From the Library With Love
Librarians, bestselling authors and our wartime generation sharing their love of books, reading and some extraordinary stories .
#Hidden History #Forgotten women #Bibliotherapy #Libraries
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to From the Library With Love. A podcast for anyone whose life has been changed by reading. I’m Kate Thompson.
Wonderful, transformative things happen when you set foot in a library. In 2019 I uncovered the true story of a forgotten Underground library, built along the tracks of a Tube tunnel during the Blitz. As stories go, it was irresistible and the result was, The Little Wartime Library, my seventh novel.
Bethnal Green Public Library, where the novel is set was 100 years old in October 2022, and to celebrate the centenary of this grand old lady, funded by library philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, I set myself the challenge of interviewing 100 library workers. Speaking with one library worker for every year this library has been serving its community seemed a good way to mark this auspicious occasion. Because who better to explain the worth of a hundred-year-old library, than librarians themselves!
I wanted to explore the enduring value of libraries and reading. I quickly realised that librarians have the best stories.
My research led me to librarians with over fifty years of experience and MBEs, to the impressive women who manage libraries in prisons and schools, to those in remote Scottish islands. From poetry libraries overlooking the wide sweep of the Thames, to the 16th century Shakespeare’s Library in Stratford, via the small but mighty Leadhills Miners’ Library.
This podcast was born out of those eye-opening conversations, because as Denise from Tower Hamlets Library told me: 'If you want to see the world, don't join the Army, become a librarian!'
I’ll also be talking to international bestselling authors and some remarkable wartime women about their favourite libraries, stories, the craft of writing and the book that helped them to view the world differently. Come and join me as I delve into the secrets behind the stacks.
Podcasts edited by Ben Veasey at media-crews.co.uk
Image by Julie Price
From the Library With Love
100-year-old Bletchley Park Codebreaker, Charlotte 'Betty' Webb on keeping her wartime secrets
Bletchley Park, Britain’s secret centre of code breaking housed the finest minds of a generation, and has always been perceived as a predominately male institution.
Countless books, films and documentaries have paid tribute to the genius of eccentric code-breakers like Alan Turing, widely regarded to have brought the war to a premature end by cracking the infamous Nazi Enigma encryptions, but little has been said of the quietly formidable women of Bletchley Park.
By 1944, Bletchley had over 8,000 personnel – 75 per cent of them women. These women, who outnumbered the men three to one, formed the backbone of the entire operation.
Women like Charlotte ‘Betty’ Webb, a former Bletchley park codebreaker. I went to visit Betty at her home in Worcestershire and was charmed by this lively, whip-smart 100-year-old. Betty is full of surprising stories about her time at Bletchley, or as she described it ‘Britain’s Wartime University’. Rather than jitterbugging with a GI at London’s teeming dancehalls, on her leave weekends, Betty would head instead to an Indian restaurant for a curry. "Unusual, but so much nicer than boiled beef and beetroot’,’ she told me. This episode is full of fascinating tales of her time at Bletchley and after VE Day, her experiences of working in the Pentagon in Washington.
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