Rhoda Power

Rhoda Dolores le Poer Power (29 May 1890 in Altrincham, Cheshire – 9 March 1957 in London), was a pioneer broadcaster and children's writer, whose highly regarded historical novel Redcap Runs Away (1952) tells of a runaway minstrel boy in the Middle Ages.

The daughter of Philip Ernest Le Poer Power (born 1860), a stockbroker, and Mabel Grindley, née Clegg (1866–1903), Rhoda Power and her sisters Eileen (1889–1940), who became a historian, and Beryl (1891–1974), who joined the civil service, were raised by their maternal grandfather and three aunts, after their father was convicted of fraud in 1892 and left his family, and their mother died in 1903. Rhoda Power attended Oxford High School, run by the Girls' Public Day School Trust, and then read modern languages, economics and political economy at St. Andrews University in Scotland (1911–13).

After a year in the United States, Power worked as a freelance journalist in several European countries. In 1917, she became governess to the daughter of a business family in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where she became caught up in the October Revolution. An illness she caught there may have triggered the progressive deafness from which she began to suffer.

Power started to write history books for children in the 1920s, with her sister Eileen and later independently. In 1927 she began a career as a broadcaster with the BBC. She moved with the school broadcasting department to Bristol in 1939 and worked there for the rest of her life, apart from a year spent travelling in the Americas in 1946–47. In 1950 she was awarded an MBE for her work.

Power's novel Redcap Runs Away, illustrated by C. Walter Hodges, has rightly become a children's classic, although one in danger of being forgotten today. It tells the story of a 10-year-old boy who takes up with a band of minstrels in the 14th century. As an anonymous reviewer in the Melbourne newspaper The Age put it in 1957, Redcap's adventures make "a peg on which to hang the stories the people used to hear in the market places and inns 600 years ago.... Miss Power has collected them from authentic sources and they still make very good reading."

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