Auction of glamorous spy’s medals fetches record price

A collection of war medals, including the George Cross, awarded to an Anglo-French World War Two Resistance heroine has sold at auction for £260,000.

The George Cross and several other medals were purchased for 312,000 pounds ($486,000), with buyers’ commission, by Lord Ashcroft, who will display the medals to London’s Imperial War Museum. That’s far above the previous record of £93,000 for a George Cross, a decoration awarded to civilians and service personnel for courage, auctioneers Dix Noonan Web said.

Ms Rigby founded the Violette Szabo Museum in Herefordshire after moving into the house that was owned by Violette’s aunt and uncle, and has written to the Prime Minister and the Queen to request their help in securing the future of the medals.

Szabo was just one of four women to be.

Tania, who watched the auction at London’s Washington Mayfair Hotel, admitted it had been a “difficult decision” to sell the medals after years of supporting the legacy of her “gallant mother”.

In December 1946, she was posthumously awarded the George Cross.

“I do so with regret but it is a decision derived from much careful thought and I have every confidence that the successful purchaser will cherish and take great care of them”.

She said the medals had been “so hard won” and it was important they stayed on display in the country “she fought and died for”.

Szabo, whose courageous missions behind enemy lines were immortalised in the 1958 film Carve Her Name With Pride, is one of only four female recipients of the prestigious honour.

She said: “It’s a lot of money but what has been sold is worth a great deal”.

“It deserves to be seen by people in memory of this extraordinary woman”.

Born Violette Bushey in 1921 to a French mother and a father from Berkshire, Szabo spent her childhood between France and south-west London.

After a whirlwind romance, she married French Foreign Legion officer Etienne Szabo in shortly before he was sent overseas.

On 5 April 1944, Szabo parachuted into occupied France, where she posed as a French secretary while carrying out unsafe reconnaissance work, gathering intelligence on factories working for the German war effort, which would guide Allied bombing missions.

She endured months of torture and was shot dead at Ravensbruck concentration camp in January or February 1945.

Tania recalled the day when she arrived at Buckingham Palace as an orphaned four-year-old to collect her mother’s posthumous George Cross from King George VI in 1946.