The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (56 page)

If so, Christine would not have been the first former agent to sometimes consider ways to end her life. Francis Cammaerts later admitted that ten of his close friends from the war committed suicide, some straight after the conflict, some thirty years later.
13
But while Christine and Muldowney may well have once discussed death during a low moment on the
Ruahine,
she was essentially a fighter; it does not seem in character for her to have seriously considered a pointless end, and while she might later have taunted him or dared him to do his worst, it is unlikely that she expected him to pull the deed off. As usual, Christine had moved on, and in her mind another lover had been consigned to the past. Muldowney however, constructing his own fantasy, seemed to believe that he had remained loyal to Christine’s wishes. ‘We made certain arrangements’, he told his siblings, which had to remain ‘secret’, but he was convinced that ‘if she were around she would back me, I am sure of that!’
14

Muldowney was clearly deluded, an emotionally damaged individual, obsessive, poorly treated by Christine perhaps, and unable to cope with rejection. In fact he claimed that both he and Christine ‘were a couple of “Nuts” by rational standards’, but he proudly said that he refused to hide ‘behind a cloak of insanity’.
15
It should not have been his choice. Muldowney’s sad childhood history, the nature of his relationship with Christine, and his mental health, are not relevant to his guilt, but rightly or wrongly, they might have had significance for his sentencing.

After the Second World War there was a rise in violent crime in Britain, much of it against women by their returning menfolk. In 1945 and 1946 a series of murders of wives by their husbands hit the headlines. With domestic violence still largely seen as a private matter, and adultery regarded as serious provocation, those cases that reached court were generally presented as crimes of passion, requiring a degree of sympathy and resulting in some extremely light sentencing. In several murder cases where the wife had been unfaithful, the defendant was acquitted completely.
*
Over the next few years a series of popular books and films centred, not entirely unsympathetically, on war heroes emasculated by a post-war world and striking back at the women around them.
†
Muldowney knew he was not a returning hero, but that this was Christine’s role did not emasculate him any less. As a regular cinema-goer, to some extent he may have conceived of his plan as within the bounds of recognized behaviour, if not of acceptability, and the fact was that violence against women was generally seen as more acceptable.

In this climate, had the jury had a fuller picture of events, and Muldowney’s own mental state, it is possible that they might have felt compelled to request some leniency in sentencing. As it was, Christine was presented as both a Countess and a ‘brilliant wartime Secret Services agent’ who had been decorated for saving the lives of other heroes.
16
Muldowney was ‘a lowly-born man from Wigan’, with no distinguished war-record, an ‘unreliable informant’ and ‘fantasist’ according to prison doctors, and a self-confessed killer.
17
He was not Christine’s husband, and there seemed little to reason to believe his claim that they had had an intimate relationship. In any case Muldowney did not press the point. ‘I owed her some’, he wrote to his family. ‘That is why “they” only knew that which I, “intended”.’
18
The jury made no recommendation for mercy, and after the trial the Secretary of State was unable to find sufficient grounds to overturn the death sentence.

Muldowney had no wish to live in any case. His life, he said, offered no interest for him now that Christine, ‘with whom he was still very much in love’, was dead.
19
On the night before his last hearing he tore strips from his prison bed-sheets, trying unsuccessfully to make a rope of his own. When sentence was passed and he heard that he would be ‘taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, and there suffer death by hanging, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul’, he only commented ‘He will’, in what the papers noted was a ‘self-assured voice’.
20
Only the
Mail
commented, rather more humanely, that Muldowney had ‘tried to live up to Christine’s standards. He insisted on pleading guilty, knowing the consequences’.
21
‘And so he will hang, and uselessly, wastefully, bang go two lives’, Christine’s friend Kate O’Malley wrote reflectively to her parents. ‘I suppose we must pray also for his poor benighted soul.’
22

Dennis George Muldowney was executed by hanging at Pentonville prison at nine o’clock on the rainy morning of Tuesday 30 September 1952. After the post-mortem the prison authorities recorded that ‘the execution was carried out in a humane manner’ and ‘death must certainly have been instantaneous’.
23
With the sentence carried out, Andrzej Kowerski and Christine’s other friends might now try to move forward in their own lives, although Andrzej would never get over his loss. It was not the end of the story for the Muldowney family either.

