Women volunteers’ wartime diaries go online
The Royal Voluntary Service has made thousands of pages of Women’s Voluntary Service monthly reports available for free
Over 30,000 pages of diaries by members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) are available to view for the first time.
To coincide with the unveiling of an English Heritage Blue Plaque for the charity’s founder, Stella Reading, Royal Voluntary Service (RVS) has released 31,401 pages of monthly narrative reports from local WVS sections.The diaries date from 1938-1942 and cover more than 1,300 different cities, towns and villages across Great Britain.
The diaries were inscribed on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World register in 2010 as one of the most important historical documents in the UK, but have only just been digitised after RVS raised £28,000 for the project from over 700 members of the public via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.
Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, founded the WVS in May 1938 and toured the country throughout 1938 and 1939, telling audiences “the greatest disservice a woman can do at the moment is consider herself useless”.
By the end of August 1939, over 300,000 women had joined the organisation and more than 1,200 WVS centres had been set up around the country.
During the war, one in ten British women was a member of the WVS. As well as contributing to the war effort by sewing, cooking, knitting and helping their communities recover after raids, members learnt new skills such as extinguishing incendiary bombs, driving in the blackout and garnishing camouflage nets, helping transform the way in which women were viewed by society.
Matthew McMurray, RVS archivist, said: “It is quite remarkable that Stella Reading managed to set up such a huge organisation in such little time.
“At the outbreak of war, the WVS had only existed for little over a year, but they had spent that year preparing for the worst.
“Her vision was that every woman could help and have a role to play in the defeat of Hitler.”
The WVS eventually became the Royal Voluntary Service, now a charity focused on helping older people through services such as dining clubs, exercise and dance classes, Books-on-Wheels and Good Neighbours.
The blue plaque commemorating Stella Reading was unveiled on 4 July at 41 Tothill Street, the wartime headquarters of the WVS. Anna Eavis, curatorial director at English Heritage, said that Lady Reading was “one of the most remarkable women of the age”.
The new archive provides a remarkable insight into the ups and downs of life in wartime Britain. In Ventnor on the Isle of Wight the Housewives Section of the WVS sprang into action after an air raid in 1942.
One member whose house was damaged by a blast turned her stirrup pump on a nearby building and fought the fire caused by incendiary bullets. Other members attended to bullet wound casualties in the road, and elderly people suffering from shock were taken to safety and provided with hot drinks. The WVS was on duty for three days providing assistance to the homeless and the rescue and salvage teams.
There are also flashes of humour in the diaries. One report from Stone in Hertfordshire describes how the canteen organiser struggled to cope with rationed supplies: “Thanks to dried eggs, dried milk, and even powdered saccharin, the organiser, with a cookery book in one hand, managed to make what at any rate looked like cakes. She was very thankful that she didn’t have to eat any of the efforts herself.”
To read the diaries, go to
Every woman could help and have a role to play in the defeat of Hitler