From the Nameless to the Nameless by Maggie Brookes

In 1947 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the British and American Quakers for their "compassionate effort to relieve human suffering," which included their work during the Spanish Civil War. It was given for their "silent help from the nameless to the nameless."

Quaker Fundraising © Britain Yearly Meeting

But of course the volunteers were not nameless, and a small handful of extraordinary women laid the groundwork for the large and well organised charitable responses we see today.

By 1936 Edith Pye was president of the British Midwives Institute and also an experienced humanitarian worker. She had qualified as a midwife in 1906 and become a member of the pacifist Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1908. During the First World War she set up a maternity hospital in France, inside the war zone, and was one of very few women to be awarded the French Legion d'Honneur. 

Edith Pye © Creative Commons

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, refugees began to trek north, escaping the advance of Franco's fascist army and the worst fighting. Edith went to Barcelona to assess the needs of the children. Her report said,"food supplies are diminishing rapidly" and identified serious shortages of "milk, sugar, farinaceous foods and cod-liver oil."  Fundraising by the Society of Friends and Save the Children International followed.  Soon dried milk, plus donations of cocoa, biscuits and oats from Quaker companies, began to be shipped to Spain. 

Map 1937 © DKB Creative

As the war continued, Edith Pye was instrumental in setting up a fund for Spanish refugee children. She persuaded the British Foreign Office to pledge £10,000 if other governments would do the same.  Her efforts succeeded so well that by 1938 the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees was based in Geneva and had money coming in from 24 governments. On the ground in war-torn Spain a team of British Quakers was put in charge of administering the distribution of thousands of tons of wheat and condensed milk and other goods which arrived in Barcelona. Two of the team were Francesca Wilson and Kanty Cooper.

Francesca, aged 49, was also a veteran of aid work. She'd studied history at Newnham College and became a teacher at Gravesend in Kent. At the start of the first world war she heard that Quaker Relief was helping civilians in France. She was interviewed by Ruth Fry at Friends House and stressed her fluent French and willingness to do any kind of work. But Ruth Fry turned her down, saying "You are engaged in useful work here. What is your motive for wanting to leave it? Is it a genuine concern for the relief of the unfortunate, or only love of excitement?" Despite this rejection, Francesca found a way to get to a POW camp on the Dutch island of Urk and from there to a refugee camp in Gouda, and later to work with refugees in France, Corsica, North Africa, Serbia, Austria and Russia.

Francesca Wilson © Britain Yearly Meeting

In 1937 the headmistress of her school gave her two months leave to go to Spain. She travelled south from Barcelona to Murcia, finding refugees suffering, "The greatest misery I've ever seen in my life." She swung into action, organising deliveries of food and serving breakfasts to the children and expectant and nursing mothers in the worst refugee night shelter, which housed 4,000 people who had escaped from Malaga. She saw children were dying  – there was a 50% infant mortality rate – and called on Sir George Young, who agreed to fund a children's hospital, which Francesca got equipped and running in just over a week.

On subsequent leave from her teaching, she set up a farm school to give teenage boys an occupation and stop them joining the army, and a holiday camp which became a full time "colony school" on the beach near Benidorm, to give refugee children a healthy break in the fresh air. She strode fearlessly into war zones and appalling situations, saying, "I have a species of arrogance that this is not my time to die... My insolent confidence protects me from fear."

Spanish civil war map 1938 © DKB Creative

For the Spanish-speaking English sculptor Kanty Cooper, who had studied under Henry Moore, the war was her first taste of relief work.  Her "indignation at the injustice of our non-intervention policy which crippled a socialist, democratically elected government fighting a right wing fascist revolt," led her to help out with the 4,000 Basque children who had been evacuated to Britain. Then she developed neuritis. "It was like arrows of fire down my arms at night." Her doctor told her she would have to stop sculpting for at least six months, so she decided to go to Spain.

Kanty Cooper © Len Lye Centre NZ  

In January 1938 she arrived in Barcelona and was immediately put in charge of three of the canteens being managed by the British Quakers. One of these alone fed 3,000 children a day. Thousands of refugees continued to pour into Barcelona and the city was under constant air attack from Franco's forces. After a "short apprenticeship" Kanty took over the running of all the Barcelona canteens and opened more until every district had its own. By September 1938 she was running 74 canteens feeding 15,164 children and by January 1939, 132 canteens served 27,532 every day. There were perhaps a million refugees in Catalonia, of whom many passed through Barcelona on their way north towards France. As Franco's forces closed in on the city, most of the foreign aid-workers left, but Kanty stayed in Spain for a further five weeks, distributing the last of the food stores.

Kanty Cooper's memoir The Uprooted. Author's photograph.

After the Spanish Civil War, these three women continued their life-saving humanitarian efforts. Francesca went on to support refugees in France and Hungary, while Kanty worked in Greece, Germany, Jordan and Amman. Both Kanty and Francesca wrote moving memoirs. During WW2 Edith Pye became a leading member of the Famine Relief Committee and worked in both France and Greece. She was awarded an OBE.

