Kate Adie's Women of World War One

We do all rely on each other and it is very close-knit up here.

-WOMAN:

-It is like a second family.

Because there's nitro-glycerine in it, everything is done by hand.

Without a doubt, if you work with munitions, it is a dangerous job.

These women are tying together explosive charges for shells

in a South Wales factory.

It's a task little changed in nearly a century.

During the First World War,

the Munitionettes were the poster girls for the war effort.

A production line of death that ended on the Western Front.

But they were only part of an army of women workers,

recruited to keep Britain's war machine running.

War is usually viewed through military eyes -

the battles, the heroic actions, the loss of life.

But in 1914, a new front opened up - the Home Front -

as an entire nation was drawn into the war.

And women found their lives changed.

What were they asked to do?

How did they respond?

What was their war like?

War on the Home Front offered an opportunity

to demonstrate that women could be as active and productive as men.

It's commonly said that the First World War

changed the image and status of women in British society.

The suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett said,

"It found them serfs and set them free."

They claimed a presence in public life they'd never had before,

but did they keep it when the war ended?

Or was it all only for the duration?

"Let your women keep silence in the churches,

"for it is not permitted unto them to speak,

"but they are commanded

"to be under obedience, as also saith the law.

"And if they will learn anything,

"let them ask their husbands at home,

"for it is shameful for women

"to speak in the church.

"For Adam came first, then Eve."

To be a woman in 1914 in Britain,

your life was defined more by what you couldn't do,

than what you could.

You couldn't read the lesson,

you couldn't preach in church,

certainly not in the pulpit.

Indeed, you couldn't hand out the hymn books,

take the collection,

or even ring the bells.

Away from church,

if you spoke about women's rights in public

you were likely to be jeered, or have stones thrown at you.

Not for what you've said,

but for having the temerity to speak in public.

If you were arrested,

it would be by a man -

all police officers were male.

Into court, the lawyers, the jury, the judge -

all were men.

It remained very much a man's world.

For over a decade,

women's suffrage campaigners

had battled to overturn this man's world.

They argued nothing could change in women's lives

until they were given the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

Women engaged in campaigns of protest and violence,

they endured imprisonment and hunger strikes

to force the men in government to back down.

Nothing, it seemed, would stop the Suffragettes

until the women had the vote.

But then, Germany invaded Belgium.

When war was declared in August, 1914,

the suffrage campaigners were faced with a quandary.

Should they support the men in government, their sworn enemy,

and suspend their campaign for the vote?

Something which a few months earlier would have seemed unthinkable.

Suffragette leader, Emmeline Pankhurst,

wasted no time coming to a decision.

Within days of war being declared,

she suspended their campaign of militancy with immediate effect.

"What is the point of fighting for the vote,

"if we have not got a country to vote in?"

The suffrage campaigners showed a new patriotic commitment,

by renaming their newspaper -

The Suffragette became Britannia,

and it bore a new motto -

instead of "Deeds not words" it was now,

"For King. For country. For freedom."

Her message to her supporters was clear.

It was time to transfer their energies to the national cause.

OLD RECORDING: # We don't want to lose you

# But we think you ought to go

# For your king and your country... #

For the first time the government looked to women

to urge men to sign up to fight.

# We will love you and miss you... #

In the autumn of 1914,

a young car painter named Percy Morter

took his wife to the theatre.

Topping the bill that night was Vesta Tilley.

A woman appearing in public wearing trousers,

posing as a man,

was seen as indecent back then.

But Vesta Tilley did it on stage.

# For your king and your country

# Both need you so... #

When Vesta Tilley appeared wearing men's trousers at the first

Royal Command Performance in 1912,

Queen Mary pointedly buried her nose in her programme,

followed by all her ladies-in-waiting.

Public disapproval of such immodesty.

But Vesta Tilley went down a storm with musical audiences,

and with a war to support

she introduced a new male character into her routine.

Dressed as a recruiting sergeant major,

she sang patriotic songs,

and urged young men to enlist.

# When people tell me that the army's not complete

# It goes to show

# That they don't know

# I think the army's simply perfect - can't be beat

# I know it's true

# Because I do... #

-WOMAN'S VOICE:

-And then she came out off the stage

and walked all round in the audience.

Up and down, either side,

down the middle and she was...

The young men was getting up out of the theatre

and following her back again.

