The Women Who Collected Britain’s Rubbish While the Men Were Away at War

The Women Who Collected Britain’s Rubbish While the Men Were Away at War

One wartime job I had never really thought about was rubbish collection. Women’s wartime work is usually associated with factories, farms and the railways, so I was surprised to find women emptying dustbins and sweeping streets too.

Women of the St Pancras Women’s Street Cleaning Brigade with their dust carts, London, 1942. Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer. Imperial War Museums, D 8942. Public Domain – expired Crown Copyright. Via Wikimedia Commons.

As men were called into the armed forces or moved into other wartime work, councils began losing some of the people who had carried out these everyday jobs before the war. The rubbish still had to be collected. In January 1943, the subject even reached Parliament. Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, confirmed that dustmen were not generally in a reserved occupation and said that the work could be carried out by men over military age or by women.

By then, women were already doing it. In London, women worked as street cleaners and refuse collectors, pushing handcarts, sweeping gutters and clearing rubbish from the roads. The St Pancras Women’s Street Cleaning Brigade was working in the capital in 1942, doing a job that before the war would overwhelmingly have been regarded as men’s work.

Mrs G. Warren of the St Pancras Women’s Street Cleaning Brigade sweeping a London street, 1942. Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer. Imperial War Museums, D 8944. Public Domain – expired Crown Copyright. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It was hard physical labour. Many household dustbins were made from galvanised metal and had to be lifted by hand, and they could be made considerably heavier by ash and cinders from coal fires. A full bin could be extremely heavy. It certainly makes putting a wheelie bin out at the kerb seem rather easy by comparison.

The contents of those bins were changing too. The government wanted households to waste as little useful material as possible, and salvage campaigns asked people to separate paper, metal, bones, rags and other items. One official campaign instructed householders that paper, metal and bones should not go into the dustbin at all, but should be put out separately for collection.

Bones might sound like an especially strange thing to save now, but they had uses in wartime industry. Waste paper was collected for salvage and scrap metal was reused. Kitchen waste was useful as well, particularly for feeding pigs and hens. Even some of the things people would normally have thrown away were now being saved and collected.

That meant more sorting and more collecting for the people doing the rounds. Street cleaners also had the dirt and debris of wartime towns to contend with, and in places affected by air raids they could find themselves working among damaged buildings and piles of rubble.

There was little glamour in carrying bins, shovelling rubbish or spending hours with a broom and handcart, particularly in bad weather. It was simply one of those jobs that could not be left undone for very long.

These are the Home Front stories I particularly enjoy finding. They remind me that, despite everything going on, somebody still had to deal with all the ordinary jobs of everyday life. Rubbish did not disappear because there was a war on, and neither did dirty streets.

Women were among the people helping to keep those everyday services going.

I think I might complain a little less next time I have to drag my own bin outside.

Had you ever heard about women working as refuse collectors and street cleaners during the war?

The Battle of Stamford Bridge: The Victory That Nearly Cost Harold Godwinson England

The Battle of Stamford Bridge: The Victory That Nearly Cost Harold Godwinson England

Harold Godwinson had just won one of the most decisive victories of 1066. The Viking army of Harald Hardrada had been shattered, his own brother Tostig was dead, and the threat from the north appeared to be over. But while Harold was still dealing with the aftermath of the battle, another invasion force was preparing to change England forever.

The Battle of Stamford Bridge, Peter Nicolai Arbo, 1870. Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Today I want to look at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, fought on the 25th of September 1066, because it was not simply a dramatic victory for Harold. It It was also a battle that may have left part of Harold’s army exhausted and battle-weary less than three weeks before he would face William of Normandy at Hastings.The crisis had begun when Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, invaded northern England with a large fleet. He was supported by Harold Godwinson’s own brother, Tostig, who had been exiled from England the previous year after losing his position as Earl of Northumbria. Tostig had turned against Harold and was now helping a foreign king challenge him for the English throne.

Hardrada was not a minor rival. He was one of the most experienced warriors in Europe, a man who had fought across Scandinavia, eastern Europe and the Byzantine world. His claim to England rested partly on earlier agreements involving Scandinavian rulers, and in September 1066 he arrived with a substantial invasion force.

