Glamorous loved life...
Christine Granville was Britain’s first and longest-serving female secret agent yet her full story has remained untold. As a new book brings her achievements to light, Clare Heal speaks to its author
THAT Christine Granville survived the Second World War at all is remarkable. She was a woman who loved life yet risked her own in the name of freedom, serving in three different theatres of war ( Hungary, Egypt and France) where the average life expectancy for an agent was a mere few months. In Hungary, she helped co- ordinate a system of couriers smuggling pro-Allied propaganda into occupied Poland and bringing intelligence reports out, fi rst gaining entry to the country in February 1940 by skiing from the Slovakian side of the Tatra mountains down into the town of Zakopane.
Following a sojourn in Cairo, she joined the British Special Operations Executive and was parachuted into France to help the Maquis, the rural section of the French Resistance, prior to the Allied invasion of France.
During these years her achievements include providing some of the fi rst information to reach Churchill of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union; “exfi ltrating” hundreds of prisoners of war and demanding of the Gestapo in south- east France that three British agents be released just hours prior to their scheduled executions.
She dodged numerous bullets and had to make her own escape from the Gestapo by biting her tongue so hard it bled, to fake the symptoms of tuberculosis. Along the way she managed to fi nd time for two husbands and numerous lovers. It is therefore a tragedy that she died not in action or in a welldeserved old age but at the hands of a stalker in 1952.
As a secret agent, Christine Granville had many aliases including “The Fly” and “Madame Pauline”. Yet Clare Mulley, author of The Spy Who Loved, a new biography of this uniquely charismatic woman, has chosen to refer to her by the name she legally adopted when made a British citizen in 1947 and of which she was undoubtedly very proud.
At fi rst, Mulley, an award-winning biographer, was reluctant to take up her literary agent’s suggestion that she write a book on Granville, preferring to pick her own subjects, but as soon as she began her research she was captivated.
Christine was born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek in Warsaw on May 1, 1908. Her father was a Polish aristocrat and her mother the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker.
She was brought up in a manor house near Trzepnica in southern Poland but in 1926, when she was 18, the Goldfeder bank went under and the family was forced to sell off everything they owned and move to Warsaw. By that time, she had already established herself as a fearless and gifted horsewoman, a skilled skier and a captivating, dark-haired beauty.
In Warsaw, the aristocratic Skarbek name ensured she was invited to all the society parties but her half- Jewish ancestry and her family’s fi nancial misfortune meant she was gossiped about relentlessly.
Christine instead chose to spend her time in the city’s smoky cafes and bars often, shockingly, without a chaperone and in the company of young men. She took a job in a Fiat dealership and was a runner-up in the 1930 Miss Poland beauty contest.
Her experiences were to stand her in good stead for her later career as a spy. Mulley says: “Christine faced some ostracism before the war. It helped prepare her, although she didn’t know it, because she was used to living on the margins.
“When the war came, it turned everything around. Those people who were in the middle of society and were well known couldn’t really do much but she had been on the edge of society and had learnt how to manipulate it. She had made diplomatic contacts and knew journalists and was suddenly very well placed to take a central role in the war, which she did with gusto.”
Despite being lavishly decorated with a Croix de Guerre, the George medal and an OBE, Christine was not allowed to continue working for the British special services following the war and was forced to take work as a stewardess on cruise liners.
Although the job allowed her the freedom to travel, it involved a lot of drudgery and she was unpopular with colleagues who thought her a fraud.
“The c aptain of the fi rst ship she worked on, the Ruahine, insisted that all staff should wear any medals they had been awarded during the war.
Obviously, Christine had plenty of ribbons but the