Invisible women: follow a writer's journey to reconstruct a hidden life

Writer Rachel Cude has begun a fascinating new project to fill in the gaps in her unconventional grandmother's mysterious life...

How much do we really know about
our female ancestors?

When I was little, my mother tried to explain to me that I had a half brother. “Where’s the other half?” I enquired. And there began my love of the giant puzzle that is family history. As the child of my father’s old age (he was born in 1899) I have a fairly unusual family tree, which makes it easy to ‘go back’ over 100 years.
One of the earliest trails I followed was that of my paternal grandmother. On the surface, she was a respectable teacher and mother of four. She was born in the slums of Nottingham in the 1870s, yet she somehow went to art college. Her husband lived apart from her, so how did she gain her job and social status? And what secret strength kept her going?

Family history documents like birth, marriage and death certificates or census records can provide rich data about a person. However, I'm lucky enough to be able to supplement this with childhood memories of people who knew my grandmother. A hard working local village history group transcribed oral histories from people my grandmother taught, including memories about her and her school.

One of her pupils recalled: “When she warn’t banging ower yeds together she were larnin’ us to knit!” (my attempt at reproducing a Derbyshire accent!). This snippet, together with the other facts and tales demonstrate the tough discipline she dished out to keep a large, probably unenthusiastic, class in order, plus the emphasis she placed on practical skills, to help give her pupils a solid and realistic start in life. 

I’m also increasingly aware that my own memories aren’t much use locked up in my head, as the generations of my family move along. I have facts: the ‘what’ and ‘when’ as displayed in official documents, and a little of the ‘who’ afforded by the memories pulsing in my head and transcribed onto a page. There comes a point for every family history researcher when you have uncovered all the facts available about an individual. Then it is time to spread out all the information in front of you, like a patchwork counterpane. Your female ancestors have a story – what are you going to do with it? For me, the answer was to write it down.

But there will always be some holes that remain: the ‘how?’ and the ‘why?’. This is especially true of women’s lives, because they were traditionally less visible than men: less well educated and able to record their experiences and also literally invisible. Upon marriage in the late Victorian era and well into the early 20th century, women often gave up working outside the home, and so disappeared from society's view.

There will always be some conjecture about how a woman made her life choices, for example how she chose the man she did to marry – and in my grandmother’s case, why she later chose to leave him. This is where the coloured thread of historical fiction can come in useful, to embroider your account of a life.

I’ve begun to write a book called Invisible Women, to try to shed some light on the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of my grandmother’s amazing life story. The book also compares her life choices with those of a fictional modern day woman, in order to celebrate my Victorian ancestor’s inspiring independent spirit. It’s a journey of discovery and I’m learning along the way. Hopefully my grandmother’s story will entertain others one day and, just maybe, help them think about their own lives too.

Follow Rachel’s progress and keep up to date with her blog posts at www.rachelcude.co.uk

Dad's Army? Stephen Cullen's new book uncovers the stories of women in the Home Guard during World War Two

Members of the Women's Home Guard Auxiliaries

Following the BBC evening news on 14^th May 1940, the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, broadcast his appeal to "men […] who are for one reason or another not at present engaged in military service […] to come forward now and offer their services" for the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). The response was instantaneous, and among the hundreds of thousands of men who registered in the following days and weeks, there were many women who also wanted to join the new defence force. 
One such woman was Edna Selwyn, a company secretary from Birmingham. She later remembered: ‘’I went straight round there [the police station] as soon as Anthony Eden finished [the police sergeant] was quite horrified and said “I had no idea there’d be any women”’. The police sergeant gave Selwyn the job of helping him to enrol volunteers, and, in this way, she became one of the first ‘unofficial’ women to support the new force.

It was not the government’s intention that women should join the LDV, but it is clear that local LDV commanders did accept women. Typically, these ‘unofficial’ women acted in auxiliary capacities, as secretaries, drivers, and in catering roles. Despite the government ban, the government itself believed that as many as 50,000 women were serving, entirely unofficially, by late 1942. Ironically, women were often enrolled in units designed to protect government ministries. Mary Warschauer, who was a 20-year-old code and cipher clerk at the Air Ministry in London, later she remembered:

"We had a Home Guard there […] There were about ten to twelve women, and about twenty men. And we went to practice rifle shooting [...] We wore air force blue, navy blue, dungarees, and little Glengarry type hats, both the men and women wore the same thing […] The Captain used to train us, we did more than the Home Guard people would do […] The Sten guns had just come into being then. They weren’t issued to soldiers at that time, but we were allowed, we just had the one that we were allowed to practice on".

