Early life

I interviewed Betty in her home in Chichester in 2010. She was born in 1921, the daughter of a unitarian minister. She was the youngest of six, her eldest brother having died in the First World War. In her childhood she moved between Brighton and Ditchling due to her father teaching in Brighton and having established a chapel in Ditchling. Betty was educated at Channing School, Highgate, which was for daughters of unitarian ministers with the focus on having a broad education that would enable them to go to university if they so wished. Betty’s daughter and granddaughter both attended the school.

Betty left school at 18, having done an additional term to retake her school certificate. She very much enjoyed school ‘because I felt a certain amount of restriction at home and I had my older sister to cope with- she never thought I was capable of doing anything because she was so good at doing everything, she had that reputation at school, so I had to make my way in the school after her. The next sister was much quieter, she was very close to me, she was the same, there was only two years between us, but there was a lot of music and drama, particularly drama at the school, which I loved and there was hardly a play I wasn't in because we did one every year on Founders day when they, all the parents turned up in the summer, I just loved it.’ After leaving school she did a short technical course in shorthand typing, which would help her in her WRNS’s category. 

Coming from an ‘artistic’ family she was hoping to attend the Central School of Speech and Drama, having secured a place. Her sister Joan initially trained as a dancer and following having her children worked at Stratford in the theatre and was a dresser for ten years, with her niece becoming a wig maker. She noted how much the family loved the theatre, which would be a common theme throughout her time in the WRNS. With the war breaking out Betty’s father had said ‘Joan’s wasting her time dancing you’ve got to do something for the country’. Her brother had already been called up into the Territorial Army as an engineer. He initially fought in France and then was deployed to India and Burma. Betty’s decision to join the WRNS was based on being able to live near home but also due to liking the look of the sailors.

Joining the WRNS: HMS Vernon

Betty joined the WRNS in March 1941 aged 19 and was initially stationed at HMS Vernon in Portsmouth, which was the torpedo school. It covered the whole area of what is now Gunwharf Quays. Betty did not discuss her initial training period and could not remember how she applied to join the service. She recalled how terrifying working there was, due the amount of bombing it was subject to: ‘I mean trying to get to Vernon, in the morning, after a night raid, if I caught sight of one of the officers I knew of I would follow them. I thought ‘well if they can get there I can get there’ as I didn’t know Portsmouth at all, it’s quite frightening, the raids were appalling’. Betty was billeted at one point in a Wrennery called HMS Hood. It was a children’s home with a large room with sinks all the way around the edge, with many of them cracked and smashed due to plaster falling from the ceiling during bombing. She carried a rug wherever she went and if she came back from a night out or a watch she would often find it covered in plaster on her bed. She recalled ‘there was another part of it, it was a huge room, with a whole row of baths with curtains round them, you could see one wren getting out of one bath and washing the back [laugh] of the Wren in the next bath’. Betty recalled her time in the Wrennery with great humor and a sense of adventure.

Recalling one particular air aid: 

Having walked back to the Wrennery in Brighton ‘we had an air raid go off while the lunch was on, and that’s another thing you can’t explain to somebody what it’s like to see feathers from feather beds floating, and the smell and the sound of houses falling down, you know, even when the bombs of the planes had gone over and it was fairly quiet there was this incredible hush when you just heard the tinkle of things falling down, trees going over, that sort of thing, which you get with bombs constantly falling. And I hadn’t even had my lunch, but we’d hid under the stairs, I remember, there was a whole fleet of dive bombers that came over and they just stalked the whole area with their machine gun fire and dropped bombs and things, and it was quite frightening. In fact, one of our Wren senior, she was a Chief Officer, but she was again, I was so fond of her, she was lovely, and we were hiding under the stairs and during a sort of hush because waiting to hear the planes coming over, she said ‘what did you do in the great war granny?’ [laugh] 