And when she got to our stall,

where we was, she hesitated a bit

and I don't know what happened,

but she put her hand on my husband's shoulder,

and as the men was all following her down,

he got up and followed her down, too.

# .. so let the bands play

# And shout hooray...#

Britain's Best Recruiting Officer had struck again!

# I joined the Army yesterday

# So the Army of today's all right #

We came home that night, and I was terribly upset,

and I said I didn't want him to go and be a soldier,

because I didn't want to lose him.

I didn't want him to go, at all.

But he said, "We have to go."

He said, "There has to be men to go and fight for the women."

"Otherwise," he said, "where should we be?"

# I found the colonel of the regiment in the dumps

# I said "What for?"... #

Percy Morter wasn't the only one caught up in Khaki Fever.

In the first week of September alone,

nearly 200,000 men volunteered to fight.

And in this recruiting frenzy, for the first time ever,

the Government targeted women.

Mothers and daughters should put pressure on their men

to show their manliness.

# ..and then the band played

# They all hoorayed

# Kitchener looked so pleased at such delight

# I joined the Army yesterday

# So the Army of today's all right. #

This is a small ad that appeared in The Times.

"Jack FG. If you are not in khaki by the 20th,

"I shall cut you dead. Ethel M."

Women were perceived, traditionally,

as the moral guardians of the nation.

That's where their power lay.

They might not have the vote,

but they were expected to uphold virtue,

and to persuade men to do what was right and proper.

In December, 1914, war came to the Home Front.

German warships attacked the north-east coast of England,

targeting Hartlepool and the fashionable resort of Scarborough.

Scores of civilians were killed,

including women and children.

With women now victims of enemy action,

like the soldiers in France,

the rallying cry became "Remember Scarborough!"

as scores of upper- and middle-class women

rushed to don uniform in the voluntary organisations.

For them, it was an unrivalled opportunity

to get out of the house, to do something useful,

to gain independence.

Squad! Squad, 'shun!

First into action on the Home Front was the aristocracy -

society ladies,

used to using their social clout.

Young girls joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry - the FANY.

Formed before the war, and still going strong today,

it came into its own -

sending women as ambulance drivers to France.

Hundreds of other volunteer organisations sprang up,

such as the Women's Volunteer Reserve,

ready to do their bit,

adopting military-style uniforms,

to command attention and respect.

Some did skilled training in the Lady Instructors Signals Company -

most though were cooking, cleaning and running errands.

Keeping a watchful eye was their Honorary Colonel,

Evelina Haverfield.

Evelina, the daughter of a baron,

was a determined Suffragette veteran -

in 1910, she was arrested for punching a policeman in the face.

When charged, she replied

"It was not hard enough. Next time I will bring a revolver".

Women like her were full of ideas,

ready for action.

The Women's Volunteer Reserve remained resolutely middle-class,

largely because they had to buy their own uniform,

which cost more than £2 -

a small fortune in 1914.

Even though there was no suggestion that a woman would ever fight,

the image of a woman in military-style uniform

was troubling for many.

Yet the Women's Volunteer Reserve relished the authority it gave them,

despite the catcalls and jeers.

It was distinctive, purposeful,

and very publicly part of the war effort.

Squad, stand at ease.

Aristocratic women had an unshakeable sense of duty,

and were determined to set an example and take charge.

At the same time, they cut down on their spending -

fewer hats and dresses.

So, just weeks into the war,

tens of thousands of working-class women found themselves redundant.

In response, Queen Mary decided to start her own war effort.

Knitting is hardly a heroic act,

but Queen Mary's Needlework Guild

set needles clicking throughout the land,

to keep soldiers warm,

and for poor families who, as the Queen said,

"Will feel the sharp pinch of war."

After just five months of war,

175,000 knitted articles had been delivered to St James's Palace -

items such as dressing-gowns, pyjamas and hot-water bottle covers.

But it quickly became obvious that all these volunteers

might put even more women workers out of a job.

The trade union leader Mary Macarthur

borrowed a line from a popular song to complain that there were

"Too many sister Susies sewing shirts for soldiers."

The Queen had rather put her royal foot in it.

Mary Macarthur was a women's rights campaigner,

considered a notorious firebrand by the respectable classes.

She led the National Union of Women Workers,

and begged for someone "to stop those women knitting!"

But war can throw up unlikely alliances.

