LETTER OF THE MONTH
Humanitarian hero
Edward Abel Smith’s article on Nicholas Winton (Amazing Life, January) mentions that the Prague office of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia was “led by a remarkable woman called Doreen Warriner”. But I wonder how many readers know just how remarkable she was.
Aged 34 in 1938, she had a flourishing academic career and had just finished her first major book, The Economics of Peasant Farming, based on three years of research in eastern Europe. Ashamed of the Munich Agreement and impelled by a desperate wish to do something, she temporarily abandoned academia and flew to Prague. She soon realised that the people most immediately in danger were the Social Democrat leaders who had opposed Hitler’s plans for the Sudetenland. Enlisting the help of the Labour Party in Britain and the Swedish trade union movement, she organised the escape of 250 Social Democrat MPs and trade union leaders through Poland.
It was the beginning of a programme of evacuation that, in the words of one of her colleagues, saved “hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jewish and Social Democrat lives”, organised by a woman of “competence and compassion who was never too solemn or too earnest” (The Times, 30 December 1972). She was still in Prague when the Germans took over in March 1939, and finally left in April, shortly before the Gestapo came to her hotel to find her. I hope that the recent film One Life does her justice.
Dr Paul Brassley, Newton Abbot
Historical balance
I thought it harsh of C Alexander (Letters, February) to refer to Philippa Langley as an “amateur historian”. Langley has studied the Wars of the Roses and Richard III’s reign for many years, and written plenty of researched articles on the period.
However, for the sake of balance and reader interest, the input of well-known historians such as Nathen Amin and Michael Jones could have added valuable contributions on the topic of Langley’s new theory about the princes in the Tower.
Norma Postin, Rugby
Princes and parliament
Philippa Langley gives some interesting evidence in her defence of Richard III (Books Interview, January) but, unfortunately, falls at the first hurdle. She accepts, in a single line, the declaration by parliament that the two princes in the Tower are illegitimate. But parliament was not a democratic body: Richard controlled the ch
