Preamble: Currently, rather than focusing on creating more blog posts of my recent trips (I’ve been to the UK twice since I was fully vaccinated for covid, but have been doing a horrible job of keeping up to date with posting about it), Instead I’ve been mercilessly decimating my photos collection. I realized that had over 64 THOUSAND photos in my cloud storage — the downside of how cheap it is to take and keep digital images compared to the old days of silver one. And when I looked at them, many were not what anyone would call “keepers”. So, first thing I was spent a month or more going through them and deleting stuff not worth saving, and successfully almost halved the total — but that still left around 32 thousand images. Then I started creating photo composites. There were a lot of photos that in and of themselves were sort of “ho hum” but if you combined them, they documented something… the below is an example of that.
Also I’m cropping my images in such a way that they make good TV screen savers, because I realized that while stuck at home, being able to see glimpses of my travels on my TV’s screen actually brought me a lot of joy and decreased my stress levels… so all of them are being edited to fit my wide screen TV — because if they don’t show up on the screen saver I forget I even took them because 32,000 photos is too many to intentionally scroll through … even if you’re showing them to friends.
Anyway, today I put together this compost of three memorials I came across while in London back in the spring of 2022. While there I learned about Noor Inayt Khan, a women I’d never heard of before that. I did so while I was trying to ferret out the memorials of British named women.
Not long ago, 2021 actually, British activists who are trying to obtain parity for women had noticed that while there is no clear list anywhere of all the statues in London of memorializing historical people (not including things like lady justice), it was estimated that of the around 265 statues scattered around London (who weren’t royalty), only 17 were of women!! In fact there were more statues of famous historical PETS in London than of women of note. First time I came across this embarrassing fact, I think was in a Youtube video on the topic made by a women who does “things to see when you’re visiting London videos”, which led me to googling the topic, where I found newspaper articles, etc., talking about how “yup, it’s nutty but true” there are more statues of PETS than women.
As such, there’s been a mad rush to decide which women deserved memorialization, and pressuring the government that any new statues going up had to prioritize THEM and not more men. So while finding those, I came across these statues of Noor Inayt Khan
who was British spy during WWII.
Noor, on top of her personal achievements, was a direct descendant of the Indian Prince Tipu Sultan. During WWII she joined the war effort and because she spoke fluent french was trained as a secret agent/radio transmitter for SOE.
She recently has become a person of some acclaim; she not only became a major supporting character in a film with Keira Knightley about female spies of WWII, but has also had at least 6 books written about her.
Additionally she’s earned herself TWO statues (ostensibly) and a blue plaque (on the wall of her old apartments during WWII) scattered around London. One statue is of her and is near her old neighborhood, while the other is adjacent to the Thames, on the opposite side of it from from and facing Britain’s Parliament/the Big Ben building. This 2nd statue is her standing in as an example of ALL of the British spies who risked their lives inside Nazi held territories during WWII… That said…
Not to be cynical or anything but I’m sure the fact that she ticked off at least THREE boxes of underrepresented citizens (women, Britain’s of color, muslim) had nothing to do with the government choosing to elevate her above all the other female spies of that period. And it didn’t hurt that she a princess, albeit an Indian one, in her own right.
… Let’s add to my cynicism the fact that she was actually HUGELY unsuccessful as a spy.
Proof in point: the Nazi’s caught her pretty quickly (she landed in France on the 16 or 17th of June, the Germans knew of her by June 24th, and in spite of the the British having realized she’d blown her cover almost as soon as she landed and warning her to keep moving and hidden till they could try to get her out, she was arrested by the 13th of October of the same year. On top of that, after the Gestapo caught her she chatted away with her jailers betraying enough about who she was that they were easily able to figure out her real identity pretty quickly. But even that wasn’t enough… in her final hiding place they found her notebooks, and, directly counter to her training, the woman had written down all the messages she’d sent!!! As such, the Nazis were able to figure out her style of transmission and continued to send counter-espionage (as her) for a while after her capture. Not surprisingly, this resulted in the arrests and deaths of the folks the S.O.E. had sent in after her to try to save her;
Is it not me or do folks who screw up this badly normally end up in infamy rather than honored? And might her acclaim might have more to do with her genetics than her achievements?
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Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 