Suzie’s commanding officer recommended her for a commission, which was rather awkward, as having joined underage, she was only just 18 years old instead of the required 19 or 20:
Nevertheless, I went ahead and went up to the Air Ministry and they said that I was a little bit young at the moment, but they would call for me in 3 months time. Three months later to the day I was called back and told I had a commission. Then I trained as a PI.
After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, Lavender Bruce had spent several months of the summer of 1939 travelling around Argentina with her father who was involved with the expansion of the railway system. On 3 September she boarded a cargo ship at Buenos Aires to return home:
and heard the news that war had been declared. The ship could not take its scheduled route to Britain, so we sailed south, through the Magellan Straits, spent some time in Chile and then northwards to pass through the Panama Canal. We then sailed to Jamaica where bananas were loaded, but instead of setting off across the Atlantic, the ship turned north to Halifax, Nova Scotia where we became part of a large convoy.7
Having gone some way to circumnavigating the American continent, Lavender eventually arrived in Liverpool and joined the WAAF. She was another plotter at RAF Bentley Priory who was later commissioned and trained as a PI.
Hazel Furney had enrolled before war was declared and she had reported to RAF Farnborough in the autumn of 1939. She and her colleagues were issued with raincoats, navy berets with an RAF badge on one side, and black ties, while the rest of their WAAF uniform slowly trickled in. Hazel had the choice of being a typist, a driver or a cook, and chose the latter. She worked in the station cookhouse at Farnborough:
mixing up huge troughs of plum duff, making yards of sausages and great pots of vegetables and stew. I got to be a sergeant butcher having passed a trade test with surprisingly high marks, and started a cricket side which we called the ‘Hotplates’ and challenged other teams. We never did very well, not as hot as we hoped.
When the 1st Canadian Army arrived in the area they asked us to dances – we used to be collected and returned in a lorry with a sergeant in charge. When the music started, there was a stampede and we were all on the floor ‘jitterbugging’ like mad. Any idea that the Americans introduced the jitterbug to England is not true! I was selected for a commission and PI training later’.8
For many young women in the summer of 1939 life was stiflingly limited and predictable. Although educational opportunities had improved for many girls by this time, attendance at university often depended on personal financial independence or the willingness of a family to pay fees. Even then, passing university exams did not guarantee a woman a degree. When Dorothy Garrod graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1916, women received certificates instead of full degrees, and were excluded from any part of the governance of the university. Despite becoming a professor and renowned archaeologist, Dorothy did not receive her degree until 1948, when Cambridge University at last awarded them to women.
While job opportunities had also increased in the professions, many girls left school at the age of 14 to take an unskilled job, while others completed a training course for a skill that would enable them to seek a steady, secure post. The expectation for many young, middle-class women was to live at home with parents until meeting and marrying a suitable young man with good financial prospects. Her job would then be given up to care for the house and the children that followed. Nineteen-year-old Joan Bawden lived in a pleasant Surrey village with her parents and worked as a shorthand typist in London, but her ambitions were to write, travel and become famous. Seemingly impossible aspirations, until the declaration of war presented the opportunity to change her comfortable lifestyle. On 20 September 1939 Joan joined the WAAF and was sent to RAF Hendon in north-west London as a clerk typist and told, as she had hoped, that she could be posted abroad. Later on Joan trained as a PI, but initially:
I’ll explain my reasons for joining. Firstly, doing one’s bit. I suppose that’s there, though it doesn’t seem particularly in evidence at the moment. Secondly, this life will get me away from home, make me adult and independent. Thirdly, it’s a change and an adventure. Fourthly, and at present most strongly, I want to swank around in a uniform.9
Dorothy Colles, aged 22 at the outbreak of war, was an assistant teacher in a private school and attended art college. Her headmistress was not only surprised but totally baffled at Dorothy’s decision to throw up her safe job and join the WAAF. She became a clerk SD and was sent to RAF Leighton Buzzard, where the new recruits were housed in what had been the local workhouse. Uniform was in short supply so they dressed in navy overalls for several weeks, until: ‘At last I have a uniform and I’m glad to be a proper WAAF! We are transported to and fro in a van, like sardines in a tin. It creates a sensation in the town and all the RAF men put their thumbs up to us.’10
The uniform was a major factor in Susan Bendon’s decision to join the Mechanised Transport Corps in 1940:
I was not at all interested in mechanics or transport but an officer-type uniform was available and it was very stylish. It comprised a khaki jacket with lots of brass, a leather belt similar to a ‘Sam Browne’ and a really rakish forage cap. Having so far in my life been involved in haute couture and films, all this appealed to me. A rude awakening awaited.
My job was as an ambulance driver, working 12 hour shifts during the London Blitz. It was a frantic time – we drove our ambulances with sirens screaming, bombs and incendiaries dropping all around, and took the wounded to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington where there were the most terrible sights.11
Her ‘rude awakening’ does not refer to the hospital sights, but to the living conditions at their base where they waited to be called out: a large room, furnished with a few wooden chairs and two-tier metal beds strewn with dishevelled grey army blankets shared with the other drivers. After her initial horror: ‘I vowed to myself that I would muck in with whatever was in store from then on.’ Susan joined the WAAF in early 1941.