No-one was more surprised than Mary Macarthur

when she was summoned to an audience with the Queen.

To everyone's astonishment, they got on famously.

Afterwards, Macarthur claimed that she had

"positively lectured the Queen on the inequalities of the classes,

"the injustice of it."

The Queen, she said, had listened intently,

and asked for suitable reading matter on the subject.

After Mary Macarthur's visit,

the Queen Mary Workrooms were set up,

to offer paid work for unemployed women.

The Queen herself spent the rest of the war supporting schemes

to help the needy and visiting hospitals,

earning herself the nickname

of the Charitable Bulldozer.

As for Mary Macarthur, her work was just beginning

in the fight for equality for women in the workplace.

By 1915, huge numbers of working-class women

right across the country

were becoming part of the war machine.

The well-to-do and the do-gooders had seized

the initiative in the first few months of the war.

Close behind were women who worked for a pittance in domestic service,

or were now unemployed.

They were needed by the Government.

The fighting men on the front line were short of ammunition.

By May, 1915, only a third of the six million shells

ordered by the Government had been delivered.

As the nation grew more aware

that this war was making demands like no other,

the newspapers splashed with the Shell Scandal.

The Prime Minister Herbert Asquith

responded by creating a Ministry of Munitions.

In charge was his former Chancellor, David Lloyd George.

Lloyd George, a wily and ambitious politician,

had always been more sympathetic to the rights of women.

Now he saw how their desire to work

could be integrated into the war machine.

To further his cause, Lloyd George secretly funded a demonstration.

30,000 women marched along the Embankment

to demand the right to serve.

The protest, organised by Emmeline Pankhurst,

ended in the gardens of the Ministry of Munitions,

where the crowd was addressed by Lloyd George himself.

Within days, footage of the march appeared on newsreels

in more than 3,000 cinemas across the country.

The transformation was swift.

In 1914, 500,000 shells were produced

by Britain's munition factories.

Three years later, that figure had risen to over 76 million.

Britain became one seething munitions factory

as vast new buildings sprung up all over the country,

and the old arsenals expanded.

For those women who'd previously been in domestic service,

life as a Munitionette was liberating.

It was sociable.

You didn't have to be servile.

You got away from home.

As one woman put it,

you felt "Let out of the cage."

All over the country huge buildings,

like this one in Hereford,

were crammed with nearly a million women workers

who'd answered Lloyd George's call to arms.

By the end of the war, women in munition factories

earned more than three times what they'd earned before the war

in domestic service.

The Munitionettes' work was essential to the war machine.

It was a challenge to those who always argued that women were

life-givers, not life-takers.

The work was arduous -

12-hour shifts -

it was noisy, dirty, dangerous.

And in many ways, it echoed the experience of the men in Flanders.

Munitions factories were legitimate military targets.

The women were regularly evacuated

due to the threat of bombing by German Zeppelin airships and planes.

And the risk of explosions was always present.

Behind these concrete blast walls was a wooden hut,

with 14 women in it -

filling shells with TNT,

ramming it home with a wooden mallet.

Originally, there'd be dozens of such huts,

as far as the eye could see.

The purpose of these walls was chillingly practical.

If there was an explosion,

then there'd be not a lot left.

But the other huts wouldn't be affected.

And productivity could be maintained.

The chemical compounds handled on a daily basis by the women

were not just explosive -

they were also highly poisonous.

TNT caused swollen faces and horrible rashes -

it turned the women's hands and faces yellow,

earning them the nickname of the Canary Girls.

You went completely yellow

and your clothes came off you yellow.

You never got rid of it.

Just stayed there.

You got more and more yellow

and people looked at you, then.

When you got into the bus, or a tube, or anything like that

they sort of looked at you, they wondered what was wrong with you.

We felt like lepers going home.

This is Marion Constance Lotinga.

She came to work at the Hereford Factory in 1917.

Eight months later, just before her 30th birthday,

she was dead from working with TNT.

A letter to the Imperial War Museum a year later

from her only sister says,

"It was a bitter blow for her poor mother. She was her baby.

"She was a lovely girl, full of life".

Official records show 109 munition workers died from TNT poisoning

during the war.

Gladys Sangster was born in 1917.

Her mother worked in a munitions factory in Banbury, Oxfordshire.

Tell me first of all of what you know your mother did in the war.

