21-540: The Shell Seekers is a 1987 novel by Rosamunde Pilcher . It became one of her most famous best-sellers. It was nominated by the British public in 2003 as one of the top 100 novels in the BBC's Big Read . In Germany the novel is called Die Muschelsucher and was also in the top 100 novels. The novel sold more than five million copies worldwide, and was adapted for the stage and as a film for television twice. Shifting in time,
42-751: A British civil servant. Just before her birth her father was posted in Burma , while her mother remained in England. She attended the School of St. Clare in Penzance and Howell's School Llandaff before going on to Miss Kerr-Sanders' Secretarial College. She began writing when she was seven, and published her first short story when she was 18. From 1943 until 1946, Pilcher served with the Women's Royal Naval Service . On 7 December 1946, she married Graham Hope Pilcher,
63-636: A war hero and jute industry executive who died in March 2009. They moved to Dundee , Scotland. They had two daughters and two sons. Her son, Robin Pilcher , is also a novelist. Pilcher died on 6 February 2019, at the age of 94, following a stroke . In 1949, Pilcher's first book, a romance novel, was published by Mills and Boon , under the pseudonym Jane Fraser. She published a further ten novels under that name. In 1955, she also began writing under her real name with Secret to Tell . By 1965 she had dropped
84-612: Is often more prosaic than romantic. Pilcher retired from writing in 2000. Two years later, in the 2002 New Year Honours , she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature. Her books are especially popular in Germany because the national television station ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) has produced more than a hundred of her stories as TV movies , starting with The Day of
105-623: The Romantic Novel of the Year Award by Romantic Novelists' Association in 1996. The president of the association in 2019, the romance writer Katie Fforde , considers Pilcher to be "groundbreaking as she was the first to bring family sagas to the wider public". Felicity Bryan , in her obituary for The Guardian , writes that Pilcher took the romance genre to "an altogether higher, wittier level"; she praises Pilcher's work for its "grittiness and fearless observation" and comments that it
126-739: The Wrens ) was the women's branch of the United Kingdom 's Royal Navy . First formed in 1917 for the First World War , it was disbanded in 1919, then revived in 1939 at the beginning of the Second World War , remaining active until integrated into the Royal Navy in 1993. WRNS included cooks , clerks , wireless telegraphists , radar plotters , weapons analysts, range assessors , electricians and air mechanics. The WRNS
147-580: The slogans used in recruitment posters was "Join the Wrens and free a man for the Fleet". Wrens were prominent as support staff at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park ; they were the direct operators of the bombes and Colossus used to break Axis codes and cyphers. The WRNS remained in existence after the end of the war although Mathews retired in 1947 and Goodenough had died
168-639: The RAF Royal Air Force . The WRNS was disbanded in 1919. At the beginning of the Second World War Vera Laughton Mathews was appointed as the director of the re-formed WRNS in 1939 with Ethel (Angela) Goodenough as her deputy. The WRNS had an expanded list of allowable activities, including flying transport planes. At its peak in 1944 it had 75,000 active servicewomen. During the war 102 WRNS members were killed in action and 22 wounded in action . One of
189-741: The Storm in 1993. A complete list can be found on the German Misplaced Pages: Rosamunde Pilcher (Filmreihe) . These television films are some of the most popular programmes on ZDF. Pilcher was awarded the British Tourism Award in 2002 for the positive effect the books and the adaptations have had on Cornish tourism. Notable film locations include Prideaux Place , a 16th-century mansion near Padstow . Women%27s Royal Naval Service The Women's Royal Naval Service ( WRNS ; popularly and officially known as
210-565: The WRNS were subject to the same discipline as men by the next year. In October 1990, during the Gulf War , HMS Brilliant carried the first women officially to serve on an operational warship. That same year, Chief Officer Pippa Duncan became the first WRNS officer to command a Royal Navy shore establishment. The WRNS was finally integrated into the Royal Navy in 1993, when women were allowed to serve on board navy vessels as full members of
231-456: The crew. Female sailors are still informally known by the nicknames "wrens" or "Jennies" ("Jenny Wrens") in naval slang . Before 1993, all women in the Royal Navy were members of the WRNS except nurses , who joined (and still join) Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service , and medical and dental officers, who were commissioned directly into the Royal Navy, held RN ranks, and wore WRNS uniform with gold RN insignia. A series of exhibits on