But anyway when it had quieted down and they’d gone the call came out for first aiders to pick up their first aid box and go out and that, this was at Whitehall in Brighton, the Wrennery was just on the front there, a huge, again it was a convalescent home, we took over, but on the corner there was a post office, a little corner shop, and it really was on the corner, where they sold all sorts of things; newspapers, and I think they probably did post office as well, and as I came out it was obvious there was, all the air raid wardens had turned up there, it was obvious it was the right place to go, and I went across with a big box of first aid things in my hand, it was summer, I’d just had a shirt, my shirt sleeves, and of course I looked a bit like a nurse and they would call ‘nurse, nurse here!’ So you didn’t know what you were going to find, but I went into the little shop and the counter, there was a police man lying out on the counter, there wasn’t much to his head and then they’d covered up the rest of him, it had literally had just happened, his helmet had been blown off and his head gone.

And then I heard somebody calling for me, so I went out and it was a woman round the corner … a window had gone, she shards had got into her head and… I wasn’t an experienced nurse or anything but I’d learnt a bit from my sister at home. Anyway, I got this woman into some sort of position where I could get at her, and I said we’ll get the ambulance as soon as we can, so I took her down to the end of the road where the ambulances were coming in. Between us and the town was the Sussex County Hospital, but it was sufficiently far away so that every time the ambulances came from the hospital to come towards us they were stopped by somebody else so we waited an awful long time, by this time her head was in a state, she’d got Kirby grips in her hair and trying to get these pins out with all the blood! Anyway, we finally got her into the ambulance and she went off and then eventually, about half past two, I got back into the Wrennery to have some lunch, I really couldn’t face it by then, I had blood on my shirt and thought I really must get changed before [work]. Those were the sort of, they didn’t happen very often, quite important times’.

Duties at HMS Vernon

Her role at HMS Vernon was as a Writer in the Captain’s Office where she would maintain records of who was coming into the training establishment on draft: ‘you’d get whole drafts of people coming in for doing a whole week’s course, in fact we had the Duke of Edinburgh who came in to do a course, and then you had you had to mark them off and then if they were given a ship to go to, we had all lists, navy lists of ships and who was being sent there and if there were any of our officers we had to make sure that they were notified and gave them their travel warrants and that sort of thing’. When HMS Vernon was relocated to Roedean, Brighton in May 1941 her duties also included working in the Regulating Office, which included allocating guards to watches and placing sailors in accommodation on the base as they came in for their training. HMS Roedean had approximately 800 RN personnel and Wrens working on it. There were around five Wrens working in the Captain’s Office. Initially there were only around 12 Wrens on the base, but by the end of the war once torpedo production had been moved there and technical branches training established, Wrens recruited into torpedo and technical roles numbered around 80-100. 

‘And every day, in the afternoon I had to take another big board and put it up in the long corridor to say what their duties were going to be over night and they used to be milling round waiting to see what was going to happen whether they’d be able to go ashore for an evening, or not, and every now and then the language was pretty awful. There was one or two officers not training in but in charge of different schools, teaching them high power, low power, all the electrical things and I remember one, very tall, very handsome, coming past where there was this language of some sort going on; ‘bloody hell why have I got this again, I was on last night’- that sort of thing, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘do you stand for this?’ and he shouted at the sailors ‘keep your mouths shut in front of the women!’ I did, I have pictures of him, he was a lovely man…’

Betty was good fun in sharing her stories of things that she found amusing. ‘And the Wren officer who was drilling us on one occasion, it was very naughty of him to speak to her in front of us like that, because she was drilling us, making us march up, turn and come back, and he said ‘for heaven’s sake woman you turn round like a fat cabbage in a high wind!’’ On the whole she said the negativity from service men was minimal and that they ‘were pretty good’. Working in the Certificate and Regulating Offices meant she came into contact with a lot of different people who she found to be ‘great fun’ on the whole. 