Well, just carefully,

and very carefully,

she poured the powder into the shell - the brass shell.

She knew how dangerous it was?

Oh, yes.

Yes, she knew that.

You've got to keep your wits about you, the whole of the time.

The powder that was going into the shells - did she or the girls,

did they know that it could possibly harm them,

as well as explode?

Oh, yes. They knew all right,

but they couldn't do nothing about it.

While she was at the factory, she became pregnant, with you?

Yes.

-Did she go on working?

-Oh, yes. She kept on working.

There was nothing unusual about that.

Until you were born?

Yes.

-Right up to it?

-Yes, right up to it.

And when I was born, I was yellow.

And I really was yellow.

Did she know why you were born yellow?

Because of the powder she swallowed as she was filling them.

So you get a certain amount - like dust -

blowing in the air.

And that's how she came to swallow some of it.

It just went through her throat.

And probably up her nose, as well, in breathing, naturally.

That was it.

So you were a Canary Baby?

I was a Canary Baby!

SHE CHUCKLES

As the war progressed,

the Government began to take an interest in women workers' health.

Not through altruism -

a healthy workforce produced more.

It had found many women under-nourished,

so the works canteen was introduced.

The women were served plain food -

meat and potatoes -

but this was a mealtime revolution.

Most had never sat and been served by someone else before.

And, at home, meat was usually reserved for men.

Crowded into huge factories,

it's little wonder that women munition workers craved fresh air.

Teams from the shipyards, engineering works

and munitions

donned mobcaps and even shorts.

Even more than today, many thought -

"Women? Playing football?!"

Many men were keen to point out

why the women should not play.

The British Medical Journal was worried about

"The danger to women's organs

"which the common experience of women

"had, in every way, led them to protect."

But in 1915 the men's professional game was suspended -

the trenches had taken both players and officials,

and the women's game flowered.

Thousands turned out to watch.

And the press treated them as professionals.

On occasion, the women played men who had their hands tied

behind their back, as a handicap -

the keeper was allowed one hand free.

But usually the women's teams played each other,

sometimes with bruising intensity.

The most successful team in the north-east of England

was Blyth Spartans Munitions Girls.

The north-east of England, even then, was especially football-mad,

and a group of girls from Blyth, working on the docks there,

were taught to play football on the local sands

by the crew of a visiting naval ship.

In 1917, The Blyth News announced that the town now had a ladies' team

who were "undergoing a thorough initiation into the art

"of controlling the elusive pigskin".

In their first game,

17-year-old centre-forward Bella Reay scored six goals.

Bella was the daughter of a local pitman.

She quickly became the star of the team,

scoring 133 goals in one season.

And Blyth Spartans Munitions Girls

remained unbeaten for the two years they were together.

She worked in the munitions factory, you know, when she was 17.

And then decided then that they wanted to do something more

for the war effort.

All of the games that they ever did were all for the wounded soldiers.

All the money they ever made,

it was all done for charity.

Did lots of people come to see them?

Yes, she played anywhere from crowds of 1,000 up to 20,000 people.

When your grandmother talked to you about football, what did she say?

Just how good she was.

That was the main thing, you know.

She said, "I was good, but I knew I was good."

We would never forget her saying that to us -

"Oh, I knew I was good!"

She played in the Munition Girls Cup Final, didn't she?

-Yes, she did. Yes.

-That must have been a big match.

Yes, it was.

That was when she got her gold medal which...

Would you like to have a look at the gold medal she got?

Fantastic!

Beautiful medal, it is.

How did she do in the final?

Very well.

She was, I think she was the best goal scorer in the final.

People are surprised now to hear

that girls played football at that time.

-What do you think of that?

-Well, because when they get on about it,

I say, "Well, my grandma played nearly 100 years ago,

and we're very, very proud that we are part of history, really.

You know, because she was very, very well-known in her time.

Everybody knew her "Woah, Bella" -

that was what they used to shout - "Away, Bella!"

You know, that's the thing, and it's lovely, really,

to think that we are part of a little bit of history.

Some Munitionettes matches continued after the war,

sometimes attracting larger crowds than the professionals,

who had been demobbed.

But by 1921, the Football Association had had enough,

and it banned the women from playing on their grounds, saying,

"The game of football is quite unsuitable for females

"and ought not to be encouraged."

Women's football, like so much else,

was only tolerable for the duration of the war.

