Who were they? What did they achieve? How did they come to be overlooked? In Misread Signals, expert codebreaking historian Dermot Turing turns his attention to these long-ignored women and puts their contributions back in the spotlight where they belong.

In Britain, we’re proud of what happened at Bletchley Park, breaking the Enigma cipher in the Second World War. And of the fact that it’s a place where diversity flourished, all those years ago, so that 75% of the workforce were women. You have written a new book about women codebreakers – can you tell us a bit more about why you wanted to do that?

It’s right that, by the end of the war, 75% of Bletchley’s staff were women. But in the years since the story of Bletchley Park became declassified, we have been led to understand that the women of Bletchley were largely employed in junior, menial roles. We know of vast squadrons of Wrens who operated Bombe machines to help solve Enigma, women in the WAAF and the ATS, and an anonymous group of women civilians notionally employed by the Foreign Office who seemed to be deployed on non-specific clerical work like ‘indexing’. The codebreaking, by contrast, was done by men, notably people like Alan Turing, who were hired at the beginning of the war from an ‘Emergency List’ compiled by the head of the Government Code & Cypher School (which became Bletchley Park and then GCHQ), Alastair Denniston. Denniston described these people as ‘men of the professor type’. So, the accepted story is that the male professors did the brainy stuff and the women did the low-skilled tasks.

My book is about whether that’s true. There were, indeed, women doing codebreaking. But were they exceptions? And why didn’t we know about them before?

Joan Clarke is almost as famous as Alan Turing, but maybe as an exception to the general rule of codebreaking being a men’s preserve. Were there many others? Who were the women codebreakers?

In fact, looking at the records – things like official reports in the archives and oral histories – it turns out that there were dozens of women doing full-on codebreaking roles. Right from the outset, when the GC&CS was formed in 1919, women were entrusted with professional codebreaking jobs. This didn’t change when the Second World War began. Rather the reverse: there was a big recruitment drive, particularly across women’s colleges in Cambridge and Oxford, to bring in women with the right skills.

Again there’s a myth here about women at Bletchley Park. Setting aside the women in uniform, who were recruited rather later in the war, the picture we have been shown is one of very posh young women – the ‘Debs’ who were presented at court and who had connections in high places. Because they were upper-crust they could be relied on to keep a secret. Then when they got to Bletchley they were given filing and tea-making to do. I don’t deny that there were a handful of these posh ladies there (and some of them did rather more important things than pouring the tea) but the main cohort of civilian recruits came as a result of a call to the colleges and a fairly stern selection process conducted by a lady called Miss Moore at the Foreign Office.

Can you give us some examples of the characters you came across?

One of my favourites is a lady called Wendy White, who appears in the archives as a ‘superintendent of typists’. She was a veteran of the First World War, kept on when the GC&CS was formed in 1919. She worked in the Naval Section and was the only woman among an irreverent group of men who did the same work. It’s clear from the papers that she was quite able to hold her own, and it’s also clear that she was recognised as a capable codebreaker. Things only went wrong in the Second World War, when there was this influx of ‘men of the professor type’, who didn’t like to be told by someone graded as a superintendent of typists that their work didn’t stack up.

Then there’s the woman who put the post-Watergate Church committee in its place. That was Juanita Moody, who had given the White House an early warning on the Cuban missiles, and then found herself put up as the fall-guy when the NSA was being accused of spying on its own citizens in the 1970s. But she hit back hard. She was a tough nut, most impressive.

And I was quite astonished to find out about a German codebreaker called Erika Pannwitz. She was a mathematician who broke American State Department signals during the Second World War. She was a bit of a stand-out because she dressed in men’s clothing, which seems to have been okay in Nazi times (rather surprisingly) but then the university authorities took against her after the war, and she was denied the academic post she craved. It’s odd that the post-war environment was more hostile than the regime which we thought was completely inimical to unfeminine women. There were surprises everywhere in this exploration!

Your book is called Misread Signals and the subtitle of the book is ‘How History Overlooked Women Codebreakers’. How did they come to be overlooked?

That’s the big question, and it has many answers.

The starting-point is that phrase of Commander Denniston’s – the ‘men of the professor type’. That comes from a file in the National Archives which details his efforts at pre-war recruitment. All those dons from Cambridge and Oxford were taken on as ‘senior assistants’, which meant senior-rank codebreakers, and all the women he recruited were classified as ‘linguists’ or ‘clerical staff’ or even ‘typists’. When historians read these papers they take things at face value. But what’s not obvious, until you dive into it, is that the job titles are not job descriptions. Women’s job titles were different, because they were paid on different scales. To fill the urgent need for more codebreakers, women were taken on as codebreakers, but the job titles they had were completely misleading.

My favourite story to illustrate this was told by Joan Clarke herself. In order to get herself promoted she needed to become a ‘linguist’, even though she was a mathematician working on the naval Enigma problem. She had to fill in a form which required her to list her language skills, and she put ‘None’. Needless to say she got the promotion. But it showed what a nonsense the job-labels were, relative to the work the women were actually doing.

There has been lots of attention given to Bletchley Park in recent years and, indeed, celebration of the role of women there. Why didn’t we recognise that there were women in the top professional jobs too?

