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Former policewoman and district nurse turned novelist, Jean Fullerton has written over 20 novels but recently published something a bit closer to home, her memoir, A Child of the East End. In conversation at the Write Idea Festival, Jean shared eye-watering stories of her childhood in Wapping, the curse of family secrets, bum-stamping and sexism in the police force and why we romanticise the past, Jean proves there is no such thing as a ordinary life. I started by asking her what made her bare her soul in the pages of a book…
Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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In the 19th century it was surprisingly easy for a woman to be consigned to the misery of an asylum. Many in fact weren't actually mentally ill.
Husband tired of his wife? A woman who bore an illegitimate child? A woman who didn't want to marry the man her parents had chosen for her? Or anyone, in short, who didn't conform to the narrow standards of society.
Once a woman was incarcerated, it was almost impossible to get out of a place often described as 'death traps'.
Author Louisa Treger came across the astonishing true story of investigative journalist Nellie Bly, who intentionally got herself committed to an asylum in order to write a blistering expose and lift the lid on conditions. She was 'instantly hooked and intrigued' as she told me in this fascinating conversation.
Louisa also discusses her fascinating new novel, The Paris Muse, a fictionalized retelling of the disturbing love story between talented French photographer Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso. Louisa shares her motivation behind ensuring this talented woman is no longer a footnote and how she breathed life into this extraordinary love affair.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Historical fiction author Kristy Cambron wears a lot of hats.
She's a Christy Award-winning author of historical fiction, including her bestselling novels, THE BUTTERFLY AND THE VIOLIN and THE PARIS DRESSMAKER, as well as nonfiction titles. She also serves as Vice President and literary agent with Gardner Literary, where she was named ACFW Agent of the Year in 2024.
Kristy squeezed in time to chat with me about our shared love of research and forgotten stories from the past. Her latest novel is a must read for those who can't resist a wartime tale and a dusty second-hand bookshop!
Inspired by real accounts of the Forgotten Blitz bombings, The British Booksellers highlights the courage of those whose lives were forever changed by war—and the stories that bind us in the fight for what matters most.
A tenant farmer’s son had no business daring to dream of a future with an earl’s daughter, but that couldn’t keep Amos Darby from his secret friendship with Charlotte Terrington . . . until the reality of the Great War sobered youthful dreams. Now decades later, he bears the brutal scars of battles fought in the trenches and their futures that were stolen away. His return home doesn’t come with tender reunions, but with the hollow fulfillment of opening a bookshop on his own and retreating as a recluse within its walls.
When the future Earl of Harcourt chose Charlotte to be his wife, she knew she was destined for a loveless match. Though her heart had chosen another long ago, she pledges her future even as her husband goes to war. Twenty-five years later, Charlotte remains a war widow who divides her days between her late husband’s declining estate and operating a quaint Coventry bookshop—Eden Books, lovingly named after her grown daughter. And Amos is nothing more than the rival bookseller across the lane.
As war with Hitler looms, Eden is determined to preserve her father’s legacy. So when an American solicitor arrives threatening a lawsuit that could destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to preserve, mother and daughter prepare to fight back. But with devastation wrought by the Luftwaffe’s local blitz terrorizing the skies, battling bookshops—and lost loves, Amos and Charlotte—must put aside their differences and fight together to help Coventry survive.
From deep in the trenches of the Great War to the storied English countryside and the devastating Coventry Blitz of WWII, The British Booksellers explores the unbreakable bonds that unite us through love, loss, and the enduring solace that can be found between the pages of a book.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Neil Barclay is an award-winning civilian librarian at HMP Thameside. Nominated by prisoners, and described by his colleagues as “our library superstar”, Neil has been praised for the outstanding dedication, skill and creativity he has shown in transforming the prison’s library into a dynamic learning and resource centre, much valued by prisoners and staff, and described as “the envy of other prisons”.
Here he shares with us his passionate belief that books and reading have the power to rehabilitate and transform prisoners lives.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Rachel Hore is the multi-million selling Sunday Times author of thirteen novels with her fourteenth, Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge, coming out next year.
Rachel is an avid reader. 'My reading addiction got properly under way when I was five and our family moved from Surrey, England, where I was born, to live in Hong Kong because of my father’s job. I loved Hong Kong, but I also missed home, and one of the great excitements was receiving parcels of books from relatives in the UK. When the tropical heat got to me, which it often did, being red-haired with fair skin, I’d lie on my bed and lose myself in Enid Blyton, Black Beauty or the Chronicles of Narnia.'
