Graeme Lamb on Christine Granville
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 May 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lt-Gen Sir Graeme Lamb, former head of British special forces, champions the life of wartime spy Christine Granville, assisted by her biographer Clare Mulley.
Christine, born Kristina Skarbek, was a glamorous swashbuckling heroine who skied into occupied Poland to distribute Allied propaganda, and parachuted into southern France to work with the Resistance after D Day. Murdered after the war by a jilted lover, she is little known today - thanks partly to the efforts of a group of men she had been close to, who formed a committee to "protect her reputation" from suggestions of sexual impropriety.
Matthew Parris chairs the discussion.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear. |
| 0:06.5 | My first reaction on reading an outline of this week's Great Life was Incredulity. |
| 0:12.5 | My second was despair. |
| 0:14.6 | Incredulity because this story of undercover agents, parachute drops behind enemy lines, microfilm |
| 0:20.3 | concealed in blocks of shaving soap and rubber-coated cyanide pills stashed in socks |
| 0:26.0 | would be rejected as a novel as too fanciful. |
| 0:30.0 | Despair, because how the heck are we going to get through such an amazing string of adventures |
| 0:34.7 | in half an hour. Can my guests do it? Our main man today is a former director of UK Special Forces |
| 0:41.3 | who's served in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lieutenant General Sir Graham |
| 0:45.8 | Lamb, a man who can presumably kill a man with his bare hands? |
| 0:50.1 | Oh, I don't think so. |
| 0:52.1 | Well you would say that anyway. |
| 0:54.0 | Seriously, though, although we're going to be discussing the Second World War and the Special Operations |
| 0:58.6 | Executive, I presume special forces are as important now as they were then. |
| 1:04.8 | You've called for British special forces to be used against so-called Islamic State. |
| 1:09.6 | Yes, they have a role to play, but it's part of complementing an overall government. |
| 1:15.4 | Of course, if they were being deployed even as we speak, we wouldn't know, would we? |
| 1:19.4 | We wouldn't be told. |
| 1:20.4 | That to me makes eminent sense. |
| 1:21.8 | Why would you then call them either special or secret? |
| 1:24.5 | Tell us then whom you've selected as your great life. |
| 1:27.7 | Christina Scarbeak, Christine Scarbeak, who was known as an alias as Christine Granville. |
... |
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