A number of factors come into play. First of all, when the Bletchley story was first declassified, all the books were written by men and many of them were about what they, the men, had done. Some were about the ‘notable people’ at Bletchley, some of whom were famous in the post-war era for other things, and some of them were about the people in leadership roles at Bletchley, and as is the way of things the leaders get the credit for everything done in their section even if they themselves don’t wield the tools.
More recently, we have heard the wonderful first-hand stories of women who worked at Bletchley. Typically, of course, these are stories of those who were very young when they worked there, so they were genuinely in junior roles – and their stories got told because they are still here. It’s a rich and colourful collection and we are privileged to have these veterans around to tell them. But the women who actually worked in codebreaking roles during the Second World War were a bit older, so didn’t live to describe their work. Their witness record is more threadbare. It’s a shame, because it reinforces the stereotype that women were only allowed to work on lower-grade things. Perhaps we should say that young people fresh out of school were put to work in junior roles, then it comes into a better perspective.

So, how did you come across this gap in our knowledge?

Some years ago I read a very interesting short paper by Karen Lewis, who volunteers at Bletchley Park. It was called ‘Women of the Linguist Type’ – which was a wry take on that old phrase of Commander Denniston’s. Karen’s paper showed that Denniston had been hiring women from Oxbridge as well, who were taken on as what were called ‘linguists’.

Well, that idea sort of floated about in the back of my mind, but then I kept coming across more and more stories of women who hadn’t been doing menial roles at Bletchley, and I thought I would cross-check in the archives about how they were described.

And it turned out that it wasn’t just Joan Clarke. All sorts of codebreaker women had been classified as ‘linguists’ and also as typists and clerks and what-have-you, because these were the lower-paid job strata where only women were employed. For example, there was Helen Haselden, who was officially an ‘established typist’ but whose job was to reconstruct the ‘subtractor tables’ used by the Spanish to encipher their signals. And Rhoda Welsford, a veteran of the First World War, called back to break codes again in the Naval Section, who was graded as a ‘clerical officer’.
So a piece of curiosity about terminology led to a lot of research about women’s position in the civil service and a wider enquiry about why nobody seemed to have noticed that women at Bletchley did have professional jobs.

Your book isn’t just about Bletchley Park. Tell us about the other dimensions you looked at.

My previous book, which was about the weakness of British codes during the Second World War, involved a lot of research into the efforts of the German codebreaking agencies to master the British systems. In that work I came across the most extraordinary thing: in the heart of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office in Berlin there was a cohort of women codebreakers. This was the Nazi regime where women had all been fired from professional civil service positions after Hitler came to power. So these women were very interesting, if peripheral to my previous book, and I wanted to look into their stories further.

It’s very curious how there were parallels with the Bletchley Park system, for example in the way that job labels didn’t match the actual work being done. And there were other parallels: for example, in the way that the American codebreaking agencies hired wartime codebreaking staff – huge numbers of young women graduates taken on just like at Bletchley Park.

And then the story got even more interesting: in the United States, modern codebreaking really began – at the time of the First World War – with the work of two women, Elizebeth Friedman and Agnes Driscoll. Mrs Driscoll became the chief codebreaker of the U.S. Navy and Mrs Friedman the main intelligence source acting as a gang-buster in the prohibition era. And yet, even in the U.S., the principal codebreaking stories have usually featured men as the heroes. It seemed that women disappearing from codebreaking history was a world-wide phenomenon, not just a curiosity of Bletchley Park.

So this opened up some different enquiries, comparing what happened in different countries, things like the marriage bar and the attitude to sexual preferences and how things like that affected employability in sensitive jobs.

Were there any surprises when you were doing your research?

I think one of the biggest shocks was seeing how one of the famous American codebreakers – a man – had completely panned the reputation of Agnes Driscoll, who not only founded American naval codebreaking but had a string of very important code-breaking successes to her credit. For some reason this guy had taken against Mrs Driscoll and, when he came to give an oral history interview in his retirement years he let all the poison flow out. He shredded her abilities as a codebreaker and his opinion of her personality was about as negative as you can get.

But the problem was that other witnesses didn’t agree with any of it. The real issue to my mind is why this particular person in his interview had been treated with such reverence and not challenged on anything he said. It might not have mattered except that his view somehow crystallised into the received historical view, and it’s wrong, and unfair – and it tells you quite a lot about how history comes to get accepted. I learned a lot from that. You have to be very critical about your sources and the context in which they say the things they say.

You might sum it up this way: a central theme of my book is about how the archival record was misinterpreted, because historians took too literally what they read, rather than looking into the context. It’s how we failed to see the women codebreakers who were there, in the record, right before our eyes.

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Steadily, throughout the 2000s, I had searched for former members of the Association and done my best to ensure that they didn’t throw away records. Whenever there were files or memorabilia that the owner no longer wanted I was able to redirect these either to the British Library or the National Football Museum in Manchester. My own cellar revealed old minutes, newsletters and football programmes, all of which have been invaluable in compiling this book. I have not had access to a complete set of WFA minutes but I have done the best I could with whatever material was available to me – and it was a lot! Just as important, have been the memories of so many people who were involved with the WFA from its inception in 1968 and beyond.

Although, as the late Queen Elizabeth II said, ‘recollections may vary’, the memories of so many have helped to jog the brain cells to unearth long-buried stories. My thanks in particular to June Jaycocks, David and Marianne Hunt, Jenny Bruton, Pam Marlowe, Mary and Suzanne Hull, Bill and Viv Bowley, and many more. Almost all of whom I tracked down were kind and generous with their time and their help. Occasionally someone did not wish to talk to me, but I hope that I have done justice in recording what was a relatively short existence for the Association. The WFA was founded on voluntary effort, which continued even after we were able to open an office. Unsurprisingly, given the time span, I was too late to speak with some volunteers. Clubs, leagues and much of the Association’s business was down to their efforts. When it became obvious that our inadequate resources would not be enough to develop the sport as it deserved, we handed its organisation over to the Football Association in 1993. The 2022 Euros trophy and England’s silver medal from the 2023 World Cup are surely proof that we were right to do so.