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#1732797831518252-516: The forward impetus of the novel involves the work of her father, including a painting called The Shell Seekers , given to Penelope as a wedding present. Pilcher's novel September includes the character of Noel Keeling, son of Penelope. This Emmy -nominated television film of the book in the Hallmark Hall of Fame starred Angela Lansbury as Penelope Keeling. Other actors include Anna Carteret , Patricia Hodge and Irene Worth . It
273-703: The history of the WRNS are part of the Western Approaches Museum in Liverpool. The WRNS had its own ranking system, which it retained until amalgamation into the Royal Navy in 1993. Ratings' titles were suffixed with their trade (e.g. Leading Wren Cook, Chief Wren Telegraphist). Wrens wore the same rank insignia as their male equivalents, but in blue instead of gold. The "curls" atop officers' rank stripes were diamond-shaped instead of circular. From 1939, Wren uniform, designed by leading British fashion designer Edward Molyneux , consisted of
294-475: The novel tells the story of Penelope Keeling, the daughter of unconventional parents (an artist father and his much-younger French wife), examining her past and her relationships with her adult children. When the novel opens, Penelope is in her 60s and has just been discharged from the hospital after what was seemingly a heart attack. Penelope's life from young womanhood to the present is revealed in pieces, from her own point of view and those of her children. Much of
315-449: The pseudonym and was signing her own name to all of her novels. The breakthrough in Pilcher's career came in 1987, when she wrote the family saga The Shell Seekers , her fourteenth novel under her own name. It focuses on an elderly British woman, Penelope Keeling, who relives her life in flashbacks, and on her relationship with her adult children. Keeling's life was not extraordinary, but it spans "a time of huge importance and change in
336-635: The world." The novel describes the everyday details of what life during World War II was like for some of those who lived in Britain . The Shell Seekers sold around ten million copies and was translated into more than forty languages. It was adapted for the stage by Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham . Pilcher was said to be among the highest-earning women in Britain by the mid-1990s. Her other major novels include September (1990), Coming Home (1995) and Winter Solstice (2000). Coming Home won
357-585: The year before. In the 1970s it became obvious that equal pay for women and the need to remove sexual discrimination meant that the WRNS and the Royal Navy would become one organisation. The key change was that women would become subject to the Naval Discipline Act 1957 . Vonla McBride , who had experience in human resource management , became the Director of the WRNS in 1976, and members of
378-621: Was a British novelist, best known for her sweeping novels set in Cornwall. Her books have sold over 60 million copies worldwide. Early in her career she was published under the pen name Jane Fraser . In 2001, she received the Corine Literature Prize 's Weltbild Readers' Prize for Winter Solstice . She was born Rosamunde Scott on 22 September 1924 in Lelant , Cornwall . Her parents were Helen ( née Harvey) and Charles Scott,
399-644: Was also released as an abridged audio book read by Lynn Redgrave . An unabridged audio book, read by Hannah Gordon is also available. Another unabridged version of audio book, read by Barbara Rosenblat , was published by Recorded Books, Inc., in U.S.A. In 2017, Macmillian Audio released an unabridged audiobook read by Hayley Atwell . The novel was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 in 2024 by Lin Coghlan, starring Emma Fielding as Penelope and narrated by Jessica Turner. Rosamunde Pilcher Rosamunde Pilcher , OBE ( née Scott ; 22 September 1924 – 6 February 2019)
420-802: Was filmed on location in Ibiza , London , Cornwall and the Cotswolds and involved significant changes to Pilcher's original story. The novel was adapted into a stage play by Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham . The UK tour started in Spring 2006. In 2006 the book was made into a mini-series starring Vanessa Redgrave as Penelope Keeling. It was filmed in Cornwall with scenes shot at St Michael’s Mount , Lamorna , Port Isaac and Prideaux Place at Padstow , directed by Piers Haggard . Other cast members included Sebastian Koch , Maximilian Schell , Victoria Hamilton , and Stephanie Stumph. The Shell Seekers
441-570: Was formed in 1917 during the First World War . On 10 October 1918, nineteen-year-old Josephine Carr from Cork became the first Wren to die on active service, when her ship, the RMS Leinster was torpedoed . By the end of the war the service had 5,500 members, 500 of them officers. In addition, 2,867 Wrens, 46 officers and 2,821 other ranks who had previously supported the Royal Naval Air Service chose to be transferred to
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