Foreign News: After Boadicea

(See Cover)

At 111 a. m. Sept. 3, Great Britain’s ultimatum to Germany expired. At 11:35 the first air-raid warning wailed over the British capital. Some 8,000,000 unhurried Londoners tramped down the steps of their air-raid shelters, among them George VI, King-Emperor, and his Queen Elizabeth. Half an hour later, the all clear signal given, George and Elizabeth emerged. For him, as Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal and Marshal of the Air Force, the war had begun. For her, as for some 15,000,000 other British women, the pre-war life of home and children and firesides and friends had stopped.

The Queen had gone down into the Buckingham Palace dugout wearing a morning gown of her favorite soft blue. Twelve days later, by the King’s command, she assumed the title of Commandant in Chief of the three women’s auxiliaries to the fighting services—Women’s Royal Naval Service, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. A large part of her new life was thus to be devoted to leading Britain’s women-at-war, and the uniforms of these organizations were added to her wardrobe,* the first warlike garments to be worn by an English Queen since the days of Boadicea.

Greatest Experiment. For better or for worse, so far the British Army and Navy (along with the French) have not undertaken any great decisive action at the front or on the seas (see p. 31). But even if and when they do, even if some great attack should sweep the Germans out of the ocean, some air armada lay Berlin in the dust, some huge offensive run the Reich’s soldiers all the way through Prussia and chase Herr Hitler off his cliff at Berchtesgaden, it may well be that these are not the deeds of which Britain will be proudest in World War II. It may be that the greatest victories will have been won at home, in the vast cooperative efforts of British citizens to save each other needless suffering and loss of life, in the carefully planned nationwide emergency hospital service, the transfusion service, the ambulance services (even one on the Thames), in the evacuation of more than 1,000,000 of the defenseless from the danger areas of London, Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester to places of greater safety. For in a nation which, by the world’s standards, already had top marks for humanitarianism, the war’s first month produced an entire new order of social responsibility. The movement within a week of whole masses of people into thousands of other peoples’ homes and schools and churches, Prime Minister Chamberlain described as “the greatest social experiment which England has ever undertaken.” On the whole, it was Britain’s 15,000,000 women who undertook it.

The Women. Not only were Britain’s women taking the major part in Britain’s social reorientation, they were taking the brunt of it. The men were in the Army or the Government or carrying on in essential businesses, for the time being socially fixed. With the women it was different. Many thousands of British working women found themselves suddenly out of work as business and industry adjusted themselves to wartime conditions. Thousands of maids and nurses lost their jobs, now that so many families were dislocated. Small factories shut down in fear of bombs, although many, particularly in the garment trade, are reopening as a result of the war boom in uniforms. Hardest hit were typists, stenographers, clerks, sacked when firms folded up or skeletonized their staffs as they deserted the big towns. Shopgirls getting 30 to 40 shillings a week were dropped by the hundreds because with evacuations retail trade slumped badly. In London, Selfridge’s had to let 1,000 go, John Lewis dismissed 300, gave the rest a 25% pay cut. Even the tarts had an unemployment problem due to the nightly blackouts.

Women whose chief duty was to keep the home fires burning—somewhere—had their troubles too. On to hard-driven wives of low-pay workers went the added strain of higher food and clothing prices. They simply did with even less amusements, scarce anyway since the blackouts. Toughest economic time of all was had by wives of well-paid business and professional men called to the colors or the Government, or dismissed from their civilian positions. Their domestic overhead was out of all proportion to Army or civil service pay, and if the husband had no job at all, there was nothing to do but draw on savings, if any.

Metropolitan homes were emptied of their children. On the whole, when mothers accompanied children to live with strange families in the countryside, the arrangement was carried out with good-natured tolerance by both families. Hut not always. In the excitement and instability of change, the visiting children broke things, fought with their young hosts, ran wild. In most homes the kitchen was the focus of friction, mothers clashing over meals and washing privileges. One distraught visitor took a knife to her hostess. Even when things ran smoothly, women longed to get back to their homes and husbands, if they were still home. The younger women were particularly homesick (some were also apprehensive lest their husbands stray in their absence). Since the youngest mothers tended to have the youngest children, last week the Home Office decided that where infants under 5 were to be evacuated, their mothers would be left behind and they would be cared for in country nurseries. (Coolly observed Lady Astor: “I believe that the mother is necessary to the child only during its first year.”)