On the 20th of September, Hardrada and Tostig defeated the northern English earls Edwin and Morcar at the Battle of Fulford, just outside York. York surrendered soon afterwards, and the invaders appeared to have secured a major foothold in the north.

Harold Godwinson was in the south of England when the news reached him. For much of the summer, he had been watching the Channel, expecting William of Normandy to invade. Instead, the first major attack came from the opposite direction.

Harold responded with remarkable speed.

He gathered his forces and marched north from London towards Yorkshire. Without modern transport, moving an army such a distance was a considerable undertaking. Men carried weapons, armour and supplies, while horses, carts and pack animals moved with them. Yet Harold appears to have covered roughly 180 to 200 miles in around a week.

Hardrada and Tostig were probably not expecting him so soon.

On the 25th of September, the Norwegian army was gathered near Stamford Bridge, east of York. According to later accounts, many of the Norwegians had left their armour at the ships. They were expecting hostages and provisions rather than the sudden arrival of Harold’s army. 

Then Harold’s army appeared.

Harold is also said to have offered his brother Tostig the return of his earldom if he abandoned Hardrada. Tostig is said to have asked what Harold would give the Norwegian king. Harold supposedly replied that Hardrada could have “seven feet of English ground”, or as much more as he needed because he was taller than most men.

It is a famous story, although it comes from later Scandinavian sources and should not necessarily be treated as a word-for-word record of what was actually said. What we do know is that negotiations failed.

The battle that followed was ferocious.

One of the most famous stories describes a single Norwegian warrior defending the narrow bridge over the River Derwent, holding back the English army while the rest of Hardrada’s forces prepared for battle. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the warrior killed a number of Englishmen before one of Harold’s soldiers finally managed to get beneath the bridge and strike him from below.

Whether every detail happened exactly as later writers described it is impossible to know, but the story reflects just how fierce the fighting became.

Once the English crossed the bridge, the main battle began. Hardrada’s men formed a defensive shield wall, but Harold’s army repeatedly attacked. Hardrada himself was eventually killed, traditionally said to have been struck by an arrow in the throat.

Tostig continued the fight.

Reinforcements arrived from the Norwegian ships, led by Eystein Orre, but they had marched rapidly towards the battlefield and were already exhausted. Scandinavian tradition later remembered their desperate attack as “Orre’s Storm”.

It was not enough.

Tostig was killed and the remaining Norwegian army collapsed. The scale of the defeat appears to have been enormous. Later tradition claimed that the invasion fleet had arrived in hundreds of ships but that only a small fraction were required to carry the survivors home. The exact figures are uncertain, but there can be little doubt that Hardrada’s invasion had been decisively crushed.

Harold Godwinson had achieved something extraordinary. In only a matter of days he had marched an army across England, surprised one of the most feared warrior kings of the age and destroyed a major invasion force.

But the victory came at a terrible moment.

Just three days after Stamford Bridge, on the 28th of September 1066, William of Normandy landed at Pevensey on the Sussex coast.

Harold now faced the situation he had feared all summer. England had been invaded from the south, but his army was hundreds of miles away in Yorkshire after fighting one of the bloodiest battles of the year.

There was no long period to recover, reorganise or replace the men who had been killed and wounded. Harold had to turn around and march south again.

Less than three weeks after Stamford Bridge, he would stand on another battlefield near Hastings.

The victory at Stamford Bridge removed one claimant to the English throne, but it may also have weakened Harold at exactly the moment William needed him to be weakest. That is what makes the battle so important. Harold won brilliantly in the north, but the struggle for England was far from over.

Next, I want to follow William of Normandy as his fleet finally crossed the Channel and landed on the south coast of England.

Why Were Women Giving Birth Inside One of Britain’s Grand Country Houses During WW2?

Why Were Women Giving Birth Inside One of Britain’s Grand Country Houses During WW2?

Today I want to discover more about one of the lesser-known parts of wartime evacuation: what happened to expectant mothers. When we think about evacuation, we usually picture children carrying suitcases and gas-mask boxes as they left Britain’s cities. But pregnant women were also among those the government wanted to move away from areas at greatest risk from air raids.