Muldowney’s son, John, turned twelve while his father was in prison. He had not seen his father for some years, and his mother had already remarried by 1952. After the trial she told the papers that she hoped her son would never know who his father was.
24
This was probably as Muldowney would have wished. ‘Try hard to forget that I ever existed’, he had written to his siblings from prison, but the press stories denied them any such choice.
25
The eldest brother moved to Preston the following year, the second to Manchester. Neither of them trusted the government, police or authorities after the case, and would never use their family name outside the home unless they had to. When they did, they found their construction business was refused government contracts without clear reasons being given. Their sister emigrated to New Zealand. None of them ever mentioned their notorious elder brother, and they would deny they were related to him ‘even when confronted with evidence’.
26
And yet, although there was no history of the name in the family, the eldest named his daughter, born in 1953, Christine.

Notes

E
PIGRAPHS

1
Aidan Crawley,
Escape from Germany, 1939–45: Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During WWII
(1956, 2001), p. 2.

2
Winston Churchill, ‘My Spy Story’,
Thoughts and Adventures
(1932), p. vi.

P
REFACE

1
Pienkowska papers, Andrzej Kowerski/Wladimir Ledóchowski (1973).

2
Jan Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Granville’; also Jan Ledóchowski, ‘Who was she?’, p. 6.

3
Wladimir Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Skarbek-Granville’, pp. 5–6.

4
Ibid., p. 6.

5
Ibid., p. 5.

6
Jan Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Granville’, p. 1.

7
Mieczysława Wazacz,
Tydzien Polski (Polish Week),
(26.2.2005).

8
Jan Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Granville’, p. 22.

9
Picture Post,
[Bill] Stanley Moss, ‘Christine the Brave’ (13.9.1952 – 4.10.1952).

10
Cole/Moss papers, Wladimir Ledóchowski letter to Bill Stanley Moss (13.0.1953).

11
Pienkowska papers, Andrzej Kowerski/Wladimir Ledóchowski (1973).

12
Wazacz,
No Ordinary Countess.

13
Pienkowska papers, Andrzej Kowerski-Kennedy/Barbara Pienkowska (24 January,
c.
1974).

1: BORDERLANDS

1
Daily Express,
‘Stabbed Heroine Told Her Story’ (17.6.1952).

2
B
ę
czkowice parish archive, Krystyna Skarbek’s baptism certificate (November 1913).

3
Masson,
Christine: SOE Agent,
p. 4.

4
Kasparek, ‘Krystyna Skarbek’: Re-viewing Britain’s legendary Polish agent’,
The Polish Review,
XLIX, no. 3 (2004), p. 946.

5
Zamoyski,
Chopin,
p. 20.

6
Stefania was described by Maria Nurowska, from photographs now lost.

7
Unattributed press cutting (12.12.1898), quoted in Wladimir Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Skarbek-Granville’, p. 12.

8
Alphabetical list of the landowners in the Kingdom of Poland
(1909), p. 110.

9
Royal Castle Warsaw archive, Szymon Konarski to Wladimir Ledóchowski (1960).

10
Wladimir Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Skarbek-Granville’, p. 8.

11
Ibid., p. 8.

12
Ibid., p. 10.

13
Wazacz,
No Ordinary Countess,
Janina Nowotna interview.

14
Zamoyski,
Poland,
p. 298.

15
Stanisław Rudziejewski was the father of the Polish novelist Maria Nurowska, who wrote a fictional account of Christine’s life in her novel
Miłošnica.

