The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  † Major Victor Cazalet replaced Peter Wilkinson on the flight.

  ‡ Although no evidence of foul play has been found, conspiracy theories still surround General Sikorski’s death. After the war Captain Klimecki, one of Anders’s adjutants, returned to Poland and accused Anders of Sikorski’s assassination, only to later face accusations of being a Communist agitator himself. In 1947 the military governor of Warsaw made the same accusations against Anders in the Polish parliament. Some years later Moses Szapiro, an intelligence officer also known as Edward Szarkiewicz, confessed to planning the assassination attempt in Cairo, although his testimony is also open to question. It is quite possible that Christine met all these men in Cairo, but there is no record that she knew of any assassination plans.

  * The ‘M’ came from Gubbins’s middle name, McVean, as the initial ‘C’ was already taken. Ben Macintyre suggests that Gubbins was one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’ in the Bond series, as was Fleming’s mother, who also signed her letters to her son ‘M’. See Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond (2008), p. 63.

  * The surviving cousin, Dominik Horodyński, later married Wladimir Ledóchowski’s niece, and became a well-known journalist. After the fall of Communism in Poland he was allowed to build a memorial to his family at their estate.

  * Kate O’Malley burnt the manuscript of her novel, but ten years later helped her mother, the author Ann Bridge, to rewrite the story. It was published as A Place to Stand in the 1950s. See Ann Bridge, Facts and Fictions (1968), p. 83.

  * Porter soon made good use of these tricks himself behind the lines in Romania.

  * Francis Cammaerts’s parents were Émile Cammaerts and Helen Braun.

  * Francis called Auguste ‘the best man and most reliable friend I had’, and regularly pressed for him to be decorated for his ‘heroic work’. Despite having the longest record of unbroken wireless service in France, Auguste did not receive British decorations. In his February 1945 SOE debrief, the interviewer concluded: ‘Informant gave the impression that he had been over cautious during his clandestine activities … did not give the impression that he ever took those risks which have to be taken if positive results are to be obtained.’ All of Auguste’s family had been arrested by the Nazis and his wife and teenage daughter were sent to Ravensbrück. See HS6/570, Deschamps, interrogations (27.2.1945).

  * The officers evacuating compromised agents and resisters from this sheltered bay to Falmouth were using the same route as the real-life Scarlet Pimpernels of the French Revolution.

  * Francis lobbied for Gormal to be decorated, but having returned to Britain with rest of the crew he was shot down and killed twenty-four hours before VE day.

  * The Imperial War Museum has a Polish Vis Radom gun, displayed as having belonged to Christine Granville, but without any provenance. There are no references to this gun in her files, but she may have acquired it in Warsaw, Budapest, Cairo or Algiers.

  * It has been claimed both that de Gaulle used the phrase in his broadcast of 5 June 1944, but that it was not included in the list of transmitted messages in the BBC archives. See Michael Pearson, Tears of Glory: The Betrayal of Vercors 1944 (1978), p. 42.

  * Their affair was kept quiet. Maurice Buckmaster, SOE’s Head of F Section, said agents were organized into groups ‘that would get on well together, but not too well. I mean, in other words, that the organiser wouldn’t want to go to bed with the courier all the time … we never had any problems of that kind’. IWM, Sound Archive, 8680.

  * Captain Jean Tournissa, alias Paquebot, died a week later, on 18 August 1944.

  * MI9’s Christopher Hutton created silk maps so that they would not rustle inside clothes should an agent be searched.

  * Paddy O’Regan was not surprised that the Germans believed these rather wild claims. ‘I would have believed anything that Christine told me and done anything she asked. So would and did anyone who knew her’, he wrote. His wife, however, pointed out that they would only have had to start speaking in English to catch Christine out. See Liddell Hart archive, Paddy O’Regan papers; and Mieczysława Wazacz (director), No Ordinary Countess (2010), Ann O’Regan interview.

  * This ruse had already been played successfully, with more circumstantial evidence if no more truth, by Odette Sansom. After her arrest Sansom had claimed (falsely) to be fellow agent Peter Churchill’s wife and (spuriously) therefore a relation of the British PM. It was a bluff that may have helped to save her life.

  * Xan Fielding later returned to Digne as an adviser for the film of Bill Stanley Moss’s book, Ill Met By Moonlight. When the film team discovered that their hotel was adjacent to the building where Fielding had been interrogated, they suggested moving at once. Fielding laughed it off, saying he was glad to be back under such different circumstances. ‘This calls for a bottle of champagne’, Dirk Bogarde responded. See Daphne Fielding, The Nearest Way Home (1970).

  * Francis stayed in touch with Vercors veteran Daniel Huillier, whose father had been ‘like a brother’ to him, sending a bottle of ‘Don Chevalier Huillier’ Bordeaux wine every year. Daniel remembered that in his last letter Francis ‘considered himself French, he wasn’t with you foreigners. He considered himself French’. M. R. D. Foot mentioned that at one point Claude Renoir gave Francis one of his grandfather’s paintings, though Francis’s daughter, Joanna, had not heard of this.

