2. Women at War
In 1909, in a remarkable act of anticipatory thinking, the British Government decided to form Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) to provide medical assistance in time of war.By the summer of 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, there were over 2,500 Voluntary Aid Detachments in Britain.
Of the 74,000 VAD recruits two-thirds were women and girls.
Katharine Furse took two VADs to France soon after the outbreak of the First World War. After establishing a hospital at Boulogne, she returned to London where she became Commander-in-Chief of the organisation.
During the next four years 38,000 VADs worked as assistant nurses, ambulance drivers and cooks. VAD hospitals were also opened in most large towns in Britain.
At first, the military authorities were unwilling to accept VADs on the front-line.
However, this restriction was removed in 1915 and women volunteers over the age of twenty-three and with more than three months’ experience were allowed to go to the Western Front, Mesopotamia and Gallipoli. Later VADs were sent to the Eastern Front.
Some women went to the Western Front as letter writers for soldiers who were either too ill or too illiterate to write their own letters. May Bradford, the wife of John Rose Bradford, physician to the British Expeditionary Force, later recalled how she educated men on the treatment of women: "To one man I said, 'Shall I begin the letter with my dear wife?’
He quietly answered: 'That sounds fine, but she'll be wondering I never said that before.'
Enter the Bells
The McQuoid family became part of this national outpouring of support for the serving soldiers when Minnie Bell was sent to Caernarvon Castle as a VAD nurse for the period during the war.
Muriel Dickson, her daughter, speculates that she joined up because her fiancé Joe Maybury, then in the army, had persuaded her – or that it was after he had been killed on active duty.
Mother imbued daughter with the same sense of service to a nation in need.
In 1941 – two years into the Second World War - after winning a Government’s Snow Bursary from Victoria College to train students in electronics and radar to assist the war effort she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and after eight weeks’ training was commissioned.
During the following year she was trained at different RAF stations around the south of England in radar before she was posted to the Telecommunications Research Centre at Malvern
Following the end of hostilities she switched to Education Service but decided after meeting with John Dickson, a scientist at the same location, that the only way out of the service was to marry!
John was moved to the controversial Atomic Energy Establishment at Harwell and was given a prefab and it was there in 1946 following her ‘demob’ that she hung up uniform and hat.
John worked both at Harwell and the attached Rutherford Laboratory for 41 years until he retired in 1987.
The have been together for 60 years in Abingdon (originally in Berkshire but since 1974 in Oxfordshire.) where all the family have been born.
The Bell family was typical of many in Northern Ireland who severed – and suffered – on behalf of king and country during the two world conflicts of the twentieth century.
The Home Front was not without its hardships- and deprivations.
The war effort was supported not only by Andy Duffield and his eldest son Cecil who worked in the Belfast shipyard but by his daughters Dorothy (Doris) who contributed to the output of Heaton Tabb and company as ships’ outfitters and Lavinia (Lily) who was recruited by the Ministry of Food to implement its rationing programme for a hungry population.
Other members of an ever widening Bickerstaff clan played their part by keeping the wheels of the economy turning as future chapters will reveal.
