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This July marks the 136th anniversary of the matchwomens strike at Bryant & May match factory in London's East End in 1888.

Exposing the truth of the ‘poor waif matchgirl’ historian Louise Raw fills us in on the true story of the vibrant working class women who downed tools, went on strike and changed the course of history.

Her work on the Bryant and May Matchwomen altered the way the modern trade union movement was understood. "It was actually begun by young women and girls, regarded by their supposed betters as the 'lowest of the low'," Louise explains in this episode, "but who changed the world for working women, using sisterhood and long hatpins!"

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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Ivor was just 12 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz. He survived with the help of his older brother, but the rest of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.

He was brought to England in November 1945 as one of a group of orphans, and started forging a new life. Ivor built a successful clothes manufacturing company; married and had four children (and now six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren). For half a century, the past stayed in the past – until it could be contained no longer.

Eventually, he started to open up – describing the luck, hope, belief and love that have helped him to live and he wrote his own book, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chicken-Soup-Under-Tree-Journey/dp/1999378156

I visited Ivor in his London home and found a warm, curious and intelligent man. But the past is always there as he explains in this open and honest discussion.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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Swathed in luxurious fur coats, wearing diamond rings as a knuckledusters and hats to hide their stolen wares, Britain's most notorious all-female gang ruled the tenements of Waterloo and Elephant and Castle and earned the respect of Soho's most feared underworld bosses.

In this fascinating conversation, bestselling author Beezy Marsh reveals how she discovered the story of this notorious gang at a funeral and then used painstaking investigative journalism to uncover the richness and complexity of the lives of the so-called, Forty Thieves. The result is her new gangland series, The Queen of Thieves.

Beezy Marsh is a Sunday Times top-ten best-selling author and journalist who puts family and relationships at the heart of her writing. She believes that ordinary lives are extraordinary. Her historical novels featuring the gritty lives of working class women in the first half of the twentieth century have spent six weeks in the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list in the U.K. and nine weeks at the coveted #1 slot in Canada.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.