Gangs of working women enjoying themselves after a 12-hour shift,

were unnerving to many people.

Instead of being at home under father's watchful eye,

they discovered the forerunner of Girls' Night Out.

The press went into overdrive, with stories of "giddy factory girls"

frittering money in pubs with men.

The Aberdeen Journal reported that they had

"more money in their hands than usual, and they were only too many

"ready to help them to spend it in the wrong way."

The Munitionettes were experiencing a liberation they hadn't expected.

They were aping their betters -

out and about, with a little money to spend.

Traditionalists were outraged.

Not for the first time in the war,

there was a bout of moral panic.

Women were getting out of control.

More worldy-wise women, such as Margaret Damer Dawson,

set out to protect women, as well as cautioning their behaviour.

Dawson approached the Commissioner of Police in London

for permission to create a voluntary body

of trained and uniformed police women.

He declared himself "not at all averse to the idea",

as long as they remained separate from his force.

The result was the foundation of Britain's first

Women's Police Service, the WPS.

Margaret Damer Dawson was a tough character.

Her friends called her "Fighting Dawson".

Her first recruits were mainly educated middle-class women,

trained in first aid and a little jiu jitsu.

But they faced a battle to be taken seriously by the men.

When one male police officer, when asked if women would ever

be police constables, laughed and said,

"No, not if the war lasts 50 years".

The WPS were not granted the power of arrest,

and were expected to deal solely with women and children.

Most male constables thought that Dawson's "Copperettes",

as the Sussex Times called them, should be deployed

only to protect Britain's men from the temptations of women.

Prostitution was frowned on.

And the authorities viewed it as entirely the fault of women.

Dawson's patrols were not popular with the women they policed.

One 14-year old girl said she'd been told off for crimping her hair,

and "dressing up and walking about

"in order to attract the attention of men".

Many men disliked having to deal with women.

Especially in the factories.

By 1917, the Rotherwas Munitions plant in Hereford employed

nearly 4,000 women workers.

Many were rowdy and tough.

When disputes arose, managers,

more used to obedient wives and daughters, had no idea what to do.

The Prime Minister David Lloyd George turned to

Margaret Damer Dawson's women police.

He deployed nearly a thousand of them to keep order

in the munitions factories.

Policewoman Gabrielle West kept a diary, describing her experiences.

Her initial impressions of the workers

at the Pembrey Munitions Factory in South Wales were not favourable.

"They are full of socialistic theory

"and very great on getting up strikes.

"But they are easily influenced by a little oratory,

"and go back to work like lambs when you shout at them long enough".

Rather than being a social leveller, as it's often portrayed,

life in the munitions factories relied on the class system

to maintain law and order.

Within weeks of the war ending,

the Metropolitan Police announced plans to train women

to become paid constables for the first time.

What followed was humiliation for Margaret Damer Dawson.

Her officers were rejected as candidates -

dismissed as "vinegary spinsters" and "blighted middle-aged fanatics"

who wanted to "purify" the male police.

As a final blow, Dawson was ordered to wind down the WPS.

Margaret Damer Dawson died in 1920, aged 45, of a heart attack,

it was said, brought on by the hostility she faced

from the male police establishment.

She'd tried so hard to gain acceptance.

Just before she died,

she got to the heart of the problem of policing women.

"In the realm of morals", she said,

"we have not advanced beyond Adam and Eve".

But at least Eve could go to work,

and women on the Home Front were now celebrated in popular song.

MUSIC: "Women's Work" by Tom Clare.

# ..with his ship so grey, and his army fighting far away

# All the boys have gone

# So the girls today carry on with the work in the morning

# Oh the conductorette without much fuss

# Just do their level best for us

# But they don't push people off the bus

# When it's raining hard in the morning

# Oh the girls have shown surprising gifts

# From railways now they work the lifts

# If they'd only do the work in shifts

# They would get such a crowd in the morning... #

Images of this new British workforce reached as far as the frontline,

thanks to "Smokes For Soldiers" -

a campaign to keep the troops supplied with tobacco.

Carreras slipped a patriotic card into packets

of Black Cat cigarettes, each depicting a pretty war worker.

Here we have a road sweeper,

and then there's the woman stoker.

There's a mechanic, and there are also coal workers.

And then, there's the Lady Gamekeeper.

