Women: Special Operations Executive

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for initiating this debate. My grandfather, Lord Selborne, succeeded Dr Hugh Dalton in February 1942 as Minister of Economic Warfare and, as such, he had ministerial charge of the SOE for three years. In fact, near the end of his life he revealed that about three-quarters or four-fifths of his time was spent on the SOE, for the Ministry of Economic Warfare was of course a convenient name to disguise what was going on.

I had the great privilege of speaking at the unveiling of the SOE Memorial on the Albert Embankment on 4 October 2009. I suppose that I was really speaking for my grandfather and all those who had had such respect for, and first-hand knowledge of, SOE agents. I pay tribute to the trustees of the Public Memorials Appeal who raised the money for that monument—the first for all SOE agents—to be placed here in London. I also pay tribute to their foresight in having a female agent, Violette Szabo, represent all agents on it. That memorial faces us here at the Palace of Westminster and it could not be in a more suitable location. We have already heard that Violette Szabo was one of those posthumously awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre.

The SOE’s activities were not universally welcomed by other armed forces. Air Chief Marshal Portal described the agents as assassins, and the Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS, now known as MI6, viewed the SOE with great suspicion. I can quite imagine that the SOE did indeed confuse issues so far as MI6 and the Foreign Office were concerned. My grandfather spent a lot of his time defending his colleagues in the SOE from being undermined by other branches of government. Churchill could always be relied on for robust support but at the end of the war the SOE was unceremoniously wound up. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was no supporter, nor indeed was Anthony Eden, but Lord Selborne and Sir Colin Gubbins, the last executive director of the SOE, and many others felt that the astonishing bravery of the SOE agents and the very great contribution that the organisation had made to winning the war both in Europe and the Far East had not been adequately recognised. Certainly, the agents would not reveal their role to their own families and they were certainly not going to talk about their achievements. Therefore, this short debate could play a very important role in redressing this long historical grievance.