Hannah Day was born in 1999 in a village outside Frome in Somerset. Her parents, both Quakers, raised her in the moral seriousness of the Religious Society of Friends: the silent Sunday meeting at the Friends House in Frome, the four testimonies of peace, integrity, equality and simplicity, and the practical view that what you believe is shown by how you live. Her childhood was not religiously narrow. Her father was a maths teacher, her mother a midwife. The household was full of books, music and argument. Quakerism was the air, not the discipline.
The Holocaust entered her childhood through a school visit when she was thirteen. The Years 9 history syllabus at her comprehensive school had reached the Second World War; the class was taken to the Imperial War Museum in London for the Holocaust exhibition. Hannah came back from the trip in a kind of silence that her parents recognised. She had not been able to put what she had seen into the framework she had brought with her. The Quaker idea that there is something of God in every person, the testimony of peace, the assumption that human cruelty is bounded by reason: none of it accounted for what she had stood in front of that day. Her mother, who had trained as a midwife in part because the Quaker history at Bergen-Belsen had drawn her family towards medical service, told her that her own grandfather had been one of the Friends Ambulance Unit volunteers who reached the camp in May 1945. The story had been in the family but it had not been told to Hannah until then.
The next four years she spent reading. Primo Levi first, then Wiesel, then Hilberg, then Friedländer, then Browning. Her A-level history teacher at Sidcot School lent her his own copy of Ordinary Men when she was sixteen. She wrote her Extended Project Qualification on the question of what made Reserve Police Battalion 101 different from Sonderkommando 4a, which was not the question she had expected to be writing about, and which her teacher told her was the question that mattered.
She read History at Magdalen College, Oxford, between 2017 and 2020. Her undergraduate dissertation, written under the supervision of Robert Gildea, treated the post-war French legal reckoning with Vichy collaboration through the lens of the 1995 Chirac speech and its preparatory drafts. She graduated with a First in 2020 in a year when most of her finals had been written under lockdown. She did not go on to graduate work. The reasons were personal and practical: she had decided during her final year that she wanted to teach, that she wanted to teach in a school whose ethos she could share, and that the academic career path would absorb her in the wrong way.
She joined Sidcot School, the Quaker secondary school in north Somerset, in September 2021 after her PGCE year at Bristol. Sidcot was founded in 1808 by the Friends and remains a Quaker school. Hannah teaches Years 9 to 13 history, including a sixth-form module on the Holocaust that she designed and that Sidcot adopted in 2024. She has a quiet teaching presence, careful with words, rarely raises her voice, and has the air of someone who is thinking about what she is going to say a beat longer than her students expect. They like her for it.
She is twenty-seven in 2026. She is interested in what historical understanding does to the people who acquire it: how it changes them, what it equips them for, and what it cannot do. She is concerned, particularly, with how the public memory of the Holocaust has come under pressure on social media platforms whose incentives reward simplification, distortion and outright denial. She has begun, since 2023, to write occasionally for the school’s internal magazine and once for the Friends Quarterly, on questions of historical literacy and memory. She is not yet a public figure and is unsure whether she wants to be.
She listens to a wide range of music when she is reading or marking, including the older songs of Slipknot and the newer work of Nine Inch Nails, which is a private fact about her that she would not normally share with her students. She runs in the Mendip hills on Saturday mornings. She is single, has no children yet, and lives in a rented cottage in Winscombe, ten minutes from the school.