Smokes For Soldiers was the pet project of Lady Denman.

She'd been a supporter of the women's suffrage movement,

but now her passion was to keep our boys supplied with tobacco.

At the time, smoking was regarded as beneficial to health.

Sending out cigarettes was seen as equal

to sending out food or medicine.

The scheme proved wildly successful,

shipping over 265 million cigarettes to the front.

And the Carreras cigarette cards were an added treat.

On the back of each card, there's a description:

"The Woman Gamekeeper is a distinct novelty in the English country life.

"Quite a number of sportswomen have taken up this work

"for the duration of the war, and in this they are proving themselves

"thoroughly capable and efficient".

There are 50 of these in total - and they're a marvellous record

of what women were doing on the Home Front, for the men away at war.

# And did those feet in ancient times

# Walk upon England's mountains green... #

Women the length and breadth of Britain

now felt themselves part of the Home Front.

# ..on England's pleasant pastures seen?

# And did the countenance divine

# Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

# And was Jerusalem builded here

# Among those dark satanic mills? #

The first Women's Institute in Britain opened on Anglesey in 1915.

The organisation quickly took root, responding to the demands of war.

It found its leader in the Smokes For Soldiers mastermind,

Lady Denman,

who kept chickens within squawking distance of Buckingham Palace.

Trudie Denman was passionate about poultry.

Now she swapped cigarettes for eggs.

Countrywomen were to meet and act collectively, to get involved

in food production rather than just subsisting on the land.

Yes, jam-making was involved,

but a quiet revolution was taking place in their lives.

Right, we've got one leg.

There's the nose. Everything's all right here.

All right, sweetheart, good girl. Yes, you're a good girl.

You're doing very well indeed.

-Come on, Nelly.

-Oh!

Come on, darling, come on, take a little breath, there's a good boy.

Come on, give it a wash! That's right.

Beyond the estates of the wealthy,

the countryside wasn't an easy place to live.

Unlike now, it was unmechanised and backward-looking.

For half a century, agriculture in Britain had been in decline,

mainly due to cheaper foreign imports.

The life of a farmer's wife was physically exhausting,

frequently lonely, and often on the edge of poverty -

a pre-war report said that women in the countryside

are the class most likely to go insane.

But now, for the first time in living memory,

home-grown food was needed, and profitable.

In 1917, events on the Home Front took a dramatic turn.

German U-boats targeted supply ships,

in a bid to starve Britain into submission.

Dire warnings were issued

that the nation had only a few weeks' supply of wheat in reserve.

The result was the formation of the Women's Land Army.

After much cajoling, 23,000 women joined up,

to put food on the nation's tables.

And wearing smocks and gaiters, many felt liberated

from the servility and loneliness of domestic service.

The propaganda value of the Land Army ultimately outweighed

its contribution to food production.

The image of a girl behind the plough had lasting resonance,

and country women began to take charge of their own livelihoods.

As an enraptured Dorchester Chronicle put it,

"Here is a dawning of a new era for womankind,

"and therefore, the human race!"

Growing up in the North-East of England,

I remember the shipyards as the exclusive domain of men.

They still are, where they survive.

But in January 1916, when conscription was introduced,

more women than ever were needed

to take on skilled men's work in industry.

The yards, the forges, the engineering works,

were made to open their gates to women, by war.

Skilled men feared that their prized status would be threatened

by unskilled women working alongside them,

doing the same job and being paid less.

Entrenched attitudes and prejudices were at play.

Men were expected to be the breadwinners, supporting a family.

Women were thought to have more modest running costs -

"tea and toast are cheaper than beer and beefsteaks",

said one factory foreman.

A strong conviction remained that people should be paid

not for what they did, but for who they were.

Equal pay was never mentioned - the Government wasn't concerned -

all it wanted was to increase production.

Its answer was a policy known as "dilution".

This meant splitting a skilled man's work

into two or three component parts,

to be divided up between two or three women.

The unions accepted dilution,

on the understanding that it was only for the duration.

Once the war was over, and the men returned,

all agreed that everything would revert back to normal.

The women worked hard during the war,

but so did the men and their trade unions,

to safeguard their skilled positions,

and maintain their higher pay.

The fear was the feminisation of the workforce,

and that would mean less money, because women always had been,

and they thought, always would be, cheaper to employ.

By 1916, wounded men were coming home in overwhelming numbers,

in urgent need of medical attention.

