From the Library With Love

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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.