Christine Granville: The Polish aristocrat who was Churchill's favourite spy
Britain's longest-serving World War Two spy, Christine Granville, risked her life countless times carrying out missions across Europe, yet today her contribution is barely known. Who was she and why does the nation owe her such a great debt?
On 15 June 1952, Granville returned to the west London hotel she called home, her flight to Belgium having been cancelled due to engine failure. After making her way to her usual room on the first floor, she heard a man in the lobby shouting her name and demanding the return of some letters. Downstairs, she found herself faced by her former lover who suddenly thrust a commando knife into her chest, fatally wounding her. Having survived many perilous situations on three different fronts during the course of World War Two, it was a bitter irony that she should lose her life in the apparent safety of a Kensington hotel.
Born in May 1908 as Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, she was the daughter of a Polish count and, through her mother, an heir to a Jewish banking family. She spent her early years running free on a grand country estate, a childhood that would profoundly influence her later life. "She'd been brought up used to a lot of freedom and adoration, taught to ride a horse, shoot a shotgun, all that sort of thing," says historian Clare Mulley, who is the author of The Spy Who Loved, a biography of Christine Granville - the identity the agent assumed while working for the British. In September 1939, she had been travelling in southern Africa with her second husband, a Polish diplomat, when they heard their homeland had been invaded by Nazi Germany. The couple headed straight to Britain to join the war effort. While her husband went on to France to join the Allied forces, Granville had a different plan as to how she could make a difference. "She storms off to what's meant to be the secret headquarters of MI6," says Mulley. "She doesn't so much volunteer as demand to be taken on."
Granville submitted a plan to ski across the Carpathian Mountains into Nazi-occupied Poland, to take in Allied propaganda material and funds and bring back intelligence about the occupation. As they had limited information about what was happening in Eastern Europe, it was a plan Britain's spy bosses liked and, according to Mulley, Granville was promptly signed up as MI6's first female recruit. Over the following years, the Polish exile became the stuff of legend in the intelligence community. "She was this countess who had all of these connections to varying people in the know," Mulley explains. "She spoke all the right languages... and she knew how to get in and out under the radar because when she'd been a rather bored countess - because she's a high-adrenalin woman - she used to smuggle cigarettes across the border skiing, just for kicks. She didn't even smoke."
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67298675
