Clare Mulley

I am fascinated by the little gaps in history.

I became interested in the subject when…

I came across a leaflet called ‘A Starving Baby’, made by the social reformer Eglantyne Jebb (1876-1928), who was campaigning to end the economic blockade causing starvation in Europe after the end of WWI. She was arrested and conducted her own defence in court. Technically, she hadn’t cleared these leaflets with the government censors, so she focused on the moral case. In the end, she was fined just £5, and afterwards the Crown prosecutor himself pressed a £5 note into her hands. ‘No thank you, I’ll pay my own fine,’ she replied – but she did take his £5 and put it towards a new fund, and that was the first ever donation to Save the Children. I thought, why don’t we know that story? So I wrote my first book, which was a biography of Eglantyne called The Woman Who Saved the Children.

Growing up I was fascinated by…

Just about everything! I was an aspiring punk; I was shaking a bucket for the miners’ strike; and the museum in St Albans had some Roman tiles from Verulamium, with cat pawprints on, which really spoke to me. My mum and dad both had childhood collections of shrapnel from WWII, and I was fascinated by those, too.