In the Second World War women were not allowed to fight alongside men in the frontline services but they played a vital part in the war effort often close to danger, and often paid with their lives.
Like their male services comrades they were usually achingly young serving as WAAFs in the air force and Wrens in the Navy as well as the nursing corps in all three service arms. In 1938 the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the ATS, was formed as the Army’s uniformed women’s service.
Of course, its most illustrious recruit was our late Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth. The first ATS group was formed in Sussex in 1938 and Olga Hermione Violet Mosley Mayne OBE was a senior figure in establishing the service.
She was the product of Empire born in India where her father Major Mosley Mayne served with the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry. She served in the First World War in Italy where she ran a soldiers’ club and canteen for the British Expeditionary Force. She was made an OBE in 1918 for this work, volunteering immediately the ATS was announced.
By July 1942 she had been promoted to the rank of Chief Commander (equivalent to Lt. Colonel) and was stationed at Oadby Racecourse on the outskirts of Leicester. Her unit of ATS women operated searchlights as part of the antiaircraft batteries stationed there. The American 80th AA Airborne and 82nd Airborne were based at the racecourse as the US forces build up preparing for the Normandy invasion. The ATS also ran canteen and welfare operations.
Chief Commander Mayne was aged 52. She required an operation but following this she developed pneumonia and in those days before widely available antibiotics she succumbed to the infection.
She had asked to be buried in a quiet country churchyard and after a service in St James the Greater church, Leicester, a cortege made its way past the racecourse and on to the nearest village of Great Glen. She was buried with full military honours at St Cuthberts Church with the Director and Deputy Director of the ATS as pall bearers.
Next week I will tell the stories of teenaged women service personnel and their tragic deaths.
When Commonwealth War Graves are mentioned, for most of us the immediate image conjured is of those moving acres of white gravestones in immaculate grounds in all parts of the world. Unsurprising, as our forces have always done their fighting, and dying, abroad. But in almost every cemetery and churchyard in Britain there are scatterings of those distinctive CWG stones all commemorating servicemen and women who made their sacrifice closer to home. There are stories of great heroism, tragedy, stoicism or devotion to duty, often all of those. Choice is telling some of those stories mainly from the Second World War as a way of following the time-honoured credo “We Will Remember Them”. We are starting in Norman Wright’s local Leicestershire graveyards but we aim to spread our net further afield as we plan to bring a story every week until Remembrance Sunday 2025.
