Noor Inayat Khan: Life of a Spy Princess (3)

Noorunissa Inayat-Khan's Biography • Noor Inayat-Khan Memorial Trust • Donate to Noor's Memorial Trust

By Sarah Jobling

Noor's British passport
Despite Noor’s cosmopolitan background - her father was Indian, her mother American and she lived in France - she had a British passport. Her siblings were all born in Britain, but Noor was born in 1914 in pre-revolutionary Russia. Family archives show that Noor attended kindergarten at Notting Hill in west London when the family moved to England shortly after her birth. It seems likely that her Indian father - India at the time being part of the British Empire - that entitled Noor to her passport.

Issued by the British Consulate in Lyon in 1932, the passport shows Noor aged 18. At the time she was studying music and living in the family home to the west of Paris. The pages within her passport are filled with stamps from border crossings, evidence of a woman who travelled extensively throughout Europe in the late 1930s.

But clearly at the bottom right of one of the pages is the all-important purple stamp bearing the date 22 June 1940 – the day that Noor, her mother, sister Claire and brother Vilayat arrived in Falmouth. Just days earlier they had fled their home in Paris as the invading German army advanced across Europe.

It would be almost three years to the day when Noor returned to France, but this time she would be working for the Special Operations Executive.