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The Lady James Bond: Britain’s First Female Spy
Christine Granville and the daring rescue that made her a legend of the French Resistance during WWII
James Bond might have been a hero on the pages of novels and on the silver screen, but outside of Hollywood, it was women who often did the most dangerous, the most difficult, and the riskiest spy work. Women spies of WWII were highly-trained agents who were often even more effective than their male counterparts. As one recruiter, Selwyn Jepson, put it:
“In my view, women were very much better than men for the work. Women, as you know, have a far great capacity for cool and lonely courage than men. Men usually want a mate with them.”
One of these courageous spies was Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent and the possible inspiration for a James Bond character.
Christine Granville¹ feared very little. She could parachute from a plane without breaking a sweat. She carried a pistol and a knife and wasn’t afraid to use either if she had to. She could scale mountains, cross snowy hills, navigate the most rudimentary of maps, operate a wireless radio from just about anywhere, deliver messages that could get her killed, blend into any crowd, and talk to any Nazi official without revealing her true identity. In short, Granville was the perfect spy for the Allied forces.
“I am going to make sure that I keep on Christine’s side in the future,” one of her male colleagues said of her.
“She frightens me to death,” another colleague added.
But there was one surprising thing that scared Granville: bicycles. She hated them. In her mind, they were two-wheeled death contraptions. She’d walk for miles if it meant she could avoid bicycling. But on the warm day of August 17, 1944, she had no choice. For at least the third time in so many days, she had to get on a bicycle and ride the 26 miles from her safehouse in Seyne-les-Alpes in the South of France to a village called Digne.
As she rode the borrowed bicycle, she concentrated on her mission, not on the fact that she was terrified of the speeds she reached going down the steep hills of the countryside. She didn’t have energy or focus to spare. She…
