Noor Inayat Khan

Noor Inayat Khan was a British resistance agent during World War II, and was the first female wireless operator to be sent by the Special Operations Executive into occupied France.

Noor’s biographer, Shrabani Basu, dubs her the ‘Spy Princess’, due to her being descended from Indian royalty. Noor is also described as being a ‘gentle writer of children’s stories, a musician, but she was transformed. She was a tigress in the field.’ Noor was raised on religious tolerance and was influenced by pacifist ideals. After the outbreak of WWII, however, Noor decided to help defeat Nazi tyranny. This was less for any love or pride for Britain, but more for being opposed to fascism and dictatorships.

After a short time in the Women’s Auxiliary Airforce, Noor was recruited by the SOE and was deployed to France under the codename ‘Madeleine’. Her job as an operator was to send and receive messages about planned sabotage operations, or where arms were needed for resistance fighters. Using disguised or hidden aerials, they typed out Morse code on transmitters and would then wait for hours for a reply. This communication was vital for resistance strategies to be successfully coordinated but the operators were highly vulnerable. If they stayed on the air for more than 20 minutes, their signals were likely to be picked up by the enemy. An operator’s life expectancy was 6 weeks.

Noor’s network was eventually infiltrated by a Nazi spy but, despite this risk and many members of her team being arrested by the Gestapo, Noor continued her mission for as long as possible. Although urged to return home to England, she refused as she believed to be the only remaining radio operator left in Paris. Eventually, she was betrayed and imprisoned. She was kept in solitary confinement for 10 months, and after two escape attempts was branded ‘highly dangerous’ and was shackled in chains for most of the time. Noor refused to reveal any information, despite beatings and torture from the Nazis, for this entire period. She was finally transferred to a concentration camp with three other female SOE agents (Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, and Eliane Plewman) where they were executed.

Noor was posthumously awarded the George Cross, Britain’s highest award for ‘gallantry in the face of enemy’, as well as the French Croix de Guerre. She has also more recently been honoured with a bronze memorial bust in central London, as well as a blue plaque on her wartime home. This is the address that she etched onto a bowl whilst in prison so that she could be identified. It is also the first blue plaque to honour a woman of South Asian descent in London.

Noor might be someone I’ll revisit for a one off portrait in the future because there are many more interesting pictures of her to choose from. For this project, however, it’s more consistent to choose simpler pictures.

(Not sure what that magical ring of light is…)

As I’m posting these fairly sporadically, I thought I’d reexplain what it is I’m actually doing here. Hello! This is my portrait project called Black & White Women. I’m drawing portraits of women I find interesting and inspiring, some of them I have loved for ages and some of them are completely new to me. Either way, I’ll draw a small portrait of them and upload them here with a condensed biography to share the knowledge of them with others. This is my third list for this project, the first two I self-published into art zines and put them up on etsy (I still have some of the second up on there if you’re interested!)

If you scroll through the rest of this page, you’ll find the full list of women I’ll be drawing and if you keep scrolling you’ll find the other two lists, and some interlude portraits I did during lockdown.

Megan