Packing Up the Nation: Saving London's Museums in WW2

A gripping and sometimes eccentric story of how a band of curators and custodians saved Britain’s national heritage, determined that these treasures would not fall into the possession of Adolf Hitler’s forces which were gathering on the other side of the Channel to launch their invasion.

This dedicated team of unlikely heroes hatched secret plans to evacuate their precious collections in a myriad of ways involving locations such as Wiltshire quarries and Welsh mines in a race against time in the summer of 1939.

THE ARTS SOCIETY ACCREDITED LECTURER

Dr Caroline Shenton

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it ‘microhistory at its absolute best’. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barry’s War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as "a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful". Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2017, has appeared at the Cheltenham, Hay and Henley literary festivals and on BBC radio and TV. Caroline’s third book, National Treasures, will tell the extraordinary and sometimes hilarious stories behind the saving of London’s art and museum collections in World War Two.