Before the outbreak of the Second World War (1939 to 1945), many women looked after the home.
Those who did work were often in what was then considered ‘women’s jobs’, such as nursing, working in shops or being a domestic servant.
With hundreds of thousands of men away fighting, labour shortages became acute. Women were needed to fill men’s roles. Many volunteered, but many more were needed.
The National Service Act of December 1941 legalised the conscription of women for war work. At first, only single women aged 20 to 30 were called up.
Women could opt for work in industries such as munitions factories, aircraft and tank factories, or in shipbuilding. Farming was also an option.
They might also choose to join one of the uniformed services, either the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, or the Women’s Royal Navy Service.
By mid-1943, almost 90 per cent of single women and 80 per cent of married women, many juggling jobs with childcare, were employed in essential war work in hundreds of different roles, military and civilian.
These included working as builders, engineers, mechanics, pilots, drivers and boat crew, as well as in communications, air defence, transport, the fire service, the fishing industry, agriculture and intelligence.
The pay was generally around two-thirds that of their male counterparts.
After the war ended, many women returned full-time to their domestic lives, with their working contribution (fundamental to helping win the war) largely unacknowledged.
But the seeds of social change had been sown, and a new role for women in post-war Britain began to emerge.
The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF)
The WAAF, the women’s branch of the Air Force, was created in 1939 to free men from the RAF for front-line duties. By late 1943, 183,000 women had joined up.
Women undertook many key roles in the WAAF. They manoeuvred barrage balloons into position, worked in radar stations, and were meteorological officers forecasting the weather before Allied air raids on Germany.
They interpreted aerial reconnaissance photographs of enemy targets before such raids and debriefed crews when they returned.
As flight mechanics, women checked and maintained aircraft and signed airworthiness certificates.
WAAF members also worked as plotters, receiving information from radar stations and the Observer Corps about the number and direction of incoming enemy aircraft.
Plotters tracked these raids in real-time, pushing round wooden markers, each representing a raid, on a large table map. Based on the intelligence, RAF fighters would quickly be deployed to do battle with the enemy.
The Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS)
The ATS, rooted in the First World War, was re-established in 1938.
It was the women’s branch of the Army and the largest of the women’s services. Over 250,000 women had served in the ATS by the war’s end.
Initially, women took on traditional female roles such as clerks or cooks. But as more men left to fight and women were conscripted, the roles multiplied to include mechanics, radar operators, military police and drivers.
Many were involved in air defence – helping operate anti-aircraft guns, locating enemy aircraft and controlling the guns’ targeting. Officially, they never fired at the enemy during raids. That was a job reserved for their male colleagues.
Princess Elizabeth was the most famous member of the ATS during the war, along with Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary Churchill.
Elizabeth trained as a driver and mechanic and was a 2nd Subaltern before becoming Junior Commander.
The Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, nicknamed WRENS)
The WRNS, originally formed in 1918, was the women’s branch of the Navy. At its peak in 1944, there were 74,000 serving Wrens in around 200 different jobs.
Wrens maintained and repaired ships. They were also weather forecasters, signallers and radar operators and trained as welders and carpenters.
Those with language skills were based at naval stations around the coast to intercept and translate enemy signals.
Others worked at the top secret Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, where Britain broke secret German and Japanese military codes.
Wrens were not allowed on ships that were in active service.
However, they did command and crew the duty boats, the small harbour launches that plied between anchored ships at sea and the shore, in all weathers, day & night. Wrens also served as coastal spotters of enemy mines.
Many Wrens were involved in the planning and organisation of naval operations, including the D-Day landings: the Allied invasion of Normandy, France, 6 June 1944.
Pat Turner earned the unofficial title of ‘Chief Wren Pilot’ at Plymouth, where she was tasked with piloting flotillas of invasion craft up and down the River Plym as part of the invasion preparations.
The Women’s Land Army (WLA)
The Women’s Land Army, originally founded in the First World War, was revived in June 1939.
At its peak, there were 80,000 members. The WLA was a civilian force, and these ‘Land Girls’ wore a green jersey, brown breeches, a brown felt hat and a khaki overcoat.
The government urgently needed to increase the amount of home-grown food. Merchant vessels carrying essential foodstuffs to Britain were at the mercy of enemy attacks, and there was a danger that the country could starve.
Able-bodied men had been conscripted, and there was a shortage of workers in agriculture. Members of the WLA took their place.
Land Girls ploughed the fields, planted and harvested crops, and looked after dairy, beef herds, and poultry. It was hard, dirty work, with long hours, in all weather and conditions.
