Women of colour in the ATS and WAAF in the early years of World War 2

By Audrey Dewjee (8^th November 2024)

When people speak or write about the contribution of women of colour to the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the army (ATS), and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in the Second World War, they are usually referring to women who came over to Britain from the Caribbean in 1943 and 1944. However, in this article, I want to focus on some earlier pioneers about whom little has been written.

At a time when there was supposed to be a colour bar in the armed forces, several young women managed to become accepted in the women’s services. How did this happen, and how were they treated by their colleagues and officers?

ATS recruits born in Britain

Some of these early recruits were native Britons. Perhaps the first to join up was Norma Quaye. She was photographed on 19^th December 1939 with three white colleagues by Reggie (“Scoop”) Speller, who worked for Fox Photos based in Fleet Street, London. It was noted in the caption to the picture that, at the time, she was the only Black member of the ATS.

Norma Doris Quaye was born on 10^th September 1922, the daughter of Caleb Jonas Kwamlah Quaye from what was then the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Doris Balderson an English music hall artiste. Her father, a pianist and band leader, died before she was born. He was killed in a railway accident in Northamptonshire on 27^th January, on his way to perform in a concert. Norma’s older brother was the famous Jazz musician Cab Kaye.^[1]For information about Cab Kaye see https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/mar/21/guardianobituaries2 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cab_Kaye

On the 1939 register, Norma was recorded as a pupil nurse, living in Salisbury, Wiltshire. In 1943, she married Olakunle J.T. Nelson-Cole and later went to live in Lagos, Nigeria. Norma’s sons also became well-known performers in Nigeria, first as the Nelson Cole Brothers and then as part of Soul Assembly.

At least two young ladies from Bute Town, Cardiff (aka ‘Tiger Bay’) joined the ATS. Their photographs and some memories of their service life appeared on the BBC News website in 2005.^[2]Information from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/4476215.stm Patricia Douglas (later Mrs. Smith) who enlisted in 1941 recollected that she never had any trouble because of racism, but Private Vera Roberts (later Mrs. Johnson) was court-martialed because she hit a young chap over the head with a large serving spoon after he knelt in front of her and started singing ‘Mammy, Mammy.’ However, she explained that she ‘got away with it’ because witnesses testified what he had done.

Mildred Josephine Milne, service no. W/94611, enlisted in Lancashire. Known as Milly, she was born in Liverpool on 5^th June 1925, the daughter of Dalie Milni and his wife Mary, née Fletcher. Dalie Milni, a Muslim, was Indonesian and a sea-going ship’s bosun; her mother was from Liverpool. Dalie also owned a café/tobacconist at 24, Mill Street, Liverpool. At some point, he changed the family name to the more English-sounding Milne.

In the ATS, Milly served as a chef. In 1945, she was one of the very few British women who had the harrowing experience of entering the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp after it had been liberated by Allied troops.

Towards the end of 1953, Milly married Joseph Ignatius Armstrong, a Jamaican double bass player, who came to England on the Empire Windrush. He was already well-known in Jamaica as a member of Delroy Stephen’s band, The Commandos. He had intended to forge a musical career in the USA and Paris and he saw the trip to England as a step on his way, but meeting Mildred changed the course of his life. He fell in love and decided to remain in Liverpool, where the couple became parents to seven daughters. Milly died in Liverpool on 31^st March, 1996, three years after Joseph passed away.^[3]Thanks are due to Bill Hern, Head of Research at Historycal Roots, for telling me about Mildren Milne and sharing his research about her with me.

ATS recruits from the Caribbean and India

Other recruits prior to 1943 were women from the Caribbean area or India, who were already resident in Britain before war was declared.

Maud Ivy Belboda, known as Ivy, had been living in England since August 1929 when she came to attend a school in Cornwall. Born on 16^th September 1920 (I think in Dominica) she was described as a ‘Scion of an old Dominica family and a highly gifted St. Kitts father.’ She was the eldest child of Rev. Alban Edward Belboda (b.1889), a Methodist Minister, and his first wife Ruth E. Bellot Belboda. Sadly Ruth died in childbirth two years later.

Ivy wasn’t yet nine when she travelled to Britain, destined for West Cornwall College, a Methodist girls’ school in Penzance, where she excelled in music and gymnastics. Her father came on a visit to Britain in 1934, no doubt to see his daughter, but he also completed a round of meetings at Methodist churches in Halifax and surrounding districts in Yorkshire while he was here. Ivy became a student of the organ and was reported to be doing extremely well in an item in the Dominica Tribune in August 1939. On the 1939 register she was recorded as a university student, living in Cardiff. When war broke out, she joined the ATS and by 1942 she was serving in radio location (an early form of radar) in South Wales.

After the war she became a probation officer before starting to work for the British Caribbean Welfare Department at the Colonial Office in 1957, helping to settle new migrants to Britain. She married Sydney Alleyne at Willesden, London in early 1958 and remained in Britain for the rest of her life. She died in Camden in 2003.

Adina Henrietta Williams, a 30-year-old nurse from British Guiana (now Guyana) came to Britain on holiday in 1938 and stayed on. She arrived at Plymouth on board the Van Rensselaer and gave her destination as 315 Park Road, Blackpool.

