Two Wrens pose with a machine gun at an English naval base in 1943, left, and an ATS spotter, right (Image: Getty)
Delivered in the wake of the Dunkirk evacuation, Winston Churchill’s “Never Surrender” address in June 1940 is renowned for the Prime Minister’s rallying cry: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets.” The words inspired a nation ill-prepared for war, on the brink of the abyss. But cleverly disguised in Churchill’s rhetoric was an awareness of the challenge that faced Britain’s thinly spread military: “We must put our defences in this island into such a high state of organisation that the fewest possible numbers will be required to give effective security.”
The PM was referring to Anti-Aircraft (AA) Command and the urgent need to protect Britain’s skies from invading Luftwaffe aircraft at the same time as fighting a world war overseas. Churchill was on the horns of a dilemma: he desperately needed to free up men for the frontline, but in 1940 female conscription was still unthinkable.
These days, Muriel Harvey is 102, but 85 years ago the pall of war had already defined her young life. Aged just 15, she was relocated to Nottingham as a typist at the hosiery firm I & R Morley, with return visits to London during the Blitz providing a stark reminder of what Britain was up against by the winter of 1940.
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Grace Taylor, 101, from Poole, was 16 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (Image: Courtesy Tessa Dunlop)
Hannah Potter, 103, at home in Basildon, Essex (Image: Courtesy Tessa Dunlop)
“I think it made us feel more patriotic, seeing the impact of all the raids,” she recalls.
But feelings weren’t enough to win a war. Relentless bombing saw gun-sites mushroom across Britain, and AA Command tripled in size. But as their leader General Sir Frederick Wise discovered, many new recruits were not worth having – for every 25 men, “one had a withered arm, one was mentally deficient, one had no thumbs, one had a glass-eye which fell out whenever he doubled to the guns, and two were in the advanced and more obvious stage of venereal disease”.
Left with the dregs of the army, Wise crossed a Rubicon and proposed that women be allowed to serve on operational gun-sites.
Grace Taylor, 101, from Poole, was one of the pioneering teenagers who took up the challenge after “they began advertising for girls to work behind guns”. She lied about her age to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) at just sixteen and a half. “That’s right dear, I was selected to serve with AA Command,” she says. “They tested us and I operated the height-finders and the predictors, and the men were on the heavy guns. I enjoyed it very much, it was the comradery that I loved.”
Grace swapped her former life as a domestic servant for service on a gun-site – the uniform, the friendships, and the independence were hallmarks of a job that freed her from servitude.
Churchill’s youngest daughter Mary likewise became a poster girl for service behind the guns, while the Minister of War talked up the value of these new roles. Secretary of State for War David Margesson told Pathe News at the time: “Women of Great Britain are replacing men and allowing the men to go and do work that men alone can do. I sincerely hope more women will come forward.”
ATS women plot enemy aircraft positions (Image: Popperfoto via Getty)
But there were never enough volunteers. By the winter of 1941, the realities of a wider conflict insisted on an unprecedented U-turn. Defeated in Greece, occupied in Crete, pushed back in North Africa, haemorrhaging at sea, blitzed at home and desperately short of supplies, Churchill reluctantly conceded women must be compelled to serve.
Eighty-five years ago in early December 1941 the PM dismissed his own doubts about demoralised men and anxious parents and addressed the House of Commons, arguing that compulsion was needed to draw sufficient numbers of women into the armed services, before gently reassuring wartime Britain that there were no plans to “extend compulsion to join the services to any married women, not even childless married women”.
Formalised in law, for the first time in our history, was the proof that men could not fight and win without compelling women to serve alongside them. Many young women did not wait to be called up. Aged 18, Muriel Harvey joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. “I suppose it was more glamorous to serve in the air force and I was inspired by all the aerodromes in Nottinghamshire,” she tells me.
A wireless operator with Bomber Command, Muriel served under their revered (and later vilified) leader, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. “You did not dare speak to him, he was up there and we were down here,” she gesticulates with her hand. “I was a very good wireless operator. Initially, I didn’t think I had the brains, but our course was compressed into one year and I was one of the youngest.”
There is pride in her voice. And also confusion. “At the end of the war they asked if I wanted to go in an aeroplane and see the devastation the Lancasters had caused going to bomb every night in retaliation. ‘No!’ I said. I was appalled.” Grace and Muriel were small cogs in a giant war machine, one helping to defend Britain, the other helping attack Germany. Their work was technical and by 1941 compulsory. Women could not be forced into military service – but working for the war machine in some way was unavoidable. Even Princess Elizabeth, left, joined the ATS.
Hannah Potter, aged 103 and living in Basildon, Essex, laughs: “All my formative years were in the forces. You had to go in, you were put in prison if you didn’t do as they told you. Everyone had to do something.”
She recalls one conscientious objector being sent to prison on the Isle of Wight. “I got a letter and so did my sisters. We were all called up at once.”
A young Muriel Harvey during her time as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (Image: Courtesy Muriel Harvey)
None of it was unexpected. Blitzed out of their London home at the beginning of the war, Hannah was living in Salvation Army accommodation and sewing military uniforms when she was called for selection.
She didn’t like animals, which ruled out the Land Army, and she didn’t fancy the military services: “So they said what about the timber corps?”
“What do you do there then?”
“You chop down trees.”
“Oh, I can chop down trees.” Hannah stops and laughs some more. “I had never chopped a tree, but I’d taught myself how to work a sewing machine. So I reckoned it would be ok.”
Hannah became a “lumberjill”, one of a small group of women equipped with axes and cross saws and rudimentary learning.
“Wood was needed for the telegraph poles and sleepers on the railway lines, and pit poles. I chopped and cleaned three trees a day in the Forest of Dean.”
Like Grace and Muriel, Hannah is pleased to have served. It defined her young life, taught her new skills and brought her into a collective national space, a version of Britain where everyone had skin in the game. All three women are proud of their wartime records, and they are proud to be British. But as they look out across a century, they don’t like what they see.
With fresh talk of conscription and national service across Europe, they don’t worry about our current younger generation lacking patriotism (“they’ll do their bit, you’ll see”), but they do worry about more war. Muriel is alarmed that “millions of people died and now it is happening again, the same old thing”.
Bombing raids deep in Ukraine overshadow our first conversation, and our second comes in the wake of antisemitic stabbings in London. The concern in the voices of these heroes is a reminder that the futility of conflict is hard to recover from. Hannah is adamant: “All you get at the end of war is a load of rubble. And a load of people killed. Is it worth it? There ain’t no winners in war, tell Putin that.”
Lest We Forget: 100 Stories of Love, Loss and Heroism, by Tessa Dunlop (HarperCollins, £10.99), is out now