Despite demands for women to play a full role in the Home Guard, it was an increasing shortage of men and women for service on the Home Front that led to the announcement, on 20 April 1943, that women could be officially enrolled, in non-combatant roles, in the force. These women were eventually known as the Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries (WHGA). By March 1944, 28,000 women, most of whom had already been working unofficially with the Home Guard, were enrolled with the force.

Discover more about female members of the Home Guard in Stephen Cullen's new book In Search of the Real Dad's Army
You can also listen to Stephen's recent talk about England's first female racing driver Dorothy Levitt on the BBC Radio 4 Making History programme and read his latest article in the Women's History Review

Find out more about Stephen Cullen here

Women and fiction

Kathy and her mother on
holiday in Austria, 1971

A love of reading was passed down to author Kathy Martin by her mother, who sought adventure in historical novels. Little did Kathy know, her mother had already experienced enough drama to rival her favourite heroines...

My mother Ingeborg was a voracious reader of historical fiction. With a home to run, five rowdy children to care for and a demanding full-time job, her free time was a precious commodity to be spent carefully on something that really mattered to her. She chose to spend it devouring the works of Norah Lofts, Anya Seton, Margaret Campbell Barnes, Jean Plaidy and sundry others who set their novels in the foreign country that is the past.

Kathy's mother just before she
arrived in England

An Austrian by birth, Mother raised her children on tales of the Emperor Franz-Josef and his beautiful Empress Sissi yet her passion for historical fiction knew no borders. Through her avid reading she became as well-versed in the genealogy of the Angevins, Plantaganets, Capets and Trastamaras as in that of the Hapsburgs of her homeland. While her Catholic upbringing imbued her with a deep-seated respect for the sanctity of marriage, her romantic nature found it impossible to resist epic tales of mistresses, illegitimate offspring and enduring illicit love. 

Love stories on their own were never enough for her, though; a clever and immensely talented woman, in her fiction she demanded protagonists with real depth of character and storylines with endings that couldn’t be second-guessed. Her favourite heroines were strong, passionate women who defied convention in order to live their lives dancing to no one’s tune but their own.

In contrast to her gutsy heroines, Mother spent her adult life putting her husband’s needs and wishes before her own. Blessed with more common sense and a quicker wit than my socially awkward father, she nevertheless curbed her brilliance in his presence so that she wouldn’t outshine him in front of his children. She deferred to him in everything, even to the extent of foregoing fish, which she loved, because he loathed its smell. 

Kathy's mother with her husband, aunt-in-law and
daughters (four-year-old Kathy is in front of her mother).

Her political views I never knew because although my father would hold forth loudly and at length about the iniquities of Socialism, she never ventured her own opinion. Something a little more than gut instinct suggests to me that her sympathies lay with the Liberals but as she never openly disagreed with my father’s ultra-Conservatism, I’ll never know for sure.

Mother came to Britain as a new bride soon after the end of the Second World War. During the war years she had experienced hardship and in its final weeks saw unimaginable horrors as she fled from the advancing Russians. At one point she became separated from her parents and survived terrible danger thanks only to her wits and resourcefulness. She was tough, clever, funny and capable, and I have often asked myself why such a woman was content to live in the shadow of her less able husband. 

Perhaps she knew he needed a subordinate wife to bolster his fragile ego, or perhaps she loved him so much that deferring to his wishes made her happy. It’s a conundrum to which I’ll never have a definitive answer but one thing I do know for certain is that historical fiction was my mother’s conduit to a world in which strong women spoke their minds, ate fish if it pleased them, and took control of their own lives for better or worse.  

Kathy's latest book, Who's Who in Women's Historical Fiction has just been published by Pen and Sword. Uncover the stories behind famous fictional heroines!