Britain's small band of professional nurses were joined by

nursing assistants from the Voluntary Aid Detachment - the VADs.

The professional nurses bitterly resented

the "gently-bred young ladies" who volunteered.

But the sheer number of soldiers requiring care

soon swept aside such objections.

Across the country,

public buildings and private residences were offered up

or commandeered for use as auxiliary hospitals, staffed mainly by VADs.

In 1917, Lady Stamford offered Dunham Massey to the Red Cross.

Her daughter Lady Jane Grey worked here as a VAD.

It could be grisly work,

with the operating table tucked in next to the Grand Staircase.

Lady Jane remembered helping remove a bullet from a soldier's brain.

I was given the job of shining a torch into the hole

once they'd made the hole in the brain,

and so I held the torch in front and saw the bullet

being extracted by the surgeon.

It was very interesting!

By 1918, more than 70,000 VADs had played a crucial part

in the war effort.

In a man's world, they were the perfect women - volunteers,

not wanting equal pay, and not demanding a new kind of job.

Theirs was the traditional caring role -

they were non-threatening - plucky, but lovable.

Women doctors, on the other hand,

evoked a very different kind of response.

There were just over 500 qualified female doctors in Britain

at the outbreak of war.

Their options were narrow. They could only treat women and children.

Male professors were known to bar female medical students

from anatomy lectures, which featured the naked male body.

But some managed to make their mark,

such as the outstanding Elsie Inglis.

The moment war was declared, Elsie headed for the War Office

at Edinburgh Castle, and saw a senior official.

She told him she could supply 1,000 trained women doctors and nurses

for service overseas.

The response?

"Dear lady, go home and sit still."

Like Elsie, two other remarkable women doctors had been active

in the suffrage movement:

Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson,

the daughter of the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain.

Together, they now founded the Women's Hospital Corps.

After watching them successfully run hospitals in France,

the British War Office gritted its teeth and offered them

a large military hospital, with over 500 beds, in London.

They accepted immediately, and revealed their growing confidence

by insisting it must be entirely staffed by women.

The new hospital was sited in Endell Street, in Covent Garden.

The building had previously been a notorious workhouse -

thought to be the workhouse in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.

When the women arrived there, they hardly got a warm welcome.

"Good God..."

said the colonel in charge of converting the building, "..women!"

New staff were told that skill levels acceptable from a man

would not be accepted from a woman.

They had to do better.

It was a very, very busy hospital throughout the war.

Their main intake was from ambulance trains which came in,

into the main railway stations,

from Dover usually. Often late at night,

a convoy of ambulances would arrive in this courtyard,

and there would be 80, 100 men to be triaged and dealt with,

and often quite a few of them had to go to theatre immediately.

They had a lot of serious cases - these weren't convalescent soldiers,

these were soldiers requiring a lot of treatment.

One of the great features of the hospital was not just

the clinical side, it was the actual atmosphere.

What was special about it?

They laid special emphasis on getting the men recovered

psychologically from the traumas they'd seen.

And every effort was made to make the atmosphere

of these rather grim buildings congenial.

The courtyard had flowers regularly tended by the gardeners,

the wards had fresh flowers in them, changed regularly

by a team of volunteers, there were sports days,

there were demonstrations by champion boxers.

It was a very varied programme of entertainment.

The hospital did have the word "suffragette" attached to it.

Yes, it did, because Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson

had been very prominent in Mrs Pankhurst's organisation.

Flora Murray was actually Mrs Pankhurst's personal physician,

and Anderson had spent time in Holloway,

having thrown a brick through a window.

So they were well-known, and many, many of their staff

were also supporters of the suffrage movement.

But these women had shown themselves capable of running a hospital,

a large military hospital,

they'd shown themselves to be capable of treating

really very serious medical and surgical problems,

and of successfully treating male patients,

and this was something that had not been proved before.

And what is more,

they had shown it would happen without civilisation collapsing.

More than 26,000 men were treated at Endell Street Military Hospital.

Many needed major abdominal and cranial surgery.

In 1917, in recognition of their pioneering work,

both Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson were awarded CBEs.

The legacy of Endell Street

is that men could be treated by women doctors.

Only one patient ever said he wouldn't be treated by a female.

And after a few days, he changed his mind,

and asked his mother if he'd be allowed to stay a little longer.

