The WRNS in Wartime

The Women's Royal Naval Service 1917-1945

Hannah Roberts

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781788310017
• eBook ISBN: 9781786723253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was created in 1917, re-formed in 1938 and maintained after 1945. This book determines for the first time the reasons for the expansion and contraction of the service and the impact key individuals had on it and in turn the influence it had on its members. Hannah Roberts offers new insights into a previously little studied British military institution, which celebrates its centenary in 2017. She shows how political and military decision-making within the fluctuating national security situation, coupled with a growing cultural acceptability of women taking on military roles, allowed for the growth of the service in World War II into realms never expected of women. Although it shared a similar pattern in its formation to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and had a similar ethos to its Air Force counterpart, the WAAF, the WRNS took on a wider-ranging role in the war, in part due to the latitude afforded to the service because of its uniquely independent origins. From 1941 onward the WRNS spread internationally and subverted the combat taboo by adopting semi-combatant roles. Using twenty-one new oral histories and a multitude of archived personal documents, this book demonstrates the pivotal importance of the Women's Royal Naval Service in both the world wars.

CHAPTER 1

The Creation of the
World War I WRNS

The only consideration which influences me toward an integrated women’s service is that I think it will be more efficient in the end. No question of the advancement of the women’s cause, or anything of that kind, affects me in the slightest.¹

Sir Eric Geddes, 1917

Sir Eric Geddes, political creator and military instigator of the WRNS, indicates in this letter to Katharine Furse that the first Women’s Royal Naval Service, created in November 1917, was not the result of women’s emancipation. 1917 represented a cultural change in the Royal Navy, based on wider political, cultural and social structural shifts created in a Britain gripped by total war that saw its leadership and institutional practices transformed. Certain individuals recognised the expediency of using female labour in response to productivity shortages facing the British government by this point of World War I, coupled with an unwillingness by the War Office to form one united women’s auxiliary corps (which Geddes favoured), having formed the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) independently from the Navy in March 1917. Eric Geddes, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, was integral to this. His background is important to establish how the WRNS developed differently to its counterparts and how the Royal Navy came to be able to accept women carrying out naval duties.

The national security situation in Britain had become so dire by 1917 that an unusual response was required. British cultural norms and values toward the role of women in society had shifted somewhat during the war, allowing women to aid the war effort. However, these roles were ‘predominantly seen as that of helping and supporting the vital male “work” of combat’.² It was a long, political process to make the idea of women doing ‘war work’ acceptable. Noakes, in her study of the role of women in the army, demonstrated the significance of women not being employed unless they were directly replacing a man who could go and fight. Within the WAAC in particular, attempts were made by the leadership to present the organisation as female rather than military, holding a supportive role by referring to the homely nature of their barracks.³ The result was that the cultural norms of the time were maintained. The WRNS did much the same, forming a militaristic institution that was governed by strict rules of propriety.

It has been assumed in the current literature that the idea for the WRNS was the responsibility of Sybil Rocksavage, later the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, who suggested it to Geddes at a social gathering.⁴ Documentary evidence does not support this, with sources about the formation of the service in the National Maritime Museum and Geddes’ personal documents about the WRNS in the National Archives showing the difficulty of supporting such a claim. In fact, the evidence has only served to establish how important Geddes himself was in setting up the conditions possible to form a women’s auxiliary for the Royal Navy.

The introduction of the WRNS by the Admiralty was the ultimate culmination of the increased value placed upon female labour as part of the wider inclusion of women into traditionally male occupations such as munitions (which Geddes had been involved with as the head of the Gun Ammunition Department) and the formation of the WAAC. It went against a 100 years of naval tradition as part of a general introduction of women officially into the military, and as a major political and military restructuring of the administration of the Royal Navy, which was placed within the wider administrative reforms of the Lloyd George government due to his desire to place men in roles to improve productivity and bureaucracy.

