Wartime service didn’t end after VE and VJ days in 1945, many served long after that in mopping up operations, peacekeeping and preparing for defending the nation in the much changed and dangerous post Second World War world.
Women played a significant role during the conflict and afterwards. They also sacrificed their lives usually not in battle but almost more poignantly with illness (TB was still a killer) and by ill luck. But the sacrifice and tragedy was the same.
Two 19-year-old Leicestershire friends signed up for the Women’s Auxiliary Airforce as soon as age allowed to do their bit in that post war world.
Lilian Gibson and Kathleen Scotney were just six weeks into active service after passing out from their training, on, ironically, November 11, 1947 when they were sent on an assignment in an RAF car. Both Aircraftwomen 2nd Class were trained drivers. On the night Kathleen was the detailed driver with Lilian as companion.
It was foggy weather and the car went out of control on a nasty ‘S bend’ near Runnymede and crashed into the River Thames. Both girls were drowned.
Lilian was buried at Cosby cemetery in her home village just outside Leicester and Kathleen in Leicester’s Gilroes Cemetery.
Another WAAF Sheila Carpenter, aged 20, died in Harrogate, Yorkshire after a tonsil operation in 1940. A strip of gauze was left in her throat and an inquest ruled death by misadventure censuring the hospital. She was laid to rest in Gilroes Cemetery.
Doris Norman was just 18 in 1943 and as a Royal Navy Wren was posted to HMS Ferret a shore station on the Northern Ireland coast which was an important unit helping to organise and protect Atlantic convoys. She became ill and died and is commemorated in her home town of Market Bosworth, Leicestershire in St Peter’s churchyard.
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.
Next week flying training as well as flying in combat was hazardous and many paid the ultimate price of the headlong race to get crews into the air and off to bomb Germany.
