Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  The story of Kit Davis (‘Mother Ross’) is more complex. She was a Dublin woman, born in 1667 to a father who had been killed fighting for James II at Aughrim. She inherited her aunt’s pub, married Richard Welsh, one of the waiters, had two children and was pregnant with another when, in 1691, he disappeared. It transpired that he had joined the army under circumstances that remain unclear, and she left her children with her mother, disguised herself as a man and enlisted. Wounded in 1694 while serving in the infantry as Christopher Welch, she was exchanged by the French, discharged after a duel, and then re-enlisted in the Scots Greys. It was to take her thirteen years to find her husband. Although the marriage was decidedly unconventional, she seems to have been genuinely upset when he was killed at Malplaquet. By this time she had lived with male comrades in camp and field, using ‘a silver tube with leather straps’ to enable her to pass water standing, and it was only a breast wound at Ramillies that broke her secret. Her CO, Lord John Hay, interrogated her bedmate (for soldiers slept two or more to a bed at a time) and was wholly persuaded of her innocence. She became a sutler, selling general necessities like beer and baccy within the regiment and was buried in the Royal Hospital at Chelsea in 1739. Hers is a more complex tale than that of Polly Oliver. She was initially looking for her husband, but soon discovered that she enjoyed being a soldier, and soldiered on long after she could have become a civilian.

  Hannah Snell, born in Worcester in 1723, married a Dutch seaman James Summs, and although he deserted her when he discovered that she was pregnant, after the death of their infant daughter she determined to track him down. She maintained that she served in Guise’s Regiment of Foot in 1746 during the Jacobite rising, and received 500 lashes without her gender being discovered, but this part of the tale may well by apocryphal. It is certain that she enlisted in Fraser’s Regiment of Marines at Portsmouth, and sailed for the East Indies with Admiral Boscawen’s fleet. She was wounded several times in the fighting on the Coromandel Coast of India, and on one occasion a native woman helped her treat a groin wound. She then became a sailor, at first nicknamed ‘Molly’ because her face was so smooth, and later, after her good-natured ways had made her popular with her fellow sailors, ‘Hearty Jemmy’. While at Lisbon on the fleet’s return to Britain she heard that her husband had been executed for murder in Genoa, and when her man-o’-war paid off at Gravesend in 1750 she resumed her female identity. Hannah made much of her military service, appearing in London theatres in uniform, running through her drill-movements, and singing ballads. The Duke of Cumberland agreed that she should become an out-pensioner of Chelsea Hospital, and for a time she ran a Wapping pub called The Female Warrior. She married twice more, bearing two sons; lived in Berkshire and the Midlands; and eventually settled with one of her sons in Stoke Newington. Afflicted by mental illness, she died in Bedlam Hospital in 1792, and was buried at the Royal Hospital.

  James Miranda Barry was appointed assistant surgeon in 1813 and eventually rose to become inspector of the Army Medical Department, dying in 1858 after lengthy colonial service and, allegedly, fighting a duel. It was only after she had died that it transpired that she was actually a woman, and had borne a child. It would have been much easier to conceal her gender than it was for Kit Davis or Hannah Snell, for her officer status offered more privacy. It would have been impossible to practise as a military doctor had it been known she was a woman. Perhaps the adoption of gender was the price she had pay to live on the terms that she chose.

