Christabel Bielenberg, a niece of Lord Northcliffe, was born in 1909 and left for Hamburg, Germany, in 1929 to study singing. There she met and married the lawyer, Peter Bielenberg, in 1934. She lived through the war as a German citizen and wrote about her experiences in her memoir, The Past is Myself (1968) and in its sequel, The Road Ahead (1992). The Past is Myself was adapted for television by Dennis Potter under the title Christabel. In 1988, the Federal Republic of Germany awarded her the Commander's cross of the Order of Merit for her contribution to German-English understanding. Since 1948 she and her family had been living in Co Carlow, Ireland, where she died in 2003.