There was grumbling, but not because the country was at war. Almost without exception, Britain’s women were sure their nation’s cause was just and their side would win. Any sacrifice that would help bring victory was worthwhile. Most of the complaining was over restrictions and red tape, an old British custom. The rest arose from the fact that with 1,500,000 women directly engaged in war work, there was not quite enough war work to go around. In the elaborate but as yet unused Air Raid Precautions service, particularly, women chafed at inactivity. The mass will of the women was to do something, and they were doing it all over the Kingdom last week.

¶A drive was begun to recruit auxiliary policewomen. Requirements: ages 24 to 35, minimum height 5 ft. 4 in., single or widows, British-born. Pay: £2 a week for trainees, £7 53. for inspectors, uniforms free.

¶ London Passenger Transport Board had ready a register of 2,000 women bus conductors. In the Lake District women were already bus-conducting.

¶Three hundred thousand members of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes organized into 6,000 branches began preserving, canning, bottling against a food shortage, as they did in 1915.

Meanwhile, uniformed, trained, disciplined for months, there were dozens of big and little women’s outfits whose business it was to take over men’s jobs, take up the task of making the national life as safe and tolerable as possible, get on with the war.

VAD. “I wish to express my admiration at the way my countrywomen have come forward in their thousands to give their help in the present emergency,” wrote Queen Mother Mary from somewhere west of London. “The Queen, my dear daughter-in-law, has told me of the wonderful spirit, enterprise and courage shown on all sides, of which she has found ample proof in her visits to various centres. I wish to send a special greeting to all nurses. . . .”

Britain’s Red Cross nurses—the Voluntary Aid Detachment—naturally have a soft spot in the Dowager Queen’s heart. It was her old War I outfit formed in 1909 and having in uniform 126,000 women in 1918. VAD membership is now 60,000, age limit 19 to 45 (average 28). The nurses are under contract for the duration of the war at £30 to £40 a year. Trained by doctors and trained nurses, given hospital experience, clothed in blue gingham, they are being allocated to military and naval hospitals at home and abroad. VAD will not care for air-raid civilian casualties. This is the job of the Nursing Reserve, recruited mostly from shops and factories and affiliated with the great Women’s Volunteer Service (see col. 3). VADirectress is famed old Dame Beryl Oliver, a grandmotherly soul who did similar work last time and got her D. B. E. for it in 1920.

Wrens. Another able War I veteran runs the Women’s Royal Naval Service (“Wrens”), a unit of 2,000 who work at naval bases as cooks, bookkeepers, cipherers, but none on ships. Their head is Mrs. Laughton Matthews, daughter of Sir John Laughton, the naval historian, and sister of a lieutenant commander on the Royal yacht. A weatherbeaten lady seadog, she was the first woman administrator sent to base in the last war, spent the peace with the girl scouts. Her women wear navy blue (with blue rating marks instead of the Navy’s red), get paid a little less than standard naval wages and grumble a bit because many of them are Navy wives and have to stay put while their husbands move to new locations.

WATS. The female uniform most often seen tramping about the British countryside is the khaki of the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (tunic, skirt, a cap that has upfolded ear-protecting flaps). Formed in 1938, the WATS are a revival of War I’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps —the celebrated and occasionally indiscreet WAACs who went to France 57,000 strong under Helen Gwynne-Vaughan (later Darned).

WATS have been recruiting and training since last year to serve with the Army as cooks, clerks, signalers. There are now 20,000, aged 18 to 43, many of them veterans or daughters of veterans. With Dame Helen again at their head, the WATS live the life of college girls in neat barracks, play hockey (absorbedly watched by soldiers off duty), give dances, go in strongly for makeup and midnight suppers.