  It took another half-century for women to serve as soldiers in their own right. After the Boer War, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry was developed to help well-to-do women provide nursing support. The FANY was not strictly speaking part of the ‘armed forces of the Crown’; Its most junior officer rank was ‘ensign’, and in the Second World War when members of FANY served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), appointing a woman an ensign gave her better protection if captured – as so many were. When war broke out in 1914, FANY women got to France quickly, helped by the fact that they were actually unofficial. The army concluded, however, that it did not require up-market young ladies driving generals or whizzing about as dispatch riders. It wanted women to work in a variety of jobs so as to free up fit men for front-line service. Not that those thus liberated were always delighted at the prospect of going to the front: one assistant forewoman, working in Aldershot, recalled ‘some hostility from the men we were releasing’.1 The army was not quite sure that it wanted women to be soldiers and was worried about the impact of thousands of young working-class women upon the brittle morality of young officers. But it did want them. In France 1917 Helen Gwynn-Vaughan, a former head of department at Birkbeck College, London, was appointed to command the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) in France. Her chief in England, Miss Watson, emphasised that all women appointed ‘officials’ – the term officer was not yet used – should have done regular work of some kind: there were to be no Lady Bountifuls. Ranks and their badges were always a difficulty – should they look like ‘real’ officers’ badges, or not? On 9 April 1918 the corps’ title changed to Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Army Corps. This was welcomed by many women who had felt ‘the WAAF and WRNS had put us in the shade – the WAAF had a much smarter uniform, and the WRNS were the senior service’.2

  Gwynn-Vaughan’s sister was commissioned, and ‘we were carelessly formal in our official behaviour … with “Yes, Ma’am” and “No, Ma’am”’. She insisted on the rule that all women should be able carry their own baggage. All grades should be referred to by their rank, and the most junior – ‘workers’ – by their surname. There were untold difficulties for women who had joined in the hope of being snappily turned out in smart boots and Sam Brownes, only to discover that their uniforms were utilitarian and most of their jobs seemed anything but war-winning. And there was no escaping deep-seated sexism. When Marjorie Mullins went to Devonshire House for her army medical in early 1917 she reported that ‘The doctor mentioned my lovely legs, commenting on the dreadful condition of those of some of the volunteers.’3 The Hon Dorothy Pickford arrived in France as a WAAC official in January 1918, and in late March was deeply worried by the progress of the German offensive:

  It has been a grisly week but today things seem a bit better. Hard work has been our salvation, and that is why you have so few letters, by the time we have knocked off at supper my brain has been too utterly addled to string two words together. I was doing inventory all Good Friday, yesterday was ration returns and more nominal rolls, and today we were hard at work all morning and again this evening …

  However, she had time to tell her sister:

  Your new dress sounds absolutely ‘it’. I wonder if I shall yearn for clothes or be bored to tears with them, but it will be such years before I wear anything but khaki that it’s not much good thinking of them. I raised a new collar and tie for Easter day and feel quite ‘Knutty’, but my stockings are pale green and my shirts are becoming a peculiar pink, and Grace has lost my very best new silk handkerchief which I lent her.4

  Sex was generally less of a problem than had been feared, possibly because it was made a court-martial offence for a male officer to speak, unchaperoned, to a female worker. Assistant Forewoman Mullins recalled two girls being sent back from France for going out with male officers to whom they were not related. Out of a total of 230,240 women who served, less than 200 became pregnant. Helen Gwynn-Vaughan recalled:

  Our first baby in May, 1918, came … as a bit of a surprise. Worker X had been on duty with a comrade all morning. When they broke off for elevenses she did not return and was discovered in her bed with a baby.5

  Women who were found to be pregnant or who gave birth were discharged from the corps. Worker Olive Taylor, who ‘had always wished to be a boy … I really wanted to be a soldier’, admitted that when she lived in a hutted camp at Aldershot

  There were trenches all around the huts and we quickly learnt the geography of all three. They were excellent hiding places and some o
f the more daring girls would take a chance and meet boy friends there. We who remained in the huts at night kept watch for them and when an officer made a spot check to see if any girl was missing, we would say that she had gone to the toilet and one of us would nip out quickly with a warning signal. The officer always came round again after a ten minute interval and of course every girl was present.

