Shiela Grant Duff

Shiela Grant Duff (11 May 1913 – 19 March 2004) was a British author, journalist and foreign correspondent. She was known for her opposition to appeasement before the Second World War. Early years The youngest daughter of Adrian Grant Duff and the Hon. Ursula Lubbock, Shiela Grant Duff was born in the Grosvenor Square home of her maternal grandfather, Sir John Lubbock. The youngest of four children, her paternal grandfather was Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff. Her father, who served as Army Secretary to the Cabinet from 1911 to 1913 (alongside First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill), was later a commanding officer in the Royal Highland Regiment, and died leading his regiment's attack at the First Battle of the Aisne in 1914. The young Shiela Grant Duff grew up understanding that her father's central contribution, as creator of the British Government's War Book, to the successful prosecution of the First World War had been overlooked. At the age of 12, she attended St Paul's Girls' School in London, where she befriended Diana Hubback and Peggy Garnett. Through Garnett she met Douglas Jay, who influenced her intellectual development. She went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1931, where she read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and was tutored by R. G. Collingwood, John Fulton and Isaiah Berlin. Among the friends she made at Oxford were Berlin, Goronwy Rees, Christopher Cox, Herbert Hart and Ian Bowen; although her closest friendship was with Rees, she remains associated in historical literature with the later German Widerstand figure Adam von Trott zu Solz, then a Rhodes Scholar attending Balliol College who was romantically involved with her friend Diana Hubback. Career as author and journalist Brought up by her mother to consider war as the greatest evil and appalled by the violence and brutality of the Nazi regime, Grant Duff committed herself to trying to prevent a future war. Acting upon the advice of Arnold J. Toynbee, she sought to discover the cause of war by becoming a foreign correspondent. Her application to The Times was turned down by editor Geoffrey Dawson who believed the job was unsuitable for a woman. Instead, Grant Duff moved to Paris, where she worked in Paris for a time under the Chicago Daily News Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer.