TLC Talk: Protecting the Nation’s Art Treasures in WWII – Caroline Shenton, Parliamentary archivist
Tuesday 13th May at 11:00 | £15
This is a gripping and sometimes hilarious story of how a band of heroic curators and eccentric custodians saved Britain’s national heritage during the Second World War. As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London’s museums, galleries and archives forged extraordinary and ingenious plans to send their collections to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, quarries and their own houses, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation’s greatest treasures and, in a race against time, set out throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures. Dr Caroline Shenton is a public historian, archivist and formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London.