Before the war had even begun, plans were being made to evacuate expectant mothers from vulnerable areas. Once war was declared, maternity homes were established in receiving areas, often using buildings that had never been designed for medical care. “Large houses and other suitable buildings were adapted and equipped to provide maternity care away from the areas considered most vulnerable.

One of the most remarkable examples was Brocket Hall near Welwyn in Hertfordshire.

Brocket Hall was the sort of place that seemed worlds away from an ordinary London maternity ward. The house had a long aristocratic history and was associated with Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister. In 1939 its role changed completely. The City of London Maternity Hospital helped transform Brocket Hall into a maternity unit for women leaving London, while Hertfordshire County Council administered the site.

Rooms that had once been used by wealthy guests became part of a working maternity hospital. According to Brocket Hall’s own history, Lord Melbourne’s former room became the birthing room, and the Prince Regent’s Suite was used as a recovery room.

In November 1939, Parliament was told that around 165 emergency maternity homes, providing about 4,500 beds, had already been assembled as part of the evacuation arrangements. In the first six weeks of the war alone, more than 3,500 births had taken place in them.

For women leaving London, Brocket Hall offered distance from the bombing and organised maternity care. The City of London Maternity Hospital itself was badly damaged during air raids in 1940 and 1941, and after September 1940 it could no longer admit inpatients at its City Road site. Women who chose to leave London for their confinement could be sent to Brocket Hall.

For the women, evacuation brought difficult choices. Leaving a heavily bombed city offered greater safety, but it could also mean giving birth away from familiar surroundings and separated from husbands, relatives or friends. Families were already being separated by military service, evacuation and war work, and childbirth could become another moment shaped by war.

Brocket Hall continued as a maternity hospital beyond the end of the fighting. Responsibility for financing Brocket Hall passed from Hertfordshire County Council to the City of London Maternity Hospital in 1946, and the Hertfordshire maternity unit remained in use until 1949.

 Evacuation was not only about schoolchildren leaving cities with labels tied to their coats. It also involved thousands of women preparing to give birth, travelling away from home and entering maternity units created in some very unexpected places.

For a few of those women, that unexpected place was a Hertfordshire mansion where bedrooms became wards, grand rooms became delivery and recovery spaces, and thousands of babies began their lives while war continued beyond the estate.

Had you ever heard of Britain’s country houses being turned into wartime maternity hospitals?

Image info:

Nurses at Brocket Hall maternity hospital

Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer / Imperial War Museums, D 9037. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

A family day out on the Thames ended with more than 600 lives lost after their steamer sank into sewage-polluted water.

A family day out on the Thames ended with more than 600 lives lost after their steamer sank into sewage-polluted water.

Imagine taking your family for a day out on the Thames. You have had a lovely day, the children are tired, music is still playing on deck and you are finally heading back towards London.

The Great Disaster on the Thames — Collision between the Princess Alice and the Bywell Castle, near Woolwich, 1878. Originally published in the Illustrated London News; reproduced in Harper’s Weekly. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Then another ship appears ahead.

Today I want to discover more about the Princess Alice disaster of 1878, because I honestly think this is one of those Victorian tragedies that far more people should know about.

On the 3rd of September 1878, the paddle steamer Princess Alice was carrying hundreds of passengers back to London after a pleasure excursion. These trips were really popular with Victorian families and, when you think about it, it probably felt no different from taking the family out for the day now.

That evening, near Woolwich, the Princess Alice came into the path of the much larger steam collier Bywell Castle.

The two ships collided, and the impact was devastating. The Princess Alice was badly torn open and sank within just a few minutes.

Passengers were thrown into the Thames while others were trapped inside. Rescue attempts started straight away, but this is the part that makes the whole story even more horrific for me.

The river was heavily polluted.

Untreated sewage from nearby outfalls was being discharged into the Thames, so the people fighting to stay alive were doing so in filthy, contaminated water. Survivors later spoke about the awful smell and taste, and some people who were rescued later died after swallowing it.

