A Historian from Royal Holloway has helped comedian Jack Whitehall, and his father Michael, explore their family tree in BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are?

Professor Jane Hamlett with Jack and Michael Whitehall

In the programme, Jack discovers that his great-grandfather Richard Ernest Baxter Whitehall – known as R.E.B - was a pupil at the Royal Commercial Travellers' Schools, Pinner, Middlesex in 1881. Professor Jane Hamlett, whose research expertise includes life in institutions such as asylums, boarding schools and colleges in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain, explains to the Whitehalls what this would have meant for R.E.B and helps them find more information about his mother.

First broadcast on 5 August 2019, the programme is available until mid-September on BBC iPlayer.

As with all members of academic staff in the Department of History, Professor Hamlett teaches on the core modules for first year undergraduate students. She also contributes to undergraduate modules on Modern British History, Twentieth-Century British History and The Victorians. Her specialist modules include 'Modern Girls: Women in Twentieth Century Britain', 'Grand Designs: The Victorians and their Material Worlds' and 'Photography and Film in British Society, 1840-1965'.