The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  33. Christine at a Vercors memorial event, July 1946.

  34. Christine, Andrzej (right), Ludwig Popiel (far right), and possibly Dennis Muldowney (left), in front of the Shelbourne hotel, 1952.

  35. Dennis George Muldowney photograph from his seaman records.

  36. Christine’s decorations: Musketeers’ commemorative gorget in the shape of a shield; George Medal; OBE on civil ribbon; Croix de Guerre with one bronze star; 1939–1945 Star; Africa Star; Italy Star; France and Germany Star; War Medal 1939–1945.

  37. Bill Stanley Moss, ‘Christine the Brave’, Picture Post, 13 September 1952.

  38. Andrzej rushes to right the cross at Christine’s grave, Kensal Green Roman Catholic cemetery, London, June 1952.

  39. Oil portrait of Christine by Agniela Pawlikowska, c.1952.

  Appendix I: Christine ‘preferred dogs to children’: a note on Christine Granville’s childlessness1

  Christine Granville never had children. For a woman who seemingly had every opportunity, it is intriguing to consider why not. Certainly by chance or design she managed to have a cheerfully active sex life throughout the war and afterwards, when contraception was not reliably available, without any issue. This was a notable achievement. ‘There is nothing wrong about young couples sharing beds – especially in war time’, Christine’s second husband, Jerzy Giżycki, wrote, supporting the idea that there were rather more relaxed rules around romance during wartime.2 The results, however, were predictable. Jerzy noted that during just the months that he was in Cairo, over twenty nurses had to be evacuated to England because they were pregnant, and they had better access to contraceptives than most. This raises the question of whether Christine’s lack of children was a positive choice, that perhaps her lifelong passion for travel and adventure precluded any desire she might have had to have children, or conversely whether she already knew that she could not have children and this to some extent informed her outlook on life.

  Christine’s cousin, Andrzej Skarbek, told me that it was ‘not in her nature to have children; she did not have maternal feelings. She was drawn to people of her own age and generation, but not so much to children’.3 It is certainly true that Christine enjoyed her freedom, showed little interest in babies, and rarely visited friends after they had started a family. However, it is hardly unusual to find a friend’s baby dull or difficult, especially when you have none yourself. The most interest she seems to have shown in a very young child was when she commissioned a version of the Skarbek family coat of arms, worked in leather by Polish artisans, to hang above the cot of a Skarbek baby, and this feels more like a desire to pass on pride in the family than a wish to cheer the child. Even the young children of some of her friends, such as Richard Truszkowski’s daughter Diana, who met her several times, felt that ‘Christine didn’t like children, she didn’t approve of them’, and even that she ‘preferred dogs to children’.4

  And yet sometimes Christine went out of her way to spend time, and form relationships, with fairly young children, often going against the grain of expected behaviour to do so. In Cairo she visited the lonely daughter of an officer whose wife had died and who was, as a result, boarding at a Catholic school, a background not unlike Christine’s. Furthermore Anna Czyzewska’s daughter Suzanna, whom she befriended in Nairobi, remembered that Christine was ‘very sweet with children’, and the only one of her parents’ many house-guests who would seek her out, tell her stories and bring small gifts.5 Christine’s interest in children might be described, then, as ambiguous or episodic, but she was certainly not opposed to them on principle, or unable to empathize with individual children. The only conclusion that can be safely drawn from all of which is that she was not disposed to talk about her feelings regarding children with her younger, male cousin, who had four children of his own.

  Other people during my research suggested that Christine was not so much unwilling, as unable, to have children. One theory was that she had had a secret abortion in pre-war Poland that prevented her from getting pregnant later. If so, the secrecy was maintained: there is no evidence to support this theory. Others suggested that it is common for women enduring great stress, such as when conducting covert operations during a war, to stop having periods altogether. However, Christine’s special operations colleague John Anstey reported that when she was facing imminent departure from Algiers ‘we had the awful dilemma when at a certain time of the month, her physical condition and the moon coincided’, leading them to postpone her drop to her great frustration.6 This would imply that Christine was not entirely free from her monthly cycle.

  When Dennis Muldowney was in prison, having confessed to killing Christine, he underwent medical assessment to determine whether he was fit to stand trial. During this process, he asked one of the doctors whether a woman could have eight abortions. Explaining his interest, he said that ‘sexual intercourse took place often’ between himself and Christine, ‘and at no time were contraceptive precautions taken’ because she had reassured him that after eight abortions she knew that she would not become pregnant.7 Although he had had a son from his marriage, Muldowney was wondering, he said, who was sterile, Christine or himself. The Polish word ‘poronienie’ translates as both abortion and miscarriage. Given Christine’s imperfect English, it is possible that she had meant a series of miscarriages, after which she firmly believed she could not carry a child. If this is true, it might have contributed to her rather more carefree attitude to sex than usual for her times, and perhaps also to her desire to keep her freedom rather than marry and fail to raise the expected family.

