Paul Lay is a historian, writer and former editor of History Today magazine. He is the author of the acclaimed Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate.
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Paul is a Trustee of the Cromwell Museum and sits on the advisory boards of the Institute of Historical Research and the History and Policy unit at KCL. He reviews regularly for the Times, Telegraph and the Literary Review.
In 1940 Olivia Jordan, then Matthews, drove an ambulance under fire in France, escaped to Britain as the Germans closed in and became Charles de Gaulle’s driver-translator in London. Subsequently she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, though talking of her war work last year, Olivia, who has died
2019 was the 100th anniversary of GCHQ, once called the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) and the brainchild behind one of World War II’s most famous institutions: Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.During the war, Bletchley depended on the heft of a predominantly female ...
During the Second World War, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) at its peak consisted of nearly 300,000 women, the majority of whom were conscripted. The author of a bestselling new book of oral history spent lockdown talking to seventeen veterans about their experience. Although ...
Warrior Princess‘The Princess was a quiet girl. She didn’t put herself for- ward.’ Gwen Evans (née Ansell) is 98 years old and served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service between 1942–6. We’ve only just met. Finding women in their late nineties who served in Britain’s female army in World ...