Rhoda Dolores Le Poer Power (29 May 1890 in Altrincham, Cheshire – 9 March 1957 in London), was a pioneer English broadcaster and children's writer.
The daughter of Philip Ernest Le Poer Power (born 1860), a stockbroker, and Mabel Grindley, née Clegg (1866–1903), Rhoda Power and her sisters Eileen (1889–1940), who became a historian, and Beryl (1891–1974), who joined the civil service,[1] were raised by their maternal grandfather and three aunts, after their father was convicted of fraud in 1891 and he went to prison for five years.
She moved with the school broadcasting department to Bristol in 1939 and worked there for the rest of her life, apart from a year spent travelling in the Americas in 1946–1947.
[3] Power's book of stories Redcap Runs Away, illustrated by C. Walter Hodges, has become a children's classic, although one in danger of being forgotten today.
The delineation of the characters and plot drew upon Rhoda's experience in schools' broadcasting, in which her forte was the dramatization of history for younger listeners.
Her grasp of the social history of medieval England owes much to her older sister, the historian Eileen Power, who before her early death in 1940 had collaborated with Rhoda in preparing scripts for broadcasting on the BBC.