As such, Lloyd George’s role is significant, as he was the person to select men to transform unproductive departments. Geddes could simply be seen as a tool of Lloyd George’s wider political goal to achieve widespread reforms, with the formation of the WRNS as an aspect of this. However, the latitude he afforded Geddes, due to his very hands-off approach, meant the latter had the most significant impact on the changes in the navy and the formation of the WRNS. Lloyd George may have placed Geddes in a position of responsibility, but Geddes made the decisions and drove the reform of the Admiralty. Despite the precedent of a women’s corps within the army, Geddes would not have been able to establish the WRNS without the reorganisation of the wider structure of the navy.

The Social Structural and Cultural Characteristics of Women’s Employment Prior to 1917

Prior to assessing the specific political and military conditions which prompted the change in the Admiralty’s policy toward the participation of women in the Royal Navy, it is necessary to trace the cultural and social structural composition of gender roles in British society leading up to the war and throughout the conflict. This is because of the way in which the social construction of gender, in terms of the norms and values concerning womanhood, influences their presence within political and military policy. Iskra et al. (expanding Segal’s model) argue:

an analysis of the culture and social conditions in a society inform much of the relationship between women and their participation in military forces. Through this dimension the underlying values and concepts of social relations are created in a society.⁵

World War I, Marwick argued, ‘revealed very starkly the assumptions and attitudes which were widely held about women, and the sorts of discrimination customarily practised against them’.⁶ The characterisation of women by social thinker John Ruskin is still pertinent in this period:

her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision … By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter all peril and trial.⁷

Ruskin, seeking to define the role of middle-class women in this industrial period, demonstrates the broad dichotomy between the roles of women and men that were still present at the beginning of World War I.⁸ The roles portrayed are stereotypical; women are depicted as virtuous, whereas men are faced with the dangers of life. The two sexes are responsible for different areas of social life; women held the expressive roles and men the instrumental.⁹ These social roles were deeply embedded within the elites of Edwardian society, particularly the middle and upper classes, despite the opposition of some women at this time.

The growth of scientific thought, alongside traditionally held views of gender roles, meant that by the mid-Victorian era, there was an assumption of a ‘natural order’ based upon ‘the supposed naturalness of women’s supposed mental inferiority to men’, particularly in the upper and middle classes.¹⁰ It was at this time that social commentators were questioning the reasoning behind this staunchly held set of cultural and scientific beliefs. During the middle of the nineteenth century, the initial debate about female enfranchisement was beginning to emerge, and individual women were beginning to openly contradict the scientific and social arguments about the mental inferiority of women. This rise of intellectually capable and socially active women began to demonstrate the ability of females to go beyond their recognised social position, contending that there was no ‘natural order’.

Florence Nightingale rejected the confines of the attitudes shared by the likes of Ruskin and indeed her own mother and sister. The archetypal protagonist, Nightingale demonstrated the ability of women to advance their roles beyond the social expectations of the time. She found the position of women at this time ‘painful’, recognising the obvious difficulty women had in contradicting the role prescribed for them, which in many cases would have resulted in derision and ridicule.¹¹ She became a figurehead for the inclusion of women in the military sphere through her nursing role in the Crimean War. The Secretary of State for War had requested that she oversee the introduction of female nurses into the Turkish military hospitals in 1854. Nightingale transformed the profession of nursing into one that was respectable for women, and in 1860 established the first professional training school for nurses at St Thomas’ Hospital.¹²

In terms of Segal’s expanded model,¹³ it would seem in the case of Britain in World War I that the cultural dimension was not the most significant factor in allowing women to assume pseudo military roles by 1917. Even a cursory survey of the situation suggests that despite some improvements this could not have played a big part, beyond maintaining expectations of women’s behaviour when the corps were formed, as throughout the early years of the war traditional gender roles were maintained. Nursing clearly supports this argument as it was the one profession where it was acceptable for women to be included in military roles, simply because it still allowed them to maintain a link to their expressive role.