Francesca Wilson and Kanty Cooper both appear in Maggie Brookes' new novel Acts of Love and War published in June 2022 in the UK and August 2022 in North America. 

Desert Island Books -- Sheena Wilkinson

I’m at the Scattered Authors retreat this week, in lovely Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, a History Girl’s paradise. On Monday night I took part in a very enjoyable bookish version of Desert Island Discs, where castaways had to choose three books – a ‘classic’, a contemporary book and a ‘wild card’. It struck me, when it came time to think about my monthly post, that my choices all said a great deal about my love of history, though when I chose the books it was with no conscious awareness of that. So here they are for you, with some historical musings, and with thanks to Mary Hoffman (fellow panellist)  for the idea!

1. Classic Children’s Book – Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild, 1936.

I love Ballet Shoes for its mix of grit and romance, for its three very different heroines, for the nuanced adult characters and the 1930s London setting. I first read it as a child in the 1970s, and knew immediately, when I read about the Fossils’ having to ‘save the penny and walk’, that I was in ‘the olden days’. At that age I wouldn’t have known exactly when in the olden days, because I don’t think I would have had the nous to check the date of first publication, but it didn’t matter. It was a world of nursery teas, omnibuses and genteel poverty. A world where your frock needed to match your knickers. Later I knew that this was the 1930s, and understood how shortly that inter-war period was to come to an end.

Ballet Shoes, of course, is not a historical novel – Noel Streatfeild was writing about her contemporary world, which was forty years in the past when I first read it, and eighty years ago now. My second choice was very different:

2.    Contemporary Book – A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson, 2014

This is one of the best novels I have ever read, and is broadly historical – broad in that sense that its story encompasses about a century. It is, I suppose, a kind of family saga, except that suggests something much more conventional. A God in Ruins is structurally unconventional, moving backwards and forwards in time, and there is a conceit at its heart which I would not dream of spoiling for you which asks questions about the very nature of history and existence. Once again, as always, I loved the small material details, but unlike Noel Streatfeild, Kate Atkinson is looking back, particularly to the years around the Second World War.

Which leads neatly to my third choice:

3. Wild Card – When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr, 197X

This is a very different kind of novel. It is historical – Judith Kerr was writing in the seventies about the thirties, but it is also based firmly on her own personal history.  As in Ballet Shoes, we are in difficult circumstances, but here too the children are largely protected by heroic adults, in this case their parents. Once again, material things matter and help to bring the world to life – Anna having the right kind of pinafore for her French school, buying a pencil, travelling to Switzerland by train.

I thought I had chosen these books randomly. And, yes, on a different day I might have chosen three others. Only now do I see the links between them: they all write about a similar period, in very different ways. Between them I think they contain everything I love as a reader of fiction set in the past, and everything I strive for as a writer of historical fiction.

So – what would your Desert Island books be, and what might they say about you as a History Girl?

Those Magnificent Women in Their Flying Machines - Aviatrices of the 1920s and 1930s by Christina Koning

Having just finished my latest novel, ‘Time of Flight’, which is set in 1931, and features - amongst other characters - a number of female flyers, I wanted to make my last post for the History Girls about these wonderful ‘queens of the air’, who did so much to popularise flying in its golden years. One of the most celebrated was Amelia Earhart - pronounced ‘Air-heart’ (1897-1937) - who, apart from setting numerous aviation records, including being the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic, was instrumental in setting up ‘The Ninety-Nines’, an association of women pilots.

In 1920, Amelia visited an airfield at Long Beach, paying $10 for a 10 minute flight in an aeroplane piloted by Frank Hawks. This proved a turning-point for the young enthusiast: ‘By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,’ she said. ‘I knew I had to fly.’ Like Amy Johnson after her, she saved up for flying lessons and had her first lesson a year later, gaining her pilot’s license in 1923.

Her instructor was the delightfully named Neta Snook (1896 - 1991), who ran a commercial flying school in Virginia (the first woman to do so), and who later wrote about her friendship with Earhart in her book, I Taught Amelia to Fly.

After the enormous popular interest in Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Amelia was selected, the following year, to take the place of aviatrix Amy Phipps Guest (1873 -1959) as the first woman to make the trip, after the latter decided to drop out. Interviewed after the flight, which was piloted by Wilmer Stultz, Amelia said, with characteristic self-deprecation: ‘Stultz did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage…’ adding, ‘maybe someday I'll try it alone.’

 In May 1932, having undertaken many lengthy flights across America, she got her wish. Setting off from Newfoundland, she arrived, 14 hours and 56 minutes later, in what she hoped was Paris. In fact, it was a field in Ireland - her Lockheed Vega 5B aeroplane having been blown off course. But she’d done it - becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Awards and acclaim followed, but Amelia refused to rest on her laurels. She was determined to fulfil her dream of flying around the world, and, after several false starts, set off in July 1937 with co-pilot Fred Noonan, in her Lockheed Electra 10E. What followed has been the subject of speculation ever since, after the aeroplane disappeared over the Pacific. Was it sabotage, engine failure, or (the most likely scenario) a breakdown of the inflight radio system which caused her to lose her way? 

