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Women: Special Operations Executive

Many of the women of whom I speak tonight went on to live lives of ordinary toil, making a living, raising a family, paying their taxes, watching the television. They got on with things as best they could, just as they did what needed to be done in the 1940s. I can only guess how heavily their wartime experiences weighed on them and their families. Their greatest memorial is, of course, a free Europe: a Europe that was liberated to build peace and prosperity over the decades to come. However, it has to be our insistence that, as new generations appear, this story does not become a sad sepia snapshot of a fast-fading time, but a story retold, refreshed and respected anew. This House and the Government of the day carry a clear debt of honour: a duty of care to perpetuate the memory of our SOE women. To live now for so long in a Europe purged of fascism, where millions have a reasonable chance of living their lives without enduring prejudice and brutality, where minorities can hope to be free, where political ideas compete inside democratic institutions and are not imposed by thuggery, must have seemed like an exotic fantasy in those early days of the 1940s. As the women of whom we speak today knew better than most, none of this comes cheap. My granddaughter’s granddaughter should be able to know and see this story—this wonder of sacrifice, determination and achievement—in a century still to come. That is why I put down this Question tonight.