After the emergency measures necessary in 1939–40, conditions of entry and training became regularised in the women’s services.
Myra Murden, a shorthand typist in Reigate, was offered a ‘safe’ job by a family friend, so she could continue to live at home throughout the war. Determined to do something more adventurous, Myra promptly enrolled at the WAAF centre in Croydon on her eighteenth birthday, having turned down the WRNS because they only wanted cooks. Two months later she reported to RAF Bridgnorth in Shropshire for ‘kitting out’:
First came another medical examination, followed by vaccinations for typhoid and paratyphoid and a check to see that I was FFI – Free From Infection, which meant no head lice.12
The uniform items issued were a jacket, skirts, an overcoat, shirts with separate collars for starching plus collar studs and a black knitted tie, black lace-up shoes, grey lisle stockings and a service hat, which completed the outerwear. Less glamorous were three pairs of interlock bloomer-style knickers and two pairs of ‘passion killers’ – striped flannelette pyjamas. Other essentials were the three square ‘biscuits’ to make into a mattress, which caused endless troubles and disturbed nights to recruits. A groundsheet, gas mask in a box, brass button-polishing equipment and a kitbag completed the issue.
Many recruits then proceeded to the WAAF Depot at Morecombe. This holiday resort on the north-west coast of England had its ample number of boarding house rooms taken over for the duration of the war to house WAAFs for ten days’ basic training. Without exception their opinion of the experience was ‘dreadful’. Peggy Hyne remembers: ‘It was bitterly cold with bracing winds and doing PT on the pier in January was a real challenge!’13
The recruits learned to march on the sea front and Myra also recalls a lecture that included instructions on how to use a wash flannel: ‘FFF – Face, Fanny, Feet!’ Her pay was 15s a week. On leaving Morecombe she was posted as a clerk to ‘an office i
n London’ and forbidden to give any details to anyone, not even her parents. The ‘office’ was underground and was, in fact, the Cabinet War Rooms, where she worked for a year before being posted to RAF Medmenham.
Susan Bendon commented:
We were billeted at a boarding house on the sea front with very basic accommodation and a landlady who hated us all. The place was not very clean, the food terrible and she was so frugal that she counted the number of tinned peas on each plate as she served them. Drilling included performing exercises in our knickers (dark blue, extending to the knee) on the pier above the frozen sea – it was so cold that sheets of ice floating on the waves beneath. After two weeks everyone received their posting notices – except me. Whenever I went to the various WAAF offices, I was brushed aside and told to try elsewhere. Eventually it became clear that my papers had been lost and no-one knew what to do with me – I simply didn’t exist in the Air Force. Before it was resolved, I spent seven weeks in that ghastly boarding house where, in spite of my pleas, my sheets were never changed and the landlady’s dislike of her perpetual lodger became almost a joke as new batches of recruits came and went.14
To pass the time, Susan bought a notebook and positioned herself each morning in the large reception area for new recruits, and looked busy. Before long she became an accepted member of staff until eventually her posting to RAF Biggin Hill came through. Later on she was sent to learn PI at Medmenham: ‘Why was I given such a wonderful opportunity? I never discovered the reasons – but it was a prize beyond prizes.’
Learning to live in close proximity with women of all backgrounds, ages and attitudes came as a great shock to many. Jane Cameron, who described herself as extremely shy, without close friends and reticent, joined up in 1939:
I found my freedom as a six-digit number, an aircraftwoman in the WAAF, inside a high wire-mesh fence, behind the guarded gates of a Coastal Command station. My shyness, my reticence dissolved like mist in a barrack room shared with twenty-nine other women. I wore a uniform, but at five feet nine inches tall and with shoulders broader than my twenty-two inch waist I wore the uniform better than the other twenty-nine. When I elected to lie on my cot and read a book instead of going to the NAAFI with them they told me with cheerful frankness that I was a ‘queer one’ but implied that they accepted me as I was.
When, within a few weeks I became corporal in charge of them, I watched them, listened to them, helped them write their letters home, bullied them to bed when they came in drunk, forced them to wash and mend their underwear, man-handled them apart when they indulged in hair-tearing, clawing quarrels and discovered some nine months later, when I was posted to be commissioned as an officer, that I loved them. They were sad, one or two shed tears and the oldest of them, a woman of nearly forty, summed up their thoughts when she sighed and said: ‘Well, we’re not surprised.’ I had never known so much raw, rumbustious, uninhibited life.15
Although WAAF personnel were in the majority at Medmenham, a few WRNS officers and a number of ATS officers and NCOs also served there. In 1939 Joan ‘Panda’ Carter had a job in the Admiralty Drawing Office, and, after being called up into the ATS, was sent to Talavera Camp in Northampton for basic training. Of the twenty-four recruits in her hut:
Two had their heads shaved because of lice, one wet the bed nightly and another had regular nightmares and walked in her sleep. Our four weeks training was like a complete new world. Each day, come rain, shine or snow, when the camp was ship-shape, we spent many hours learning how to march and obey commands. I enjoyed it after a while, and even knew my left from my right. Our uniforms fitted smartly and we were medically A1, having had all the appropriate injections.
