SHIRLEY JOSEPH EMERGED from her Women’s Land Army interview ‘already mentally clothed [in a pair of] coveted khaki breeches’. She was not the first young woman to have her head turned by those honey-coloured corduroys – nor was she the last. I found a pair of Land Army breeches on Camden Market when I was in my early twenties. I loved their deep pockets and the ease with which they fastened, with three buttons on each side of the waist. They were extremely comfortable to wear but, having seen Evelyn Dunbar’s paintings of Land Army workers, I have to conclude, with Shirley Joseph, that ‘khaki breeches … do not make for glamour, whichever way you look at them, least of all from behind.’1
Breeches like these were a key element of the uniform with which the 80,000 members of the WLA were issued on registration. And, thanks to government recruiting posters, they are the image of the Land Army worker – or Land Girl, as they were known – that always comes to mind: the young woman gathering in the harvest on a golden afternoon. The majority were not country women: one derived her idea of rural life ‘from an office calendar depicting scenes which existed only in the imagination of the artist’. This and the ‘picturesque uniform’ made her decide to join up; another Land Girl, aged sixteen, only knew horses from cowboy films. There were many rude awakenings. Romantic visions of cowslip-dotted country lanes were soon scotched by the reality of hard, heavy labour and the conditions in which the WLA worked: rain driving into their faces, the sun beating on their backs, up to their ankles in water, or fingers numbed with frost. ‘Nobody sees her; nobody but the men whose ordinary life it has always been, and who, she knows, will be only too glad of a chance to catch her out,’2 Vita Sackville-West wrote in the official publication The Women’s Land Army (1944).
Women started registering for war work as soon as war was declared. They could choose between the WLA, the Women’s Services – the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) – or civil defence, industry, and a wealth of other war work. For many young women, putting on uniform marked their transition into adulthood and independence. In November 1939, May Smith noted ‘the appearance of uniform in almost every public place … Almost every other girl and woman is swaggering about the streets in her khaki stockings and costume, and soldiers are nipping about here and there, with or without stripes.’3 However, it was the introduction of conscription for women, for the first time in British history, in December 1941, that altered the wartime landscape for good; this was the most significant change the war brought to women’s lives.
‘[Y]our finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers,’4 Virginia Woolf wrote in 1938, noting the regimental ribbons, braid and dress-uniform folderols worn by high-ranking military. She did not have uniformed women in mind. In Vita Sackville-West’s view, ‘You cannot look fashionable in uniform; you can usually look only trim, neat and correct.’5 The look of the uniform determined which Service many young women chose, however. With no way of knowing what Service life really entailed, a surprising number, as Virginia Nicholson has noted, judged by appearances. For many ‘it was enough to know, and let other people know, that they were doing a job which entitled them to wear a uniform’.6 In her fortnightly ‘Letter from London’, Mollie Panter-Downes informed readers of the New Yorker that, with conscription, young women could ‘no longer decide that they look better in navy blue than in khaki and act accordingly’.7
The navy blue ‘Wrens’ uniform was generally reckoned to come top in both colour and style. (‘Efficient, neat, yet soignée too’8, according to an advertisement for Miner’s Liquid Foundation.) Their refashioned hat met with such approval – Christian Lamb maintained she ‘only joined for the hat’9 – that it was copied in different colours for civilian wear. Barbara Pym thought the hat ‘lovely, every bit as fetching as I’d hoped, but my suit rather large though it’s easier to alter that way. I have also a macintosh and greatcoat – 3 pairs of “hose” (black), gloves, tie, 4 shirts and 9 stiff collars, and two pairs of shoes which are surprisingly comfortable.’10
The ATS uniform was redesigned to make it fashionable, but Lucia Lawson was not alone in thinking she looked ‘AWFUL’ in khaki, ‘but alas, it is not because the clothes don’t fit because they fit beautifully.’11 Hilary Wayne was struck by the ‘dinginess of the clustered khaki uniforms under electric light. The colour is designedly dull and inconspicuous by day: by night it is dead.’12 An unbecoming jacket did not help. Air Force blue was generally liked as a colour, but the WAAF broad belt accentuated the hips and, even worse, one young woman was horrified at the prospect ‘of the underwear she [would] have to endure – vests with short sleeves, and woolly pantees!’13
Hilary Wayne described how lavishly the ATS were kitted out.
