Patrick Comerford
When I was in Bloomsbury earlier this week, walking from Euston Station to Fitzrovia, Mayfair and Soho, I stopped in Gordon Square to see the bust commemorating the British-Indian agent Noor Inayat Khan, who worked in France during World War II and who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in 1944, when she was only 30.
I had known of this sculpture before, but failed to find it the previous week when I was looking at the sculpture of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Perhaps it is appropriate that the memorial to the special operations agent known as Madeleine is hidden away in the bushes, but I found her at lunchtime in the north-east corner of the gardens of Gordon Square.
The sculpture by Karen Newman was unveiled by Princess Anne in 2012 after a two-year campaign by Madeleine’s admirers to have the bust erected.
Noor was an Indian princess who was posthumously awarded the George Cross for her work in France and for revealing nothing of use to her interrogators despite being tortured by the Gestapo for 10 months. She was murdered by the SS in Dachau concentration camp on 13 September 1944.
Madeleine was a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, the renowned ‘Tiger of Mysore’, who refused to submit to British rule and was killed in battle in 1799. Although she was born in Moscow, grew up in Bloomsbury, was a fluent French speaker and carried a British passport, she had no one particular national identity, but had a strong aversion to fascism.
Noor Khan grew up as a Sufi who believed in nonviolence and religious harmony, as an admirer of Indian independence leaders Nehru and Gandhi, and as a pacifist. Yet she joined Britain’s sabotage force, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and became the first female radio operator sent into France in 1943.
Noor Inayat Khan was born on 1 January 1914, in Moscow, the eldest of four children. Her father, Inayat Khan, was born in Baroda in India, and lived in Europe as a musician and a teacher of Sufism; her mother, Pirani Ameena Begum (born Ora Ray Baker), was an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Vilayat Khan later became head of the Sufi Order of the West, later the Sufi Order International, and now the Inayati Order.
Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, the family left Russia and settled in Bloomsbury in London. The family moved to France in 1920, and lived in Suresnes near Paris.
Noor studied child psychology at the Sorbonne, and music at the Paris Conservatory. Her career as a writer began with publishing poetry and children’s stories in English. After Nazi Germany invaded France, the family fled back to Britain.
Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in November 1940 and later was recruited to the Special Operations Executive. She was sent to Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, for special training as a wireless operator in occupied territory.
She was flown into Nazi-occupied France on 16/17 June 1943, with the instruction to ‘set Europe ablaze’. The assignment was seen as so dangerous that she arrived in Paris with a life expectancy of just six weeks.
Noor Khan was the last essential link with London after mass arrests by the Gestapo destroyed the SOE’s spy network in Paris. As her circuit collapsed, her commanders urged her to return to Britain, but she refused to abandon her French comrades without communications. For three months, she single-handedly ran a cell of agents across Paris, frequently changing her appearance and name until she was eventually captured.
She was betrayed to the Germans, arrested on 13 October 1943. After two attempts, she escaped on 25 November. She was taken to Germany on 27 November 1943 and was held in isolation for 10 months, shackled at her hands and feet. She was abruptly transferred to Dachau on 12 September 1944 and at dawn on the following morning she and three other women were executed by two SS men, one after another, by a shot through the back of the neck.
She was just 30. Her last word was reported as ‘Liberté.
Later, she was awarded the George Cross posthumously for exceptional bravery.
Her sculpture in Gordon Square Gardens is on land owned by the University of London, close to the Bloomsbury house where Noor lived as a child in 1914 and where she returned while training for the SOE during World War II.
The inscription on the front of the plinth reads: ‘Noor Inayat Khan, 1914-1944, GC, MBE, Croix de Guerre. Unveiled by HRH The Princess Royal on 8 November 2012.’
The inscription on the right of the plinth says: ‘Noor Inayat Khan was an SOE agent infiltrated into occupied France. She was executed at Dachau Concentration Camp. Her last word was “Liberte”.’
On the left of the plinth, the inscription says: ‘Noor lived nearby and spent some quiet time in this garden.’
The back of the plinth explains: ‘The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret organisation set up by Winston Churchill to help resistance movements during WWII. Installed by the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust. Sculptor Karen Newman.’
Noor Khan’s childhood home in Bloomsbury was at No 4 Taviton Street, near Gordon Square, and she returned there while she was training for the SOE. A blue plaque at 4 Taviton Street, was unveiled by English Heritage five years ago, on 28 August 2020.
Madeleine’s memorial in Gordon Square is all but hidden, tucked away inside the railings in the shady the north-east corner of the gardens, partly hidden by foliage. Somehow, this seemed appropriate to me on a sunny mid-week afternoon as she spent her last months working from the shadows.
This is the first stand-alone memorial to a woman of Asian background anywhere in the UK. It has been described as ‘one of the few anywhere in the world to a Muslim woman.’ It is a reminder of her values of nonviolence and harmony and the personal cost of making heroic sacrifices in the face of the evils of oppression and fascism. It is also a reminder of the contributions immigrants and refugees make to life and liberty in Britain and a challenge to the Islamophobic stereotyping of Muslims and Muslim women in Britain.
Her story is told by Shrabani Basu in her biography Spy Princess (2006) and by Arthur Magida in Code Name Madeleine: A Sufi Spy in Nazi-Occupied Paris (2020).
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