Kate Aidie tells Shrewsbury audience of women's roles in First World War

The journalist, broadcaster and author, now a sprightly 70 and showing no signs of slowing down, was invited to speak at Shrewsbury Sixth Form College on the role of women in the First World War.

It's a topic she is something of an expert on, having written a book called Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One in 2013.

She said she largely relied on the inside pages of local newspapers to glean the inside story on how women contributed to the war effort.

"It's quite interesting, there have been thousands of books published on the subject of war," she said.

"But most of them, if you go to the index and look at W for women, or women's names even, there are none to be seen.

"They concentrate on the military strategy and the huge story that is the military war, understandably.

"But if you look, as I did, hugely in local newspapers, there is another story.

"An extraordinarily complex and rich one about how people had to cope and what they were faced with, and how we were changed.

"And it's there very much in local newspapers. I burrowed through, I wished I could have spent far longer because they are wonderful and beautifully written as well.

"You will find there will be little columns, and I am hypothesising now, but for instance Shropshire Suffragettes, and the suffrage movement, which morphed in the war into a great body of women doing huge amounts of welfare work, would have regular meetings.

"And it would be meticulously recorded, and there would be speeches by women, very feisty stuff.

"Then you can find, of course, there would be the lists of local men and what had happened to them.

"But on top of that, the court reports, of locals, and I know of stories here, who found themselves in trouble with prisoners of war because there were POW camps here.

"Any fraternisation, anybody seen as being too near foreigners, was massively frowned upon.

"You can read these things in local newspapers, and they are rarely the sort of things local historians go for, and they are the picture of a nation at war."

In Shropshire in particular, Miss Adie, said, women stepped up to help on farms when the call came to men to fight on the front line.

She said: "In Shropshire they lost a huge amount of their farm workers to the war.

"And so this was one of the areas where women had to come and work on the land, and didn't want to. The land was considered horrible, poor, it was thought of as a dreadful job. But they got on with it."

Things have clearly changed for the better for women since the Great War – but in an article this month, it was claimed it would take another 100 years for pay levels for women to finally match up to those of their male counterparts.

"You underestimate us," Miss Adey said, "Equality and equal responsibility have not yet been achieved, that is fairly obvious to everyone in the labour market.

"When you see, still, cohorts of men everywhere, you think hang on, such as the Houses of Parliament.

"This shouldn't be like this with just a smallish number of women, there should be much better representation, and so forth throughout the rest of life.

"There is more to do – but when you see where women started a century ago, just beyond living memory, in fact you think it has been an enormous change.

"There has never been one like it, so it is going to take, in a complex society, a bit longer.

"We have still actually got to do quite a lot."

Miss Adie has had a glittering career in journalism and broadcasting and is best known for her reports from the front line of various war zones all around the world while with the BBC.

The two foreign assignments she is most often associated with are the American bombing of the Libyan capital Tripoli in 1986 and the Chinese authorities' killing of protesters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989.

She was on duty in London in 1980 when the siege of the Iranian Embassy was brought to an end by the SAS. Her commentary, which interrupted the World Snooker Championships, was heard in millions of homes.

She served from 1989 until 2003 as the BBC's chief news correspondent.

Miss Adie gave her address as part of the Shrewsbury Bookfest, which is commemorating the Great War with a number of events and talks.

She said reading was still a critical skill, adding: "It's a tool that is never going to go out of fashion and it's a skill you have to master," she said.

"I do worry slightly that people say, well the internet means you don't need these things.

"But of course you do, because the internet basically is a vast library in an electronics box and we need to be able to read.

"Yes there are games to play, and emojis.

"Do I use emojis?

"No of course not," she laughed.

"I use words, words are wonderful and we have a wonderful language, so I stick to those.

"But it is important, to get more children reading when you know there are quite large cohorts of children who just don't seem very interested.

"So many forms come through the door. We're expected these days to do things online, this means being able to type, to be able to read as well.

"Getting through our very bureaucratic world is hugely difficult if you have difficulty reading."