This feature first appeared in March 2024 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
It can be easy to look at the blue plaques scattering London or watch any of a thousand war films, and think, okay, the stories of the battles, the sacrifices, the victories, the losses and the courage that determined the direction of the Second World War are the stories of men.
And yet women were parachuting into occupied France and smuggling arms across the Polish border on skis and codebreaking messages that changed British military strategy; women were serving on the frontline of the Blitz as doctors and firefighters, and piloting planes across the UK through embattled skies; women were inventing Spitfire modifications that fundamentally altered the balance of power between British and German pilots in the Battle of Britain.
So here, a handful of war service stories, to stand as examples of countless more that get less airtime than they deserve.
(Content warning: this feature - and many of the articles and interviews linked to - discusses wartime service and deals with death, injury and trauma.)
Christine Granville/Krystyna Skarbek
Britain’s longest-serving female secret agent only became Christine Granville in 1941, after a run-in with the Gestapo forced her to assume a new identity.
She was born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek in 1908, into an aristocratic Polish-Jewish family. When Germany invaded Poland, she and her then-husband abandoned their travels through southern Africa and moved to England to help defend their homeland from Nazi rule. Unlike many agents serving then, approached and recruited by the intelligence services for their background or skillsets, Skarbek did the running: she sought out an MI6 representative and convinced them to bring her into the fold. She then crafted an extraordinary mission proposal: she’d travel to neutral Hungary, secretly cross the mountains and infiltrate the border of occupied Poland on skis, transport in weapons, arms and money to supply the resistance movement there, and return with intelligence. Which she did. Multiple times.
During the course of her espionage career she was arrested by the Gestapo and tricked her way out of imprisonment, and adopted the identity Christine Granville to evade their attention on future missions. During other missions she also - among countless action-hero moments - parachuted into occupied France, crossed the Alps on foot with a backpack full of hand grenades, arranged the destruction of a Nazi-held fortress in a key strategic position, and rescued two British agents being held by the Gestapo.
Her loyalty wasn't repaid well by the British government, who left her post-war with a month's salary and, without a British passport, 'virtually stateless' (written about by Xan Fielding, one of the agents she saved from the Gestapo, in Hide And Seek). Her war record was often disbelieved, and at least once she was accused of fraudulent claims when she wore the medals she’d received. Eventually granted British citizenship, Granville struggled to find steady employment and settled at the Shellbourne Hotel, which provided cheap accommodation for Polish emigres. She lived there from 1949 until 1952 when, aged just 44, she was brutally murdered by a former lover who had been stalking her.
There’s now a blue plaque commemorating her bravery in Kensington, on the site where the Shellbourne once stood.
Dr Joan Martin
Exactly 80 years ago today, on 3 March 1943, Dr Joan Martin was on duty as a casualty officer at the Children’s Hospital on Hackney Road. It was the night of the worst civilian loss of life of the Blitz, when 173 men, women and children died in Bethnal Green underground station, caught in a crush trying to descend into the air-raid shelter in the station. That night Dr Martin treated those injured in the crush, and received the many, many bodies of those who had been killed, and referred to it, when speaking to the East London Advertiser in 2014, as ‘the worst night of my medical career’.
"We worked through the night, my two medical students and I. I kept waiting for a consultant to come, but no-one came… I had only been qualified for one year and yet here I was in charge of this desperately impossible situation.”
For a long time after the tragedy the government covered it up, claiming it would damage morale if the scale of the disaster were known. When Dr Martin was able to speak publicly, decades later, about her experience she spoke of lasting trauma, and still experiencing panic in crowded stations.
The fullest description in her own words of the tragedy, the subsequent cover-up and the impact on her own life I could find is in this BBC interview. And we’ve made a video of the memorial to the tragedy here - Dr Martin attended its unveiling in 2017, a few months before she died at the age of 102.
Adelaide Hall
In August 1940, Adelaide Hall - singer, entertainer, Broadway star and new(ish)ly arrived Londoner - performed at the Lewisham Hippodrome in what became an unexpected marathon of a show. She performed till 3.45am, powering through 54 songs, through hours of bombs dropping outside.
"On this particular night the Luftwaffe struck but even though we could hear bombs exploding outside the theatre, we carried on. We were told that no-one could leave the theatre because it was too dangerous. Outside everything was burning. So we carried on…"
One of the most extraordinary things about Adelaide Hall’s career might be how rarely that night - a 54-song set, bombs raining down, Hall commanding the Hippodrome and even convincing the audience to join in as fires rage around them - gets a mention.
