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Raffles 1887
STORIED SUITES
The Granville Suite at Raffles London at The OWO
CHRISTINE Granville was Britain’s first – and most successful – female agent of the Second World War. She carried out so many dangerous missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France that she became known as Churchill’s favourite spy. It was thanks to her that Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) decided to recruit more female agents in Nazi-occupied countries.
Initially Granville smuggled money, arms, explosives, intelligence and sometimes people in and out of Poland. In 1941 she was arrested in Hungary, but then released having persuaded the Gestapo she was suffering from TB. Later she was parachuted into Nazi-occupied southern France and travelled widely through enemy territory, conveying messages and, at one point, securing the release of three British agents awaiting execution.
Some claim Granville was the inspiration for the Vesper Lynd character in Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale. Whatever the truth in that, there’s no doubt that her astonishing derring-do earned her a George Medal and an OBE (and a Croix de Guerre). Not that this counted for much when she found herself in Cairo at the end of the war, jobless and stateless.
The problem was that Christine Granville was her nom de guerre. She was actually Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, the daughter of a Polish count and a Jewish heiress. As a former British agent, it was too dangerous for her to return to Poland, but because she wasn’t a British citizen, she had no right to enter Britain either. After kicking up a stink, threatening to return her George Medal and OBE, she was finally granted British citizenship in 1946 and settled in London. Sadly she died as she had lived, and just six years later she was stabbed to death by a spurned admirer.
The sensational Granville Suite at Raffles London at The OWO is set in a part of the building once used for military receptions and there’s no doubt that Christine Granville would have loved it: an aristocrat with no interest in domestic matters, she always did prefer hotels to houses.
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