To people feeling the coupon pinch and wondering where the next pair of stockings was coming from, it was miraculous to be handed four pairs. The kitbag which was given out first was, indeed, soon overflowing with underwear of excellent quality, khaki shirts, ties, sweater and gloves. Then cap, tunic, skirt and greatcoat were tried on and critically inspected by an officer before they became one’s own. Then to the ‘Haberdashery’ counter for studs, shoe-laces, tooth-brush, hair-brush, comb, button-cleaning equipment, shoe-brush, field dressing and housewife. Then two pairs of shoes. And the only thing to disburse at the end of this orgy of acquisition was a signature as receipt.14
Cleaning equipment was essential. Belts, buckles, buttons had to shine. Lucia Lawson wrote to ‘Darling Mummy’, requesting ‘Some cleaning rags important & a duster.’ Three days later, her desperation became clear. ‘I’ve never known anything like the cleaning that goes on buttons, shoes & goodness knows what else … I’m afraid there isn’t nearly as much time for writing letters as I thought, owing to this awful spit & polish.’ Arriving at her Army quarters in 1942, she described being marched into lunch and marched out again: ‘(in future, the abbreviation of marched is M because it seems to be the only [way] we move about) … then M to medical inspection … we then M to collect luggage, got same & M to our hut,’15 and so on.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, who had put on overalls to relieve munitions workers during the First World War, now lectured to over a hundred ATS on behalf of the Workers’ Education Association. ‘The sight of so many depressed tunics was soul-searing … the poor things were living in such horrid chilly hencoops, and it was melancholy to hear them leaping to their feet as their officers walked in, the two hundred odd uncomfortable Heavy Oxfords thundering as one – all the disadvantages of being soldiers and none of the fun.’16
Uniformed life took some getting used to. Lucia Lawson told her mother that ‘lunch at Claridge’s in uniform was a little hard, I tried telling myself how much superior I was to all the be-foxed, be-minked, be-scented & altogether pretty be-stinking & I think it worked.’17 Lunch at Claridge’s was not exactly the norm; there were fewer be-minked women dining in British restaurants or Lyon’s Corner Houses (although quite a number were be-foxed and be-scented) and, in no time at all, uniformed women were everywhere.
Barbara Pym ‘felt funny being in uniform – more like fancy dress than anything’.18 Hilary Wayne thought that
There is no doubt that ‘dressing up’ helps soldiers, as it helps actors, to play their parts. I think we not only looked different, we felt different. For one thing, I personally felt less self-conscious … the very numbers and the fact that day and night we were all dressed exactly alike gave me the comfortable feeling that, whatever happened, I could not be conspicuous.19
While Hilary felt comforted, she also saw how easily the power that uniform conferred could be abused. Novelist Betty Miller was also fascinated by ‘the astonishing effect on quite ordinary civilians of army life. No sooner had they donned uniforms than these men (and women too), who in everyday life were respectable, God-fearing citizens became – under the influence of a very peculiar CO – quite unrecognisable.’20 ‘War is a strange thing,’ Shirley Joseph noted.
The grander the uniform the more important your job must be. Values, ideals, and morals get mixed as if in a cocktail shaker. The result, for a time, is stimulating. In the shaking-up process girls who before the war were doing menial work – or what they regarded as menial work – found that they were welcomed into houses with as much enthusiasm as a conquering hero, just because they happened to wear a uniform. It was all very unsettling. The uniforms would have to come off one day.21
Despite the democratisation uniform imposed, and the fact that women were required to mix with those they would not otherwise have known, social class remained an issue. Hilary Wayne described how the division of the ATS into S (Specialised) and G (General) gave ‘the impression that the categories labelled G, which included cooks, orderlies, messengers and so on, would absorb the socially lower entrants’. Marghanita Laski’s family invited their Land Girls to choose a book to read and ‘placed’ them according to their choices. The receipt of uniform was itself a demarcation: for some it meant their first pair of shoes that were not hand-me-downs. Vita Sackville-West criticised the Land Girls’ tendency to mix their uniform with their own clothes, but who would not wear the warm overcoat with which they had been issued? Behind some criticisms lay the assumption that members of the WLA had a wide selection of clothing to choose from, and plenty of opportunities to wash and dry the clothes they had. It was an old argument dressed up differently. The WLA issued guidelines, as opposed to strict rules; some felt this could make for ill discipline – and ill discipline let the side down. Vita Sackville-West bemoaned ‘a flowery frock showing under their khaki overcoat, or a magenta jumper combined with dungarees. And as for the things some of them do with their hats and their hair!’22
‘Uniform, yes, but not Uniformity,’ an advertisement for Boots Cosmetics declared, and many women did do their bit to assert their individuality. Joan Wyndham, who hailed from bohemian Chelsea, felt ‘There is not much you can do to make a WAAF’s uniform look sexy (apart from pulling your belt in till you can hardly breathe), but jumping up and down on your cap to loosen up the brim does help to give it a rakish air.’ On completion of her officer training, her uniform acquired a thin blue band, ‘not to mention £2 14s 10d a week – though I understand that most of this goes on what’s known as “living up to your uniform”. Can’t wait to live it up – let’s hope I get posted near London.’