HMS Collingwood

She became a leading Wren in 1943. Working in the Certificate and Regulating Offices though meant that she was unable to apply to become a Petty Officer, as there were no exams in her category. In November 1944 she was redeployed to HMS Collingwood, Fareham. She had been due to go to Greenwich for Officer’s training, but had to go to hospital in Brighton so her draft was cancelled. Her replacement at Vernon had already been drafted there, so instead Betty was redrafted to Collingwood due to the Petty Officer in the Certificate Office being off sick… ‘I first sat at my desk and I had piles of certificates all the way round the desk knowing that all these sailors at sea somewhere were waiting for their certificates, because with their certificates … they got an extra 2 pence or whatever for every training they’d done… and that all had to be filled in, taken up to the school masters where they’d been training at Collingwood and then the school masters would send it back and they would be sent out to sea to wherever they were, wherever they were serving. And until they got their certs they didn’t get their extra money, so I was very important to them. And I was determined with all these waiting and knowing that all these sailors were waiting for their money I was determined to get these out and down because I didn’t like to have clutter on my desk. And I mean there literally was a foot deep. So I used to work to about 8’oclock every night when I first went there’. ‘But I didn’t get a promotion for it… it was an awful shame’.

I asked Betty what the food was like at Collingwood. This was really her one main negative of the war and her service in the WRNS: ‘Oh it was appalling. Well I tell you on Saturday mornings we always had porridge, egg and haddock for breakfast and it was cooked for the cooks and stewards who had to be on duty at half past six and I would come in for my breakfast at about 8’oclock because I didn’t have to be in the office until half past eight and by that time the haddock was crisp, it was so dried up, they’d cook them all and then put them in the ovens to keep warm, and it was the same with the coffee. They made the coffee in the very early hours in great big vats like this and then because it got cold, it had the milk added to and it would get cold, so they would put these a bit like a pipe with hot air in it, stick it in and it bubbled and it heated it up and about the time it had heated up, I don’t know how many times, by the time I got my coffee at half past eight. I had been voted in, and you could only be voted in, to be a representative of the mess, and the mess was quite big at Collingwood, I mean there were thousands of Wrens there, and I managed to get voted in for that job and I went to the Wren officer and said ‘the coffee is absolutely disgusting, it really is not fit for pigs’ and she said ‘it’s perfectly alright’ and I said ‘well I’m sorry if that’s what you have to drink’. Oh it used to make me so cross!’

Betty also found the life at Collingwood more restrictive than what she was used to at Brighton. ‘At Collingwood you would never dare to speak to anybody. I didn’t even know the Captain’s secretary who I worked for, very different’. The social life was very different too: ‘the awful thing on Saturday morning if you were going on weekend leave, again at Brighton I didn’t even go up to work because I was in a Wrennery. In Brighton I used to just jump on a train and go home to Lewes, but in Collingwood you couldn’t leave the establishment without going out on a liberty boat, really old fashioned, so you had to march and you had to have the right coloured card because there was a green watch, red watch, yellow watch and brown watch or something, and you had to have the right colour because they were on weekend leave. So, you’d march up to the gate and hand it into the master at arms as you left and then you got to walk down from there to Fareham and from Fareham there were three double decker buses, which used to take about 8000 sailors, of course only one of the watches was off at the weekend, but take them down to Gosport to the ferry, and then we had the ferry from Gosport across to Portsmouth, from Portsmouth you get up to the town station to get the train to Brighton, and you used to run down from Brighton station … and pick up a coach, a bus to take you to Lewes, and I’d get home about lunch time, and for my breakfast I’d had porridge and kippers. And in the corner of our huge mess, it was an enormous mess, there was half a cupboard, just a wooden thing in the corner, and behind that was a great big dustbin and you, what you had to do was scrape all your stuff into the dustbin and then hand your plates in to be washed and everybody would do that, you couldn’t leave it on the table you see, and by the time I’d had my breakfast at quarter past eight, and I would go round this corner to get rid of my stuff [and all] the porridge was all down the wall [laugh]!