I cannot imagine the panic. One minute you are sitting with your family on a pleasure steamer, and the next you are suddenly in freezing, foul water trying to find your children, your husband, your wife or anyone you arrived with.

There was no complete passenger list, so we will probably never know the exact number who died, but around 640 people are believed to have lost their lives.

What gets me most is just how ordinary the day had been. These were not people knowingly heading into danger. They had gone out for a family trip and were simply trying to get home.

It is such a heartbreaking reminder of how quickly an ordinary day could turn into a disaster.

Had you ever heard of the Princess Alice disaster before?

Find out more on my extended version on my subscription page.

The Women Who Aimed Britain’s Anti-Aircraft Guns - But Were Forbidden to Fire Them

The Women Who Aimed Britain’s Anti-Aircraft Guns - But Were Forbidden to Fire Them

Imagine standing at an anti-aircraft battery while German aircraft approached overhead. You were trusted to locate them, calculate where they would be seconds later, help aim the enormous guns and pass the information needed to bring them down.

But when the moment came to actually fire the weapon, regulations said that final act had to be carried out by a man.

Today I want to discover more about the thousands of women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service who became part of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences during the Second World War. Their work was highly technical, enormously important and often carried out while enemy aircraft were somewhere above them. Yet official regulations still drew one very firm line: women were not permitted to actually fire the guns.

When the war began in 1939, the roles available to women in the ATS were initially much more limited. Women worked as cooks, clerks, orderlies, storekeepers and drivers, but as Britain’s need for manpower increased, that began to change.

Anti-Aircraft Command needed enormous numbers of people.

Protecting Britain’s cities, ports, factories and military installations required far more than simply positioning a gun and waiting for an aircraft to appear. Hitting a fast-moving aircraft thousands of feet above the ground was an extraordinarily complicated task. Its height, direction and speed all had to be established, while other factors could also affect where the shells needed to be sent.

Increasingly, women were trained to do this work.

ATS women became range-finders, radar operators, telephonists, plotters and predictor operators. Others worked with sound-detection equipment or operated searchlights that swept across the night sky looking for enemy aircraft.

The predictor was particularly important. Information about an aircraft’s position and movement could be fed into the equipment, which calculated where the gun should aim. Range-finders, meanwhile, helped establish the position and distance of the target.

In other words, the women surrounding an anti-aircraft gun were not simply assistants standing safely in the background.

They could be helping decide exactly where that gun was going to fire.

From the summer of 1941, women increasingly served alongside Royal Artillery men in what became known as mixed anti-aircraft batteries. They trained for the work, learned aircraft recognition and became familiar with complicated pieces of equipment that had to be operated accurately and quickly.

There was little room for error when an aircraft was moving rapidly across the sky.

By 1943, around 56,000 ATS women were serving with mixed anti-aircraft batteries.

But there was an extraordinary contradiction.

Women could track the aircraft. They could operate the equipment that calculated the firing solution. They could work alongside the guns during an attack and even help aim them.

But they were still officially considered non-combatants and were prohibited from actually firing the weapons.

The distinction must have seemed rather strange to the women themselves.

Being forbidden to pull the trigger did not mean they were protected from the dangers surrounding the gun site. Anti-aircraft batteries could themselves become targets during raids. The women experienced the thunderous noise of the guns, the smell of cordite, darkness, bad weather and the knowledge that enemy aircraft might be approaching the very area they were defending.

Some later found themselves helping Britain respond not only to German bombers but also to the V-1 flying bombs that began reaching Britain in 1944.

And still, technically, they were not combatants.

I think this is one of those wartime stories that shows how quickly old assumptions could begin to look rather ridiculous. Britain desperately needed these women. They were trained to perform complicated military work, trusted with equipment upon which the accuracy of the guns depended and placed directly inside an active air-defence system.

But regulations still insisted that firing the gun itself was a step too far.

The women of Britain’s anti-aircraft batteries may not officially have been allowed to pull the trigger, but without the information they produced, many of those guns could not have done their job.

Had you heard about the ATS women who helped aim Britain’s anti-aircraft guns, or did you assume the gun crews were entirely male?