Later Joan told her diary, ‘I have been given a superb new job – Messing Officer. This means I’m in charge of the booze cupboard, and can order make-up for my friends … I am now one of the most popular girls in the Mess.’23 Make-up was now widely accepted, indeed was an expected part of uniformed life. Elizabeth Arden was quick to support uniformed women, inviting them to use her London salon as a place to meet friends, take a shower or telephone. She also offered cosmetic advice: ‘burnt sugar is the colour Miss Arden boosts to go with khaki’24, Mollie Panter-Downes noted; Tangee lipstick was also popular. Laura Knight’s 1941 paintings of Corporal Elspeth Henderson and Sergeant Helen Turner, both of whom received the Military Medal for bravery, presents them both in scarlet lipstick; Corporal Henderson has matching nail polish too. Make-up was not just a matter of individual pleasure: young women driving ambulances in France were advised to wear lipstick to cheer the wounded. The most telling account of the role lipstick played in wartime is provided by Linda Grant, who, in The Thoughtful Dresser, describes the restorative power that gifts of lipstick had on newly liberated concentration-camp survivors.
Attractive uniforms, scarlet lips – enough, but not too much make-up. As ever, women struggled with mixed messages. Abram Games’s recruitment poster for the ATS was famously withdrawn because the ‘blonde bombshell’ had excessive sex appeal. Wartime phraseology – ‘Up with the lark, to bed with a Wren’ etc. – made it all too clear how women were perceived. It was not merely servicewomen who were denigrated: Sheffield bus conductor Zelma Katin complained that a woman in a uniform was thought ‘easy’. New roles, the same old judgements.
By 1943 women aged between eighteen and fifty were being directed into war work. By then, at least 80 per cent of married women and 90 per cent of single women were contributing in some way, whether in full-time, part-time or voluntary work. The services accounted for less than 10 per cent of these millions of working women. To Jenifer Wayne, ‘any form of militarism seemed … fatuous and obscene, and an utter waste of anything I had learned at Oxford’. Instead, in the autumn of 1939, she joined what was then a somewhat makeshift ambulance service. She recalled ‘the faint smell of petrol; the blacked-out windows; the radio playing “Run, Rabbit, Run”; Spam sandwiches and siren suits … We were a kind of Dad’s Army set-up, but with both sexes.’25
Zelma Katin enjoyed wearing her blue uniform with its nickel buttons. As her bus ran to and from the centre of Steel City, she took in the breathtaking vistas across the rubble heaps, while watching early-morning factory hands give way to shop assistants and clerical workers, shoppers and, eventually, ladies of leisure.
Was this woman in navy blue myself? There must be two ‘I’s’: the original ‘I’ is a married suburban woman who once studied botany in a university college, speaks with a southern intonation, confines herself to her house, and belongs to the petty bourgeoisie. She must have indulged in a burst of dichotomy and procreated another ‘I’ – an aggressive woman in uniform who sharply orders people about, has swear words and lewd jokes thrown at her, works amid rush and noise, fumbles and stumbles about in the blackout, and has filthy hands and a grimy neck.26
Zelma relished her new freedom and her new personality. Like servicewomen, she too observed, ‘It’s extraordinary what a profound part in your and my psychology a uniform plays.’