Her love for tales about the past was born from reading books by historical authors like Cynthia Harnett, Hilda Lewis and Rosemary Sutcliff.
'During my early teenage years I perused Jackie magazine and longed for romance, but instead fell in love with English literature. I tried Jane Austen and the Brontës, raided my grandfather’s bookshelf for Dickens and my local library for Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Wilkie Collins. I owe a huge debt to the public library system and believe passionately that we should maintain it for future generations.'
In this conversation, Rachel and I talk about her latest book, the craft of writing and the mysterious photo which triggered her journey into Cornwall's wartime past
You can learn more about Rachel and her wonderful books, hereThank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Donna Jones Alward is prolific author, writing over sixty novels. Here she explains why her first historical fiction novel, When the World Fell Silent, challenged her to grapple with a dark chapter in Canada's history...
When the World Fell Silent
A Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestseller
1917. Halifax, Nova Scotia
Nora Crowell wants more than her sister’s life as a wife and mother. As WWI rages across the Atlantic, she becomes a lieutenant in the Canadian Army Nursing Corp. But trouble is looming and it won’t be long before the truth comes to light.
Having lost her beloved husband in the trenches and with no-one else to turn to, Charlotte Campbell now lives with his haughty relations who treat her like the help. It is baby Aileen, the joy and light of her life, who spurs her to dream of a better life.
When tragedy strikes in Halifax Harbour, nothing for these two women will ever be the same again. Their paths will cross in the most unexpected way, trailing both heartbreak and joy its wake…Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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When Brian was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2010, his friend Alison offered to write letters to cheer him up. Over the next two years, as Brian’s cancer moved from stage III to IV, Alison’s letters kept on coming.
The letters became part of Brian’s recovery process, while Alison discovered a passion for writing she never knew existed.
Brian is now cancer-free, Alison is a writer, and the two have a relationship that only the term ‘best friends’ can describe. Alison and Brian are now dedicated to getting us all writing letters through their charity, https://www.frommetoyouletters.co.uk/aboutThank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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What happens when ordinary people are faced with extraordinary choices?
In her second blistering novel set on the Channel Island of Jersey, Beyond Summerland, author Jenny Le Coat turns her attentions to the often overlooked issue of what happened after Liberation Day...
Jean Parris was a child when her adored father was taken away by the Nazis. As she and her mother wait anxiously for news, the life Jean thought she knew begins to fall apart.
Hazel Le Tourneur has never conformed to the island’s idea of perfect womanhood. But is she the worst kind of collaborator – an informer?
In the summer of 1945, the Liberation of Jersey has unleashed a different kind of war: one of suspicion, accusation and revenge. For among the heroism and sacrifice, there has also been betrayal and corruption. And while the beautiful island is permanently scarred by gun towers and bunkers, its people must learn to live with a different kind of wound – the desire for truth.
Jenny Lecoat is a novelist and screenwriter. Her debut novel The Girl From the Channel Islands was a New York Times bestseller.
In the 1980s she was one of the first female stand-ups on the UK Alternative Comedy circuit, before going on to write for magazines and newspapers, and later for television.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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This July marks the 136th anniversary of the matchwomens strike at Bryant & May match factory in London's East End in 1888.
Exposing the truth of the ‘poor waif matchgirl’ historian Louise Raw fills us in on the true story of the vibrant working class women who downed tools, went on strike and changed the course of history.
Her work on the Bryant and May Matchwomen altered the way the modern trade union movement was understood. "It was actually begun by young women and girls, regarded by their supposed betters as the 'lowest of the low'," Louise explains in this episode, "but who changed the world for working women, using sisterhood and long hatpins!"Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Ivor was just 12 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz. He survived with the help of his older brother, but the rest of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.
He was brought to England in November 1945 as one of a group of orphans, and started forging a new life. Ivor built a successful clothes manufacturing company; married and had four children (and now six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren). For half a century, the past stayed in the past – until it could be contained no longer.
