Rhoda Power facts for kids
Rhoda Dolores Le Poer Power (born May 29, 1890, in Altrincham, Cheshire – died March 9, 1957, in London) was an important English broadcaster and writer for children. She was a pioneer in using radio to teach kids. Her famous book, Redcap Runs Away (1952), tells exciting historical stories through the eyes of a young minstrel boy who runs away in the Middle Ages.
Life and Career
Rhoda Power was born with two sisters, Eileen and Beryl. After their mother passed away in 1903, Rhoda and her sisters were raised by their grandfather and aunts. Her sister Eileen later became a well-known historian, and Beryl worked for the government.
Rhoda went to Oxford High School. She then studied modern languages, economics, and politics at St. Andrews University in Scotland from 1911 to 1913.
After studying, Rhoda spent a year in the United States. She then worked as a journalist in different European countries. In 1917, she became a governess in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. She was there during the October Revolution, a big historical event. An illness she caught in Russia might have caused her to slowly lose her hearing over time.
In the 1920s, Rhoda Power started writing history books for children. She first worked with her sister Eileen, and later wrote books on her own. In 1927, she began a new career as a broadcaster with the BBC. She joined the school broadcasting department, which moved to Bristol in 1939. She worked there for the rest of her life, except for a year of travel in the Americas from 1946 to 1947. In 1950, she received an MBE award for her excellent work.
Her Work with the BBC
Rhoda Power was especially good at making history exciting for young listeners on the radio. She would turn historical events into plays and stories. This helped children learn about the past in a fun and engaging way. Her deep understanding of medieval England's social history came partly from her older sister, Eileen Power. Before Eileen's early death in 1940, the sisters worked together. They created scripts for BBC broadcasts, including a story about life in a medieval village. This story, told from the view of a serf named Simon, might have inspired Redcap Runs Away.
Redcap Runs Away
Rhoda Power's book, Redcap Runs Away, is illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. It has become a classic children's book, though it is not as well-known today. The story is about a 10-year-old boy who joins a group of minstrels in the 14th century. Minstrels were traveling musicians and storytellers.
The book uses Redcap's adventures as a way to share old stories. These were the kinds of tales people heard in market places and inns 600 years ago. Rhoda Power gathered these stories from real historical sources. A reviewer in the The Age newspaper in 1957 said the stories "still make very good reading."
A Classic Children's Book
In 1952, Redcap Runs Away was added to the famous UK Puffin Story Books list. This was thanks to Eleanor Graham, a senior editor for the series. Graham praised the book highly in the Junior Bookshelf magazine. She wrote that it "stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries." She believed it would "set a new standard" for children's stories.
The way the characters and plot were created in Redcap Runs Away was influenced by Rhoda's experience in school broadcasting. She was very skilled at making history dramatic for young audiences. The book's focus on minstrels also connects to a long history of English literature. Writers like Sir Walter Scott and John Clare wrote poems about minstrels. Novels by Helen Craik and Sydney Owenson also featured minstrel characters. More recently, books like Minstrel Dick (1891) and Darkie and Co. (1932) also explored similar themes.
The many minstrel stories in Redcap make the book feel very real for its time. However, not all critics in the US liked this. When the US edition came out in 1954, The Bulletin of the Children's Book Center said the many stories slowed the plot. They also mentioned the book's small type and crowded lines made it hard to read.