"The whole hospital is a triumph for women",

wrote another patient home,

"incidentally, it is a triumph for suffragettes".

By 1917, women were involved in almost every area of life

on the Home Front.

# When the post girl comes upon the scenes

# In the early morn like fairy queens

# For their knocks are soft for they know what it means

# To disturb baby boy in the morning... #

It turned out there was little that women couldn't do.

# Though the jobs they've got may not remain

# When the time comes round we shan't complain

# For they'll be their old sweet selves once again

# When the boys come home in the morning... #

But Britain's women were still denied the right to vote -

the very issue that sat at the heart of the Suffragettes' campaigning.

Deep within the all-male Parliament,

there existed a place which epitomised the status of women

in public life - the Ladies' Gallery.

The original Ladies' Gallery was destroyed by bombing

in the Second World War, but today's press gallery

occupies a similar position.

It was a cramped space, hot and stuffy.

And there was a metal lattice grille

which obstructed the view of the House of Commons below.

Though it was originally installed

so that the men below would not be distracted by the ladies above.

The Suffragettes regarded it as a symbolic cage,

which separated them from the business of politics.

Before the war, Winston Churchill argued that

"Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands".

But many of those men were overseas now

and potentially ineligible to vote.

The Government contemplated changing the law on voting qualifications.

And the suffrage campaigners scented a chance to press their case

to include women.

The new Prime Minister was David Lloyd George.

He offered a more sympathetic ear to the campaigners -

no-one knew better what invaluable work they'd done in the factories.

Emmeline Pankhurst was pragmatic.

She urged him to speed the legislation and said,

"Whatever can be passed in war circumstances,

"we are ready to accept."

On the 19th June 1917,

the Ladies' Gallery was packed with women eager to hear the Commons

debating a new bill - The Representation of the People.

Even the most optimistic couldn't have predicted

the outcome of the vote.

55 against.

385 in favour.

The tide had finally turned.

The Representation of the People Act became law in 1918.

It granted the vote to women over 30 who were householders

or the wives of householders, or graduates.

The First World War had delivered a partial victory for Britain's women.

There's no escaping the fact that MPs saw the vote for women

as a prize rather than a right.

As one woman put it, "Rather like a biscuit given to a performing dog

"that has just done its tricks particularly well".

The majority of the women who worked in the factories were under 30

and not householders, so they remained without a vote.

One reminder of that tumultuous time is hidden away

in the basement of the Houses of Parliament.

A few weeks after the vote,

the notorious grille which had caged in women in the Ladies Gallery

was quietly removed.

Here's a section of it -

a symbol of the struggle by women to achieve their rights.

Its removal cost a modest £5.

Fighting officially ended across Western Europe

on the 11th of November 1918.

For many women war workers, the celebrations were short-lived.

A week after the Armistice, 6,000 Munitionettes marched on Parliament

demanding "immediate guarantees for the future".

According to the Times, they were "loudly cheered by soldiers".

But the phrase "only for the duration" was coming home to roost.

By the end of 1918, only a third of adult women were in employment -

the same as before the war.

Within a dozen years,

their wages were less than half those of men in the same industries.

The clock had struck midnight.

The Cinderellas were no longer in the limelight.

They were at home, by the hearth.

The lot of women was to be carers once more,

to return to a traditional, maternal role.

A Ministry of Labour leaflet made clear the Government's position.

"A call comes again to the women of Britain,

"a call happily not to make shells.

"But to help renew the homes of England, to sew and to mend,

"to cook and to clean and to rear babies in health and happiness".

The Union leader Mary Macarthur was caustic in her analysis.

"The new world looks uncommonly like the old one", she said.

But there had been a shift.

Women had been on the public stage, in the media,

shouldered responsibility, tasted independence.

Not as queens, saints or martyrs, but as ordinary women.

They could now think of themselves differently.

Three years after the Armistice, the suffrage campaigner

and academic Maude Royden climbed to the pulpit

here in St Botolph's in the City of London.

The first woman in the Church of England to preach from the pulpit.

A woman in the pulpit had been unimaginable before the war.

But now, women from all backgrounds had experienced

a taste of public life, and held their own in the workplace.

Their own lives had become entwined with national events.

Having proved what they could do, for the duration of the war,

they emerged to press the case that they always should do it.

And continue the struggle for fairness and equality.