Eventually, he started to open up – describing the luck, hope, belief and love that have helped him to live and he wrote his own book, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chicken-Soup-Under-Tree-Journey/dp/1999378156
I visited Ivor in his London home and found a warm, curious and intelligent man. But the past is always there as he explains in this open and honest discussion.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Swathed in luxurious fur coats, wearing diamond rings as a knuckledusters and hats to hide their stolen wares, Britain's most notorious all-female gang ruled the tenements of Waterloo and Elephant and Castle and earned the respect of Soho's most feared underworld bosses.
In this fascinating conversation, bestselling author Beezy Marsh reveals how she discovered the story of this notorious gang at a funeral and then used painstaking investigative journalism to uncover the richness and complexity of the lives of the so-called, Forty Thieves. The result is her new gangland series, The Queen of Thieves.
Beezy Marsh is a Sunday Times top-ten best-selling author and journalist who puts family and relationships at the heart of her writing. She believes that ordinary lives are extraordinary. Her historical novels featuring the gritty lives of working class women in the first half of the twentieth century have spent six weeks in the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list in the U.K. and nine weeks at the coveted #1 slot in Canada.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Mervyn Kersh recently celebrated his 99th birthday. Nearly a century of life on earth and what a life he has had. The hair may have turned silver, but he still has the same twinkle in his eye that he had as a young man.
I went to visit Mervyn at his immaculate home in Cockfosters, which he shares with his two cats, and over a cup of tea and ginger biscuits he told me his remarkable story.
In this episode you can listen to his experiences of the D Day landings, entering a booby-trapped chateaux, battling his way across France and into Germany and the horror of stumbling across newly-liberated concentration camp Bergen Belsen.
From there Mervyn was told to prepare to go to the Far East. 'The Japanese heard I was coming so they surrendered,' he joked. Instead, he was sent to Egypt where he contracted dysentery. By the time he was demobbed and returned home he was so brown and skinny his own mother didn't recognise him. 'Can I help you?' she asked as he walked up the garden path.
Mervyn attempted to settle back into life as a civilian, but it was hard. 'Every job I applied for I was told I was too old. I was 22. How could I have come earlier?'
Eventually he found his calling in journalism, settled to civilian life, married a lovely lady and had three children.
In 2015 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest military honour. He is also president of the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women. Every year he returns to Normandy to take part in commemoration services, but the visits he enjoys most are to secondary schools. He tells children his extraordinary story and sings them a song that goes like this.
'Me and my wise old horsey. The times I've heard him say, the trouble with the world is the people who live in it. They've all learned to get, but they've never learn to give in it. You'll never build a world, a decent sort of world. You'll never build a world that way.'
Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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98 years ago today, Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in California. She went onto become the legend that was Marilyn Monroe.
No one knows more about Marilyn than writer Michelle Morgan who has dedicated her life to peeling back the layers of this fascinating woman. In this conversation Michelle shares the lesser known sides of Marilyn and reveals a warm, funny woman who loved reading and nothing more than browsing dusty book shelves.
Monroe was a passionate book lover with a personal library containing over 400 titles. She read prolifically, devouring not only novels, drama, and poetry, but also nonfiction works dealing with psychology, politics, religion, philosophy, travel, and history.
Join us as we journey back to the 1950s and uncover the secret life of Marilyn Monroe.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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The BBC’s period drama “Call the Midwife” made an eccentric, lovable community of nuns and nurses famous the world over. But what of the formidable East End mothers whose babies they delivered? Join me, Kate Thompson and Smithsonian historian Alan Capps as we delve deep into the social history of some truly remarkable women.
During the 20th century, London’s history-rich East End, in common with all working-class communities, was a fiercely matriarchal society. Women in aprons and button-up boots were the beating heart of the tenement neighborhoods. It was the matriarchs—or so-called “aunties”—who ruled the sooty cobblestone streets, kept the children fed, birthed the babies when there was no midwife to call, and laid out the dead.
I reveal how these often-overlooked working-class mothers informally but powerfully led their communities and the ways in which they contributed the to the diverse economic, political, and cultural shaping of the East End. And as this May marks 83 years since the end of the Blitz, I celebrate the astonishing ingenuity, resilience, and strength of the East End women who faced the horrors of war in their own neighborhood streets.
We also discuss the importance of documenting social histories and how I brought the stories of these unrecognized women into the spotlight. I hope you enjoy.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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Maggie Brookes is an ex-journalist, BBC TV producer and creative writing lecturer, now full-time novelist and poet. She was born in London and has been writing stories and poems since she was six.