Our determination

Since UK women’s football has found its way on to the sports pages of the national newspapers and even TV and radio news bulletins, there has been a steady increase in the number of books written on the subject. None, however, have been devoted to the re-emergence of the sport in the late twentieth century through the work of the Women’s FA following the Football Association ban of women’s matches from pitches under their control (and consequently the other British football authorities) in 1921. A ban that remained in place until the end of 1969.

Some women found a way to play football in the intervening years, but it took the selfless efforts of men and women in the 1960s to overturn the ban and secure a sound base from which today’s women’s players have benefitted. Breaking the Grass Ceiling attempts to record the struggles of the Women’s Football Association to become established and to recognise what those people achieved.

Extracted from Breaking the Grass Ceiling by Patricia Gregory

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At her birth in 1889, Miss Dorothy Walpole, as she then was, seemed to have it all. Her family boasted an impressive political and literary heritage: ancestors included Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister and his famed son, Horace, author of the first gothic novel. Her father was heir to an earldom and her American mother the daughter of a wealthy railroad magnate. Dolly (as she was known) was raised in two of Norfolk’s finest houses, Wolterton and Mannington. But her privilege was tempered by several factors, including the early death of her mother and the clear desire of her father for a male heir.

When Dolly married a clever but poor army officer, Captain Arthur Mills, her father – by then the Earl of Orford – disinherited her and went on to marry a woman younger than his daughter. Life is often described as a journey. As an aristocratic woman with all the attendant advantages, Dolly could have taken the easy route, but the consequences of falling in love with the ‘wrong’ man saw her take another path. In doing so she underwent a metamorphosis and discovered much about herself, physically and mentally. Although she would never lose her love of donning a glamorous frock and downing a cocktail, for several months each year she left the decadent glamour of Jazz Age London for the wildness of desert, jungle and bush, where she found great solace.

Dolly had fallen in love with the Sahara when holidaying in Algeria. Her first expedition was in 1922 to Tunisia, to stay with the reclusive cave dwellers. Before Dolly, few women had chosen to journey through Africa, much of which was still little-known, and she became particularly known for her exploration in West Africa, becoming the first English woman in Timbuktu. Chugging along sluggish rivers on rickety boats she endured deadly heat, man-eating crocodiles and a male pursuer with teeth filed to sharp points. That achievement and the first of her six travel books, The Road to Timbuktu, cemented her reputation as an explorer and a travel writer.

In Liberia she was the first woman to cross the country to its furthest point, encountering cannibals on the way. In Venezuela she travelled over 800 miles through challenging terrain and along the Orinoco river. Everywhere she went, she stayed with local tribes whenever possible. Those who accompanied her on her expeditions were people she hired locally as guides, porters, interpreters. She never travelled with close companions, not even Arthur, who undertook his own journeys to find material for the successful adventure stories he wrote. They would reunite in their London flat, holiday together, then write and socialise.

Dolly travelled during a volatile period, when the world was emerging from the chaos of the Great War and re-shaping itself politically and culturally. She witnessed history in the making when Lord Balfour opened the first Hebrew University in Tel Aviv: her observations of the relationship between Jews and Arabs were prescient. In Iraq, she stayed with the Yezidi tribe, arriving via Aleppo in northern Syria and enduring a near-ambush by brigands. A century later, it is sobering to see that parts of the Middle East into which she ventured remain deeply troubled, and that some other places and peoples she wrote about have, at various times, continued to be the subject of distressing news.

Afterwards she shared her experiences with the world by turning them into compelling prose for her travel books and escapist stories for her novels, while undoubtedly being the only explorer who also wrote journalistic features on a wide range of topics for the emerging modern woman, now empowered by achieving suffrage. That she continued to enjoy the buzz of a social life when back in England provided a marked contrast with the other worlds she inhabited.

Today we take for granted the protection of inoculations for foreign travel. In Dolly’s time, smallpox, malaria and TB were rife, the number of people killed between 1900 and 1950 alone totalling more than those killed in both world wars. In several countries she explored, yellow fever was a killer: inoculation trials did not begin until 1938. Although she took precautions against certain illnesses, she succumbed several times yet survived, her petite, almost delicate frame enduring an extraordinary amount: no doubt she put her resilience down to the cigarettes she smoked and the alcohol she consumed whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Yet she also faced personal tribulations, including – ironically – a serious accident back home in London when she was at the height of her fame, and an emotional blow from her father. But she was buoyed up by her election in 1930 as an early female Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Always keen to foster a curious mind in the young, on her death in 1959 her most significant bequest was a legacy for a young woman member of the RGS to use for an explorative enterprise.

With no-one close enough to keep her memory alive, Dolly has been overlooked. Yet her curiosity, courage and sense of humanity showed the world extraordinary places and peoples, focusing always on what draws us together rather than what divides us.

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When did you first read about Joanna Plantagenet? And what inspired you to write a book about her?

I’ve known about Joanna’s existence seemingly forever, but she only ever appears in the background of works about the more famous members of her family: as Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter, or as Richard the Lionheart’s sister. She’s just another name on the family tree – and, even then, only where the family tree bothers to include the daughters at all.

Many books have been published about Joanna’s male relatives and about her mother. However, the more I read about them, the more Joanna popped up in a series of wildly different and sometimes unexpected places: in France, in Sicily, in Cyprus, in the Holy Land, in Rome … and I thought to myself, just what sort of a life did this woman lead?

I therefore thought it was about time Joanna had a book of her own, and I’m very glad I was able to write it, because I’ve made some absolutely fascinating discoveries along the way.

What was the most difficult and most rewarding part of the research process?

It was certainly very challenging trying to find specific mentions of Joanna in contemporary medieval records (not to mention digging out my rusty and wasn’t-even-very-good-to-start-with Latin …). Most of these records were written by churchmen, who had very little to say about the deeds of women and even less interest in women’s personal thoughts and experiences.

But, as it happened, this also turned out to be the most rewarding part of the process as well, because those mentions are there if you look carefully, and I was able to dig out some very interesting material. Yes, the narrative of the Third Crusade is mainly about King Richard, but the occasional, almost throwaway ‘and his sister’ or ‘with his queens’ (meaning his wife and his sister) can tell us where Joanna was and what she was doing. I was also able to read the one and only surviving charter of her own, which was very exciting.

It was also fascinating for me to get to grips with some sources that aren’t very well known in England, for example the ones that tell us of Joanna’s time as queen of Sicily. Sicily was a very unusual kingdom in the Middle Ages: a place where Christians, Muslims and Jews all lived side by side in peace. So it was amazing to be able to bring that lesser-known aspect of history to the fore.

What is your favourite chapter in the book? Why?

This will sound a bit weird, but actually it’s Chapter 4, ‘To the East’, where Joanna gets shipwrecked off the coast of Cyprus. This event was unfortunate, of course, but the ensuing situation gave her the chance to demonstrate her leadership skills. She was on a ship with Princess Berengaria of Navarre, whom she was chaperoning, and also some men of lower rank – there was no father, brother, husband or other royal male in sight. So it was Joanna who had to negotiate with and fend off the ruler of the island, who was keen to get the party ashore so he could rob and do harm to them.

The icing on the cake of this episode is that one of the contemporary narratives we have, written by one of those same dismissive churchmen, was produced by an eye-witness who was actually there. And even he was impressed with the way Joanna comported herself in such a perilous situation.

How would you describe Lionessheart in 3 words?

Medieval women rock.

Have you learnt any life lessons from the women featured in the book?

From Eleanor of Brittany I’ve learned that I’m extremely lucky not to have been a minor female member of the Plantagenet family in the twelfth century! From the Damsel of Cyprus I’ve learned that you can make a mark on the world that will last for hundreds of years, even if nobody knows your name. And from Joanna herself I’ve learned that medieval women had to pick their battles very carefully – but that if they did, they could take control of their own lives and exert a great deal more influence on the world around them than they’re generally given credit for.

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World War I

The Women’s Land Army was established by the British government to recruit women and girls to work in Britain’s agriculture industry in both twentieth century world wars. The necessity was prompted by large numbers of men leaving their employment to join the armed forces, and the knowledge that 60% of British food was imported with the prospect of supplies being disrupted. Numbers of women working in agricultural settings had been falling for decades. Compared with 43,946 identified in the 1861 population Census, there were just 13,245 females recorded as ‘agricultural labourers’ in the 1911 Census.

The First World War started in July 1914 and by February 1916, 250,000 men had left agricultural occupations with another 100,000 following the passing of the Military Services Act that conscripted, with few exceptions, all single men aged between eighteen and forty-one. A plea was made for 200,000 women and girls to replace them, coupled with a dire warning that labour shortages could lead to the country’s food production falling by between 15% and 25%. The prospect of food stocks reducing to just three weeks led to the urgent need for the cultivation of 2.5 million more acres of land, and for females to help supply the additional food.

In November 1917, the likelihood of food queues prompted Lloyd George, Prime Minister, to admit that ‘German submarines are trying to starve us by sinking the ships which are used to carry to our shores the abundant harvests of other lands.’ Food prices had risen by 42% in 1916, and food rationing was imposed in January 1918.

Claims were made that Hampshire was the most successful English county to recruit, train and place women and girls in local farms. As early as April 1915, two years before the Women’s Land Army was formed, a four-week course, devised by David Cowan, Hampshire’s Director of Education, was being taught at the county’s farm school at Sparsholt. Much was made of the students’ social class; ‘far above…the ordinary labouring class’, was a local newspaper comment.

Many people played a part in the recruitment of women and girls to work on farms. Hampshire’s Women’s Land Army committee had a formidable array of responsibilities to fulfil; the selection of suitable candidates, the organisation of a wide variety of training, the provision of accommodation, the allocation of farms, and pastoral care requirements, among them. Approximately one half of Women’s Land Army workers were employed in dairy associated duties, with the others spread around many farming activities.

By the end of the War, Hampshire accounted for about 3,500 of the country’s 23,000 full-time Women’s Land Army members, 12,000 working in “Agriculture”, with the remainder in the “Foraging” and “Forestry” sections. When the disbandment of the Women’s Land Army occurred in November 1919, many members remained in the agriculture sector, leading to a Hampshire farmer being delighted that he would ‘never again have a man to look after his poultry.’

World War II

If the British government was slow addressing the crucial issues following the departure of large numbers of men to serve in the armed forces in the First World War, that was not the case when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. The Women’s Land Army had been re-formed in February that year, and food rationing was imposed in January 1940, not to be completely lifted until 1954. Despite extensive advertising, numbers of females coming forward rarely matched demand for them, accommodation was in short supply, and another appeal for more land for cultivation was needed as German U boats were severely disrupting food and other supplies.

