Tag Archives: vera brittain

Shirley Williams talks about the new film based on the life of her mother, Vera Brittain

Baroness Shirley Williams has been speaking to the Telegraph on the occasion of the release of a film based on her mother, Vera Brittain’s memoir, Testament of Youth:

Baroness Williams has praised her mother Vera Brittain’s lifelong efforts as a pacifist, saying her only regret is that “she wasn’t here when we fought against the Iraq war.”

The 84-year-old Lib Dem grandee spoke about her mother at the premiere of the film adaptation of Brittain’s First World War memoir, Testament of Youth.

She said of the writer, feminist and campaigner who died in 1970: “She never gave up. She was as much against the Vietnam War as she was against the First World War.”

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Shirley Williams on her mother’s wartime nursing service and role of women in World War 1

shirley williams by paul walterNext week, Shirley Williams is to take part in the Stratford Upon Avon Literary Festival talking about her mother Vera Brittain’s role as a nurse volunteer in the First World War and on the wider role of women generally before, during and after the war.

From the Birmingham Post:

Baroness Shirley Williams is incredibly proud of her “wonderful” mother Vera Brittain, whose First World War memoir has been adapted into a new BBC drama with an all-star cast.

Testament of Youth charts Vera’s personal journey from an Oxford scholarship

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Shirley Williams revisits her childhood haunts

BBC Radio 4’s latest series of “The House I Grew up In” (which revisits the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons) includes an episode featuring Liberal Democrat Peer, Shirley Williams.

Shirley Williams, now Baroness Williams, returns to her childhood homes in London’s Chelsea and the New Forest. Her mother was the writer, Vera Brittain, whose most famous novel – Testament of Youth – was a best-seller when Shirley was a child in the 1930s. Her father, George Catlin, was an academic and and an instinctive feminist whose own mother had been an early suffragette, ostracised by Victorian society. He was a

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