Zelma Katin’s passengers may have included some of the young women taught welding by Valentine Pearson. Valentine joined her father’s Sheffield firm and undertook university evening courses in metallurgy when her work as a graphic advertisement designer ‘dried up’ as war approached. She was proud of her reputation as ‘the young woman teacher with long, red nails’27 and, in quiet moments, reconstituted old lipsticks by holding their ends over a welding torch.
The women Valentine trained repaired castings for tank parts and ship valves or welded parts for bridges and tank vents. Those engaged in electric arc welding required strength as well as great concentration, an ability to withstand heat, and steady hands. Like the young women who worked with munitions during the First World War, some of them transferred their peacetime skills to wartime. Agnes Helme, a nanny used to decorating cakes, was an excellent welder, while Enid Hiley, a former seamstress, was assisted by her skills in invisible mending. Also like their forebears, the women met resistance from men on the shop floor; they also suffered work-related injuries. Whereas male welders wore masks that fitted on to their heads, the women had hand-held masks which did not disturb their hair. A common problem was arc eye, caused by accidentally looking at the ‘flashes’ of the flame, and those working in intense heat for eight hours a day all experienced heavy periods; two had problems following childbirth.
Novelist and memoir-writer Emma Smith took on another unconventional role. She was delighted to exchange a dull clerical posting for work on a narrowboat transporting cargo on the Grand Union Canal. Emma relished the freedom and the chance to wear scruffy clothes – dungarees in summer and her brother Harvey’s old flannel cricket trousers, in winter – with a brass-buckled leather belt slung low around her hips and an iron windlass, for winding up lock-gate paddles, tucked into it. Some years in, however, Emma’s fervour palled and she yearned for ‘pretty frocks, and shoes with high heels, and silk stockings and lacy underclothes’.28 She wanted to go dancing like her WAAF sister Pam and give up the life of a boater. By contrast, Kaye Webb (later editor of Puffin) maintained her pre-war occupation and rose through literary journalism. She described herself as ‘a war profiteer’ and felt guilty for having such an interesting job ‘while [her] girlfriends were yawning their heads off on night duty in the RAF Operation Rooms, or getting chilblains on Ack Ack sites.’29
For Nella Last in Barrow-in-Furness, the war was transforming. Though too old for conscription, she blossomed as a member of the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service). ‘I’m in the rhythm now, instead of always fighting against things.’30 Like Nella Last, my great-aunt was too old to be conscripted. Eva joined her local ARP (Air Raid Precautions), where, at the end of a day at the corner shop, she learned first aid and was issued with a notebook and whistle, and a rattle to swing in order to notify her neighbours in the event of a gas attack.
Some of the corner shop’s customers were the young women now working in neighbouring factories. Factory workers found ways to personalise their own ‘uniform’ – baggy trousers and overalls, and those ubiquitous head scarves twisted into turbans, Ruby Loftus-style. In September 1941 London diarist Vere Hodgson described a munitions procession designed to attract women to the factories. ‘All firms sent contingents in marvellously coloured overalls – on lorries containing parts of Spitfires etc with the words: We Made These … One lorry had elderly women. We are all between 60 and 80 … we are still working – why aren’t you? How happy they all looked.’31 Housewife magazine advocated patterned smock overalls and matching turbans. Wearing your hair up was a safety precaution, not just a matter of style. Vogue’s Audrey Withers was one of several magazine editors invited by the Ministry of Information to encourage women to ‘Be in the Fashion – Cover your Head’. Neat hair was also a priority for servicewomen, albeit for different reasons. Many of them chose ‘the regulation roll; hair clamped into an almost circular sausage, well clear of the collar, but with enough smooth crown on which to park a tin hat’.32
Wherever you looked, a uniformed woman was working. Trousers or no, as Nella Last observed, women were asserting themselves in new ways, although not without attracting criticism. Uniformed women came top of a Daily Mail list of gripes; factory workers were also chastised for their appearance. Housewife defended them in June 1941: ‘The woman who can look as bright as a flower during twelve hours of night work … deserves credit, not criticism.’33
Criticism of women and their appearance seeped everywhere. Doreen Fairclough was called up in 1944, and directed to work as a BBC engineer, a job that had formerly excluded women. The response was generally positive, if patronising, as a BBC manual reported: ‘We have every reason to be satisfied with the performance of these girls to date … provided we keep them strictly to operational work.’ But although women were used to being patronised, some found themselves unwelcome in any context.
