Women: Special Operations Executive

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Baroness Crawley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to recognise the contribution made by women put on active service by the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, might I remind your Lordships that this is a timed debate? When the clock says three, you have completed your three minutes and should give way to the next speaker so that all those on the speakers list have the opportunity to contribute.

[Baroness Crawley]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords taking part in tonight's debate, especially for their patience. Their knowledge and experience will indeed enhance our proceedings. I am sure we would wish to remember our dear colleague Baroness Park who, were she with us today, would surely have taken part. I open my remarks by congratulating the Government on the recent announcement that the UK is to donate £2 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. As the years pass, ever fewer of those who saw active service in the Second World War are still with us and, today, so much public attention is understandably focused on immediate conflicts. It is precisely for this reason that those of us who have the privilege to be in Parliament in this era should find the time to reflect on the effort mounted by so many, all those years ago, to rid Europe of fascism and especially to liberate France.

In this Question for Short Debate, I am revisiting the history of the women of the Special Operations Executive F Section, while acknowledging the tremendous debt that we owe to all members of the SOE. I am asking out loud whether the Government agree that not enough has been done to commemorate them formally. The women concerned were recruited to serve in occupied France. They acted variously as couriers, wireless operators and saboteurs. They found places for planes to land, bringing more agents and supplies. They established safe houses and worked with resistance movements to disrupt the occupation and clear the path for the allied advance.

Those women did these things, given wartime pressures, after a very brief period of training. Apparently, they had each been told when recruited that there was only a 50 per cent chance of personal survival—yet, to their eternal credit, off they went. Some had been born in France, some in Britain, a couple in Ireland and some still further afield. Some were Jewish, some convent-educated, one Muslim. Some were already mothers, some just out of their teens; some shop assistants, some journalists, some wives; some were rather poor. In France, they often had to travel hundreds of miles by bike and train, protected only by forged papers, and as they went about their frequently exhausting work they were under constant danger of arrest by the Gestapo. Some were even exposed to betrayal by double agents and turncoats.

The story of what happened to some of those women is often unreadable and, in 21st-century Britain, is perhaps too easily under-remembered. A number were captured in France, horribly brutalised and sent to camps in Germany. There, the torment was often sustained over weeks and months on starvation diets, the women crammed in unsanitary and overcrowded huts with disease rampant. Four of them were killed in Natzweiler by being injected—scarcely credible as it is—with disinfectant. A number, once worked and beaten to a standstill, were shot and hanged at Dachau and Ravensbrück.

From the list of those who survive, the House will perhaps recall the case of Eileen Nearne, whose death in lonely poverty in Torquay only last year provoked so much controversy. Over the post-war years, a number of initiatives have taken place publically to remember and honour these women. There have been plays, movies and TV programmes. There have been a number of biographies of specific individuals. There has been the occasional small mural and a number of memorials around the country. Most recently, we see the bust of Violette Szabo, her head facing this very House, on the Albert Embankment.

At this point, I will mention those who, over the years and up to the present day, work to keep alive the memory of these outstandingly brave women. In this respect, I mention Shrabni Basu and the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust, currently raising funds to build a statue to her in Gordon Square in London. I mention the Violette Szabo Museum in Herefordshire, run by Miss Rosemary Rigby, who I had the pleasure of meeting recently. I also mention the efforts mounted by Madame Szabo’s daughter Tania, who has commemorated her mother in a wonderful book and website. More generally, we know, of course, of the work done every day by the Royal British Legion and other bodies, such as the Allied Special Forces Association. Plenty of people care very deeply about this.

These days, however, the preponderance of effort from the relevant organisations is directed at preserving existing memorials relating to the Second World War rather than creating new ones. However understandable this might be, we just cannot let the mist of oblivion creep over the memory of these women. It would be wonderful if there could indeed be a special new memorial to them. I ask how the Minister feels about that point and how it might be organised.

However, all memorials need not just be pieces of metal or stone. We need to remind our artists of these achievements and sacrifices. We need to prompt those who name new streets and halls of residence and blocks of flats. We have a tradition of celebratory and memorial stamps that could be revisited. We need to bring this story into schools and into the curriculum. We need to encourage English Heritage and other bodies to allow plaques to appear on the houses where these women once lived.

The women to whom I refer are Cecily Lefort, Diana Rowden, Eliane Plewman, Yvette Cormeau, Yolande Beekman, Pearl Witherington, Elizabeth Reynolds, Anne-Marie Walters, Madeleine Damerment, Denise Bloch, Eileen Nearne, Yvonne Baseden, Patricia O'Sullivan, Yvonne Fontaine, Lilian Rolfe, Violette Szabo, Muriel Byck, Odette Wilen, Nancy Wake, Phyliss Latour, Marguerite Knight, Madeleine Lavigne, Sonya Butt, Ginette Jullian, Christine Granville, Gillian Gerson, Virginia Hall, Yvonne Rudellat, Blanche Charlet, Andrée Borrel, Lise de Baissac, Mary Herbert, Odette Sansom, Marie-Thérèse Le Chene, Sonia Olschanezky, Jacqueline Nearne, Francine Agazarian, Julienne Aisner, Vera Leigh, Noor Inayat Khan and Vera Atkins. Even, and especially, Hansard can be a memorial, too.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Baroness Crawley]

Many of the women of whom I speak tonight went on to live lives of ordinary toil, making a living, raising a family, paying their taxes, watching the television. They got on with things as best they could, just as they did what needed to be done in the 1940s. I can only guess how heavily their wartime experiences weighed on them and their families. Their greatest memorial is, of course, a free Europe: a Europe that was liberated to build peace and prosperity over the decades to come.

However, it has to be our insistence that, as new generations appear, this story does not become a sad sepia snapshot of a fast-fading time, but a story retold, refreshed and respected anew.

This House and the Government of the day carry a clear debt of honour: a duty of care to perpetuate the memory of our SOE women.

To live now for so long in a Europe purged of fascism, where millions have a reasonable chance of living their lives without enduring prejudice and brutality, where minorities can hope to be free, where political ideas compete inside democratic institutions and are not imposed by thuggery, must have seemed like an exotic fantasy in those early days of the 1940s. As the women of whom we speak today knew better than most, none of this comes cheap. My granddaughter’s granddaughter should be able to know and see this story—this wonder of sacrifice, determination and achievement—in a century still to come. That is why I put down this Question tonight.