Fannies. Affiliated with the WATS are several thousand ambulance driving “Fannies” (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), an old outfit founded in 1909, motorized in 1916, never disbanded. Their chief is the Countess of Athlone and some of their present ambulances are converted Harrod’s delivery vans.

WAFS. For the present, all 11,000 jobs are filled in the WAFS—Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Most popular, most beauteous and toniest service, these women live in hostels near air fields and not only cook and chauffeur but get into jumpers and help repair and maintain airplane motors. Technologically it is the top service among the women’s fighting forces, and it also has the appeal of propinquity to gallant young airmen.

WVS. Not so pretty, not military, not smartly turned out (a greyish green overcoat and a chromium badge), not paid, but by all odds the biggest, most valuable and most womanly of British female war work units is the Women’s Voluntary Service. Their big test came on the morning of Aug. 31, when the Ministry of Health flashed WVS’s chief, the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, to get the children and invalids out of urban danger spots.

WVS had been on its mark to do just that since June 1938. From London headquarters Lady Reading shot twelve telegrams to her twelve regional chiefs (in Britain’s twelve autonomous defense zones). They shot 2,000 telegrams to their local branches. From Lands End to John 0’Groats the grey-green overcoats began to gather their cars around station platforms. Other grey-green overcoats in London were leading little lines of towheads with lunch boxes and gas masks to Euston, Waterloo, Charing Cross, Victoria, Paddington stations, stuffing them into cars with more grey-green overcoats headed for whatever destination the clearest track presented. Each towhead had a postcard to send home when it got where it was going. The scheme had worked perfectly on paper, but would it work? Lady Reading and her 300 aids in their old building on Tothill Street, Westminster, kept their fingers crossed and waited. By nightfall the last of the district leaders had reported by wire, and they knew. The children were received, no hitches, no accidents—CHILDREN HAD TEA AND GONE TO BED—CHILDREN FED, SCRUBBED, RETIRED.

No War I veteran but an outstanding post-War civic leader (as member of the Overseas Settlement Board, Imperial Relations Trust, Broadcasting Commission), Lady Reading was last year picked by Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare to amalgamate 70 women’s groups into one workable body, now numbering half-a-million members. The evacuation force was just one of the services to be whipped together (it now carries on the job of clothing, feeding, schooling the evacuees for the duration of the war). She had 46,000 women trained for ambulance driving (requirements: change wheels, spark plugs, back 100 yds. in total darkness); she put other thousands to work making bandages, nightshirts, stuffing mattresses; more took over the recruiting, classification and transporting of blood and blood donors; under Lady Denman, and Mrs. Walter Elliot—the latter a Scottish sheep farmer and wife of a onetime Minister of Agriculture—25,000 girls were sent to agricultural schools for a month and then, when they learned to plow, milk, drive tractors, onto the land. All this was done without costing the Government sixpence (except rent, stationery and the salaries of 50 clerical workers and two men to make tea at London headquarters). “We begged, we borrowed,” says Lady Reading, “and I am ashamed to say, sometimes we stole.”

Daughter of a diplomat (Charles Charnaud), secretary, wife and widow of a Viceroy of India, Lady Reading explains the knack of getting big and little things done by the motto she has chosen for WVS: FLEXIBILITY. A plastic and gracious personality, she likes to travel (24,000 mi. on a speaking tour through Britain during the past year) and particularly in the U. S., where she has visited thrice and where she is usually mistaken for her step-daughter-in-law, the present Marchioness of Reading. The Viceroy told her the best way to understand the American people was to attend their national political conventions. She went to both in 1936, then went coast-to-coasting in a fifth-hand Buick. To understand the Americans a little better she stopped at tourist homes at night and helped with the dishes next morning. WVS takes all her time now on a 9:45-till-anytime schedule. Her London house is closed and when she sleeps she sleeps in a West End hotel, the name of which is known only to her.

