Princess Indira Devi of Kapurthala

Second World War

At the onset of the Second World War, Devi sat and passed the St John Ambulance first aid examination, and subsequently transported casualties during the Blitz. Earlier, she had travelled Europe and was in Munich in 1939, at the time of the Munich Crisis. For a short while, she worked as a censor for the wartime department of postal censorship. Others on the team included Mulk Raj Anand, Venu Chitale, Zulfiqar Ali Bukhari, T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster. She hosted talks with Indian men in technical training based in the UK, and a 30-minute programme called Hello Punjab, a programme in Hindustani for the British Indian Army based in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. From the House of Commons, where she was sometimes the only woman in the press gallery,

With regard to the BBC's wartime broadcasts to listeners in India, when an initial questionnaire was sent across India asking about who people preferred to listen to, Devi was found to be twice as popular as Orwell. BBC producer Trevor Hill later recalled in his memoirs Over the Airwaves, that Devi was a "very elegant lady in beautifully cut English tweeds, and with a beautifully cut Oxford accent to match". In India she was noted to have a "very good command of English".

Post-war life In February 1948, Devi was cleared of a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol in November 1947, but given a fine for dangerous driving, found to be due to taking pills containing ephedrine, caffeine and phenobarbitone, which she mistook for aspirin. At the time she resided at Yeoman's Row, Chelsea. There, she reported on the anniversary of the 1921 Northern Ireland general election. The following year she visited New York to see the new United Nations Building and report on the International Refugee Organization. She left New York on 23 January 1952 on the SS Liberté bound for Plymouth. The following month, Frances P. Bolton had praised her report as "clear and concise" and included it in her remarks at the House of Representatives. That year, the Daily Mirror published a photograph of Devi changing the tyre of a caravan, also carrying Paul; they were preparing to drive to India. In 1962, following her return from India, she narrated a film by the explorer Count Vitold de Golish, Twilight of the Maharajahs, for the BBC in their Adventure series. It was delivered alongside her own life, having discovered old film footage after recently revisiting her former family palace. In 1963 she narrated Disciples of the Sword, a film about the Sikhs by Rustom Master in the same series. She continued to work for the BBC until 1968.