An Engineer In Charge sought to limit their activities as much as possible, because their clothes got caught up in the components. In the next breath, he was complaining about women wearing trousers on his station. He had forbidden them to do so, except on the night shift, in contravention of the official line that there was no objection to trousers, provided that they were of a reasonably quiet colour.34
All these anxieties about the high visibility of women – too present, too exuberant, too vocal, especially factory workers, singing on buses and trams and going into public houses with money in their pockets at the end of their shifts – far better that they should sit quietly and knit. Jaeger offered patterns for a waistcoat, matching scarf and gloves, ‘Essentials for the Forces’, and all for 6d. Those seeking Vogue patterns could knit a pair of fishnet stockings – sexier than the dreaded lisle stockings women were forced to wear once silk became impossible to find. Woman’s Weekly included a pattern for a short-sleeved jumper for ‘When You’re Off Duty’.35 When Joan Wyndham, whose wartime diary is spliced with whisky, pernod, benzedrine, black-and-gold Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, love affairs and hangovers aplenty, decides to ‘give up men and lead a quiet life’, she knits a scarf from Air Force wool, ‘the consistency of tarry rope’.36
My mum acquired her own militaristic uniform. For a couple of years during the war, thanks to the English and Arts mistresses, Miss P. and Miss M. (until Miss P. married and gave up work), Fridays after school were devoted to the Girl Guides. As leader of the Daffodil Patrol, she had two vertical stripes on the front pocket of her Guide dress, a strong leather belt, and a lanyard to go with her daffodil badge. Like other young women up and down the country, Cora learned to march in time and read signals. Hers were benign skills – lighting fires, tracking, making beds and earning badges in the process. The Guides met in the art room and, in summer, laid tracks in the school gardens, making signs with stones on the ground. When Lady Baden-Powell visited Chesterfield, the floral patrols joined the town’s other Guides in marching round the football pitch and offering a three-fingered salute. On less ceremonial days there were campfire sing-songs (minus the campfire), ‘Riding Down from Bangor on an Eastern Train’, and similar rousing numbers. There was also a camping trip to Richmond, Yorkshire, for a real taste of life under canvas: my mum demurred.
VE Day brought celebrations all round and the sale of red, white and blue commemorative buttons. Frances Partridge described children wearing red, white and blue ribbons in their hair; Naomi Mitchison saw similarly beribboned children waving flags on the train from Scotland to London, and again in London itself. ‘Most people were wearing bright coloured clothes, lots of them red, white and blue in some form.’37 Mollie Panter-Downes reported exploding squibs, exuberant conga lines, linked arms and singing and ‘girls in their thin, bright dresses … In their freshly curled hair were cornflowers and poppies, and they wore red-white-and-blue ribbons around their narrow waists. Some of them even tied ribbons around their bare ankles.’38
My mum and grandma were holidaying in Llandudno with a school friend and her mother in August 1945, the first week’s holiday they had ever had. When news of America’s victory over Japan was announced there was dancing on the end of the pier and my mum twirled around in the arms of an American soldier. But the revelation of the Nazi concentration camps and news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant that all celebration was tinged with shock and no one was certain what would happen next. A young ATS officer Naomi Mitchison met in 1944 could not imagine what it would be like ‘to be grown-up but not in the Army’39 and, in 1945, Lucia Lawson, by now a Company Sergeant Major in Paris, working in the public relations office of the Allied Expeditionary Force, contemplated the end of the war.
Already I am scared – what’s going to happen afterwards, what is it like when there isn’t a war … What will I do when I don’t have to get up in the morning, don’t have to dress the way I’m told, all these questions to which I can find no answer, and questions which people like me are asking all over the world?40
Emma Smith’s sister Pam commemorated peace with
a symbolic gesture … chopping off the plaits which were normally twined around her head like a sort of halo, and allowing her blonde hair to swing loose in a shoulder-length pageboy bob … Overnight she reverted, effortlessly, to the character of an eighteen-year-old student, as though the war, that long dark passage of suffering and loss, had not after all been the destroyer of carefree youth, but merely, instead, an interruption to what could be resumed at the exact point where it had so arbitrarily been broken in upon.41
Sylvia Townsend Warner took a different view: ‘the temple of Janus has two doors, and the door for war and door for peace are equally marked in plain lettering, No Way Back.’42