Shiela Grant Duff was a British author, journalist and foreign correspondent.
Background
Shiela Grant Duff was born on May 11, 1913 in London, United Kingdom, in the family of Adrian and Ursula (Lubbock) Grant Duff. She was the granddaughter of two Liberal MPs, Sir John Lubbock, first Lord Avebury, the scientist and educator who saved Stonehenge for the nation and created the bank holiday, and Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, man of letters. Her father Adrian was killed leading the Black Watch into battle in 1914; her brother would also fall fighting Germany on French soil during the second world war.
Education
At the age of 12, Shiela attended St Paul's Girls' School in London. She went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1931, where she read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and was tutored by R.G. Collingwood, John Fulton and Isaiah Berlin.
Career
Refused employment by The Times because she was a woman, she went to Paris on her own, where she was given a non-paying job, and a political education, by Edgar Ansel Mowrer, the courageous anti-fascist foreign correspondent of the Chicago Daily News. While covering Hitler's visit to take possession of Saarland, she stood a few feet away from the dictator. She served as assistant and guide to Jawaharlal Nehru during his visit to England in 1935; she continued to correspond with him until his death.
On Mowrer's advice, in 1936 Shiela went to Prague, where she found herself the only full-time British journalist, writing for the Observer. On her return to England in 1937, she became an adviser to Winston Churchill, whose wife was her cousin, on Czechoslovakia, acting as a channel between Churchill and Ripka before and during the Munich crisis.
At the outset of the war, she worked for Arnold Toynbee at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, resigning after the fall of France, in June 1940, to write "A German Protectorate: The Czechs Under Nazi Rule." She became the editor of the newly created Czech section of the BBC's European Service.
Achievements
Shiela was notable for her opposition to appeasement before the Second World War.
Despite her sympathy for the Popular Front, the international anti-fascist movement, and her early faith in the Soviet Union, she remained resolutely opposed to cruelty on all sides, though she regarded Hitler as a more serious threat to peace than Stalin.
Membership
University Women’s Club
Personality
Throughout her earlier life, she had felt torn between her sense of public duty and her deep yearning for a private life devoted to friendship - tireless devotion to friends was one of her most notable and consistent characteristics - and natural beauty.
Connections
Grant Duff was married twice. Her first marriage in 1942, to Noel Newsome, the founder of the BBC's European Service, produced two children, and ended in divorce. In 1950, she married Micheal Sokolov Grant, originally Micheal Vicentivich Sokolov, a second-generation White Russian who served as an officer in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. Their marriage produced three children and lasted until his death in 1998.
