Despite her background as a daughter of the county gentry, Joan Wake (of the family residing at Courteenhall) did not attend school and was to a large extent self-taught.
She pioneered in promoting the preservation of historical records in the county, turning up at the door of pretty much every local country house in the 1920s and 1930s, bullying the owners into entrusting their archives into her care, and rarely taking ‘No’ for an answer. In 1926, she was described as ‘the Best Burglar in the County’, a description which she relished and which is a fitting title for this volume. Her visits were not confined to country houses but included rescuing neglected documents from places such as the offices of local solicitors.
By September 1939, the weight of records accumulated by the Record Society was 13 tons, a figure that continued to grow. In March 1942 alone, a tour round the county with a furniture van and material brought by train harvested a total of two tons of additional archives. The quantity of material collected gave rise to the question of where it should be housed. During the War, it was dispersed to a variety of locations. As early as 1940, Miss Wake hit on the idea of using Delapre Abbey to house the county's archives. In the 1950s, she successfully campaigned to save the building from demolition and for it to be used for that very purpose, along with providing a home for the Record Society which she had founded in 1920.
Clearly a force to be reckoned with, Miss Wake's story and that of the Record Society is unpacked in this book, which was launched when the Society passed its 100 year milestone.