The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Like the Auxiliary Fire Service, the Women’s Voluntary Services for Air Raid Precautions (usually simply the Women’s Voluntary Services, WVS) was established in response to the growing international crisis in 1938 and the imminent prospect of war. Launched on 8 June 1938 by the Dowager Marchioness of Reading at the suggestion of Neville Chamberlain, the organization had over 32,000 volunteers by the end of the year from all over the country, and eventually almost 1 million members.²² Though the WVS was not strictly a public institution, the government provided funds and supported its activities. The initial object had been to recruit potential female air-raid personnel, but the organization quickly outgrew this purpose to provide a broad-based national welfare and relief service staffed and run entirely by volunteers. The distance from regular civil defence work was incorporated in a distinctive WVS uniform of green tweed suits and felt hats. There were WVS Centres set up in most cities where women were recruited and trained. Lecture courses were organized on air-raid precautions, yet the women were not expected to administer first aid or extinguish incendiaries but to supply advice, set up and run Rest Centres, and to feed the homeless and disorientated victims of bomb attack. Demonstrations were organized of ‘street cooking’ to show how primitive barbeques set up in the aftermath of a raid could provide hundreds of wholesome meals.²³ The WVS also ran local ‘Housewives’ Conferences’ to try to spread the circle of volunteers by showing films or theatrical sketches of housewives in action. In many areas women who were unwilling or unable to become full-time WVS volunteers set up neighbourhood networks. In Hull a League of Good Neighbours was organized early in 1940 to help the local air-raid wardens by providing emergency shelters, buckets of water on the doorstep, blankets and plenty of hot drinks. A bright yellow poster printed with the words ‘Good Neighbour’ was displayed in the windows of more than a thousand Hull homes.²⁴

The effort to recruit women focused on areas popularly perceived to be women’s work – feeding, comforting, supplying household advice and goods. Yet from the outset it was clear that the civil defence services would not be able to recruit enough able-bodied men and would have to extend the service to women. This involved other judgements about the capability of women to fulfil civil defence roles. In York a recruitment drive to find women wardens specified that they should be ‘of a reliable and worthwhile type’ and should only be allowed to man posts on the outskirts of the town.²⁵ In Hull, where around one-fifth of all wardens were women, the duties of female wardens were defined in gender terms: keeping information on all the women resident in the air-raid sector, help with expectant mothers and the disabled, duty at Rest Centres, demonstration of child and infant gas masks, and relief for male wardens at posts during the day, when raiding was unlikely to happen.²⁶ In Newcastle the recruitment and appointment of air-raid shelter wardens was based on the ratio that three female wardens were equivalent to two males, seven women equivalent to five men; and so on. Women civil defence workers were paid 70 per cent of the men’s rate, and received less compensation for injuries.²⁷ The recruitment of women was nevertheless essential. By June 1940 there were 151,000 employed full-time or part-time in ARP, and 158,000 in ambulance and first-aid work, over 72 per cent of the service.²⁸ Wartime accounts of the Blitz are full of stories of female heroism and stoical resolve. In Post D, John Strachey, the socialist politician and temporary air-raid warden in Chelsea, records a woman warden who extinguished 11 incendiary bombs on her own as they scattered around Chelsea Hospital.²⁹ The true heroes of Strachey’s account are the imperturbable women who run his air-raid post. A long survey of the Blitz compiled by the Air Ministry in the autumn of 1941 observed that women wardens in general reacted more sensibly to the grim reality of death and mutilation than men. They also took casualties. In the civil defence services 618 women were killed or seriously injured over the course of the war; 102 women from the WVS were killed during the Blitz.³⁰