Auxiliary Territorial Service women at a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft gun site, Wormwood Scrubs, London, 1941. War Office official photograph / Imperial War Museums. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Plot to Bring a Foreign Army into England and Put Mary, Queen of Scots on the Throne

The Plot to Bring a Foreign Army into England and Put Mary, Queen of Scots on the Throne

Twelve years after the Ridolfi Plot, another conspiracy threatened Elizabeth I’s throne. Once again, Mary, Queen of Scots was at the centre of hopes to replace her -but this time the plan involved English Catholics, supporters abroad, Spain and the possibility of a foreign army landing in England.

Mary, Queen of Scots, after François Clouet, c.1559. Victoria and Albert Museum. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

And Elizabeth’s government was watching.

Today I want to look at the Throckmorton Plot of 1583, because it shows just how dangerous the struggle surrounding Elizabeth’s throne had become.

At the centre of the plot was Francis Throckmorton, a young English Catholic from a well-connected family.

During travels in Europe, Throckmorton came into contact with English Catholic exiles and supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots. When he returned to England, he became involved in carrying messages between Mary’s supporters at home and those abroad.

The plan was ambitious.

A foreign force, linked particularly with Henry, Duke of Guise, would invade England. Support was also expected from Philip II of Spain, while English Catholics would supposedly rise in support.

Mary, Queen of Scots, after François Clouet, c.1559. Victoria and Albert Museum. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Mary would be freed, Elizabeth removed from the throne and Catholic rule restored.

Throckmorton also had contact with Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, helping communications pass between Catholic supporters in England and Europe.

Unfortunately for the conspirators, Elizabeth had Sir Francis Walsingham.

Walsingham was becoming increasingly skilled at uncovering plots through spies, informers, intercepted letters and careful surveillance.

Throckmorton attracted attention.

Later in 1583, he was arrested and his home was searched. Documents were discovered linking him with Catholic supporters and containing information about possible invasion plans.

He was taken to the Tower of London and interrogated.

Throckmorton was tortured on the rack and confessed to involvement in the conspiracy, although he later withdrew his confession and said it had been forced from him.

The consequences were serious.

As the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza was expelled from England rather than prosecuted, leaving the country in January 1584.

Throckmorton was tried for high treason on the 21st of May 1584, found guilty and executed at Tyburn on the 10th of July.

But the plot mattered for more than one man.

For Elizabeth and her advisers, it seemed to prove something they had feared for years: Mary, Queen of Scots remained a focus for people who wanted Elizabeth removed.

There had already been the Northern Rising and the Ridolfi Plot.

Now there was Throckmorton.

Each new conspiracy made Mary’s position in England more dangerous and made Elizabeth’s government increasingly determined to stop any further threat.

And another plot was still to come.

Only a few years later, Walsingham’s agents would uncover the Babington Plot of 1586.

This time, the consequences for Mary would be far more serious.

Do you think Elizabeth was right to see Mary as a growing danger, or had keeping Mary imprisoned in England actually made the problem worse?

They Escaped Persecution- Others Had Lived Here for Decades. Britain Still Interned Them as ‘Enemy Aliens’

They Escaped Persecution- Others Had Lived Here for Decades. Britain Still Interned Them as ‘Enemy Aliens’

Imagine escaping a country where staying had become dangerous, reaching Britain and believing that you had finally found somewhere safe. Or perhaps Britain was already your home. You had lived here for years, worked here, raised a family here and knew nowhere else as home. Then war began, and suddenly the country written on your passport was more important than the life that you had built.

Women classed as enemy aliens being escorted to trains for internment on the Isle of Man, Second World War. Press Agency photographer / Imperial War Museums, HU 36121. Public domain (UK Government work), via Wikimedia Commons.

Today I want to discover more about one of the more uncomfortable parts of Britain’s Second World War story: the people classed as “enemy aliens” and interned during the fear and uncertainty of 1940. Some were refugees who had escaped persecution in Germany and Austria, others had already lived in Britain for many years. There were scientists, businessmen, shopkeepers, academics and men with British wives and children.

When Britain declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September 1939, thousands of German and Austrian nationals were living in the country. Some had come to Britain for work or to study, others had lived here for years, while many were Jewish refugees or political opponents who had escaped the German regime.

