In the Breckland town of Thetford there is a statue of Duleep Singh, the last Maharajah of Punjab. His story is astonishing enough, however, his daughters were no less remarkable. Like her sister Sophia, Princess Catherine Singh ardently campaigned for Votes for Women. Catherine was a suffragist, undoubtedly a supporter of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage March when women from all over Britain converged on Hyde Park, with one protest march starting in Cromer, through Norwich and Thetford and onwards to London. But female empowerment was not the only expression of Catherine’s courage.

In 1908, Catherine moved to Germany to live with Lina Schäfer. The ‘intimate’ couple lived in Munich and Kassel, described by Lina as ‘two little mice living in a little house’. However their quiet life was threatened when Hitler seized power and the Nazis made it clear they ‘disapproved of the old Indian lady’, who lived with another woman. In 1938 Lina died. Catherine sold everything and left Germany.

Author and historian Peter Bance discovered a secret side to Catherine’s life. She saved many Jews from the Nazis. Families she helped included Dr Hornstein, rescued from the Oranienburg Concentration Camp, violinist Alexander Polnarioff and the Meyerstein family. During the war Catherine took German-Jewish refugee families into her Buckinghamshire home and opened it to evacuees escaping the Blitz. The story of the woman known as the ‘Sikh Schindler’ is an extraordinary legacy of courage and trail-blazer for LGBTQIA+ people of South Asian heritage.