Commandant. Better and more broadly than perhaps ever before, Britain’s Queen represents Britain’s womanhood. Titular commandant of the women’s fighting services, last week Elizabeth graciously accepted the presidency of WVS, putting her on top of the female nonfighting services. She was already a typical British wife. The King was in uniform (Marshal of the Royal Air Force) and she no longer accompanied him wherever he went. She had her own visiting, inspecting, encouraging jobs to do. On a 24-hour schedule, from which future appointments had been dropped, she simply went where she thought she ought to go, appearing at one WATS post which happened to be temporarily deserted. And she typified lonely British motherhood, for her two daughters had also been evacuated. She stood it as long as she could, then flew to Scotland to see them last fortnight. No British Queen had ever spent a month more like the month spent by her subjects, and the parallel and the example was not lost on the Empire.

Her Majesty is the first Scotswoman in over eight centuries to marry an English King, the first since Henry I married Matilda in noo A.D. She is descended from Sir John Lyon, the adventurous Thane of Glamis who in 1376 won as his bride Princess Jean, daughter of King Robert II of Scotland. Shakespeare’s tragedy of Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, goes back to an earlier legendary period, but tourists still visit the Queen’s ancestral home Glamis (pronounced Glahms) Castle to see where “Macbeth did murder Duncan,” King of Scotland.

Scots ideas of discipline in child training molded the future Queen from birth. In her girlhood as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, not only was she taught to cook, sew and garden but on certain days, dressed as a housemaid, it was her duty to show tourists the sights of Glamis and afterward when most of them offered tips she was Scotch about that too. About 30 miles from Glamis is the Royal Family’s Balmoral Castle, and Queen Mary took an early fancy to budding Lady Elizabeth who presently in 1922 was bridesmaid to Princess Mary. King George V was at this time vainly trying to get Edward of Wales to settle down by marrying, but, although Lady Elizabeth was mentioned prominently, it was not “David” (the future Edward VIII) but “Bertie,” then Duke of York, who presently came to Glamis and did his best to propose during his visit. The Duke, acutely conscious of his speech impediment but also tremendously in love, went for a ride with Lady Elizabeth on the day scheduled for his departure, finally tore a leaf from his notebook in desperation scribbled what he wanted to say and passed it over.

“Lizzie.” Two days after their splendrous marriage at Westminster Abbey in 1923 the Duchess of York, still technically a “commoner” was made a Royal Princess with the rank of H.R.H. by approving George V. She asked her friends to keep on calling her “Lizzie.”

Soon the Yorks were touring British Africa in royal style (he shot a white rhinoceros, she refused to shoot another “because they are so rare”); Polish monarchists offered to start a movement to make him King of Poland (he declined with thanks); the Duke came down with influenza; and the Duchess was delivered of her first child, Princess Elizabeth, on April 21, 1926.

Next year the Duke was assigned to go to Australia and open its new Parliament with a Speech from the Throne, for him a terrible ordeal. “Well, here goes,” York was heard to say to his wife as, gritting his teeth, he arose to speak. “I know you can do it,” she replied firmly and Australians were struck by the way in which the Duchess followed every word, nodding and smiling encouragement right through to the Duke’s successful close which brought a torrent of cheers.

In the years which followed Britain began to see in the devoted domesticity of the Yorks what finally was found so glaringly lacking in Edward of Wales. “She is one of us!” became what everyone said of Elizabeth, “the Smiling Duchess.” Jocularly Wales would call his sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, “Queen Elizabeth” at times, and when King George V died many believed that Edward was resolved to avoid the Throne by abdicating then and there.

“What would you say if he did?” the Duchess of York was asked by an intimate and candid friend.

“I don’t know what I would say,” she quietly replied, “I only hope it would be something which would prove to the English people how much I love them!”

Every act of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth since their Coronation has proved that they understand what is expected of them by the British Empire. In peacetime Elizabeth once said: “If we make up our minds to try and solve (our problems) in good friendship and out of love for one another and for our country, we will somehow and sometime, I think, get things set right.”

Now deep in the far more urgent problems of wartime, Britain’s Woman No. 1, and all its other women are giving a ringing emphasis to another quotation that Elizabeth used to be fond of saying: “Let your light so shine before men. …”

*So far, Elizabeth has been photographed in none of them.