As Stephen Bourne records in an article about Hall's wartime performances (from which the quote above is taken), her wartime service often doesn’t attract much focus - partly, maybe, because she had a long and extraordinary career both pre- and post-war, littered with other, more glamorous and celebrity-strewn achievements. Already renowned in her native USA and in Europe when she arrived in London in 1938, she made the city her home for the rest of her life and became one of Britain’s highest paid entertainers, the first Black female artist in the Royal Variety Performance, TV regular, and continued performing sell-out concerts and attending awards events* until the year before she died, in 1993, at the age of 92. But during the Second World War she was relentlessly dedicated to bringing her adopted country moments of brightness during dark times - often literally, as she regularly performed in air-raid shelters during the Blitz to distract her audience from the dangers outside.
Noor Inayat Khan
You could fill a list like this many times over solely with the women serving as secret agents behind enemy lines. Noor Inayat Khan, unlike many of them, has a blue plaque commemorating her heroism and also a statue in a quiet corner of a Bloomsbury public garden, now - though as this Guardian article explores, it took a long time and a lot of campaigning for that recognition to be achieved. Her statue also became the first freestanding memorial to a woman of an Asian background anywhere in the UK.
Khan was the daughter of a Sufi mystic and a poet, born in London and raised in Paris. Returning to London during the war, she volunteered for the intelligence services. Testimony from her brother (who also volunteered for service) tells us that she struggled with the conflict between her pacifist principles, and her belief that she had a duty to try to fight the advance of Nazism. After joining the SOE, Khan became the first female radio operator in occupied France, and remained in post while most of her fellow operatives were hunted down by the Gestapo.
After her eventual capture, she refused to hand over sensitive information despite many months of imprisonment, questioning and torture. Other prisoners reported hearing her cry at night; by day and under Nazi interrogation she was defiant to her last breath. She was taken to Dachau camp and shot on 12 September 1944, aged just 30. Her final word was reportedly ‘Liberté’.
Khan was awarded the George Cross posthumously for exceptional bravery.
Vera Atkins/Vera Maria Rosenberg
It’s often said that Vera Atkins might have been Ian Fleming’s inspiration for Miss Moneypenny in the Bond novels. If that’s the case, the Bond franchise has done her a massive disservice, as she was, at my estimate, roughly 90% more fearsome — and wielded far more power — than any Moneypenny depiction across the Bond franchise has ever come close to portraying.
While Atkins entered the SOE as a secretary she was, fundamentally, working as a spymaster; she became the second-in-command intelligence officer for the French division, responsible for recruitment, briefing, training and deploying hundreds of secret agents. And for avenging them.
At the end of the war, 118 agents were still missing, unaccounted for behind enemy lines. Atkins** made it her mission to track them down: to find out their fates and enact justice. For years she did just that, tracing the capture and deaths of all but one of them, and bringing their murderers to justice where she could. Records of this period reflect her dedication to the task; she became renowned for her successful interrogations of Nazi officers, with confessions she obtained used as evidence to help convict Rudolf Hess in the Nuremberg Trials. Atkins died at the age of 92, in 2000.
*Let’s take a moment to appreciate this magnificent quote from Hall after she attended the 1992 awards ceremony for the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (at which she was honoured).
"I was so proud to be acknowledged. They said, 'You look like a Queen. You don't look more than fifty or sixty. You look so well.' I wore a sequin suit – different colours – it glittered. I must have been the oldest one there! I ate everything that came along."
To reiterate: she was 91! She died the following year! But here Hall is, RSVPing hell yes, grateful for her recognition, proud of her career and also proud of how much awards-ceremony-food she put away, flexing a little over the compliments she got, getting gorgeous with it in multicoloured sequins and, generally, showing up more vividly in her 90s than most celebrities do at the height of their career.
Disclaimer that this quote is from her Wikipedia page and I haven’t found a record of it elsewhere. But I want it to be real, and — based on her defiant, performing-54-encores-with-so-much-charisma-the-audience-are-joining-in-even-as-bombs-explode-around-you history — I think it’s very reasonable to believe that it is.
** Perhaps prompted by guilt; it’s been alleged that negligence from within the SOE in interpreting messages transmitted by agents behind enemy lines contributed to the capture and murders of a number of their agents. (Sarah Helm, in her biography of Atkins - review and overview here - attributes the blame to Buckmaster’s incompetence as a spymaster, rather than to Atkins.)
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