Tessa Dunlop | |
---|---|
Born | 1974 (age 49–50) Pitlochry, Perthshire, Scotland |
Education | Pitlochry High School |
Alma mater | St Hilda's College, Oxford (BA); Sheffield Hallam University (MA), (PhD) |
Occupation(s) | Historian, author, TV broadcaster |
Children | 2 daughters |
Parent | Donald Dunlop (1940–2009) |
Relatives | Dunlop baronets |
Website | www.tessadunlop.com |
Tessa Dunlop FRHistS (born 1974 in Scotland), is a British historian, writer and broadcaster.
She has written several oral history books and presented history programmes for the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery Channel, UKTV History and the History Channel.
Dunlop's father was Donald Henry Dunlop (1940–2009), only son of the eminent physician, Sir Derrick Dunlop.
After Pitlochry High School, Dunlop attended Strathallan School, another school in Perthshire, [1] before going up to read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she won the 1995 Gertrude Easton Prize for History. [2] She then pursued further studies in Imperialism and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University graduating as MA, before receiving a PhD in 2020 for her thesis entitled Representations of Romania in British Public and Political Discourse, 1907–1919. [3] [4]
After university, Dunlop joined London radio station LBC, then BBC London 94.9. [5]
In 2005, Dunlop was named Regional Television Personality in the Royal Television Society's West of England Awards for her work on the regional magazine show Inside Out West. [6] In 2007, Dunlop filmed Paranormal Egypt, an eight-part series with Derek Acorah on location in Egypt. In 2011, she became one of the presenters in BBC2's BAFTA-winning Coast series, and she has since presented several history series. [7]
Dunlop writes oral history books focused on women, war and the royal family. Titles include The Bletchley Girls, The Century Girls, (a Sunday Times best seller) and most recently Elizabeth and Philip and Army Girls. [8]
In 2005, Dunlop married a Romanian; they live in London and have two daughters. She struggled to conceive and has written about her experiences with miscarriage and IVF. [9] [ full citation needed ]
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire), that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
Helena Ann Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws, is a Scottish barrister, broadcaster, and Labour member of the House of Lords. She was Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2018. A Bencher of Gray's Inn, an Honorary Writer to the Signet and the recipient of 42 Honorary Degrees from many universities including those of Glasgow and Edinburgh in recognition of work on women and the law and on widening participation in higher education. She is President of Justice, the law reform think tank, and is also director of the International Bar Association's Institute of Human Rights.
Coast is a BBC documentary series first broadcast on BBC Two television in 2005. It covers various subjects relating to both the natural and social history of the British coastline and also more recently, that of Britain's near neighbours. The seventh series followed a different format from previous series. In 2016, reports from the show were repackaged as Coast: The Great Guide, an eight part series on BBC Two.
Lucy O'Brien is a British author and journalist whose work focuses on women in music.
Fiona Caroline MacCarthy was a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th- and 20th-century art and design.
Amanda Jane Vickery is an English historian, writer, radio and television presenter, and professor of early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London.
Mavis Lilian Batey, MBE, was a British code-breaker during World War II. She was one of the leading female codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
Suzannah Rebecca Gabriella Lipscomb is a British historian and professor emerita at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Higher Education Academy and the Society of Antiquaries, and has for many years contributed a regular column to History Today. She has written and edited a number of books, presented numerous historical documentaries on TV and is host of the Not Just the Tudors podcast from History Hit. She is also a royal historian for NBC.
Tessa Sarah Ross CBE is an English film producer and executive. She received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award and was named one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour in 2013. She is an honorary fellow of the National Film and Television School. In the 2010 New Year Honours, she was appointed a CBE for services to broadcasting.
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted the German secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946.
Nancy Katharine Sandars was a British archaeologist and prehistorian. As an independent scholar, she wrote a number of books and a popular version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Ann Katharine Mitchell was a British cryptanalyst and psychologist who worked on decrypting messages encoded in the German Enigma cypher at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. After the war she became a marriage guidance counsellor, then studied for a Master of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She worked at the university's Department of Social Administration and wrote several academic books about the psychological effects of divorce on children, including Someone to Turn to: Experiences of Help Before Divorce (1981) and Children in the Middle: Living Through Divorce (1985).
About 7,500 women worked in Bletchley Park, the central site for British cryptanalysts during World War II. Women constituted roughly 75% of the workforce there. While women were overwhelmingly under-represented in high-level work such as cryptanalysis, they were employed in large numbers in other important areas, including as operators of cryptographic and communications machinery, translators of Axis documents, traffic analysts, clerical workers, and more. Women made up the majority of Bletchley Park’s workforce, most enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, nicknamed the Wrens.
Margaret Osla, Lady Henniker-Major was a Canadian debutante, who worked at Bletchley Park, was Prince Philip's first girlfriend, and later married Sir John Henniker-Major.
Olivia Jordan was an ambulance driver in France at the start of the Second World War. She was the driver and interpreter for Charles de Gaulle in London from 1940 to 1943.
Action This Day was a 1941 memorandum sent to Winston Churchill personally, to advise Churchill that the Bletchley Park (BP) codebreaking establishment was short of staff in some critical areas. Their requirements were small, but as a small organisation their management did not have priority. Four senior heads of sections ("Huts") and their deputies wrote to Churchill, who had visited "BP" on 6 September 1941, where he made a speech saying he appreciated their work.
Patricia Davies is an English former codebreaker who served as a special duties linguist in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during World War II. She and her younger sister Jean Argles are often referred to as "The Codebreaking Sisters". As a teenage interceptor, Davies listened to radio transmissions in both German and encrypted code as part of the British war effort, transcribing and decoding the messages and passing them on to Bletchley Park.