This month sees the publication of Necessary Women: the Untold Story of Parliament’s Working Women, by Mari Takayanagi and Elizabeth Hallam Smith. ‘Necessary Women’ is the first book to tell the stories of women who worked in Parliament, from housekeepers and kitchen staff in the nineteenth century through to the first women Clerks and Hansard Reporters in the twentieth. This year also marks 250 years … Continue reading ‘Jane’ and the last days of Bellamy’s Refreshment Rooms