Founded in 2019, the Chelsea History Festival is a partnership between the National Army Museum, the Royal Hospital Chelsea and Chelsea Physic Garden. Its aim is to entertain, educate and inspire through local, national and global history.
This year’s programme includes events associated with Polish history like:
The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville
Join Clare Mulley as she recounts the remarkable tale of Britain’s first female special agent of the Second World War.
Courageous and enigmatic, Christine Granville – also known as Krystyna Skarbek – was the daughter of a Polish aristocrat and ended up becoming one of Britain’s most daring and highly decorated special agents.
Join historian Claire Mulley as she unpacks Christine’s remarkable career, which took her from occupied Poland to Egypt and then behind enemy lines in France. The intelligence that she gathered made a remarkable contribution to the Allied war effort, saving the lives of her fellow officers’ mere hours before their execution on more than one occasion.
Clare Mulley is an award-winning author, broadcaster and popular historian whose work re-examine the history of the First and Second World Wars through the lives of remarkable women.
Her books include The Woman Who Saved the Children, The Spy Who Loved, and The Women Who Flew For Hitler.
The Women Written Out of the Middle Ages
Janina Ramirez restores the medieval women struck from the historical record to their rightful positions as the power-players who shaped the world we live in today.
The medieval world takes on a different complexion when you examine the lives of the extraordinary women who have been written out of our history.
Male gatekeepers deliberately wrote women out of history, burning their books, destroying their artworks and producing new myths and legends that excluded their stories.
Janina Ramirez will uncover why a selection of extraordinary women, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Aethelflaed and Jadwiga of Poland, were removed from our historical narrative in this fascinating talk that will bring medieval women back to the fore.
Understanding their erasure helps us to identify the shocking number of misconceptions that underpin our understanding of history and manipulate our contemporary view of the past.
Dr Janina Ramirez is an Oxford lecturer, BBC broadcaster, researcher and author. She has presented and written over 30 hours of BBC history documentaries and series on TV and radio, and written five books for children and adults.
Passport to Paraguay
Discover the fascinating story of how Polish diplomats in Switzerland worked to save Jews during the Second World War.
In the midst of the Second World War, a group of Polish diplomats and Jewish activists working in Switzerland masterminded a remarkable scheme that is thought to have saved as many as 3,000 Jews from the Holocaust.
Join Roger Moorhouse has he tells the incredible story of the Ładoś Group who masterminded a forgery scheme, producing fake Latin American passports. As citizens of these countries were protected from deportation to Nazi extermination camps, the holders were given the chance to be interned and possibly exchanged for German prisoners of war.
Roger Moorhouse is a historian and author specialising in modern German and Central European history, with particular interest in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and World War Two in Europe.
A visiting professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw, he is also the author of a number of books on modern German history, including Killing Hitler, Berlin at War, The Third Reich in 100 Objects and The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941.
He is a regular commentator in the specialist and general press, and a consultant for film and television. He is also the author of First to Fight: The Polish War 1939.
Jazz Christmas Around the World! @ Jazz
“The Counterfeit Countess” by Elizabeth B. White
