Audiobooks / History
The Lamplighters’ War
Sample available
The Lamplighters’ War
The municipal workers who ran Britain’s blackout: 40,000 people whose job was to make a country invisible, and who were mostly forgotten by 1946.
- Written by
- Edith Raine
- Read by
- Mairead Cusk
- Running time
- 14 hrs 02 min
- Published
- November 2024
About
this book
Between 1939 and 1944 somebody had to go out every evening and turn Britain off. Edith Raine has reconstructed that workforce from wage books, council minutes and a remarkable cache of complaint letters held at the Museum of Bristol.
They were lamplighters, gas fitters, ARP wardens and — increasingly as the war went on — women who had never been employed by a council before and were not employed by one after. The book is very good on how quickly that door closed.
It is also, unexpectedly, funny. The complaint letters are a national treasure and Raine quotes them at length.
“Social history at its best: a subject nobody thought to look at, researched to the point of obsession, and written with a dry wit.”
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