  * Vera Atkins had a reputation for excellent judgement. Her eyebrows were ‘as poised as a Georgian candelabra’, one agent recalled, while Riols found her ‘terrifying … very formidable’ and only dared call her by her first name when they were both in their seventies, and then ‘only at Vera’s insistence’. George Millar, Maquis (1946), p. 19; Noreen Riols interview (October 2011).

  * Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944. The plot failed and he was executed by firing squad shortly afterwards.

  * This was not the only muddle that touched Hudson. Undercover in Yugoslavia in 1941, all his messages were indecipherable until the London team realized they were using a different edition of the Reader’s Digest to code by. See Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide, p. 85.

  * Neither Andrzej nor Leigh Fermor were sent, and many prisoners were killed in early 1945, including the SOE female agents Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. Andrzej ended the war with Leigh Fermor, ‘swanning into Hamburg, Flensburg and Kiel and then, deliriously, into Liberated Denmark’. See the Spectator, Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘The One-Legged Parachutist’, (1.1.1989).

  † Cammaerts later also visited Ravensbrück, where he must have spent some time thinking about Christine’s predecessor in France, Cecily Lefort.

  * Although there were voices of support for the Poles, notably from the future Labour leader Michael Foot, in June 1946, 56 per cent of Britons polled were in favour of sending the émigrés back to Poland, while only 30 per cent felt they should be entitled to stay. See Lynn Olson and Stanley Cloud, For Your Freedom and Ours: The Kościuszko Squadron – Forgotten Heroes of World War II (2004), p. 401.

  * Cammaerts was awarded the British DSO, French Chevalier (later Officier) of the Légion d’Honneur, and Croix de Guerre, and the Medal of Freedom and Silver Star of the USA.

  * As, for reasons unknown, Britain had refused her a travel permit for Germany, Christine travelled anyhow and then asked Nina Tamplin, who was working in Berlin, to get her a permit. See Masson (1975), p. xxx.

  * A year later Francis and Nan’s son was born, and they named him Paul, after Francis’s friend, the French resistance leader Paul Hérault.

  * Christine’s distant relative Countess Maria Grocholska was connected to Rudolf Schelich, a functionary at the pre-war German Embassy in Warsaw who later served as a Nazi intelligence agent. See Roman Buczek, The Musketeers (1985), p. 41.

  † Stanisław Mackiewicz would serve as prime minister of the unrecognized Polish government-in-exile between 1954 and 1955.

  * After arriving in London, Łub
ienska devoted herself to fighting for rights and compensation for former Polish prisoners-of-war.

  * One evening Ludwig Popiel took Maryś out dancing, was too broke to pay the bill, dropped her home, and then shinned up the drainpipe to claim a kiss before he left. As Maryś was sleeping on her mother’s bedroom floor she acquiesced to keep the peace, only to have him climb back up moments later, having forgotten his hat.

  † Not expecting to get much more use from her Cairo evening dresses, Zofia sent one to Andrzej’s delighted niece in Warsaw, where it was impossible to buy clothes, but where there was little call for ball dresses.

  * Smolenski’s brother in Poland was then arrested on the pretext that Smolenski was working for the Americans.

  * The handwriting is not her own, and the initials below the message are undecipherable. Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, Christine Granville papers (1949–50).

  † Probably Colonel Cookham.

  ‡ Hanka Nicolle was the sister of the diplomat, journalist and author Tadeusz Breza.

  * Andrzej Skarbek’s first wife, Irena, lived until 1982, and their daughter Teresa, Christine’s goddaughter, until 2002. Their family photos were passed to Teresa’s son, Andrzej Christian, born in 1956. Both Irena and Teresa were buried in the Skarbek family plot in Powązki Cemetery. It is not known what happened to Andrzej’s second wife, Alexandra.

  † At least once that summer Christine underwent some radium treatment in Bonn, but unfortunately there is no record of whether this was for a benign condition, often treated with radiation in the 1950s, or for something more serious.

  * Free-passage schemes had been set up to the Antipodes for ex-servicemen, with the first 200 families leaving in November 1946.

  * Aniela (Lela) Pawlikowska (1901–80) later also sketched Maryś Tarnowska and Jan Skarbek on the eve of their wedding, and Zofia Tarnowska Moss’s daughters with their cousins and aunt Ada Lubomirska, although this was not to mark any particular occasion.

  † Instead he started legal action. By March 1952 Andrzej was pursuing £30,000 in damages to his personal reputation and business position in Germany, in addition to repayment of his investment.