  Girls were not allowed to speak to soldiers within three miles of camp: ‘This was a very serious offence, and repetition of it could get a girl dismissed the service …’

  Worker Taylor was irritated to discover that men of the Irish Guards at Pirbright

  would even threaten to throw us into the Brookwood Canal if they couldn’t have their way with us and they seemed to have only one thought in mind. What did it matter to them if a girl lost her character and ended up in the workhouse with a baby?6

  By 1918 nocturnal air raids on British base areas in France and Belgium were frequent, and WAAC accommodation was sometimes hit; nine women were killed in this way. Worker Dalgliesh remembered the fine example shown by her officers during one air raid:

  For a time pandemonium reigned, shells bursting, shrapnel falling and the rattle and roar of the bombs contributed to the noise or not, but we kept our spirits up by attributing most of it to our own guns. Through it all our lady officers walked up and down, looking in at intervals, talking and advising without betraying the slightest anxiety. It was impossible to feel anything but stimulated by their demeanour, a feeling amounting almost to absolute trust, and whatever our individual feelings might be one and all seemed determined to show themselves not unworthy of the example the officers set.7

  Despite the solid progress made during the war, there were no wholehearted attempts to take the scheme forward into peacetime, and it was not until 1938 that a rough equivalent, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), was set up as a part-time corps. This subsumed the other women’s military organisation which then existed, including the FANY – which soon re-established its independence. Helen Gwynn-Vaughan was the director of the ATS in the rank of chief controller, equating to that of major general. Although the army was still sensitive about officer grades (a system of parallel ranks made an ATS second subaltern equate to second lieutenant, and a chief commander to a lieutenant colonel) non-commissioned ranks eventually went all the way from private to warrant officer. At first, members of the ATS were classified into five trade groups: cook, clerk, orderly, storewoman, and driver – though more soon followed, with telephonists becoming increasingly important.

  The adjutant general was very clear that women were auxiliaries and not soldiers. ‘Once we take the step of enlisting women for army service,’ he wrote in July 1940, ‘there will no longer be any bar to the employment of women for definitely combat duties. Apart from the Russians, no civilised power has yet resorted to the practice.’8 Nevertheless, in April the following year, members of the ATS were made fully subject to military law. They were obliged to salute all officers, not just their own, and badges of rank at last became the same as those for servicemen. However, they received only two-thirds the pay of a male soldier of the same rank. At the beginning of the war the ATS was maintained by voluntary enlistment, and had 65,000 members by September 1941. In December that year the National Service Act authorised the call-up of unmarried women aged between 20 and 30, and its application was later widened to include married women, though those with young children were exempt.

  General Sir Frederick Pile, head of Anti-Aircraft Command, had long argued that women could carry out many of the duties initially performed by men in the heavy anti-aircraft batteries that had become such an important feature of the war. As long as the disciplinary structure of the ATS was different from that of the army, however, it was effectively impossible to establish mixed units. One senior ATS officer warned that ‘women might smash valuable equipment in a fit of boredom’. Another observed ‘Care should be taken that restriction of privileges should involve punishment. For instance, stoppage of smoking should only be given to smokers and extra knitting to a proficient knitter is no punishment.’9 However, in May 1941, a month after the ATS had become subject to military law, the formation of mixed anti-aircraft batteries was authorised. The government stressed that women could not actually fire the guns, for they were ‘life givers not life takers’. Instead, they spotted and identified incoming aircraft, operated height-and range-finding equipment, worked the predictors that enabled shells to be fused so as to burst among the stream of incoming aircraft, and operated and repaired radars.

  Marjorie Inkster, then an ATS private, remembered that working as a radar technician on an all-male gun site was

  most trying for us girls because the battery commander was such an old woman … He obviously hated the idea of two women on his site and made life as difficult as possible for us. There were no ‘ladies’ loos and although some simple precautions could have meant this was no problem, he made it one. He would not have the girls sleeping anywhere in the quarters, although there was a medical sickbay: so we were told we had to sleep in the radar transmitter … It was all right while the Lister generator was still running, but after it was turned off for the night it was beastly cold.

