Shiela Grant Duff - Later Years

Later Years

At the start of the Second World War, Grant Duff was working at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. She resigned the position and subsequently went to work for the BBC's European Service as their first editor of the Czech section. Her 1942 book A German Protectorate beside revealing a case of the administration of Nazism in occupied territory was also a study of the inter-Continental strategic implications of German's south-eastward expansionism.

In the decades after the war, she became a farmer and, in 1982, published a memoir of her early years in journalism, The Parting of Ways. Six years later, amidst successive historians' studies of the German Widerstand and von Trott's part in it, the full correspondence between Grant Duff and von Trott saw publication. Shiela Grant Duff's final break with von Trott of June 1939, caused by the Poland proposition, continued to influence a division of attitude concerning largely herself and, on the other side, those who leaned to the view that not only was the Widerstand misunderstood even prior to the Second World War, but that Churchill particularly erred in holding to the wartime policy of unconditional surrender.

Grant Duff was married twice. Her first marriage in 1942, to Noel Newsome, the founder of the BBC's European Service, produced 2 children, and ended in divorce. In 1950, she married Micheal Sokolov Grant, originally Micheal Vicentivich Sokolov, a second-generation White Russian who served as an officer in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. Their marriage produced three children and lasted until his death in 1998.