Vermin posed a serious threat to food supplies and animal fodder during wartime.
Teams of Land Girls were trained as anti-vermin squads, killing rats, foxes, rabbits and moles.
20,000 women had volunteered to serve in the WLA by the autumn of 1941. One-third of these came from London and other big metropolitan areas.
It may be that the WLA offered the lure of a healthy outdoor life away from crowded urban living and the dangers of air raids.
The WTC was a specialist branch of the Women’s Land Army set up in 1942. The 6,000 women members, known as ‘Lumber Jills’, were forestry workers and could operate sawmills.
The arduous work involved surveying woodland and identifying suitable trees for felling, heavy haulage with tractors and horses, and sawing wood for telegraph poles and pit props for the mining industry.
The Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA)
The ATA, headquartered at White Waltham, Berkshire, took over all the ferrying of military aircraft from factories to RAF airfields during the war, as well as the ferrying between airfields.
It was notable that 188 of the 1,245 ATA pilots were women. Ferry pilots flew various aircraft, from bi-planes to Spitfires and heavy Lancaster bombers.
As ATA pilots were required to fly the unarmed aircraft within sight of land below, they were not taught how to fly with instruments. They had no navigational aids or radios, just maps and a compass. They flew blind in all weathers.
The National Fire Service (NFS)
The pre-war Auxiliary Fire Service became the National Fire Service in 1941. Within two years, 90,000 women across the country had enrolled.
Motorcycle despatch riders would carry messages between fire control and fire stations.
Bombing caused damage to water, gas, power and telephone lines, so communications about the location and strength of fires had to be given verbally.
It could be a dangerous job, often riding in the black-out, along roads with no signage, sometimes during bombing raids.
When the Blitz started in September 1940, NFS driver Gillian Tanner was tasked with driving petrol lorries with no power steering or headlights along dangerous bomb-cratered roads to refuel fire engines during bombing raids.
She was later awarded the George Cross for bravery.
The London memorial to working women
This memorial commemorates the work of women in the Second World War.
The 17 sets of uniform and clothing arranged around the memorial represent the hundreds of jobs undertaken by women during the war and include those of the three women’s services, along with the Women’s Land Army, police overalls, nursing cape and welder’s mask.
Working women paid a heavy price for their war effort: 335 members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, as well as 187 members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and 303 of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, were killed in the war.
25 women from the National Fire Service and 15 women pilots from the Air Transport Auxiliary also lost their lives.
Written by Nicky Hughes
Further reading
- Royal Voluntary Service
- The Civil Defence Volunteers
- First Aid Nursing Yeomanry: History
- History: The National Federation of Women’s Institutes
My 98 year old Mother was in the ATS as a plotter, she always says it was one of the best times of her life.
I knew a woman who said she had actually been on ships in action. she was a photographer and was required to take photos of where they were going (I think !)
Her words are on my website and I could point you at them if you like. But maybe you have wound up your work, it’s very interesting, thank you. And great photos.
Worth noting as well that many (most? all?) women had to leave school at fourteen during the war and so entered working life without any formal qualifications like the wartime equivalent of GCSEs and A-levels etc. This certainly applied to my late mother and her younger sister (who just turned ninety a few days ago). In their case, all they ever got later in life by way of a qualification were their driving licences. An entire generation thus missed out on their education – who knows what could have been…
Sad but very true. And even before they were 14, their ‘choice’ of elementary education was influenced by the family’s economic and social status. For a variety of reasons, only the children who were well-placed already went to High Schools etc
THE ATA initials was at first “Ancient Tattered Airmen- one old pilot actually only had one arm, but soon replaced by anything Anywhere”
Having a lazy day, playing on my phone and came across this website. I cried, my mum was a Dispatch Rider and Wrene being at the helm of her boat based at Portsmouth. Mum told me everything she did and went through with such pride. So young. But mum also said,” one of the best times in my life on my boat”.
I carry on the pride that she had for all that gave their freedom, their youth, including my dad.
These stories remind me of my Mother who served in Dulwich as an Ack Ack girl & said it was the best days of her life.I have only recently found this out as I was adopted in 1947. My Mother’s name was Iris Rose Beal from Plymouth Devon.
So how were he suffragette demands for women to be sent to fight on the front lines as equals handled?
Many underage boys tried to volunteer to fight. Some were successful and others turned away.
What happened to the women who tried to enlist to fight, like their brothers, did any succeed or were they sent away?