Never-before-seen photos of the beauty queen who became Churchill's favourite spy

Blackleaf

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Oct 9, 2004
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She was the deadly special agent who charged headlong into occupied territory to fight for her country and the Jewish mother who was killed in a concentration camp.

Christine Granville (real name Krystyna Skarbek) - the favourite spy of Winston Churchill - worked for years for British secret service organisation SOE (aka the Baker Street Irregulars) undermining the Nazi regime despite having a short life expectancy in the field.

But these pictures, which have languished in the archives of the Imperial War Museum for decades, show another side to the decorated fighter who made a name for herself as both a killer and a man-eater.


In a photograph taken after the war, deadly Polish/British secret agent Christine Granville - real name Krystyna Skarbek - who worked for Britain's SOE, smiles for a never-before-seen picture


The former beauty queen, whose life and work will feature in a talk at the Churchill War Rooms, in London, on September 17, has good reason to be cheerful as she smiles for the camera with a knowing sideways glance.

As shown by the military badge pinned above her heart, the war was over and she had no reason to hide, instead posing with perfect poise as she savoured the rewards of her heroism.

However, the other images in the collection show the darker side of her work where devastation and death were part of her daily existence.



Christine poses with resistance members in the Haut-Savoie region of France in August 1944


Christine poses in the wreckage of a bridge she and the French resistance had just blown up in southern France

But in her wartime exploits, destruction was never far from Christine's thoughts - or her actions.

She famously always kept a knife strapped to her thigh, so that she was ready for action at any time.


Christine, a native of Poland who was born Krystyna Skarbek, volunteered in 1939 after her homeland fell to the Nazis.


She was enrolled in what was then known as 'Section D' - short for destruction - which would later become the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which undertook espionage, reconnaissance and sabotage missions in occupied territory.

The fledgling spy was given the cover name Christine Granville, which she adopted permanently after the war.

She was sent first on missions between Hungary - then neutral - and occupied Poland, where she proved her mettle as an intelligence courier, skiing by night to dodge border patrols in temperatures of -30 Celsius.





Website of the Churchill War Rooms: http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/churchill-war-rooms
 
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