International Women’s Day 2026 – Thank you for your service!
It was timely that Dr Nina Baker’s book on the brave Scottish Merchant Navy women who lost their lives in World War II should cross our desks the other week and I am grateful to Lt Cdr Helen Taylor RN for reviewing it. It generated the question, what about the 75,000 members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service known as the WRNS? It was a less enlightened era so their primary purpose was ‘to free up manpower to serve at sea’ but that meant that they got to serve in many important roles across the war effort from parachute packing, to ammunition technicians, photographers, coxswains, drivers, photographers and coders. Our grateful thanks to Dr Jo Strange for the following taken from her book on the history of the WRNS published in 2016.
We shall remember them
303 members of the WRNS died during the war; there were understandably few who perished at sea. Some of the worst large-scale losses were when accommodation blocks were bombed. The fallen are recorded in the Book of Remembrance which resides in St Mary Le Strand church in London. They are rightly commemorated every year by the Association of Wrens.
Honours and awards
116 awards for bravery were made to members of the wartime WRNS. Others were recognised for being in a particular service or campaign. Leading Wren Nina Marsh won the first, a British Empire Medal (BEM), in 1940. Mary ‘Johnnie’ Ferguson, who was travelling from Argentina to become a Wren, won another, along with the Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea, for looking after others in a lifeboat after her merchant ship, the Avila Star was torpedoed on 5 July 1942. Wren Driver Beth Booth, was awarded a BEM for bravery in 1944: the citation declared she had “helped drag a Fleet Air Arm observer away from the wreckage of his crashed Swordfish biplane, while explosions inside the aircraft scattered burning debris all around them.”
Sadly, it seems few awards were given because of several in-built reasons. The honours system was very poor at recognising women, particularly those on the domestic front. In 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told parliament “There will be no sex distinction where the conditions [for awarding it] are satisfied.” That has been disputed. Four decades later a House of Commons Select Committee still found “race and gender can determine whether (and what kind of) an honour is received.” It recommended urgent action “to make the system fairer to all.” Also, women in that war were not allowed into positions where they could be the “right sort of brave, gallant and distinguished.” Another view was that reporting women’s valour meant revealing how much women were at risk (and therefore being defeminised en masse), as well as somehow taking away from the significance of men’s actions.
Or, as in other services, distinguished acts were written out in some way, often for gendered and propagandist reasons. For example, WRNS Second Officer Audrey Coningham (later Roche) (1909-2009) is one of the rare women honoured for bravery at sea. She was part of a group being evacuated from Alexandria in 1942 when her ship, HMS Medway, was torpedoed. She saved a man from drowning by giving up her own lifejacket. Senior officers who were there and the C-in-C Mediterranean immediately recommended her for the Albert Medal. This was turned down and she was simply Mentioned in Despatches. Part of the problem was that the Awards committee back in London held that she was a strong swimmer so “had not put her own life at risk.” Certainly, no Wren would want special acclaim just because she was female, so she did not protest.
But other forces are likely to have been at work including wartime spin-doctors who did not want to admit that Wrens had been in that tragedy, and that thirty people had drowned. Audrey wore her oak leaf decoration proudly at commemorative ceremonies. But at least one male officer was outraged at this and could not believe that a woman was entitled to it.
The WRNS awards process was also hindered by tardiness and allocation quotas. Each year there was only a limited number allowed. The delays meant by the end of the war many more had been recommended than could be honoured. So many deserving candidates did not get the recognition they merited.
Beyond the war
Peace brought many wedding bells, although an unknown number had wed in war, often in one of the ‘stash’ of lendable wedding dresses Polly Cartland assembled for the purpose. Of the thirty WRNS members sent to the Far East with Betty Archdale, eleven were wed quickly, six to Navy and Fleet Air Arm men. Other Wrens had held off from marrying in wartime but now felt they could relinquish their dedication to service. Leading steward Lois Price walked up the aisle on VJ Day. Newspaper wedding photographs show a high number of husbands were naval officers. Molly Shakepear’s marriage to the submarine ace to which she had been secretary was attended by five admirals, one of whom said her war record was “almost as distinguished as her husband’s.”
What next, workwise? “Some of you will be quite certain the one thing you want to do is get back to where you left off before the war,” thought one early-demobbed cinema Wren. Others struggled after living a wartime life “much more varied, more colourful, richer than anything we had known before.” Finding jobs for the demobbed is always a feat, and it was harder for women whose expectations turned out to have been rather fruitlessly raised, especially if seeking mechanical work.
‘Johnnie’ Ferguson became a secretary to the chairman of Booker McConnell and looked after her widowed brother’s household but “remained steadfastly reticent about her wartime exploits,” as so many veterans did. Others, acting with newfound agency, drastically changed course. Torpedoed Freda Bonner retrained as a doctor: “Was it the memory of the naval doctor swimming from raft to raft [helping flat out for two days before he died] that led me to make this choice?” Twenty-year old Dorothy Runnicles went on from the remote Scottish RNAS Fearn, “run almost entirely by women…. We had a chief officer woman, and all the mechanics were women” to another women’s world: Bedford College for Ladies where they all became social workers bent on improving others’ conditions. She joined the University Women’s Boat Club. Unlike most Wrens, who do not criticise the military, “I still think about the war regularly because it was so awful, a ridiculous slaughter of people. I joined the Peace Pledge Union…. By now we should have learned how to avoid war” and later she demonstrated at Aldermaston and Greenham Common.
Some of the luckiest Wrens went on work at sea, as Lady Assistant Pursers on liners. WRNS training had made many ideal employees for many jobs – if only they could settle. And some became volunteer leaders of the Sea Rangers, which the Admiralty had formally recognised in 1945 and in the Girls’ Nautical Training Corps.
Salute
So, in 2026, a glimpse of a past age and a big salute to their service, those who served up until 1993 and then those who joined the Royal Navy along with the women who serve today and their many female civilian counterparts, whether they work in defence or support it, and, of course, all those women who support their partners by being part of the wider Naval family.