  After her death, Christine’s autopsy revealed that while otherwise healthy, she had suffered from a fibroid uterus; that is she had a muscular layer of benign tumours in her uterus, sometimes caused by high levels of oestrogen. There is a correlation between this condition and reproductive problems such as infertility, miscarriage and early-onset labour, although a delay in having children can also contribute to cause these fibroids. It is possible, then, that although she may not have been aware of her condition, Christine did indeed suffer from a series of early miscarriages and, finding the silver lining, felt more able to take risks with her relationships than she might otherwise have done.

  Christine’s reactions to the pregnancies of her friends were only recorded twice. When her post-war London colleague, Izabela Muszkowska, told her she was pregnant with her first child, Christine exclaimed with alarm, ‘Oh my God, what have you done to yourself?!’8 Her immediate thought was for her friend’s wellbeing. But when Zofia Tarnowska Moss told her of her first daughter’s birth, Christine asked only that the child might be called ‘Christine’, the ‘lucky name’ that had got her through the war unscathed.9 For whatever reason, Christine perhaps knew that she would never pass on her name herself. If so, she would have been pleased to know that the Skarbeks are still proud of their family name, and Christine Isabelle Cole, née Moss, still thinks of her namesake with great admiration.

  Appendix II: She ‘murdered me’ Muldowney said: a note on Dennis Muldowney1

  Dennis Muldowney murdered Christine Granville in a premeditated act of appalling brutality. He confessed to his crime, declined to submit any pleas in mitigation, and was sentenced to death after a trial that was reported to have lasted less than three minutes. Once it had been found that Muldowney was not acting as an assassin on behalf of any shadowy political organization, little further consideration had been given to his motives or to any possible mitigating circumstances. As a result the fascinating profile of Muldowney that had been built up by prison doctors, and through his own communications with the prison staff and his siblings, was largely disregarded.

  In the weeks after Christine’s murder, Brixton prison’s principal medical officer decided that Muldowney was an ‘unreliable informant who seeks to dramatize his life’, but ‘not feeble-minded’, and so fit to stand trial.2 This was an accurate assessment. Muldowney had sought to dramatize his life by his very association with Christine
, and it was right that his statements should be treated with caution, but not that they should be disregarded entirely. Muldowney was quickly proved a liar, however, when he gave his date of birth as 1910, three years shy of his actual birth year of 1907. He had believed himself eight years older than Christine, had vainly presented himself as just five years older, but had, in reality, been less than a year her senior. What made this significant was that Muldowney’s lie about his age, unlike Christine’s, was discovered, casting further doubt over all his statements.

  There is little doubt that Muldowney was given short shrift by the prison service, the medics, the courts, and the press covering the story. Throughout his case records his name is repeatedly misspelled, and other details are incorrect, suggesting little concern for accuracy. His statements about his damaged childhood, the neglect and abuse he had suffered for years, were dismissed, an officer noting only that he came ‘from a respectable working-class family’.3 Emotive judgements about his character were recorded as fact. He is ‘a nasty minded exhibitionist’ Brixton prison’s medical officer wrote to his Pentonville counterpart a week before the trial.4 Prison staff discussed the press coverage of his case with other inmates in his presence and, in court, after consistent lobbying by Andrzej and others, once Muldowney had left the dock a statement was read out directly rejecting his claim that he and Christine had once been intimate. With no defence to report, the press focused on Muldowney’s appearance, his ‘casual smirk’ in the dock, and his hands, ‘thrust deeply in the pockets of his fawn raincoat’, as if his mac were an indication not only of guilt, but of possible perversion.5 He was also frequently presented as short, ‘undersized’ or ‘a goblin’, reflecting the popular view of him as a degenerate, although at five foot nine he was well above average male height at the time.

  Despite having ruthlessly murdered a woman, Muldowney was shocked to find himself demonized. ‘I’ve still got some constitutional rights you know’, he stormed to his two half-brothers, Frank and Jack, and his half-sister Marie, when the papers published a private photograph of him.6 These were rights that he had denied Christine, but they were rights, and it is questionable as to whether they had been fully respected.

  There was almost certainly some truth in Muldowney’s claims about the nature of his relationship with Christine. She was ‘the only woman who would meet his constant sexual demands’, he told prison doctors, and they had lived ‘as man and wife’.7 But she was also ‘very sadistic and had had many different lovers’, deliberately making him ‘her slave’ before breaking his heart.8 Furthermore he claimed that Christine had dared him to kill her on three separate occasions, and that ‘it was she who put the idea into my head’.9 Perhaps in a sense this too was true, and the weight of surviving the war, the daily grind of life in exile and the monotony and boredom that had replaced the thrill of resistance work had tempted Christine to flirt with danger again, risking only a life that had lost much of its value. In Muldowney’s letter to Frank, Jack and Marie he wrote that neither Christine nor he had looked forward to getting older. ‘Age – not for me!… The present cannot be avoided! The future can!’ he wrote, cheering his sentences with numerous exclamation marks, before adding: ‘A morbid philosophy? Much the same as Christine’s.’10 They had loved each other, Muldowney said, but she was ‘a withering middle-aged woman’, and well aware that she was ‘getting a little rough around the edges’.11 ‘Christine, literally and metaphorically, asked for what she got!’ he ended. ‘I am sorry, but that’s the truth!’12

  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

  EPIGRAPHS

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