Dr Lillian Southworth
Dr Lillian Southworth is Director of The People's War Memorial and one of Britain's most respected independent historians of civilian wartime life. Born in Liverpool during the late 1950s, she grew up in a family whose experiences during the Second World War shaped both her academic interests and her lifelong commitment to preserving ordinary people's stories.
Her father worked on Liverpool's docks throughout his life, while her mother served as an ambulance driver during the later years of the Blitz. Like many of her generation, her mother rarely discussed the war afterwards, leaving Lillian to discover much of her family's history through surviving letters, photographs and official records rather than personal recollection.
She studied modern history before specialising in oral history and archival preservation, eventually completing doctoral research examining the reliability of memory in recorded wartime testimony. Rather than treating interviews simply as historical evidence, her work explored how memory changes across decades and how personal experience shapes recollection.
Before joining the museum, Southworth spent many years working within local archives and regional museums across north-west England, building a reputation for recovering overlooked collections before they disappeared into house clearances or private sales. She has often remarked that Britain's greatest historical losses rarely result from deliberate destruction but from families simply not recognising the significance of what they inherit.
As director, she has deliberately resisted transforming the museum into a commercial visitor attraction. She believes visitors should encounter genuine artefacts and authentic testimony rather than immersive spectacle. Exhibitions therefore remain understated, allowing documents, recordings and photographs to speak largely for themselves.
Southworth leads a remarkably small permanent staff, relying heavily on volunteers whose local knowledge often proves as valuable as formal academic expertise. She is known for remembering every volunteer by name and for treating donated family collections with the same care regardless of their historical importance.
Although academically respected, she possesses little interest in public recognition and rarely appears in the media unless discussing archival preservation. Among colleagues she is regarded as exceptionally patient, preferring careful listening to rapid conclusions, a quality that allows grieving families to entrust the museum with deeply personal material.
When Albert's behaviour began changing in ways that software engineers could neither explain nor reproduce, Southworth resisted pressure to simply remove the exhibit. Her instinct was that the phenomenon reflected something within the archive itself rather than a conventional technical malfunction. That decision ultimately brought Rhys Maren to Liverpool and began the investigation that uncovered the hidden wartime recordings beneath Albert's intelligence.