Harp Column Blogs: Alexander RiderArchive

I just watched an edition of  BBC's history programme 'timewatch'. This documentary focused on one,  Noor Inyaht Khan. I was so profoundly affected and moved by her story that I decided that I would try to spread awareness about her among harpists.  

Noor Inayat Khan was born in 1914 in St.Petersburg. She was the daughter of a reknowned Sufi mystic and an American society girl-turned- runaway. Shortly after her birth, Noor's family moved to the suburbs of Paris where she was to grow up. Noor (whose name translates as 'light of womanhood')  grew up talented, educated and beautiful and was a writer of children's stories, many of which were published in France. However, her greatest passion was actually the harp, and one of her two  Erard gothic harps can be seen at the family home  in Paris.

After the German invasion of France in 1940, Noor, her parents and brother fled Paris to Bordeaux, managing to get a passage by ship from there to England. Once settled in Oxford, Noor and her brother decided that they both wanted to do something for the War effort. Although Noor's Sufi pacifism forbade her from killing anybody, she decided to train for a purely operational role. Like my own Grandmother, she trained as a wireless operator in the WAF (women's air force).

Fortuitously, an administrative worker spotted 'Perfect French' on her paperwork and forwarded her details to SOE (the special operations executive. At this time, the  SOE was sending many young people of either French descent, or whose skills at the language enabled them to appear so, to work in French counter-resistance. The only person more valuable than a girl with 'perfect French', was a girl with 'perfect French' who was a trained wireless operator. Depite being described during her SOE training as, 'emotional' and 'clumsy', she was 'dropped', in the dead of night, near Angers in the Loire valley, in August 1943. From there she made her way to Paris.

Owing  to the fact that one of her superiors, who met her from the plane was, infact, a double agent, Noor was being watched  (by the Gestapo 'listening service')  the instant she began to transmit. Soon after, the occupying German forces, equipped with the information this agent had given them,  began to descend on the hapless wireless operators, on the 'Paris circuit'. One by one, these valuable agents began ominously to disappear from the airwaves.  During this time, Noor moved frantically and restlessly around Paris, always  one step ahead of her captors. Soon she was the ONLY active wireless operator left in Paris, and she could not evade capture for long. The Gestapo finally caught up with her, in a hiding place not 100 yards from the Gestapo's French HQ. She put up such a tremendous fight that the commanding officer almost had her shot on the spot to avoid the trouble.

The great tragedy of her capture was that she was only caught due to an act betrayal. The sister of a fellow agent had been denied a place on the 'Paris circuit'. Insane with Jealousy for Noor, she went to the French police, and accepted a reward of 10,000 francs for information leading to her capture. 10,000 francs was just one TENTH of the price that the Gestapo would have payed for her. Betrayed, Noor had been sold to the Gestapo.

After being exhaustively interrogated (and presumably tortured) over a period of five weeks, Noor was taken from captivity in Paris to the German prison in Karlsruhe. In September , she was moved from there to the  infamous Dachau concentration camp, where she was  savagely beaten and shot dead on 13 September 1944.  An eyewitness wrote to her family, saying that the last word she was heard to murmer was 'Liberte!'- Freedom. She was just 30 years old.

I apologise for taking this heavy handed tone, and to any historians, I apologise for the brevity of this piece, and for the probable mistakes in dates and specifics. But I wanted to write about a woman who was brave, and who died doing  despite her staunch pacifism, what she held as right. In a way, as a harpist, I really wanted to tell you all about someone who might have a speck of the same blood runing through her veins as I do.

I hope that I have done the Noor who was a harpist, some service in doing so.

I wish....

1.) I could play the lute,

2.)I could play the cello,

3.) I could play the harpsichord

4.) I wish I could wheel myself into a gig without FOUR people asking me if I wished I played the darn P-I-C-C-O-L-O

"I can't believe she/he said that. I simply can't. He/she is evil! etc." Come one. We've all said it at one point.

I got round to talking with a pal of mine, who happens to be one of the foremost young harpists in London. We got onto a subject labelled, with universal formality, "politics". What one harpist has said,  about whom and why, the long historical reasons for said comments, who has become bitter, and why etc. Once, another friend of mine, a young male harpist, told me how he was "fed up with all these 'harp psychos'". I've even met harpists who haven't spoken to an ex-teacher in nearly 5 years.

In a way, I agreed with my friends. How can harpists, who engage in often instant and heartfelt comradeship, also be slightly more 'bilious'?

A nasty encounter with a fellow harpist, can be uspetting, disappointing and hurtful. Particularly in students, where the effect can be simply traumatic. It could be one teacher bad-mouthing another's teaching methods, it could be motivated by a very pure strain of competition. It could even just be an innocent remark taken too personally. It could be that one harpist simply detests you and wants to destroy you!

So what do you all think? Is this is a harp-related malaise? Or is it simply rather something that exisits inherently among those in the performing arts?

Let me know in here, or perhaps by private e-mail as I would like to write a follow up article. Everything sent to me in private will remain confidential and treated with the utmost discretion. Nothing hateful please! I don't want to spread unrest!