The characters in this book are imaginary, although based on real people, apart from well-known identities like Winston Churchill. Pigeon 2709 also existed and performed his extraordinary task under that name. The other character names were volunteered by followers on Twitter and Facebook, who also indicated what roles they would like their namesakes to play. Which names came to belong to heroic characters was accidental — I assigned the names in order of the list I’d made, though I’m glad the nickname ‘Mealworm’ coincidentally belongs to exactly the right person in this book.
Secret Sparrow deliberately leaves out the exact dates and places where many of the events happened. It is impossible to know where a female signaller might have been, as the records that might have given that information were destroyed after the war. Female signallers were, however, employed in action at the time of the Battle of Cambrai, and so I placed Jean there.
I have also kept the details of where Jean served in that battle deliberately vague, partly because to put her with a particular unit would mean falsifying what actually happened, partly because Jean herself would not have known anything beyond her small corner of the war, and also because military historians are still arguing about exactly what did happen in the Battle of Cambrai, and when and how, in those hectic and horrific weeks.
In this book Major Alan Galbraith believes that if the British troops ahead of them know reinforcements were coming, they won’t retreat, but hold the line. This would have been a reasonable belief at the time, but as Jean says in the later chapter of this book, the German reinforcements were overwhelming, and no action of hers in this book, or Alan’s, would have changed the course of the war.
The Technical Details in this Book
I am married to a man whose father served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and who began his career as an electrical apprentice at Cockatoo Island with many of his father’s veteran friends, and who has kept the tools he used then. Bryan would later work in ‘signals’ himself, sending and receiving messages and tracking the craft of the Apollo project that first sent humans to the moon. Bryan showed me exactly how to splice the World War I cable — he had identical cable in his shed, as well as the pliers and kind of knife and tape used then. Thanks to that man, and his shed — and his knowledge of Morse and signals generally — the details are accurate. I have the piece of spliced cable beside me as I write this, and will keep it always, as a memory of our partnership as I wrote this book.
The Female Signallers of World War I
Jean McLain is entirely imaginary, and not based on any single person. And yet, for the first time in many decades of writing historical fiction, I have a strange feeling that she is real. This is almost certainly just a result of my years of research into finding what life a female signaller would have led before, during and after the war . . . but I will still add that ‘almost’. If in years to come a reader tells me, ‘Jean McLain was my great-grandmother’, I won’t be surprised. Emotionally, she is real to me, even though I know her history is entirely contrived, based on many sources, and many women.
The female signallers, and the role they played in World War I, are as accurately reconstructed as possible. This has not been easy — I have been trying to find out more about them for over a decade, after reading one brief reference, a question asked about why the women were not receiving an army pension in British parliament in the mid 1920s. The answer? They were postal workers, even though they were also in the army. The army therefore had no responsibility to give pensions or even pay the medical expenses of the women.
I eventually discovered that the records of the female signallers were deliberately destroyed after World War I. As a historian this appals me. Perhaps the army did not want the public to know that matters had been so desperate and that women had been needed as signallers. But the records could have been labelled ‘top secret’ and kept sealed for 50 or 75 years. Burning archival material on this scale means stealing information from future generations, as well as protecting the reputations of the men, both in the army and politicians who were ignorant, careless, negligent and incompetent in the conduct of the war. Out of about three thousand six hundred army records, the army ordered all but thirty burned. The eradication of those records was partly to ensure that pensions couldn’t be paid to any of the women, as no record of their work could be quoted, but also from embarrassment and reluctance to admit that the army had been so reliant on the hundreds of thousands of women who served in the war in official and unofficial capacities.
Working in such physically and emotionally challenging spaces wasn’t ‘womanly’. It caused many men great unease to think that ‘the little woman’ might be capable of doing not just a man’s job, but one that needed physical strength, mechanical understanding and the courage to work under fire.
The Irish Postal Workers’ Union, however, remained proud of its female members who had served in the war, and their records were kept. The brilliant historian Barbara Walsh has written about the work and fate of Irish servicewomen, including the signallers. This book is about an English girl, mostly because I had access to what her life in the post office might have been like before she was sent to France, but it was extraordinarily reassuring to find that another historian believed and had proof that women had been signallers in such numbers on the front lines in World War I.
Without the bravery of these women, who had no access to the vote, and were rarely admitted to university or most professions, the war might have been won by the kaiser’s troops, ensuring a savage takeover and looting of the at that time vast British empire, including Australia, or the fighting might have dragged on for many years more, steadily destroying the countries involved. These women’s stories have not just been lost, but deliberately eradicated. It is time to place them back into history.
Lest we forget.