Once again Hampshire was in the forefront of the recruitment of Women’s Land Army members, known as “land girls”, with the county’s National Farmers’ Union Chairman claiming ‘that there were more land girls in Hampshire than in any other county in England.’ By January 1940, 609 land girls were already employed on Hampshire’s farms, a number that steadily grew to 2,611. The national number of employed land girls peaked at 87,000 in 1943 but had fallen to 43,125 in 1945. Most recruits were single women with an age range of 17 to about 45, and from a wide variety of previous occupations. The first week-long courses at Sparsholt’s farm school taught land girls to drive tractors, reflecting the large increase in numbers on farms compared with the First World War.

When the War in Europe ended in 1945, continued food shortages, the reemployment of fewer male workers than expected, the raising of the school leaving age, and former prisoners of war returning to their home countries, led to the continuing encouragement of females to remain in farming to support a “Food Comes First” campaign. The Women’s Land Army was finally demobilised in November 1950. Accolades were commonplace; one was that land girls ‘had obeyed the call of duty in the nation’s hour of great peril and need, and the nation owed them an everlasting debt.’

That was undoubtedly so, but not without justification was the Women’s Land Army described as a “Cinderella” operation. Land girls were not awarded the same levels of leaving gratuities that other female wartime workers received, they were not invited to march past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day until 2000, and it was October 2014 before a statue was unveiled at the National Arboretum by the Countess of Essex. Over 240,000 women and girls served on British farms in both world wars, and it must be hoped that the 75th anniversary of the disbandment of the Women’s Land Army in November 2025 will be suitably marked.

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Where did the idea for the book come from?

It all started when Queen Elizabeth II died, in 2022. I was watching the spectacle that is crowning a new monarch, and realised that Princess Anne—the queen’s eldest daughter—had lived a life of restricted royalty, but without the direction that her brother, the heir, had always had. It made me wonder what her life could have been if she had been the heir instead.

Which is your favourite Queen that you talk about in the book?

Ohhhhh, a tough one! I think probably Isabella, the eldest daughter of Edward III. She lived a bold life in the 1350s when women had very few rights at all, and she was under the control of the most powerful man in the country: her father. And yet she refused to be married off, instead gaining for herself an independent income—I think the first princess to do so—and eventually marrying, for love, in her thirties. What an icon!

What was your biggest challenge while undertaking the research?

Honestly, the fact that there simply aren’t that many records of princesses in the early medieval period! Take William the Conqueror, for example. He began his reign in 1066, and there are plenty of contemporary lists of his children—that is, lists made during his lifetime. The trouble is, none of those lists agree with each other. Not a single one is the same! So we don’t exactly know how many children he had, what their birth order was, or even what their names were. Not exactly helpful!

Where did you gather your information from and what was the research process like?

I’m really fortunate that, thanks to my university, I have access to JSTOR which has hundreds of thousands of academic articles and reports of research. I also gained access to my local university library, including some primary sources, and I used my county’s integrated library network too. I was really fortunate!

The research process was really enjoyable, even though it was a little frustrating at times. I’ve loved history all my life, I have two history degrees, and yet there were many queens who could have been that I had never heard of. It was so exciting discovering them.

Was there anything especially surprising that you found in your research?

Most definitely; just how bold so many of these princesses were! Although their boldness has to be contextualised—boldness in the 1500s looks different to boldness now—it was astonishing how much agency these princesses were not given, but demanded.

How would you describe the book in one word?

Feminist.

What is your favourite chapter in the book? Why?

I’m a medievalist at heart, and so I had a huge amount of fun with the Edward queens. They lived during the height of the medieval era, from around the 1270s to 1370s. So much changed during that time, and the royal princesses had a front-row seat…and at times, were influencing those changes.

Have you learnt any life lessons from these women?

I think to be more bold! To be more open with what I want out of life, where I want to go, what I want to do. There’s nothing like the limitations on my life compared to theirs, and they still pushed forward to make joyful adventures for themselves. They are just so fascinating, and I can’t wait for people to read Regina and discover them.

The post Ask the author: Emily Murdoch Perkins on rewriting royal history appeared first on The History Press.

Her name is Margaret.

Daughter of Henry VII and sister of Henry VIII, Margaret was married to the King of Scotland at a young age in an attempt to create ‘Perpetual Peace’, as her marriage contract was termed – but after her husband died leaving her with two children, Margaret was no longer going to accept being a pawn for the men in her life.

Though she had been raised for a life of duty and service to her country, Margaret had decided she would rather take a young, handsome, charming husband. So against the advice of all, she did.

It is truly a tragedy for Margaret that her husband was unfaithful to her, something that many women of the time, even noblewomen, had to accept.

But Margaret wasn’t going to accept that. She was a Tudor. They aren’t known for accepting their lot.

In 1519, while her brother Henry VIII was happily married to Catherine of Aragon, Margaret demanded a divorce from her husband. Henry VIII was—hilariously, in hindsight—absolutely outraged. A divorce, in the royal family? Absolutely not.

Margaret was determined, and petitioned anyone who would listen for a divorce for eight years…to the point that Henry VIII eventually delegated replying to her begging letters (for a divorce and for money) to Cardinal Wolsey—because Henry himself was too busy writing letters to Anne Boleyn.

You couldn’t make it up.