16
Tarnowski,
The Last Mazurka,
pp. 59–60.

17
Conversation with Zbigniew Mieczkowski (April 2011).

18
Maria Nurowska, interview (June 2011).

19
Ibid.

20
Wazacz,
No Ordinary Countess,
Francis Cammaerts interview.

21
Kurjer Warszawski,
notice of Jerzy Skarbek’s death (12.12.1930), p. 12.

2: TWO WEDDINGS AND A WAR

1
Mieczkowski,
Horizons,
p. 38.

2
Gombrowicz,
Polish Memories,
p. 81.

3
Breza,
Nelly,
p. 350.

4
Gombrowicz,
Polish Memories,
p. 179–80.

5
Register record, wedding Gustav Alexander Gettlich/Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek (21.4.1930).

6
Wilnow, now Vilnius in Lithuania.

7
Wladimir Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Skarbek-Granville’, p. 27.

8
Fiedler,
The Women of My Youth,
p. 52.

9
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 174.

10
Ibid., p. 352.

11
Ibid., pp. 351, 352.

12
Claude Dansey, Britain’s unofficial and independent spy-master, was in Rome at the same time. See Read and Fisher,
Colonel Z,
pp. 165–70.

13
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 386.

14
Wladimir Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Skarbek-Granville’, p. 32.

15
Tadeusz Stachowski, ‘This would make a great movie!’, in
Polish Week
(16.12.2000).

16
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 110.

17
Howarth,
Undercover.
The Archie Mayo film
Svengali,
starring John Barrymore, had been released in 1931.

18
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 386.

19
Masson,
Christine: SOE Agent,
p. 291.

20
Cole/Moss papers, Patrick Howarth correspondence with Bill Stanley Moss (12 March, year unknown).

21
Mieczkowski,
Horizons,
p. 49.

22
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 389.

23
IWM, Gubbins papers: ‘Gubbins, Poland – The Final Curtain, 1939’.

24
Carton de Wiart,
Happy Odyssey,
p. 156.

25
Davies,
God’s Playground,
vol. 2, p. 435.

26
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 390.

27
Moorhouse,
Killing Hitler,
p. 89.

3: HUNGARIAN EMBRACES

1
TNA, HS9/612, ‘C/H Madame Marchand. MP. 4827’ (‘Madame Marchand’ and ‘4827’ are both Christine Granville, C/H is George Taylor, MP is Harold Perkins.).

2
TNA, HS9/588/2, ‘Statement by “X”’ (23.2.1941) (‘X’ is Granville, misfiled in Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki’s file.).

3
Francis Cammaerts quoted in Jenkins,
A Pacifist,
p. 169.

4
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 395.

5
Karbowska,
Getting to know Mackiewicz,
p. 273.

6
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 394.

7
Masson,
Christine: SOE Agent,
p. xxi.

8
TNA, HS9/612/C425259, ‘To D/H from M/103, Fryday’ (7.12.1939).

9
Sweet-Escott,
Baker Street Irregular,
p. 27.

10
Read and Fisher,
Colonel Z,
p. 168.

11
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 394.

12
Nicholson (ed.),
Nicholson Diaries and Letters,
pp. 256–7.

13
Granville’s 1949 pocket diary, The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London.

14
Conversation with M. R. D. Foot (March 2011); also Tony Wheeler, ‘Taylor, George Francis, 1903–1979’,
The Australian Dictionary of National Biography,
online edition (accessed May 2011).

15
Howarth,
Undercover,
p. 67.

16
TNA, HS9/612, ‘To D/H from M/103, Fryday’ (7.12.1939).

17
TNA, HS9/588/2, ‘Statement by “X”’ (23.2.1941).

18
TNA, HS9/612, ‘Notes on Madam G’ (7.12.1939).

19
Ibid., ‘Mme Marchand’ (20.12.1939).

20
Ibid., ‘C/H Madame Marchand. MP. 4827’.

21
Gi
ż
ycki, ‘Winding Trail’, p. 395.

22
TNA, HS7/162, SOE histories, Hungary, ‘Hungarian Section History compiled by Major GI Klauber’.