5 historical women who deserve a miniseries from Netflix or Hulu

Lilian Wyles

Okay, we’re a bit fed up of stories about royalty and nobility now. Downton Abbey, The Crown, the hopefully upcoming Nine Days Queen (come on Netflix, make it happen) — all tell tales of upper class rich people.

Whilst they are all super interesting, there is a dearth of stories about ordinary people being told and it’s time to put some out there.

Enter Lilian Wyles, the daughter of a brewer, who hailed from a very small town in rural England, and became the first woman to join Scotland Yard.

She was educated in Margate and in Paris, at the behest of her father, who hoped she’d become a barrister. She abandoned her studies to become a nurse in the First World War.

After it ended, she became one of the first women to join the Women’s Special Police Patrols, a temporary force created to make up for the shortage of manpower caused by the war. When the team was disbanded, she rejoined the Metropolitan Police as one of the first women to do so.

As you might expect, her presence unsettled her male colleagues, but she enjoyed a friendship with her boss, Chief Constable Wensley. Whilst she was often relegated to taking witness statements, it is in this field that she proved revolutionary.

She played a large part into making women police officers to take statements from women in cases of sexual assault, as opposed to “assistants.” She retired to Cornwall in 1949 where she wrote her autobiography.

A tale of a woman making space for herself in a profession where she likely wasn’t wanted (people called members of the Women’s Police “unwomanly”) is ideal for a miniseries, and it has the added bonus of being part-courtroom drama.  

Who do we want to play her? We reckon The Musketeers’ Tamla Kari would be a shoe-in but she’s too young at the moment. We can wait.