After many years and military skirmishes with her second husband, including firing cannons at him from Holyrood Palace, Margaret finally gained her divorce in 1527. What she did next? Well, you’ll have to read Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been to find out…

Make sure you follow Emily Murdoch Perkins on social media – @emilyekmurdoch

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Back then, the word was a term used, not always positively, for those who lived unconventional lives. One of the most famous was Isabel Rawsthorne: artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse for some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, including Picasso whom she considered “not a man any woman in her right mind could care for”. Living in 1930s Paris with her husband “Tom” Sefton Delmer, a highly intelligent and shrewd journalist for the Daily Express newspaper who’d interviewed Hitler and witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime first-hand. He had originally met Isabel in the most unlikely of circumstances at the Tate Gallery in the form of a bronze bust sculpted by Jacob Epstein in 1932. As soon as the journalist saw it, he was smitten with the sitter. “You,” he said to the bust, “are the girl I am going to marry”.

18 months later something extraordinary happened. Having been dispatched to France by the Express as head of its Paris bureau, he was sitting in a Café just off the Champs Elysee when his eye was caught by a striking girl a few tables away. As he looked at the slanting eyes above the red pouting mouth, it suddenly hit him. “Please Mademoiselle, excuse my intrusion,” he politely fumbled. “I’m Tom Delmer, Paris correspondent of the Express. I have been looking at you and I feel certain you must be the famous Isabel, of whom Epstein did that superb bust. Are you?” Isabel gazed at him with her wide-open friendly eyes and shrieked: “I certainly am Isabel,” she laughed.

That first night together, Isabel and Tom danced till dawn. She soon moved into his penthouse apartment and he showed her the fine art of Parisian living. She then rented a studio in Montparnasse and frequented the Dome Café to meet and model for many like-minded artists of the French Avant-Garde; Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Balthus, who liked to paint pubescent girls in erotic poses we now view as rather creepy. Isabel was using Balthus’s studio in Paris when the Germans invaded France. She headed north and luckily boarded the last ship to leave for Britain. Having volunteered to play her part in the war, she was then sent to one of several secret units on the Woburn Estate in Bedfordshire. These came under the wing of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Isabel’s section was devoted to broadcasting anti-Nazi propaganda to occupied Europe, masterminded by her husband, who’d been recruited by fellow SOE agent (and future James Bond author), Ian Fleming. They decided to use ‘radio-pornography’ to catch the Germans’ attention and invented a character called ‘Der Chef, a German patriot who told salacious stories about Hitler’s inner-circle. The recipe was an instant success. One German woman who worked for the Gestapo was denounced by ‘Der Chef’ for having insulted the honour of the German army by using an officer’s steel helmet as a chamber pot, during an orgy, received a stream of telephone calls from listeners denouncing her.

When not dreaming up new forms of sexual depravity to attribute to Hitler’s regime, Isabel used her artistic talents to design subversive greetings cards to be distributed by the resistance. Or as she put it: “What were humorously called ‘greeting cards’ were leaflets in colour of a highly sexual nature. This was great fun. Fancy being employed by the government to create pornography! One I much enjoyed was a picture painstakingly realistic of a foreign worker making love with a bright blonde German girl.” Isabel painted the images in the neo-classical style favoured by Hitler, and her secret agent friends ordered the leaflets by the thousands. Not because they sapped German morale, but because they found them excellent for the morale of their men distributing them; and Ian Fleming, was a frequent visitor: “He was our liaison with the Admiralty,” recalled Isabel. “Years later, when I read the James Bond stories, I understood that Bond was Ian’s fantasy, skilfully told. Ian thought himself Bond.”

A few weeks before they were put on the secret base, Isabel and Tom had invited Fleming to a dinner-party in Holborn, where an unexpected guest – a German bomb – gatecrashed the evening. After a huge jolt and a bang, Tom opened the dining room door to discover the staircase had disappeared. Isabel said she’d never seen anyone move as fast as Fleming, who effortlessly vaulted the missing stairs because he was worried about his lovely car parked outside. But Tom’s life of secrecy and subterfuge wasn’t the artistic life Isabel had aspired to. And little did her husband realise Isabel was harbouring a secret from her youth – far darker than anything he or Ian Fleming could have ever dreamed of. As a child, Isabel was forever drawing and had attended Liverpool School of Art, where she hung out with the rebellious male students. Together they visited an exhibition of Jacob Epstein’s controversial sculpture, Genesis, which depicted a naked pregnant woman with swollen breasts. Its slanting eyelids and chiselled cheekbones looked remarkably like Isabel’s and the notorious sculpture attracted over a thousand visitors per week, who paid to gawp at this modern twist on the classical nude.

After leaving Liverpool School of Art, Isabel won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art. Sadly, she didn’t have a wealthy family to support her, so she tried working as a life model, but every art school turned her down. Then Isabel’s friend had a brainwave. She should go and see Jacob Epstein. “She was convinced that he would want to make a portrait,” she recalled. “She was quite right. We went together to his house in Hyde Park Gardens and he immediately took me to his studio and asked me to start posing.” Isabel was a stunningly beautiful girl who used make-up in a painterly way to accentuate the ‘modern’ features of her face. She powdered it white like a blank canvas, before carving out her eyes with thick black eyeliner, to make it more angular.

Her style spoke of ‘savage’ sophistication to some and sinful excess to others. Epstein must have spotted Isabel’s striking similarity to his Genesis sculpture, and his wife knew Isabel was a vulnerable young woman with no money. If Mrs Epstein were alive today, she would be labelled a sex trafficker for aiding and abetting her husband’s behaviour. She welcomed Isabel into the household like a spider to a fly.

