costing £1,500, which would have been a huge amount of money at the time,' said Graham.

The girlfriend was Lily Bade, with whom he had a daughter, Jean, now living in Dagenham in England.

Graham only discovered that he had another half-sibling after the authors of the book unearthed her during their research.

'I didn't know she existed until Madoc told me. She only learned about Arthur herself when she was getting married and her mother told her "your father isn't your father",' he said. Graham met Jean recently for the first time. However, he was already aware of other halfsiblings, Patricia and Robert, from his father's first marriage. They were born in Canada, where Arthur and his young bride Jessie emigrated in 1920.

The couple returned to England separately some years later, Arthur accompanied by his son Robert.

Patricia Owens grew up in England and was working as a hairdresser when she was spotted by a Hollywood scout.

After Arthur died, Graham's mother took him to see the sci-fi horror film The Fly starring Patricia, who played opposite Marlon Brando and James Mason.

She pointed to the screen and told him the female star of the movie was his father's daughter. Patricia died in 2000 and has a son living in Los Angeles who was also contacted by Madoc Roberts.

Robert Owens is also deceased while his wife is still living in England.

Graham is pleased that the book has been written. 'I think it's reasonable,' he said. 'A lot of information about what happened back then was suppressed for years. It was only recently that the files were released by MI5, which was lucky for the authors.'

He has bought a few copies and given them to family members and friends.

Following Arthur's death, Hilda and Graham returned to England to live.

Graham obtained his first job in the PIE Radio Company in Cambridge, building wireless radios.

He later moved to Luton where he met his wife Norma, a native of Ballymore, near Ferns.

It was not their first meeting. They had been pupils together for a time in Miss Sherwood's national school in St Patrick's Square, Wexford, a building which is now a private house.

Graham later switched to geophysics, working for a number of companies in England before coming back to Wexford in 2007.

'I had intended waiting until retirement but we jumped ship early because we saw what was happening in the property market. It was the wisest move we ever made,' he said.

Now that his father's secret is out, Graham hopes to put a headstone on the unmarked grave in Crosstown.

'I'll probably put a stone up now. I was concerned about doing it before because people have very long memories, you know,' he said.

Arthur himself had been so concerned for his own safety that he changed his name to White before he left England in 1948.

'At the time, there were calls for German spies to be executed', said Graham. Was his father a real-life James Bond? 'I think he got himself in over his depth,' said Graham, whose last memory of his father was on the day he died.

'It was Christmas Eve and he gave me £5, which was an awful lot of money back then.'

' That was the last time I saw him. He was taken away in an ambulance to Wexford General Hospital and that was it.'

Graham says that he cannot be 100 per cent certain that his father is buried in that plot in Crosstown.

'I sometimes wonder if he did die or engineered his departure.'

' There may be an empty coffin lying six feet under.'