The British government did have a genuine security problem. The country was at war, and officials needed to decide whether anybody living here might pose a danger. Tribunals were established and people were broadly divided into three groups. Category A meant someone was considered a potential security risk and could be interned, Category B meant restrictions could be placed upon them, while Category C meant they were considered to pose little or no threat.

Most were initially placed in Category C.

Then everything changed.

During the spring of 1940, German forces swept through western Europe. France collapsed, British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk and the possibility of an invasion of Britain suddenly seemed frighteningly real. Alongside that came fears about spies and a possible “fifth column” already living in the country. People who had previously been considered harmless could suddenly find themselves arrested.

One of them was Paul Bondy. Bondy was Jewish and had been involved in opposition to the German regime in Bremen. He had already experienced arrest and imprisonment in Germany before coming to Britain. When he appeared before a British tribunal in 1939, he was recognised as a refugee from oppression and placed in Category C. But on the 26th of June 1940, he was arrested anyway and eventually spent several months in Huyton internment camp near Liverpool.

There was also Herman Podolsky, who had lived in Britain for several years and ran a business in Camberwell. He too had originally been placed in Category C but was later interned. His case was eventually raised in Parliament, where concern was expressed for his elderly parents, who were themselves refugees from persecution and depended heavily on him.

Some of those interned would later become extraordinarily important figures in British life. Max Perutz had come from Austria to Cambridge in 1936 to carry out scientific research. In 1940 he was interned and eventually transported to Canada. He later returned to Cambridge and became one of the most important scientists of his generation, sharing the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Another young Austrian, Hermann Bondi, had arrived in Britain as a teenager and studied mathematics at Cambridge. He too was interned and sent to Canada. After his release, however, he returned to Britain and worked for the Admiralty on radar research. The same country that had considered him suspicious enough to intern was soon relying on his scientific abilities as part of the war effort.

Then there was Charles Forte, whose story shows that you did not have to be a recently arrived refugee to find yourself labelled an enemy alien. Forte had come to Scotland from Italy when he was about four years old. He grew up in Britain, attended school here and later built a successful catering business in London. Britain had been his home for almost his entire life, but legally he was still Italian.

When Italy entered the war against Britain on the 10th of June 1940, Forte was interned on the Isle of Man. He was released after around three months and would later build one of Britain’s best-known hotel and catering businesses, eventually becoming Lord Forte.

His experience formed part of a much wider upheaval within Britain’s Italian community. Italian families had lived here for decades, running cafés, restaurants, ice-cream businesses and shops. But once Italy entered the war, men who had spent twenty or thirty years living among British neighbours could suddenly find themselves regarded as potential enemies.

By the summer of 1940, thousands of people were being held in internment camps, particularly on the Isle of Man. There were genuine supporters of hostile governments, but there were also refugees who had fled those governments, scientists, academics, businessmen, shopkeepers and long-established residents with families in Britain.

For some, internment in Britain was not the end of the story. Thousands were transported abroad to Canada and Australia. The most notorious transport was the HMT Dunera, which carried more than 2,000 internees to Australia in terrible conditions. Another voyage ended in tragedy when the Arandora Star was torpedoed on the 2nd of July 1940 while carrying German and Italian internees to Canada. More than 800 people died, most of the civilian internees killed were Italian.

The disaster helped to increase criticism of the policy, and cases began to be reviewed. Large numbers of internees were eventually released. Some joined the Pioneer Corps, some returned to scientific research and others tried to rebuild the lives that had been interrupted.

Britain faced a very real threat in 1940, and security concerns could not be ignored. But these individual stories show just how quickly fear could blur the difference between someone who genuinely presented a danger and someone whose only problem was the nationality written on a document.

I’ve gone much deeper into this story for my subscribers, including more of the people who were interned, the extraordinary contradictions in their cases, the camps, the deportations to Canada and Australia, and what happened to them afterwards. The full extended version is available now in my subscriber page.

Had you realised that some of the people Britain interned as “enemy aliens” had already lived here for years, while others had actually fled the very regime Britain was fighting?