While most of us manage to pen little more than what we had for breakfast and whether the sun shone, before abandoning the whole enterprise, some take the art of diary writing very seriously indeed.

In recent years the daily thoughts of Tony Benn, Alan Clark and Alastair Campbell have climbed the bestseller charts, but years before any of them arrived in the corridors of power, Sir Linton Andrews was writing his own meticulous diaries.

Beginning in 1932, Sir Linton, the editor of the Yorkshire Post from 1939 to 1961, kept a note of everything from the changing political climate to his own personal hopes and ambitions, and, following his death in 1972, the carefully written notebooks were handed to the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.

And there they might have stayed unread, had Vanessa Rosenthal not been researching a new drama series for Radio 4 based on the diaries and letters of ordinary Britons.

"Sir Linton Andrews is a name I had known for a long time," says the writer and actress, also from Leeds. "My husband James Walsh went to Leeds University and graduated with the ambition of being a journalist. One of his professors introduced him to Sir Linton and, while he eventually pursued a career within academia, he was someone he never forgot.

"When I started looking for raw material I began flicking through the Brotherton Library catalogue and couldn't believe it when I saw they had Sir Linton's diaries."

The diaries, along with other correspondence from housewives, shopkeepers and entrepreneurs, form the basis of a special series for Woman's Hour which will be broadcast every day next week, and
Vanessa hopes that after endless months of research it will be a unique insight into how British life has changed over the last 100 years.

"I do admire people who have the self-discipline to keep a diary," she says. "I had a half-hearted attempt some years ago, but I'm sure it would bore anyone who had the misfortune to read it. That was the main problem with this series; the truth is most diaries are about the mundane things in life, and most letters are thank-yous to a great-aunt Dot for a pullover at Christmas. It is a real skill, but when you find a real gem like the diaries of Sir Linton Andrews it's incredibly powerful."

The diaries run throughout the Second World War and are a chronicle of not just how an ordinary man reacted to the conflict, but how the press dealt with the major events of the day.

"He was a great writer and as you would expect from an old- fashioned man, he chronicled events with pinpoint accuracy," says
Vanessa. "There's some lovely pieces like behind the time Oswald Mosley spoke at the town hall, but from 1933 everything seems overshadowed by Hitler. It was obviously six years before war was declared, but the entries suggest that most people in Britain were preparing for a Nazi invasion long before.

"It was a time of incredible uncertainty, and in the middle of it all was the abdication of Edward VIII which Sir Linton found himself in the middle of."

In 1936, papers in America were widely reporting details of the King's affair, but the British press were gagged until the Yorkshire Post broke the gentleman's agreement with the government.

"Arthur Mann, Linton's then boss, read the report of a speech by the Bishop of Bradford in which he said he hoped the King would take his responsibilities seriously," says Vanessa. "He believed that it was a coded tip-off to break the story, and, not wanting to be scooped, he splashed details across the next day's front page.

"Of course, none of the other papers had carried the story and the Yorkshire Post sparked a constitutional crisis. There is a real sense of jubilation in Sir Linton's diaries about this whole episode, but there's no trace of sensationalism.

"At one point he talks of how he questioned a particular story which he felt wasn't based on facts and he was told by Mann that the paper had never been afraid to be a leader in world events, and there is a real sense of public duty.

"You are aware when you're reading someone's diaries that in the vast majority of cases they were written in the belief they would never be read. I'm not sure I ever felt like I was prying, but I did feel a great sense of responsibility that I had to do them justice.

"Each of the people featured in the series has their own story
to tell and I really hope that I have helped to make their
voices heard."



Writing the Century will be broadcast as part of Woman's Hour from Monday, July 7.