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Before leaving to set up her own organisation which she
called
The Women’s Sick & Wounded Convoy Corps
Mabel St Clair Stobart had been a FANY - the rather
wonderful fur clad ladies on this month’s front cover
are FANYs. The
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
was the
marvellously eccentric brainwave of an old war horse,
Sergeant Major, later Captain Edward Baker, who had
been wounded in the Sudan, to send women on
horseback out onto the battlefield like Amazonian
paramedics to tend to wounded soldiers. At the outbreak
of the Great War the FANY volunteers were expected to
provide their own horses and pay for their own uniforms
thus only women of independent means could join up.
The FANY held training events in Hyde Park Hunting
for Casualties and taking part in Wounded Rescue
Races. Later the RAMC offered more serious training
opportunities involving the preparation of tents and
buildings as temporary hospitals alongside first aid and
stretcher drills. And the FANYs took driving lessons
for it wasn’t to be on horses that they took to the
battlefield but at the wheel of motor ambulances.
In October 1914 six pioneering FANYs had become
the first women’s voluntary organisation to go out to
the war taking with them to Calais three civilian nurses,
two male wound dressers, an ambulance driver and a
total kitty of £12.00. The British Army wanted nothing
to do with them so they worked for the French and
Belgian armies. Lieutenants Grace McDougall, Lilian
Franklin and Sergeant Isabel Wicks were joined in
February 1915 by Muriel Thompson who in 1908 had
won the first ever ladies motor race at Brooklands.
On 1 January 1916 the first officially recognised
British FANY
convoy started
operations in
the war zones
of France driving
ambulances for
the British Army.
In that first year
they would carry
80,000 wounded
men as well as
running canteens, mobile bath units and entertainments
for the troops in the form of a mobile cinema. The
mobile bath unit was nicknamed
James
– water was
heated by the ambulance engines to fill ten collapsible
baths with the unit able to offer the rare chance of a hot
bath to up to 40 front line troops an hour. These wealthy
adventurous women became infamous for the enormous
fur coats they sported during the winter months –
Mammoth Hamster Units
said one wag. Back home the
FANYs gave talks and lectures about their experiences
to raise money. FANYs were often seen as a monstrous
challenge to the natural order of things and their khaki
uniforms could attract great trouble. In 1915 Mary
Baxter-Ellis was stoned in the street when she returned
in khaki to visit her father in a Northumberland town.
After the war ended the FANYs provided a guard of
honour when the body of Edith Cavell was brought
home. The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry still exists today
but has been renamed The Princess Royal’s Volunteer Corps.
It is still a British, independent, all female unit that is
affiliated to, but is not part of, the Territorial Army.
So much for the aristocratic, upper and middle class women
what of the working classes? I would have wanted to be
driving an ambulance in my big old fur coat with my closest
pal at my side and a small dog on my lap but I would have
been spending my days in the Woolwich Arsenal alongside
my mother’s extended family who were housed in the damp
wooden hutments built for Great War Arsenal workers on old
farmland between Plumstead and the just-about-Kent village
of East Wickham. Hutments meant to be temporary for the
war effort but which would house these Arsenal families
for over 50 years until they were finally demolished and the
occupants, those who hadn’t been wiped out by rampant TB,
were rehoused in new
brick council houses –
but not until all of their
belongings had been
taken from them, with
little dignity afforded,
to be fumigated whether
they needed it or not.
In
Testament of Youth
Vera Brittain (right in
VAD uniform with her
beloved brother Edward)
acknowledges that her
first experiences of exhausting physical labour, which she
finds to be rather an ordeal, is an ordinary reality of daily
drudgery for many working women from less privileged
backgrounds. We women of the working classes worked
in vital if maybe far less glamorous roles. We toiled in the
munitions factories, our skin turning yellow from the
chemicals. We punched tickets on the buses and shovelled
coal. Some of us managed to join the Women’s Police
Service, the WPS, that had been set up by Margaret Damer
Dawson, a militant suffragette and veteran campaigner
against the sex trade, to deal with the problem of prostitution
and what the Sussex Times called
the enthusiastic amateurs
who gathered wherever men in uniform gathered.
The WPS separated courting couples in the bushes of public
parks and shooed prostitutes from public squares and train
stations. Inevitably they were called copperettes. Margaret
Damer Dawson is buried in the churchyard of St Stephen’s,
Lympne which sits on the cliff edge of old Saxon shore
looking out over the Romney Marsh. Visit if you can, her
grave is
behind the
church, very
close to the
cliff edge.
It’s a special
spot and if you
have a chance
to visit take a
flower to lay
on the grave
of a Woman of
the Great War.