Maggie says: "The principal theme which recurs in my work is the strength and courage of women in adversity. I am drawn to stories which take place in wartime because because of my parents’ experience in the second world war. My dad was a prisoner of war and my mum was a nurse. I think I get my abhorrence of war from the waste of life they witnessed. War shows the human race at its worst, and yet can also bring out the best of it."
In this conversation Maggie reveals how she uncovered the Spanish Civil war's hidden heroes for her latest book, Acts of Love and War and how she feels her way into an authentic version of the past. Plus her intriguing encounter in a lift!Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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99-year-old Professor George Leitmann is a unique man. He is both a holocaust survivor and a WW2 US Army veteran who helped to liberate Nazi occupied France and Germany.
Nazi persecution of Jewish people forced George and his family to flee their home in Austria and emigrate to the USA. Tragically, his father Josef was unable to get a visa to join them. Initially the family received Red Cross Messages from Josef but by 1940 these had stopped.
As soon as he was old enough, George volunteered to join the United States Army, becoming an non-commissioned officer with the 286th Combat Engineer Battalion. In 1944, he sailed back across the Atlantic and returned to European soil, this time as a soldier in order to fight the scourge of fascism and look for his father. His tremendous acts of bravery and sacrifice were recognised when he was awarded the prestigious French Legion of Honour in 2013.
I am hugely grateful to George for sharing his extraordinary story with me in this remarkable episode.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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In this episode, award-winning historical fiction author, Hazel Gaynor remembers the World War Two ‘seaevacuees’, the children sent away from Britain by sea to escape the bombings at home. This is an often-forgotten part of the history of the war, overshadowed by more familiar events, and it inspired Hazel to write her new novel, The Last Lifeboat.
Here she shares the heroine at the heart of this survival story, how she researched it and why these women and children deserve to be remembered.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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In The Sugar Girls of Love Lane, out today, Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, the authors of the Sunday Times bestseller The Sugar Girls, tell the remarkable stories of those who worked at the famous Tate & Lyle factory in Liverpool.
For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate’s flagship sugar refinery at Love Lane dominated the Liverpool skyline – and was the beating heart of the local community. More than 10,000 workers passed through the doors of the factory during its lifetime, with some families counting four or even five generations of service. Young women leaving school in the post-war years were drawn by the good wages and the unrivalled social life that Tate & Lyle offered.
When they arrived, they started at the very bottom, sweeping sugar off the floors, before graduating to packing and weighing by hand. The work was tough, with girls expected to stack heavy bags of sugar onto pallets five feet high, and by the end of the day their arms were aching and their stockings full of sugar dust. But, despite the hot, heavy work, they found their own ways of having fun, and the friendships they formed would last a lifetime. As well as the female friendships, many women met their future husbands at the factory, and expected their own children to follow in their footsteps.
Duncan and Nuala's social history of the post-war era casts a warm and nostalgic look back at one of the most iconic factories in the north, bringing back a vanished era of hard work, community spirit and simple pleasures.
In this episode, Duncan reveals how he set about researching and writing his latest book, the challenges of writing non-fiction and why social histories set in the 1960s are ripe for exploration.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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‘Reading gives us a privacy of the mind. Librarians are heroes.’ Librarian turned bestselling author Janet Skeslien Charles told me.
In this episode we discuss the remarkable true story behind the brave Parisian librarians in WW2 who inspired The Paris Library.
Her new book, Miss Morgan's Book Brigade, out April 30 2024, based on a true story of a group of intrepid women who lived in a crumbling chateau 40 miles from the front in WW1 to help heal the atrocities of war. We discuss censorship, the craft of writing, plotting and the research that helps us feel our way into the past. Janet is the ultimate bibliophile. If you love books about books, this is the episode for you.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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This year marks 112 years since the Titanic hit an iceberg on 14 April 1912, and in that time the doomed vessel has spawned countless myths, thousands of books and, of course, James Cameron’s Oscar-winning film Titanic . But In our quest to get to get closer to the so-called ‘Ship of Dreams’ have we overlooked the human tragedy at the heart of the disaster? In this conversation, historian and author Claes Wetterholm, from Stockholm, reveals some heartbreaking, untold personal stories…
Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.
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