Pit lasses: the truth about Britain's female coal miners

 Denise Bates's new book reveals the shocking truth about thousands of working women's lives. She tells us more about the 1842 government investigation that scandalised Britain, revealing thousands of 'half-dressed hussies' hard at work down the pit at a time when women were meant to be rearing children and taking tea in the parlour

In May 1842 the Children's Employment Commission broke a scandal that briefly transfixed Victorian society. Words and sketches by two investigators in Yorkshire led to female miners being castigated as brazen, shameless, half-dressed hussies or worse. Their sexual conduct was questionable, they failed to attend church, to keep a home decent or bring their children up in good ways. Banning them from earning a living underground was seen as the only way of banishing these horrors.

This negative view of female coal miners has persisted ever since, obscuring the horrific nature of the work they were doing and why they had to toil underground. When I discovered my 4x great-grandmother, Rebecca Whitehead, on the 1841 census, reputedly a pitiable, feckless creature who spent her days harnessed like an animal, dragging a coal truck behind her as she towed 'on all fours' with breasts swinging for everyone to see I took a critical look at the Royal Commission report.

My investigations challenge the view that females working without tops was a widespread occurrence. Topless females were only seen working by investigators at one pit. By a fortuitous inclusion of this pit as an example of a medium-sized colliery, it is possible to identify who these girls were. A maximum of five were involved. The youngest was 11, the eldest 17 and commended elsewhere for her propriety and reliable evidence. All went to church, chapel or Sunday school. They worked for family members and removed their tops at times to keep cool in a pit which was particularly hard to work.

After several readings of the report I realised the investigator who portrayed these teenagers as loose-moralled wrote hypothetically when he supposed that sexual misconduct must be occurring. As a sad footnote, before the Royal Commission published its findings in May 1842, three of these girls had died in an underground explosion because of the negligence of the pit manager.

Pictures which purport to show bare-breasted females at work can also be challenged. A topless woman dragging a cart has a masculine looking face. The supposed breasts may have been intended as nothing more than well-developed pectoral muscles for which male miners were renowned. A topless girl being hauled out of the mine sitting crotch to crotch with a teenage lad is named as Ann Ambler, the only girl working at that pit. In the text the only garments she is reported as lacking are shoes and socks. 

The shocking illustration of Ann Ambler from the Commission report
(courtesy of Ian Winstanley, Pick's Publishing and the Coal Mining History Resources Centre.)

The two investigators who created the sensation about topless working and sexual morality were a barrister and a doctor; intelligent men capable of weighing evidence and drawing appropriate conclusions. That they reported as they did was less Victorian prudery than Victorian compassion. Both men were shocked and disgusted by discovering girls who were knocked about by men they worked for, girls dragging coal carts on all fours with chains which had worn holes between the legs of their trousers and exposed flesh in intimate places, girls working in conditions which resembled a city drain and women being required to work harder than galley slaves moving coal carts which were too heavy for female strength.

A Wigan pit brow lass (image
from tumperkin.blogspot.co.uk) 

From detail hidden within their individual reports it is clear that these investigators worked together to unearth evidence which would help the women to escape from their degradation. They called in two of the national Commissioners and took them to the most shocking pits they had found. It seems likely that these Commissioners steered the investigators to produce emotive reports about moral issues. From previous involvement in official investigations they knew that calls to reform working practices based on compassion for women would fail in a society which considered that Parliament had no remit to involve itself in regulating industrial practices. If females were to be taken out of the mines (and a number indicated that they would like this to happen) the grounds had to be moral.

Topless working was only one myth which surrounded female miners in 1842. My research has addressed numerous others also and produced a picture of respectable women of surprising talents.

There has been very little investigation into the lives of the women and girls who worked underground in coal mines. I'm hoping that Pit Lasses will stimulate interest in the subject and lead to new discoveries. My research to date has identified aspects of their lives where specific studies would be valuable if appropriate samples or sources can be identified. There may be family stories around and un-indexed papers in archives. I would be interested to hear from anyone who can contribute to research on this topic.