  * There are conflicting reports of this evening. Sonya Masters claimed to have been at the supper party, and to have seen a man staring through the café windows, prompting Christine to respond rather stylishly that ‘when I was twelve or thirteen my father gave me a rifle and took me wolf-hunting. We had plenty of wild wolves in Poland in those days. I got lost and was attacked by a hungry wolf pack of perhaps ten to twelve beasts. I took my rifle and shot and killed them – all of them. Since that day I have not been afraid of men or wolves.’ Popiel, however, claimed that he had not walked Christine home because he understood Muldowney was safely in police custody. Later Stanisław Mackiewicz claimed to have walked her home, kissing her hand goodnight as he turned down her offer to come in. ‘No doubt, if that night I had accepted Krystyna’s invitation to visit her at her hotel, I would have been the first to be stabbed in the stomach’, he selfishly concluded. See Mackiewicz, Two Ladies Die After Talking to Me (1972).

  * He later told the police that he thought he had stabbed her in the shoulder.

  * Complete sets of dentures, or false teeth, were still common at this time, sported by Winston Churchill amongst others.

  * Christine’s cousin, Andrzej Skarbek, identified her body on 17 June 1952. When he came out he was surrounded by press photographers and journalists, all anxious for a story.

  * Four years later this would be replaced by a 10-foot-high wooden cross carved from a Zakopane pine, and set in a headstone engraved ‘Krystyna Skarbek-Granville, GM, OBE, Croix de Guerre avec palmes, Poland 1.5.15 – London 15.6.52’, alongside the ‘W’ symbol from the Skarbek coat of arms. The cross holds a shield bearing the Polish White Eagle protecting the Madonna of Częstochowa.

  † The few missing names included Christine’s former husband, Jerzy Giżycki, still in Canada, and Wladimir Ledóchowski, who was working in remote southern Africa. ‘Is it possible for two lives as intertwined as were yours and mine, to disentangle to such an extent that the most important decision – when to die – could be taken unilaterally?’ he later wondered. See Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Skarbek-Granville: A Biographical Story’, p. 3.

  * Teresa Łubienska was fatally stabbed on 24 May 1957, on the eastbound platform of the Piccadilly Line at Gloucester Road underground station. General Anders awarded her the posthumous Golden Cross of Merit with swords. See Jonathan Oates, Unsolved London Murders: The 1940s and 1950s (2009).

  † For some former SOE officers and agents, the fear of retribution was very real. Peter Wilkinson reportedly never joined the Special Forces Club, as he was concerned not to associate with anyone who might know people he had helped to send to their death.

  * The name Olga Bialoguski is incorrect. Polish men’s names of this type end in ‘-ski’, women’s names end in ‘-ska’, suggesting that McCormick invented this name. However, he also references Sir Owen O’Malley as O’Reilly, so the mistake may have been genuine.

  † For a more thorough examination of Donald McCormick, see Jeremy Duns, ‘Licence to Hoax’, www.jeremyduns.blogspot.com (2011).

  ‡ Maria Nurowska, Miłośnica (1999). Nurowska’s father, Stanisław Rudziejewski, was the Polish soldier whose odorous feet and Virtuti Militari had drawn the attention of Jerzy Skarbek at the Warsaw opera between the wars, and who later helped Christine in occupied Poland.

  * Andrzej liked to tell a story that in 1960 he was stopped and breathalysed while driving home across the British controlled-zone of Germany after downing a bottle of whisky. At the station the police noticed that his car had American number-plates, and seeing that his name was Kennedy, they let him off, assuming he was celebrating his family’s election victory that night in the USA. In another story, in London Zofia Tarnowska once swung open the door of his Porsche without looking, only to have it ripped off by an oncoming car. She was so upset that Andrzej felt compelled to buy her some perfume to restore her good spirits.

  * The portrait, wireless, knife and some papers were donated to the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, where the painting is now on display above the stairs.

  * In 1945 Private Reginald Keymer walked free from a cheering Nottingham Court room despite admitting strangling his pregnant wife in a local maternity hospital. A year later Frederick Booth strangled his unfaithful spouse in a jealous rage, only to be acquitted after just seven minutes’ deliberation. See Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War (2009), p. 95.

  † See for example the films They Made Me A Fugitive (1947) and The Flamingo Affair (1948); the books Raymond English, The Pursuit of Purpose (1947) and Elizabeth Taylor, A Wreath of Roses (1949). See also Alan Allport, Demobbed, pp. 162–74.

  * Unless otherwise stated, all French sources privately translated by Albertine Sharples.

  † Unless otherwise stated, all Polish sources privately translated by Maciek and Iwona Helfer.

  * Bridge built her novels around her experiences as Sir Owen O’Malley’s wife. The Tightening String describes the start of the war in Hungary, A Place to Stand is based on Christine and Andrzej’s time in Hungary, and was first drafted by Bridge’s daughter, Kate O’Malley.

  † The fictional Ginette, Countess de Maris, in Lyall’s Midnight Plus One, is based on Sylviane Rey.

  ‡ Manning used her life in Cairo during the war to inform her Levant Trilogy of novels.

  § Nurowska’s Polish novel about Christine was informed by her father’s memories; Wladimir Ledóchowski’s unpublished manuscript; and interviews with Christine’s post-war London friends.

  * Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

 

 

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