Jenny Gould describes how the inclusion of women’s labour in a potential conflict had not been considered in military planning prior to August 1914, other than in regard to a nursing role. The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) was formed in 1907, ‘with the aim of training its members as nurses on horseback to ride out from field hospitals to the battlefield’. Three years later, the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) was formed as a reserve of the Territorial Force Medical Service for mobilisation in case of invasion. They would provide voluntary aid to the sick and wounded.¹⁴ These services in the early years of the war were small and respected. However, middle-class women who joined other forms of voluntary organisations other than nursing or first aid were often ridiculed with the schemes being regarded as a ‘fashionable fad’.¹⁵ Many women’s organisations set up in order to help the war effort were scorned. Participating in knitting garments for soldiers, for example, a popular voluntary activity, was not always appreciated, especially when it was unclear what the objects were supposed to be.¹⁶

Shifts were occurring within gender roles during the Edwardian period, however. The ‘sex war’, which had been waged by the suffragist movement from 1897, had reached its peak by 1914, soon after its effectiveness fell into decline because of the claim that by continuing their ‘war’ the women were being unpatriotic. Although it had not yet reached the Royal Navy, the social construction of gender roles, particularly those of middle- and upper-class women, was beginning to undergo a process of change by the end of the Victorian period.

These changes should not be overstated. ‘For all that was achieved, inequality between the sexes was as clearly defined in Edwardian society as inequality between the classes’.¹⁷ Most of the women of Britain were working class. They had always worked and were subject to pitiable pay and poor conditions. British society by 1914 was still the bourgeois industrial society of the nineteenth century. Female enfranchisement, of any kind, had not been achieved. Social values of gender roles still regarded women as inferior, socially, economically and politically.

At the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, hundreds of women enthusiastically volunteered to help in anyway they could. Gould argues that ‘although women’s support for the war effort was widely approved, the idea that women might play roles other than those of nurse, fundraiser, knitter or canteen organiser was not popular’. There were still strict conventions of women’s roles ‘expressed most vehemently by those who also opposed women’s suffrage’.¹⁸ At the beginning of the war, despite some cultural changes to the nature of women’s social roles, traditionally held beliefs were still deeply entrenched. There was not the cultural will to allow women to take on military roles at this time. Hostility was shown toward women choosing to wear khaki or joining pseudo-military organisations such as the Women’s Volunteer Reserve (RVS), whose object, according to its colonel-in-chief, the Marchioness of Londonderry, was to organise women to release men for active service. This negativity decreased in the last two years of the war, but there remained a conflict between those who felt that women should not work outside their accepted occupations of sewing, nursing or cooking, and those who argued women should be organised along military lines similar to that of their male counterparts.¹⁹

Martin Pugh argues that the Great War made gender divisions extra clear and overwhelmed the ‘sex war’.²⁰ The early years of the war had a massive impact on the role of women. Working-class women experienced high levels of unemployment, due to the loss of textile work, whereas middle-class women had voluntarily taken up clothes making for the troops, affecting 50,000 women who were out of paid work by March 1915.²¹ Roles of women and men were firmly placed within the confines of traditional gendered narratives in the early years of the conflict. This was a very different cultural environment from Britain in 1938, where it was seen as essential that women volunteer to join military auxiliary corps as soon as war broke out.

Female Labour Characteristics Before and During the War

It was the escalation of the conflict, rather than cultural changes that led to the wider inclusion of women in the labour market and subsequently the development of the women’s auxiliaries. In 1914, there were fewer than 6 million women in paid employment in the UK and Ireland.²² Arthur Marwick argues that there were three stages in the war which affected the role and participation of women. The first phase of the war he calls the period of ‘war emergency’ followed by that of ‘business as usual’, which lasted from August 1914 to the early summer of 1915. In this stage, there was very little involvement of women. The second phase began with the creation of the new Coalition Government, established in May 1915, that created a separate Ministry of Munitions, which, as will be shown, would employ around 607,000 more women by 1918 than in 1914. Marwick states ‘the still more important, and indeed absolutely crucial...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations and Terminology
• Introduction
• 1. The Creation of the World War I WRNS
• 2. The World War I WRNS: 1917–19
• 3. The Re-Creation of the WRNS
• 4. April 1939–41: Management and Growth of the ‘Civilian’ Service
• 5. Becoming a Wren: Meritocracy Over Social Position
• 6. Disrupting the Combat Taboo
• 7. Social Perceptions and Relationships in the Service
• Postscript: The Service Postwar and the Impact on the Wrens
• Notes
• Bibliography