Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Clare Mulley tells the extraordinary story of Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville)

In this YouTube video, award-winning author Clare Mulley tells the extraordinary story of Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville) - the first, and the longest serving, female special agent working for Britain in the Second World War. The talk was delivered as part of the Lunchtime Lectures series, - a programme of free talks that takes place at the National Army Museum in London every Thursday at 12.30pm.

I am sharing it with you because this is one of the best talks I have seen. It's just over 49 minutes long, but is absolutely gripping. Enjoy!

 

3 comments:

marcellous said...

Jim

I lacked the patience for a real-time broadcast so looked her up on Wikipedia.

Doubtless fascinating.

In my late father's effects were numerous reminiscences of this sort of thing, including a memoir of the WWII forerunner to the SAS. It's never clear to me how much such ventures really achieved in terms of contributing to ultimate victory, as apart from providing a safety valve for letting off high spirits of (mostly, not always) generally upper-class desperadoes - especially once the consequences of retaliations against civilian populations are taken into account. The SAS methods only really bore fruit in irregular warfare against colonial insurgents in the post-war years.

I guess that's a bit spoil-sportish of me, especially as I haven't watched the talk yet.

Jim Belshaw said...

Morning marcellous. I loved the performance I must admit.

Interesting on your Dad. I think that there were very mixed results. The commando raids out of Australia, for example, were badly handled, I think. But there were also considerable successes such as the pipeline used to get Polish pilots and military personnel out. They really added to the war effort.

Ralph B said...

Great share, thanks for posting