Women are honoured for taking fight to the Nazis
TWO spies who went up against the Nazis are among women who will be honoured with a blue plaque as part of a drive to honour more female figures within the scheme.
Noor Inayat Khan, Britain’s “first Muslim war heroine”, and Christine Granville, “one of the most remarkable secret agents” of the period, are among the new names that were announced yesterday.
Only 14 per cent of about 950 blue plaques celebrate women but this year half of the dozen signs that will be unveiled across London will commemorate female figures.
Anna Eavis, of the English Heritage Blue Plaques Panel, said: “It is a long road but we are well on our way to receiving an equal number of public nominations for men and women.
Tortured
“There are now more women shortlisted than men, and 2020 will see more plaques to women than we have unveiled in 20 years.”
Ms Khan, who was descended from Indian royalty, was renowned for her service in the elite Special Operations Executive and was the first female radio operator sent to Nazi-occupied France.
After evading capture for three months, she was tortured and executed by the Gestapo in 1944 aged 30 at Dachau concentration camp. Her final word, uttered as the German firing squad raised their weapons, was simple –
“Liberte”, French for freedom. Her blue plaque will be erected at her wartimeWest End home. Polish Ms Granville – real name Krystyna Skarbek – was Britain’s longest-serving female agent in the war – undertaking several successful missions in occupied Europe. Her plaque will be unveiled at the west London hotel where she lived the last three years of her life. She died in 1952 aged 44.
A plaque remembering sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth, who died in 1975 aged 72, will be put in place outside the north London flat where she created one of her earliest Mother And Child sculptures.
Yesterday a blue sign was placed on the building in Bloomsbury where botanist Dame Helen GwynneVaughan – also a leading figure in the first women’s corps in the military – lived for nearly 50 years.
Plaques will also honour the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which was formed in 1897, and the Women’s Social And Political Union, formed in 1903.