The last part of our training consisted of a variety of tests to decide for what kind of work we were most suited. It was like being back at school. We had to sit several written papers, and then take a practical test of assembling wooden puzzles, fitting pegs into holes. There were also odd bits of machinery to find out if we were mechanically minded. I had just one aim, to become a draughtswoman. When it was my turn to be interviewed by the Commanding Officer, she asked me what I would like to do. When I told her she handed me a huge book about architecture. She asked me if I understood it, and I told a deliberate lie. I said I understood it all. She obviously didn’t believe me, and said I was just the right type for a clerk. I tried to protest by telling her I could not spell. Her answer was, ‘None of us can’. So that was that. My case was lost. My heart sank – how boring.16
Joan ‘Panda’ Carter sketched some of her fellow ATS recruits on parade.
Barbara Rugg applied to join the ATS in 1938 and was put on a waiting list. In September 1939 she volunteered and although she was nearly 19 years old her mother opposed the idea, claiming that Barbara was ‘not strong enough’. However, the doctor declared her medically fit and her father signed the form. Barbara was in a group of twenty-four women sent for basic training to an army camp at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain. Their arrival was not welcomed and they were billeted, with bags of straw for bedding, in a redundant church; in fact, it was a tin shack that had just been painted, and the paint was still wet. While some of the younger soldiers, who had only recently been called up themselves, were helpful, the older regulars resented the women and booed them when they first went to the mess for meals:
It was awful to start with but we couldn’t write home and say so because our mothers would have been saying ‘I told you so!’ So we all kept quiet. I was there for two years and worked in the Drawing Office of the School of Artillery. There was a different atmosphere by then.17
Jeanne Adams describes her experiences at the WAAF Depot in Morecombe in November 1941 as:
Very grim. It was terribly cold and we were all very young, very green and very, very, home sick. Our TAB injections made all of us rather ill for a couple of days and we lay under our miserably thin blankets wishing we could go home. It was interesting to observe, even at this early stage, that officer qualities came to light and revealed those who were going to lead us; they comforted us, urged us to get out of bed, eat some food and cheer up!
I was posted to Medmenham, but first I had to get there. There was only one train and that departed at 6am from Morecombe. I was billeted one and a half miles away and the only way to get there was to walk. So at 5.30am I set off in pouring rain, carrying a kit bag and gas mask, a tin hat and a suitcase and clad in something called a ground sheet, a substitute for a mackintosh. They were standard issue and because I was small I kept tripping over mine, so I struggled along the front, feeling very sorry for myself, and caught the train.18
On her first day at Morecombe, Jeanne had met a vivacious redhead, Sarah Churchill, the second daughter of the Prime Minister, who had become a stage dancer and actress in 1935. She married a well-known stage entertainer in 1936 against her parents’ wishes, but by 1941 her marriage was breaking down and she asked a rare favour from her father: ‘I had decided to join the Services and asked him to arrange it as soon as possible. I was in the WAAF within forty-eight hours.’19
Felicity Hill (later Dame Felicity Hill, director WRAF 1966–69) was in the wartime Inspectorate of WAAF Recruiting:
One day we received a message telling us that the Prime Minister’s daughter, Sarah, would be coming to Victory House to join the WAAF. Sarah Churchill was then recently married to the comedian Vic Oliver. Mrs Oliver arrived in a very lively mood after lunch at the Savoy, and I interviewed her in the inner office. I smiled to myself as I went through the motions of asking her the usual questions for completion of the application form (though I skipped over Father’s Name and Address, and the question of references seemed inappropriate to Winston Churchill’s daughter). I enrolled her as a Plotter, told her something of recruit training, and looking at her beautiful and abundant red hair suggested she should have it restyled, for I shuddered at the thought of what the camp barber would do to it. Sarah was later commissioned as a Photographic Interpretation Officer, a branch in which she and
many other WAAF officers did valuable work in detecting and deducing intelligence material from aerial photographs.20
Jeanne Adams plotted where each photograph was taken on photographic reconnaissance sorties.
Sarah continues:
In October 1941 I became an Aircraftwoman Second Class. My choice of the WAAF was influenced by the colour of the uniform. I was enrolled and despatched on a long train journey to Morecombe for the inevitable ‘square bashing’ and wrote plaintively to my mother about the first few days, largely concerned, as always, with my appearance. The shoes were a particular horror – not a pair fitted, all were hideous and you simply could not do anything but ‘clump’ in them. We left for Morecombe at four o’clock in the morning to catch an eight o’clock train. We had to carry full equipment, including gas cape and gas mask strapped on one’s back – full-sized kitbag on one’s shoulder, smothered in an enormous topcoat and clutching a suitcase with civilian clothes in the other hand. I never imagined an eight hour journey could be a rest cure! It was a wonderful system though, watching a straggly bunch of nervous civilians change in about forty-eight hours into fairly passable looking WAAFs. Another forty-eight hours saw a change in deportment and manner, and one would march away with a look of pity towards the next bunch of sad-looking individuals being herded in the entrance gate.21
Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos Page 5