When I started to interview some of the last surviving women of Britain’s “greatest generation”, my aim was to glean new insights into the Second World War.
What swiftly became clear, however, is that those women who came of age during the conflict have far more to offer than mere history lessons: there is plenty that they can teach young people today.
Despite performing eclectic roles, ranging from top secret intelligence work to agricultural labour, the 10 women at the heart of my new book, Women in the War, have admirable qualities in common.
Chief among these is resilience. Marguerite Turner, now 98, was a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment and totally unflappable. She recalls being “thrown in at the deep end” as an 18-year-old, expected to deal with a multitude of tasks from dressing grisly wounds to cleaning the sputum mugs of tuberculosis patients – all without protective overalls or gloves. “It was a case of having to do it and there was nothing more to it,” she says.
Victims of the German bombing campaign over the capital were among her charges, including distressed children. “A rocket dropped and I remember a girl was brought in. She had been walking in Croydon. The rocket hadn’t hurt her, although she was very shocked, but it was the glass from the window of a shop she was passing,” she says. “I spent hours sitting on her bed with a very fine pair of pincers taking slips of glass the size of the nail of your little finger out of her face.”
Marguerite was forced to grow up quickly. Engaging with distressed families visiting their loved ones in hospital demanded emotional maturity. “I remember an old couple coming to see their grandson,” she recalls. “I was told, ‘Go and warn those two they’re in for a shock.’ I had to prepare them. There was a lot of tenderness. You had to be very tactful.”
An incident involving a young man who had been fighting in Egypt, where British forces had been involved in the Western Desert campaign, has stayed in her mind in the decades since.
Brought back to the UK because he was gravely ill, the soldier was nonetheless upbeat – giddy at the prospect of seeing his sweetheart again. His enthusiasm captured the imagination of Marguerite and her fellow nurses, who rushed to ensure the best reception possible for his girlfriend. “He’d got a photograph of her and he was telling us all about her – so excited – saying ‘She’s coming to see me’. So made him look very presentable; clean pyjamas and a bedspread; clean curtains,” Marguerite said.
The reunion did not go to plan: “I came back in the evening and I said, ‘Well, how did it go?’ I looked at him and his face was white and drawn. She’d told him, ill as he was, that she’d found someone else.”
Jaye Edwards, now 102, also possesses plentiful reserves. Her sense of low-key grit prevented a major crash from halting her career flying Spitfires in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). She dismisses the episode – in which she smashed a Miles Magister training monoplane into a tree and lost her teeth in the crash pad – as a mere “prang”.
“I looked over my left shoulder and thought everything was fine, and forgot I had a right shoulder. That right shoulder hit a tree,” she says. “I could have done much more harm. I was lucky.”
Within days Edwards was back in the cockpit, later training with the National Women’s Air Reserve. By the outbreak of war, she boasted only two hours of solo flying experience. Yet she took the helm of more than 20 different types of aircraft, delivering them from production factories to RAF combat pilots on the front line. It was a role loaded with risk. Of the 168 maverick women who joined the 1,250-strong ranks of the ATA, almost 10 per cent were killed.
The Instagram generation could also take a lesson from the discretion exhibited by women like Joy Hunter. The 95-year-old is one of the last surviving women to have worked with Winston Churchill in the subterranean Cabinet War Rooms beneath Whitehall. Despite her fascinating war-time service, she has not dwelt on the period, let alone dined out it. Until the Imperial War Museum contacted her around a decade ago, she had never discussed it – not even with her adult children, or her husband before his death.
Yet Joy possesses so many fascinating glimpses into life in the subterranean warren of operation rooms from which Churchill and his military commanders directed the war. Explaining how the former PM tried to unwind during periods of intensity, she says: “He had one of the rooms turned into a very makeshift cinema – just ordinary chairs and a cinegraphic camera. He loved films.”
She and her friends in the secretarial pool soon received an invite. “One night we were on the late shift. It must have been about midnight, because I know we would rather have got a few hours in bed. The message came saying he was going to watch a film; would any of us like to join him? He’d be delighted. So a few of us thought we would – a bit grudgingly, really. We were terribly tired…
“We waited and waited. I shuffled a bit and began to think ‘Oh, goodness’. Then, all of a sudden, the door burst open and in he comes in his pyjamas, dressing gown, cigar in one hand and glass in the other and shouts out something like, ‘Winnie’s here – let it roll!’ He sat at the back and we sat at the front. I can’t remember anything about the film, of course.”
When Churchill was not at work or asleep in the bunker at night, he liked to climb onto the roof, she adds. “He’d be out of bed, bang upstairs, up on the roof. Especially if there was an air raid. He liked to see where the bombs were falling and see if, hopefully, his beloved House of Commons was all right.”
Joy’s diligent work was noted by her superiors and she was among a small number of typists selected to attend the Potsdam conference, the last meeting of the “Big Three” Allied leaders after the end of the war in Europe. While in Germany she joined a party on a day-trip into the ruined neighbourhoods of Berlin. Spurred on by curiosity, the group dared to cross the line of Soviet guards protecting the entrance to the heavily bombed Chancellery.
“I did get a few pieces of Hitler’s desk, which I have still got,” she says. “You wouldn’t know they were Hitler’s desk unless I told you. Everybody did; I shouldn’t think there was anything left at the end of it.”
In another extraordinary episode, she found herself at an evening reception that brought her face-to-face with Stalin. Coyly she recalls: ”I shook Stalin’s hand and for years and years I kept quiet about it, because it sounded as though I was a ‘commie’...”
Personal reminiscences were not encouraged after the war and on the whole Joy approved of a forward-looking mentality. The conflict became a frowned-upon topic. “It was over, behind us. You don’t keep on about things that are behind you.” she says. As the decades advanced, she took the view: “It was a long, long time ago and I never look backwards.”
Many women were vocal in highlighting the role of their comrades, a helpful reminder that there is an alternative to the individualism that has come to define modern life.
“I was not alone. You have to realise, there were 150 women at least who participated in the Air Transport Auxiliary. It makes me mad when people want to say, ‘Oh, you’re wonderful’,” says Jaye Edwards.
“I was adventurous, but I was anxious to help the war effort. Everybody felt like that,” agrees Ena Collymore-Woodstock, 103, who left her home in Jamaica – then a British colony – to become one of 100-odd West Indian women to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1943. “Women held their own and showed they were strong and capable,” she adds.
They also faced considerable challenges. For many, war-work entailed a series of daunting firsts: holding down a job, living away from home, having to make new friends, romantic relationships.
The majority of female personnel were paid considerably less than their male counterparts and struggled to gain full military status for their units. An outspoken group of men – and some women, including Labour MP Agnes Hardie – objected to the idea of female personnel at all, arguing that, as mothers and “nurturers”, women were not suited to life in the barracks
But just as the female volunteers in the First World War helped (some) women win the vote, the women of the Second World War paved the way for the later battles for fair pay and equal opportunities. Their essential contribution to the war even led to the first state-funded nurseries, helping thousands of mothers to join the workforce in munitions factories.
It is a sad fact that her generation sacrificed their youth to the war, withstanding unimaginable suffering and loss. But despite the personal and political challenges, some of the last surviving women I spoke to insisted they’d had it better than young people today. It struck me that they gained something, too: a sense of fortitude.
Despite the changing times, recognising the importance of pluck and good cheer even when faced with the toughest of circumstances is something we, in turn, can gain from them.
Women in the War: The Last Heroines of Britain's Greatest Generation by Lucy Fisher (RRP £20). Buy now for £16.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
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