How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (26 page)

T
he Second World War, just like the First, for ever changed the lot of women. Prior to 1939, housewifery, shop work or being ‘a
domestic’ were about the only tasks that women were expected to perform. But with the bulk of Britain’s manpower serving in the military after 1939, eventually women were also required
to do some form of National Service, if not in the services themselves then certainly in the Land Army or in munitions factories. Then it was my mother’s turn to panic. She had not worked
since her late teens and when, in the spring of 1942, two men ‘from the Ministry’ turned up on our doorstep attempting to register her for factory work, I can imagine her shock.
Eventually, she wriggled out of it by agreeing instead to provide billets for servicemen.

She was in the minority. By the middle of 1943, almost ninety per cent of single women in Britain, and eighty per cent of married women, were working in factories, on the land or in the armed
forces.

Factory work could lead to romance in the unlikeliest way. Margaret Naisbett wrote her name on a shell she was packing at the Aycliffe Ordnance Works, County Durham. Gunner Arthur Shepperson
loaded the twenty-five-pounder into his artillery piece and later wrote to Margaret to tell her that it had landed among Italian troops. Margaret wrote back to Arthur. In July 1945, they were
married at St John’s Church, Darlington.

Women were first called up for war work from March 1941, and at first that meant single women only, between the ages of twenty and thirty. Their roles were wide-ranging, from driving ambulances
and fire engines, making munitions and even building ships, to nursing and working on farms. A few delivered aircraft, and a tiny handful worked with the Resistance behind enemy lines, none of
which tasks I could ever imagine my mother performing. Factory work would have been too dirty, agricultural labour too demanding. And she gossiped too much to make a good spy. No, she was far
better suited to the role of landlady to a few members of His Majesty’s forces.

Around 80,000 served in the Women’s Land Army, which was formed in June 1939. It was not an easy life. The girls looked after animals, ploughed fields, dug up potatoes,
harvested cereal crops, killed rats, and generally ploughed the fields and scattered seeds for fifty hours a week.

Some 640,000 of my mother’s contemporaries even joined the armed forces, although of course they did not have to. They served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s
Royal Naval Service (WRNS) and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).

The ATS was formed in September 1938, initially as a voluntary organization that had its roots in the First World War’s Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. At first the roles were much the
same – cooks and clerks, waitresses and telephonists – but later they included the manning (perhaps not the correct word here) of anti-aircraft guns and operating radar. They were
banned from serving on the front line but, when the British army evacuated from Dunkirk in May 1940, women telephonists were among the last to leave. Even our present queen did her bit, training as
an ATS lorry driver.

Over 700 members of the ATS were killed during the Second World War, and the WRNS lost over 300 personnel, so despite being banned from the battlefield, women could still pay the ultimate price.
Reformed in 1939, the Women’s Royal Naval Service initially restricted its personnel to clerical and domestic work, but eventually they also worked on small vessels in harbours (but not in
open water) as well as performing similar tasks to their ATS counterparts such as radar plotters, meteorologists, bomb-range markers, cipher officers, and flying unarmed aircraft.

Sometimes, things could get confusing, though. An ATS sergeant glared when she saw one of her unit, Winnie Jenkins, strolling through the middle of Slough, wearing civilian clothing and
whistling merrily away. The sergeant resolved to put Jenkins on a ‘fizzer’ for being out of uniform. But a few minutes later, she saw Corporal Jenkins emerge from a shop, smartly
dressed and accompanied by her twin sister, who worked in a local factory. To prevent further confusion, Winnie soon found herself posted to another town.

The Women’s Auxiliary Air Service was formed in June 1939, its original function clearly stated: to provide drivers, clerical workers, cooks, waitresses and people to take messages. Like
the ATS and the WRNS, its roles were soon extended, in their cases to include working on barrage balloon sites and reconnaissance photograph interpretation. Indeed, many ‘WAAFs’ found
themselves very much in the front line, stationed as they were at RAF aerodromes under the thick of the Battle of Britain. Some 900 members of the WAAF died during the Second World War.

Women have always been particularly good at keeping calm and carrying on, but their patience must have been sorely tested between 1939 and 1945, when they were required to take on unfamiliar
roles that were normally filled by men who only ended up resenting them for it. In factories and in the armed services, women found many men hostile to their very presence, and even though that
hostility mellowed once it became obvious that women were making a positive contribution, they still had to develop a particular sense of humour if they were to survive. It cannot have been
easy.

During the war both my twin sister and myself served in the Women’s Timber Corps, a branch of the Land Army. We joined, aged eighteen, and stayed in that service until we
were twenty-two. During our annual leave we were allowed a travel warrant to the furthest point of England – any travel beyond that point, to Scotland or Wales, and we had to pay our own
way.

My sister and myself, and two other friends all stationed in Hereford, decided to use our travel warrants to go to Carlisle and, from there to hitchhike around Scotland as we couldn’t
afford digs and fares. At Oban we couldn’t find a Toc H or a hostel, and couldn’t afford the price of a bed and breakfast, so tried to stow away on a boat for the night. Unfortunately,
we got caught and were taken by the quartermaster to the local police station. Since the police couldn’t help us find cheap lodgings, we begged to be put in a police cell for the night.
Eventually we managed to persuade the police that we preferred to be locked up to spending the night outdoors with no shelter.

By law, before being given a bed for the night, we had to have our particulars recorded – our descriptions such as hair colouring and so on. We were shown to our cell and were literally
locked in. We couldn’t sleep and, at 4.30 a.m., wanted to get out so much that we began banging on the door and shouting. It took a while, but since we weren’t criminals, we were
eventually allowed to leave.

A while later, I sent a parcel of Herefordshire apples to the policeman who had taken care of us. He replied, assuring us that the apples were delicious and that we had been ‘lovely’
prisoners, who were ‘a joy to lock up’.

Ann Kent, Sandbach

During the war years I was working with the Land Army. There were a lot of Englishmen, but also Italian prisoners of war. The weather in one particular summer was wet and there
was a lot of spreading of lime to be done. These prisoners’ English vocabulary was very limited but the local boys were intent on teaching them their swear words.

One particular day, Renado, who always called me ‘Siliva’, came back while I was milking and called to me: ‘Siliva, lime no bloody good, similar shit!’ Loosely
translated, he meant that the rain had made the lime so sticky that it was comparable with cow manure. Surrounded as I was by other workers, I was so embarrassed.

Sylvia Chaplin, Truro

The best war cartoon of my recollection had to do with the policy of removing UXBs to distant open spaces for defusing. There was the man seated on the upper deck of a bus with
a huge bomb on the seat beside him. The conductress approaches and he asks for ‘One and a half to Hackney Marshes.’

Leila Mackinlay, London