Wartime spy who and dashing men
other staff didn’t believe a woman could have won them and thought she was a liar.” The only person who took her side was a steward called Dennis Muldowney and a friendship was born. Mulley believes they may also have been lovers but he was not in Christine’s usual league. She soon tired of him and tried to end the association.
However, Muldowney took to hanging around Christine’s London haunts and the Shelbourne Hotel in Kensington where she stayed when back in the city. It was there that he stabbed her through the heart with a commando knife, claiming, when the police were called, that: “I did it because I loved her.”
The last statement he made before he was hanged was: “To kill is the fi nal possession.”
Following her death in 1952, five of the men whose lives she had touched set up the Panel To Protect The Memory Of Christine Granville. It was led by Andrzej Kowerski, a one-legged Polish war hero whom Christine had known as a child.
Theirs was probably her most enduring relationship. He had proposed numerous times and it seems that she may fi nally have accepted him “but the day before she got on a fl ight to meet him, she was murdered”, says Mulley.
They worked hard to protect her reputation, suppressing various attempts at biography including a proposed biopic written by Ill Met By Moonlight author William Stanley Moss starring Winston Churchill’s actress daughter Sarah.
A book by Madeline Masson was eventually published in 1975 but, since then, more papers have come to light including personal letters in Christine’s own hand. So Mulley’s fastidiously researched tome provides the most detailed picture yet.
Through their protectiveness Christine’s selfappointed defenders may have, ironically, led to her being largely forgotten but Mulley thinks that it is for the best that her story wasn’t told in full until now. “In 1952, people were not open to the idea of women who lived and loved as Christine did,” she says. “When they think about women in the Resistance they have this very romantic and tragic idea of it. Perhaps the most famous resistance fighter is Charlotte Gray who is fictional (created by author Sebastian Faulks).
“If Christine’s story were told before it might have been twisted to make her fit in with some fictional ideal of a self-sacrificing wartime heroine when she was no such thing.
“Her defi ning trait is her passion: her passion for drama and adventure, her passion for men and above all her passion for freedom. She was a woman who loved life.”
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets And Lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s First Female Special Agent Of World War II by Clare Mulley is out now (Macmillan, £18.99)