Find out more on www.facebook.com/PitLasses or get in touch with Denise by e-mail (pitlass@btinternet.com). Check out Denise's book Pit Lasses: Women and Girls in Coal Mining c.1800-1914 (published by Wharncliffe Books, 2012) here

First World War Women's Lives: A Renegade Wren

Mary Ingham, author of Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors discovered the unusual story of Selma Valentine: First World War Wren decorated for her courage or a ship-stealing suspected spy, who was completely unable "to hold her tongue"

WRNS Officer and Ratings : Boat-cleaning at the Coastal Motor Boat Base,
Haslar Creek, Portsmouth
by Arthur David M'Cormick, 1919, (Imperial War Museum)

Researchers travel hopefully. We don’t always find what we hope for, and, paradoxically, the most rewarding aspects of research are often nothing to do with what we are actually researching. But they beckon us down a distracting side alley, lured into delving deeper, to find out more...

This is how I come to be telling the story of Selma Amy Valentine, who won the Military Medal in Russia in 1918. I was at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford, which houses a treasure trove of fascinating journals. The February 1922 issue of The Wren (for ex-WW1 Women’s Royal Naval Service members) carried a front page article about Lady Muriel Paget’s Mission (dubbed ‘Pagemish’), sending former Wrens as relief workers to eastern Europe. The following caught my eye: 

Was Selma Valentine
a Russian spy?

‘For the Crimea Unit – enter another Wren, senior writer [naval-speak for clerk] Valentine, unknown to HQ… absorbed by the Admiralty up in Archangel as general clerk, interpreter, etc., and given a Wren uniform… gained a severe reprimand and a military medal for taking a hospital ship without orders to rescue some British wounded who had been left behind during the retreat [of the doomed Russian Expeditionary Force]'.

The WW1 medal index revealed her full name, and that she had been a VAD, although with no WRNS or VAD service record. Sadly, there isn’t space here to detail how, with some help, I found out more about her. The trail led to South Africa and a pamphlet Selma published about herself during WW2, advertising lectures in aid of refugees.

The pamphlet explained why I had failed to find her on any UK census. Her origins were much more exotic. Born and raised in Russia, Selma boasted an Irish father descended from a French aristocrat who had fled the Revolution, and her maternal grandfather was an acting governor of the Baltic States (Lithuania and Estonia).

Selma spoke four languages and studied in London, arriving back in Russia in December 1916, on the day Rasputin was murdered. She spent a year in Petrograd, attending speeches by, among others, Lenin, Trotsky and the Czar, before moving to teach in Shenkursk, to help her now-destitute parents. Taken hostage when the British attacked in 1918, she managed to escape and reach the British forces. 

Selma worked as a translator for the Royal Navy, then returned to Shenkursk as a VAD to nurse the wounded. It was here, according to the official citation, that she earned her MM for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty on 10th and 14th October 1918, tending wounded under heavy fire on ship and shore, while attached to the hospital river steamer Vologjanen.’ Turning it back against orders was, disappointingly, not mentioned.

First World War WRNs badge
(Imperial War Museum)

However, Googling ‘Valentine’ and ‘Shenkursk’ produced an account of the American Expeditionary Force in Russia, which tantalisingly mentioned a ‘Miss Valentine’ nursing Russians and suspected of being a Bolshevik spy. Had she worked in intelligence? Was she a double agent? It seemed odd for an upper-class woman to return to Russia at such a dangerous time, be taken hostage, and then escape. As a ‘lecturer for the British government’, she returned to the UK several times, in the 1920s and again in the 1950s – during the cold war… Then secret service records specialist Phil Tomaselli turned up a secret naval memorandum which mentioned her.

Dated September 1918, from the head of security at Archangel, it described Selma Valentine as a ‘dangerously talkative’ woman who had acted as interpreter and secretary to the head of British intelligence in Archangel and who should not, although there was no reason to suspect her of being an enemy agent, be given access to confidential information, due to ‘complete inability to hold her tongue’.

Oh, well. Selma Valentine now suddenly shrank from glamorous spy into incurable gossip. Although, to her great credit, she did win the Military Medal. Now, what was I really supposed to be researching? Hang on a minute, though. As a ballet, elocution and PE teacher, how come Selma managed to lecture for the British government on Russia and world affairs, met Hitler and Mussolini in the 30s, moved ‘in political circles’ and worked in WW2 ‘mainly in the detection of fifth column activities’? 

 Was Selma a fantasist, or was the gossip persona simply an elaborate disguise? I feel another research detour coming on…

Discover more about Mary's research into First World War servicewomen on her website 

or buy her book, Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors (published by Pen and Sword) for the bargain price of £11.99 here