  She was commissioned after attending ‘a thoroughly boring’ OCTU at Windsor, and was anxious to ‘be involved in the gun sites in retaliation for what the German bombers had done to my home’. After attending a radar maintenance officers’ course she ran the REME detachment responsible for the repair and maintenance of radars on six north London gun sites. This time

  I found at Easy 22 [Hampstead] a very friendly and helpful Royal Artillery battery. There was a Battery Commander in his 40s (ex-London Scottish), a splendid character with just the right mixture of informality and discipline. There was a Junior Commander (female equivalent of a captain) who was in charge of all the ATS personnel on the sites, including two or three ATS officers of the mixed battery … By the time I arrived in site the ATS officers were taking their turn as Gun Position Officers.10

  Milly Le Vesconte came from a big family in Manchester’s Moss Side, ‘eldest of 10, often misused and abused’, and volunteered in early 1942 ‘to do my bit towards the war’. She completed her basic training at Oswestry.

  There we trained and marched, learned to take orders, be smart and don’t complain. After six weeks we were piped out. How I loved that feeling – it was wonderful to be marching behind Scotsmen in all their paraphernalia, kilts and pipes. Super. I shall never forget that wonderful feeling.

  She eventually found herself with 577 (Mixed) Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery in Kent.

  One night I was on fire picket duty walking round the camp … I heard a strange noise and looked up in the sky and saw a long trail of light. I immediately reported this – no one knew what it was – so the message was sent to HQ. It was the first ever doodle bug.

  Sometimes it was very cold standing at our posts in the Command Post, especially if the alarm went in the early hours of the morning. We had to remain on duty until the ‘All Clear’ was sounded. When this happened the duty cooks had to go to the cookhouse and make hot sweet cocoa for us when the air raid was over. Nothing ever tasted so nice or was so welcome after perhaps a couple of hours shivering during the early morning winter. Often we would not be long in our beds before the alarm would go again.11

  Lance Corporal Doreen Goodman, serving in a mixed battery near Portsmouth, remembered that

  In times of heavy enemy air activity we could conceivably be in the command post for many hours straight – but regular shifts plus taking post when action bells sounded. On one such occasion I actually fell down asleep when running between the guns to the command post. My partner dragged me up to complete the trip. I was always a very heavy sleeper, so when we went to new camps my ‘friends’ insisted that I take the bed right under the action bells – and even then they would often have to drag me out of bed, throw my clothes over my pyjamas and push me out of the door when the bells soun
ded …12

  In mid-1942 ATS personnel were posted to searchlight units, and in October that year 93rd Searchlight Regiment Royal Artillery was formed, with more than 1,500 women and less than 200 men. Some searchlight troops in isolated locations were allocated a single ‘token man’ to start the cumbersome Lister generator, but there were ATS girls who could muster the required upper body strength to swing the beast into life, and who were known as ‘Lister twisters’. Anti-Aircraft Command at its height had a strength of 350,000 with 76,000 provided by the ATS. Women wore the ATS cap-badge, but had white gunner lanyards on their right shoulders and wore the Royal Artillery grenade badge above the left breast pocket. The success of mixed batteries went a long way towards establishing women’s ability to carry out complex tasks in dangerous situations, and 335 members of the ATS were killed during the war. Most actually carried out more traditional tasks: Staff Sergeant Susan Hibbert typed the English version of the German surrender document at Rheims in May 1945.

  The ATS became the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in 1949, partly because it was felt that adding ‘Royal’ to ATS would produce an unfortunate abbreviation. Not that WRAC was necessarily a more comfortable designation, for pronouncing it as ‘wrac’ caused its members much irritation. Women were ‘badged’ WRAC, but grew increasingly close to the corps with whom they spent most of their time. The issue of the carriage of arms was a lively one, with the WRAC hierarchy generally reluctant to see women armed, though accepting that there would be circumstances in which they might need to defend themselves. Brigadier Eileen Nolan, the corps’ director from 1973 to 1977, was responsible for moving the WRAC forward to be recognised as a combatant but non-belligerent corps. It was as a result of her initiatives that the WRAC’s officer-training college moved from Camberley to amalgamate with Sandhurst. In 1982, women were permitted to carry arms – initially the 9mm Browning pistol, rapidly followed by the Sterling sub-machine gun – for personal defence.