Whilst I was researching my new book Queens of Bohemia, it became clear that Epstein was a sexual predator with a set pattern of seduction. First, he’d sculpt a head then, once lulled into a false sense of security, he’d ask the model to pose nude before pouncing on her. That’s how he groomed Isabel. “After Epstein had been working on my head for a few weeks… he suggested that I come to live in his house, which would make my life much simpler,” she later recalled. Isabel and Epstein soon became a noticeable couple about town being photographed together at posh premieres and art openings. He sculpted large bronzes of her stripped naked to the waist and bearing her breasts. These were to be among the first of a long line of extraordinary artworks she inspired throughout her long life. But when Epstein got Isabel pregnant, she was quietly moved out of the public gaze and gave birth to a little boy in September 1934. The arrival of a child changed the dynamic of their menage a trois lifestyle.

Only one woman in the household would be socially accepted to carry out the role of mother and Epstein was already maintaining a second family with another mistress. To maintain a third, with Isabel, was beyond his financial means. Isabel changed her name to ‘Mrs Epstein’ during her pregnancy so that when the birth was recorded in every legal sense the child became Mrs Epstein’s son, as she’d done before with her ‘daughter’ from another of Epstein’s models. Mrs Epstein was infertile and had no qualms about using and abusing her husband’s many mistresses. She brought up their two children, and even shot one mistress, Kathleen Garmen, with a revolver. Kathleen, who would become Epstein’s second wife, survived but the Press had a field day. So, with a heavy heart, Isabel handed her baby over. She was seen soon after dressed in black, looking sad and tearful. With Epstein using his connections and wealth, Isabel was ‘paid-off’ and exiled to Paris. She never saw her child again.

Isabel must have had a quiet moment of reflection wondering about the son she’d given up when news came through that Margaret had fallen on the steps of her house and died in 1947. Another ex-lover, Alberto Giacommetti, compared Isabel to a big cat – ‘a man eater’ – when he sculpted her.. She was still a desirable woman and had many lovers including the infamous homosexual artist Francis Bacon, who painted her many times and claimed she was the only woman he’d ever slept with.

Isabel was always the life and soul of any party but did her wild shrieks of laughter hide and bohemian behaviour belie a sadness? She eventually moved to a cottage in Suffolk and lived the life of a recluse before descending in to alcoholism. She also kept a gun by her side to protect her precious art collection from burglars and began writing her memoirs.

But the eye disease, glaucoma soon meant she could no longer write or paint. Increasingly blind with rails fixed to the walls, she edged around the cottage like a shadow, On January 27, 1992, she decided she could take no more, standing at the top of the stairs she leapt and fell to her death. She was 79. Her body lay at the foot of the stairs for days, waiting to be discovered: a sad shattered beauty that had once inspired so many works of art.

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Track 1: Il cielo in una stanza by Mina

The dreamy orchestration evokes Vivien’s first glimpse of Ceylon in 1953, where she would film Elephant Walk. During that time, she also had an affair with Peter Finch. It also made me think of Vivien’s earlier trip to Capri in 1936, when driven by lust, she embarked on the island to surprise her lover, Laurence Olivier, who was holidaying with his wife, Jill Esmond. The beauty of those 2 island paradises, with the tropical flowers, crystallised waters, and exotic scents was intoxicating for Vivien, but her actions were far from dazzling. The contrast reminded me of this song, which, despite sounding romantic (as Italian lyrics always do!) is actually about a brothel.

Track 2: Loco Amor by Pedrito Martinez

The passionate chants of ‘Loco Amor’ (Spanish for ‘crazy love’) bring to mind the long days and nights Vivien spent with Peter in Ceylon, as well as her time with Larry. During the early days of each affair, she was swept up in the intensity of her feelings and only had tunnel vision for the man (or men) she loved. I purposely chose classic songs in Italian, Spanish and French to represent Vivien’s worldliness but also to keep the listener lost in translation, symbolising the secret world in which Vivien and Larry (more so than Peter) existed during those hedonistic days of clandestine meetings in nondescript places and stolen moments on the film set.

Track 3: Good Luck, Babe by Chappell Roan

‘Stop the world to stop the feeling’ summarises the desperation Vivien felt in 1953, when she knew something was a miss, but she was at a loss to understand it. This perfectly sums up the heightened feelings of falling for Peter and the damage it caused, and the tragic aftermath when her mental health collapsed and she was hospitalised for several weeks. Vivien would often wish the world could stop many times throughout her life. It also suggests the loss of Vivien’s support from Larry, as he moved on and had affairs with younger women. Powerless was how Vivien felt, but she also knew nobody could match the intensity of her love.

Track 4: Wake Up Alone by Amy Winehouse

The consequence of Vivien’s illness meant that she drove people away and those she loved bore the brunt of the violence which often came with a manic depressive episode. This song reflects the loneliness of being mentally ill and misunderstood, and the longing she felt to put things right. Sadly, her relationships were fractured beyond repair and the men in her life eventually left her.

Track 5: Young and Beautiful by Lana del Rey

After Vivien awoke from her coma at the hospital, following her mental breakdown, Larry did not recognise her. The woman he loved was a stranger to him and he was afraid. In his memoirs, he wrote, ‘I loved her that much less.’ Having weathered several storms throughout their affair and, then, marriage, the lack of familiarity startled him and he realised it was the beginning of the end. Vivien must have realised it too, but her obsession for Larry would keep her bound to him, at whatever cost to her sanity. The idyllic image he held of her was shattered forever and she was always trying to go back to a happier time, but failed in her mission.

