Lillian Le Page, nee Helyar, recorded her experiences living under German rule throughout 1942 in a small dark blue diary, which was produced by the Guernsey Press.
She died not long after the war ended, but the diary remained within her family, and it was eventually handed in a worn-out state to her grandson Roger in January 2021 while he was helping clear out his mother’s house following her death.
With the diary requiring significant restoration work, Mr Le Page and his wife Gillian – who live in Essex and are avid Repair Shop fans – applied to appear on the show about 18 months ago.
They heard back from producers in March this year, and Mr Le Page and his grandson TJ were subsequently invited to two lots of filming at the show’s workshop in Singleton, Sussex.
The resulting episode will be broadcast on BBC One tonight at 8pm.
In terms of what needed to be done to the diary, Mrs Le Page said its covers had fallen off and the stitching had become brittle, meaning several parts of the book had needed to be detached from each other and then re-attached, to keep each of the pages intact and in the right order.
‘They certainly won’t come loose again now,’ she said.
‘Before it was repaired we were afraid to handle it, because we knew we could damage it further.
‘We actually had Lillian’s writing printed out to make it easier to read.’
The work was done by Repair Shop expert Chris Shaw, who Mr Le Page described as a ‘smashing bloke’.
‘He’s very humble, hellish good at his job,’ he said.
‘I’d seen him do bookbinding previously, so I never had any doubts once I found out it was going to be him doing it.
‘He treated the diary with such respect.’
Filming for the episode was done on two separate days in April, with the first session documenting the diary before its repair, and the second one after the work had been completed.
‘It took at least four hours for each of the two days, and then they’ll obviously cut that down to just a few minutes in the episode,’ Mr Le Page said.
The couple have not seen a preview of the episode, and so are eagerly awaiting its broadcast.
‘We were actually on our way to Guernsey on holiday when I got a phone call telling us when it was going to be shown, so it’s worked out quite nicely,’ Mr Le Page said. ‘I think islanders will be quite interested to see the episode.’
You need to be logged in to comment. If you had an account on our previous site, you can migrate your old account and comment profile to this site by visiting this page and entering the email address for your old account. We'll then send you an email with a link to follow to complete the process.