Next week, Shirley Williams is to take part in the Stratford Upon Avon Literary Festival talking about her mother Vera Brittain’s role as a nurse volunteer in the First World War and on the wider role of women generally before, during and after the war.
From the Birmingham Post:
Baroness Shirley Williams is incredibly proud of her “wonderful” mother Vera Brittain, whose First World War memoir has been adapted into a new BBC drama with an all-star cast.
Testament of Youth charts Vera’s personal journey from an Oxford scholarship to the battlefields of France as she volunteers to become a nurse and suffers unspeakable personal loss.
She speaks about her own mother’s role:
Explains Shirley: “I started asking her questions as a child but her book was very frank about her role in the Voluntary Aid Detachment.
“My mother wrote about her role as a nurse in the war in the first government hospital in London in 1915, in Malta in a Royal Naval Hospital and in France where the hospital was overrun by Germans in 1917 and 1918.“Many of the volunteer nurses started out knowing very little about medical techniques – they didn’t know about blood transfusions or have access to medical equipment.
“My mother and the other volunteers had training for only a few weeks. They were doing a lot of cleaning and pretty disgusting things like holding people’s limbs.
“Nursing training became much more professional after the war.”
She then went on to describe how life was for women at that time:
Women were immobilised in Britain. Until then middle-class women didn’t work outside the home but a lot of them got pulled into becoming ambulance drivers; while working class women went from working in textile factories to munitions,’’ says Shirley.
“Nursing was not thought of as a profession for middle-class girls. Most professional nurses came from more humble homes.”
Shirley will be appearing on April 29th and there will also be a new BBC film about Vera Brittain later this year.
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4 Comments
“Nursing was not thought of as a profession for middle-class girls. Most professional nurses came from more humble homes”
And nursing was better as a direct result of those people from more humble home.
Many women took over men’s jobs in WW1. My Great Aunt worked in a grocery shop. She told me about having to carry the big cheeses they had in those days..
Delightful that a film is being made about Vera Brittain. Her life is an inspiration and the fact that her daughter is Shirley Williams, got me interested in politics in the early 1980s when as a teenager, I read Testament of Youth at school.
‘Testament of Youth’ was serialised by BBC televison some decades ago. It was an eye-opening experience in many ways to watch and got me reading the book and its sequel.
@ JohnTilley
‘And nursing was better as a direct result of those people from more humble home.’
I hope you meant that it is better when it recruits from a wider range of society (I almost said of classes.) My feeling is that the widening of the class base in WW I and thereafter was an good thing because it connects the people in the profession with more people in the wider society.