A female partisan, photographed by SOE’s Bill Tilman
My last post, which included the first entry of Lt Col Arthur Nicholls’ SPILLWAY diary, didn’t go so well. A few hours after I put it up Rod Bailey emailed to say the Imperial War Museum are very antsy about people quoting their materials, and advised me to remove it sharpish. Rather than face the wrath of their legal department, I’ve complied. What a shame.
A bit of an issue for me as I’m currently languishing in Tirana ahead of a meeting with the British embassy on Monday, and am yet to hit the mountains to research the route of September’s Endurance Vile Trail, so don’t have a huge amount to blog about. Tirana, to be fair, isn’t a bad place to languish. It may lack beauty, but it certainly doesn’t lack charm. Shabby charm, to be sure, but charm nonetheless.
So as a filler, I thought I’d share some great photos I found in the National Archives, which I’m pretty sure I can post without being taken to court. They’re of various partisan girls, including Liri Gega who, it’s worth mentioning, was shot on Enver Hoxha’s orders in 1956. She was pregnant at the time. In The Anglo-American Threat to Albania, Hoxha suggests she and SOE’s Victor Smith had a bit of a pash in 1944, but Hoxha’s extensive memoirs are often less than reliable (though to be fair he was right to suggest that SOE’s Albania expert Margaret Hasluck had been the lover of the elderly Albanian regent under the Germans, Lef Nosi. Whom Hoxha had tortured and shot…).
Curiously, many of the photos seem to have been taken by another British Liaison Officer, the mountaineer Bill Tilman, who I had always assumed was homosexual. Rod reckons he was asexual, but perhaps his penchant for the turn of a partisan heel suggests he was just terribly, terribly repressed. He did bathe in mountain streams each and every day through the harsh winter of 1943/44, which has to mean something.
S.O.E. Trails 