Big Red Book

Celebrating television's This Is Your Life

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THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Freddy Bloom, journalist, author and campaigner, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews outside London's Playhouse Theatre, from where the programme was then broadcast. She had been led to believe she was on her way to a dinner appointment.

Freddy, who was born in New York and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, was working as a journalist with The Tribune newspaper in Malaysia during the outbreak of the Second World War. In February 1942, newly married, she and her husband were separated and interned in Japanese prison camps after the Japanese capture of Singapore. Freddy suffered terrible conditions in captivity in Changi jail for three and a half years until her release at the war's end in 1945.

Following the war, Freddy and her husband, now settled in England, had a daughter who was born profoundly deaf, possibly due to the malnutrition Freddy had suffered in the Japanese camps. She subsequently devoted herself to overcoming the challenges of deafness for her daughter and for other deaf children, supporting a small society which later became the National Deaf Children's Society.

"Mr Andrews!"

programme details...

• Edition No: 75
• Subject No: 75
• Broadcast live: Mon 1 Dec 1958
• Broadcast time: 7.30-8.05pm
• Venue: Playhouse Theatre, London
• Series: 4
• Edition: 10

on the guest list...

• Emmy Wenzel - mother
• Philip - husband
• William Brierley
• Katherine De Moubray
• A M Duncan-Wallace
• Walter Curtis – via telephone
• Dr Helen Worth – via telephone
• Dorothy Brodie
• Lady Templer
• Virginia - daughter
Filmed tributes:
• Goh Kok Kee
• Elizabeth Choy

related appearance...

• Louis Mountbatten - Apr 1977

production team...

• Researchers: Peter Moore, Ronald Vivian
• Writers: Peter Moore, Ronald Vivian
• Director: Vere Lorrimer
• Producer: T Leslie Jackson

• names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

• With thanks to Ginny and Jim Kanka for their contribution to this page

A Charitable Life

the unsung heroes

The Big Red Book

the programme's icon

Interviews

Ginny Kanka, daughter of Freddy Bloom, recalls this edition of This Is Your Life in an exclusive interview recorded in March 2012

Photographs of Freddy Bloom This Is Your Life