Track 6: Eternal Source of Light Divine by G.F. Handel

The pomp and splendour perfectly sum up the Oliviers when they are at their greatest: on the world’s stage and adored by their legions of fans. Onstage, they were invincible – the King and Queen of the theatre, and the audience forming their court of devoted subjects.

Track 7: You Belong To Me by Patsy Cline

The sentimentality of Vivien and Larry’s marriage, as well as the 1940s and early 50s, when they were the golden couple and seemingly untouchable, are conveyed in the lyrics. It’s all about the past, where Vivien remained stuck for much of the 50s and 60s. She longed for Larry, after he left her, and held onto the happier memories, even if much of it was a figment of her imagination. This much was true, when, in 1962, Vivien went on a lengthy tour of Australasia, retracing the steps she took with Larry in 1948, but, to her sadness, everything had changed. She looked for him everywhere and spoke of him in interviews, as if he was lingering in the next room.

Track 8: Cherry by Lana del Rey

The toxicity of Vivien’s affair with Peter and her failing marriage to Larry was a running conflict throughout her life in the 1950s. In 1955, Vivien and Larry did a season at Stratford but as soon as Peter entered the scene, she discarded Larry for her lover. ‘I fall to pieces when I’m with you’ could have easily translated to Vivien’s question, when she asked her husband and lover, ‘Which one of you is coming to bed with me?’

Track 9: tolerate it by Taylor Swift

Several parts of this song are reflective of Vivien and the men in her life, not only Peter and Larry, but her first husband Leigh Holman, whose love she only ever tolerated. Likewise, Vivien felt neglected by Leigh during their brief marriage and failed to connect on a romantic level with him and his love for her grew after she abandoned him for Larry. And, as Vivien’s marriage to Larry was coming to an end, she often felt he tolerated her and it broke her heart and shattered her confidence.

Track 10: I’d Rather Go Blind by Etta James

In 1960, Vivien attended the divorce hearing alone and wept openly as her marriage to Larry was dissolved. She was distraught, as she always hoped he would call the divorce off. Likewise, when she discovered, from the paparazzi, that he had married Joan Plowright, she was shocked but hid it for the sake of keeping up appearances – those feelings of sadness and regret were also apparent when Larry had children with his new wife. The song reminds me of Vivien’s remark: ‘I’d rather live a short life with Larry than a long life without him.’

Track 11: Please, Please, Please, Let me Get What I Want by She and Him

In middle age, Vivien was desperately trying to navigate her personal life and the lull in her career. She was also beginning a new relationship with Jack Merivale and trying to repair her bond with her only child from her first marriage, whom she abandoned for Larry. I think she was trying to repair her karma and her self-worth by doing good deeds. But her mental illness would cast a dark shadow over her plans and derail her progress. Nevertheless, it was a battle she continued to fight.

Track 12: Je ne sais plus by Dalida

In English, the song is ‘You Don’t Own Me’. Despite the challenges Vivien faced, it was important, as her biographer, to restore her sense of power. She’s an empowering woman who lived by her own set of rules, for better or worse, and was governed by her soul’s journey, instead of society’s rules. She was open about her illness and she was authentic in her passion for living.

Track 13: All Too Well (Ten Minute Version) by Taylor Swift

The greatest battles in Vivien’s life were her mental illness and her (finally) agreeing to give Larry a divorce so he could remarry. She romanticised their life together and carried a torch for him always, seemingly forgetting the horrific times they shared and the infidelity on both sides. Unfortunately, for Vivien, Larry moved on and started a family with his new wife. In Vivien’s dream world, she and Larry would remain friends and be in each other’s lives, but he kept her at arm’s length. To her, their marriage, even when it was over, was sacred. I feel, she was always hoping Larry would romanticise her, as she did him – she remembered it ‘all too well’.

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Nevertheless, there were several women who managed to undertake extraordinary journeys, yet these early pioneers and their astonishing stories have been virtually ignored.

This book has been written to finally record and properly set down the stories of the remarkable journeys made by these women, the very first women to achieve a full circumnavigation by sea and land and, more recently, in the air and in space. Author Sally Smith has delved deep around the world, including at record offices and institutions as far afield as Tahiti and Melbourne, to research the full details of these forgotten women. Some of their stories are breathtaking, others are simply hugely entertaining, but they all deserve a proper place in the history books.

Stories like that of Jeanne Baret. Brought up in poverty and illiterate, in 1767 it was against the French law for a woman to go to sea. Jeanne dressed as a man to join a French ship but the expedition leader soon had suspicions. When Jeanne discovered a beautiful plant high up in Brazil, she named it the Bougainvillea to stop Captain Bougainville from arresting her. It worked, but when they reached Tahiti and locals rushed up to touch her, denouncing her as a woman, her secret was exposed. Changing ships and going through many other adventures, including marrying in Mauritius, Jeanne finally made it back to France to become the first ever woman to go round the world.

Then there is Mary Ann Parker, the first woman to go round Cape Horn and circumnavigate the world from east to west. She had sailed out from England with the third fleet in 1791 and wrote the first published report from a woman on the early settlement at Port Jackson, now Sydney. While there, she befriended an Aboriginal Australian. On the way back, in Cape Town her boat picked up Mary Bryant, the first female escaped convict from Australia, and also some mutineers from the Bounty, but back in London her reputation was damaged when she shocked society by welcoming her Australian friend into her London home and she ended up in prison.

And so the stories go on… featuring the 11 women who achieved real firsts in global circumnavigations; records that can never be broken but more than that, fabulous stories that deserve a rightful place in the history books.

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