Amy Johnson (1903 - 1941) was Britain’s ‘answer’ to the woman nicknamed ‘Lady Lindy’ by the American press, and became a close friend of her ‘rival’, several years before Earhart’s untimely death. Born, the daughter of a prosperous businessman, in Kingston upon Hull, Amy went first to university to read Economics, then got a job as secretary to the solicitor William Charles Crocker.

My grandfather Charles Thompson - the model for my ‘Blind Detective’, Frederick Rowlands, in the series of novels of which ‘Time of Flight’ is the latest - worked as a receptionist in the same office, and knew Amy when she was first getting interested in flying. (It’s one of the reasons I knew this book had to have an aviation theme.) This was in 1928; a year later, after saving up and paying for flying lessons at £2 an hour, she gained her pilot’s license, and later the same year became the first woman to gain a ground engineer’s ‘C’ license - a qualification that would stand her in good stead on her record-breaking flight. This was the first solo flight by a woman from England to Australia. Amy was twenty-six years old, and had had only 90 hours’ flying experience when she set out from Croydon Airport on May 5th, 1930 in her De Havilland GH60 Gipsy Moth ‘Jason’, on the first leg of her 11,000 mile journey.

During the course of this epic flight, she averaged 800 - 900 miles a day, battling through rainstorms and fog, and on one occasion was forced to land in the Egyptian desert, on account of a sand-storm. Much of the time she was ‘flying blind’, unsure of her direction - radar had yet to be discovered and the instruments she had to guide her were rudimentary. She was therefore obliged to find her way by the simple expedient of looking down from the open cockpit, and following the lines of rivers and roads. Reaching India in a record six days, she ran into the monsoon, which reduced visibility to zero, and forced her to crash-land. Her engineering skills enabled her to fix the damaged plane, and she took off again for Singapore, sometimes flying so low over the sea that she was skimming the tops of the waves. After yet more hair-raising escapades, she reached Darwin on May 24th - to an ecstatic reception.

‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’ became one the hit songs of 1930; lucrative contracts with the Daily Mail (which had sponsored the flight) followed. ‘The Flying Typist’ became an instant celebrity - a role with which she was far from comfortable. Her passion was flying, and she continued to set records throughout the 1930s, including one for a solo flight from London to Cape Town in 1932, breaking her husband Jim Mollison’s record, set the previous year. Billed as ‘The Flying Sweethearts’ - the press then being as fond of a sentimental headline as they are today - she and Mollison made several long-distance flights together, including one to New York which ended in a near-fatal crash. After the marriage ended, Amy continued to pursue her fascination with speed, taking up rally driving and gliding, and becoming a part of what was then known as the ‘Smart Set’.

I haven’t space to give more than a brief mention to a few of the other distinguished aviatrices of the 1920s and 1930s, whose exploits were no less daring and ground-breaking than those already described. Beryl Markham (1902- 1986) is one of these - the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West, a journey she wrote about in her 1942 memoir, ‘West with the Night’, whose style was much admired by Ernest Hemingway (not a man given to praising other writers). Glamorous and headstrong, Beryl was renowned not only for her flying skills but also for her many love affairs - including one with Denys Finch Hatton, the husband of her friend, the writer Karen Blixen, and a member of the notorious ‘Happy Valley' set.

Other celebrated female pilots of the era include two flying aristocrats - both, rather confusingly, with the same first name. Born in County Limerick, Lady Mary Heath (1896 - 1939) began her adventurous career as a dispatch rider during the First World War. In 1928, she became the first woman to fly from London to the Cape - a journey which took her three months. Lady Heath liked to travel in her pearls and fur coat - no doubt a sensible precaution, in those days of open cockpits.

Her extraordinary feat was matched by another Irish aviatrix, Lady Mary Bailey (1890 - 1960), the daughter of the fifth Baron Rossmore, whose 18,000 mile journey across Africa was the longest solo flight ever attempted by a woman. She was modest about her difficult and dangerous achievement, saying in an interview with The Times that she’d been ‘just flying about’, and breaking her journey back to Croydon Airport with a stop-over at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, because, she said, she badly needed a bath! 

Then there was Jean Batten - called ‘The Greta Garbo of the Skies’, on account of her shy and reclusive temperament. Jean was the first woman to fly from London to New Zealand, in 1936 - just one of her record-breaking long-distance solo flights. She, too, was fond of fashion, and always packed an evening dress when flying…

I could go on - but I’ve run out of space and time. So I’d just like to say, ‘Thanks for having me,’ to all my fellow history girls. May your ‘flights’, literary and otherwise, all have safe landings. Over and out!