Dr Caroline Shenton explores the 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 even their own houses, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation’s greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures.

About the speaker

Dr Caroline Shenton is a writer and historian. She has a degree in medieval history from St Andrews and a doctorate on the court of Edward III from Worcester College, Oxford. Having qualified as an archivist at UCL, she is the former Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. She now works as Secretary to Council at Girton College, Cambridge.

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