WRNS Officers

Betty’s interactions with WRNS Officers were on the whole positive, but not in all instances: ‘we had one awful woman who came in and she was frightfully stiff, stiff and starchy, worked for … one of those big companies and she never smiled, she never said hello, and that’s when I had the trouble with her over Collingwood, she insisted. I said ‘I don’t want to go to Collingwood, my draft to Greenwich has been cancelled why can’t I stay here, I know more about this establishment than anyone else’ no, but she wouldn’t listen, and as I say it was the weekend that my husband was sent out to the Far East and I was moved. I went home crying all day with my parents, it was awful, being separated from all my friends and my family and everything’. This was a time in her service that she found the hardest, separated from her husband, moved away from her family, and sent to a new job having worked at HMS Vernon for over three years. 

Social Life

Working at HMS Vernon was a very positive time for Betty as it also had a good social scene. She got on well with her own officers, one of whom used to run a dancing school: ‘whenever they wanted anyone to do something for, we did a lot of entertainments for the troops, I was always called in to do the plays, all sorts of things, yes that was at Roedean. But she was a dancer, [so she would] choreograph any of the dances you were doing, but I had no problem with her at all. And then she was actually promoted when from Portsmouth when it went to Roedean, promoted from second officer up to first officer, and then eventually she was made superintendent’. Being in Brighton they also had a lot of access to cinemas and theatres ‘and there was always a man somewhere to take you out, you didn’t last long between boyfriends, you had one that went on draft and within fourteen hours somebody said ‘what are you doing tonight?’ So, it was a pretty gay life’. She particularly enjoyed being part of the theatrical productions at Vernon. These short one act plays would be put on regularly for the sailors whose ‘attention span is very small’. This was how she met her husband to be, Peter, who was the only man to volunteer. After a few weeks he invited her out to dinner ‘and that was the start of it.’

Marriage and later life

She married when she was 21 in 1943. Betty had some material her brother sent to her mother before the war broke out, to make her wedding dress. Peter was a torpedo officer and she found it ‘heart breaking’ every time he was deployed again. Betty could have left the WRNS at the end of the war but stayed on as Peter was still stationed overseas. When he finally returned they had not seen each other for nine months. In all they were separated for three years off and on. ‘When he came home at the end I went to stay with his parents in London and he came home to Barnett and I think he must have phoned to say he would be arriving at Barnett station at whatever time it was and I said ‘oh I’ll go up and meet him’, my father in law said ‘oh I’ll come with you’ and I thought that was the most insensitive thing a man could have done. As I walked home with him, it was quite a long walk from the station to the house, just holding his hand I couldn’t say a word because father-in-law kept talking all the time. Never quite forgave him for that’.

Betty and Peter were living on £10 a week post war with her husband having lost the job he had been in before war broke out, as the American company he was in cut back on British staff. Very fortunately in 1947/48 he was reoffered a job with the organization and became the manager of the London Office. Betty recalled ‘and so we spent a lot of time entertaining people from all over the place, so it was a great life for us’. She very much played the role of the support to her husband and enjoyed the role as hostess to their friends and his colleagues. 

In her oral history Betty discusses in depth the immaturity of post war parents and the difficulty of raising her first child. She felt that she was a ‘very immature mother’. We discussed how she thought that women who had joined the services ‘had maintained their separateness from men… you weren’t just the little lady at home, and therefore something of that must have stayed in them, in their personalities when the war was over, so they still maintained… their individuality, which is possibly the cause of half the trouble with latch key children and the pill and those sorts of being responsible for the deterioration of family values, which I think is very sad’. She was very open about the challenges she had in raising her first child.

Betty loved being a Wren and said ‘I don’t think you’d find any who won’t say the same thing’. She summed up her time in the WRNS as ‘a wonderful launch into adult life… I think it was a great experience and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything’.