On the 1939 register, she is listed as a widow, born 15^th March 1908, living at 6 George Road, Blackpool, and her occupation is given as ‘unpaid domestic duties’. When war broke out, she joined the ATS and worked alongside men in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, re-treading tyres on army vehicles. Her photograph at work repairing tyres appeared in the Evening Standard in 1942, and she was featured on a wartime poster in a series, Empire War Workers in Britian, albeit with her name wrongly recorded as ‘Diana Williams’! She was also mentioned in an article in the Pittsburgh Courier in early 1943, after she had been promoted to Lance Corporal. Sadly, Adina Williams died in Surrey in 1956, still in her forties.

Another early member of the ATS was Corporal Hinds who was photographed by Fred Morley (also of Fox Photos) on 18^th December 1942. No first names or further biographical details about her were mentioned in the captions, other than that she was originally from Barbados and that her role in the ATS was to train new recruits. Four photos of her can be seen on the Getty Images website.^[4]See for example https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/corporal-hinds-of-the-british-auxiliary-territorial-service-news-photo/609701315 and … Continue reading They depict her registering new recruits, showing them to their sleeping quarters and how to tie their ties, and at leisure playing darts. To have risen to the rank of corporal, she must have been serving in the ATS for some time.

Very little is known about another recruit who is pictured in a photograph in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. The typed wartime caption reads simply ‘Corporal M.E. Webster, from Calcutta, working at a typewriter, while serving with the ATS in East Lancashire.’

WAAF recruits

The stories of WAAF recruits Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan and Lilian Bailey (later Mrs. Bader) have become reasonably well known. However, there were other early recruits to the service whose stories are scarcely known at all.

When war was declared, Barbara Amelia Gordon joined the WAAF and became a telephone switchboard operator. The eldest child of Dr. Edgar Fitzgerald Gordon and the former Clara Marguerite Christian, Barbara was born in Scotland in 1918, while her father was a medical student at Edinburgh University. Her mother, who also had been a medical student in Edinburgh, gave up her studies on her marriage, but she is still recognised as the first black female student at Edinburgh University.^[5]https://global.ed.ac.uk/uncovered/1910/clara-marguerite-christian [accessed 02/11/2024]

After he graduated, Dr. Gordon took up a post as doctor in the small Scottish town of Kingussie where he lived for three years. In 1921 he and his wife returned to the Caribbean with Barbara and twin daughters, and in 1924 the family moved from Dominica to Bermuda. The couple separated, and in 1935, Barbara and her three sisters were sent to La Sagesse Convent boarding school in Hampshire. While Barbara served in the WAAF, her youngest sister, Marjorie was a trainee nurse at Queen Mary Hospital, Carshalton, which was one the most heavily bombed hospitals in the war.

Barbara Gordon married an American serviceman, Woodrow Wilcoxon, in Cambridge in 1945 and emigrated to America after the war. She settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where she died on 3^rd August 1986, aged 68. Details on her death record show that she was a widow and a registered nurse. Her race was listed as ‘Non-white’.

Barbara came from an extraordinary family. A great deal of information about her parents and grandparents can be found online, as well as information about her famous niece, Moira Stuart. Moira spoke about the wartime experiences of her aunt and mother on Woman’s Hour when she was interviewed by Anita Rani. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b3k4cy

 Hylda May Lumsden, born in Alipore, Calcutta (now Kolkata) on 27^th September 1921, came to Britain in 1931 with her mother and two sisters, presumably to attend school. She was educated in Torquay, and in 1939 she was living with her parents and sisters in Bristol, when the three girls were recorded as students. She enlisted in the WAAF in or after May 1941. By 1943 she had risen to the rank of Leading Aircraftwoman (LACW) and was photographed at an RAF radio school, under the caption, ‘Anglo-Indian WAAF trains as wireless operator.’

Hylda remained in Britain after the war. On 9^th February 1949, her name was listed on the UK Physiotherapy and Masseuse Register, under the heading ‘Medical gymnastics’. In 1979, the Worthing Herald reported that she was one of a group of helpers who accompanied pilgrims to Lourdes, and that she was a member of a group which raised £150,000 to build a centre in Lourdes, Hosanna House, where pilgrims could stay. She was the author of a 37-page booklet on Caring for the Cerebral Palsy Child in 1970, and another short booklet, Julian of Norwich: An Introduction, in 1990, and in 1994, the Sussex Express mentioned her as a local artist. Hylda May Lumsden died on 26^th September 2014, the day before her 93^rd birthday,

Lilian Bailey was born in Liverpool in February 1918, but soon after she went to live in Hull after the breakup of her parents’ marriage. Her father died in Hull in January, 1927, and later the same year, her mother was drowned in a flood in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Lilian subsequently spent the remainder of her childhood and teenage years in an orphanage in Middlesbrough, where she received a good education.

Wanting to do her bit for the war effort, Lilian obtained work in a NAFFI canteen in 1939, serving food and drinks to soldiers and airmen at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire, but she soon encountered problems with the colour bar. About seven weeks after she started work, she was dismissed because her father hadn’t been born in the UK. After a variety of jobs, she started working for a kind and thoughtful Jewish lady and her family in Leeds. While there she heard a radio interview with West Indian men who were serving in the RAF. This gave Lilian the idea of applying to the WAAF, and to her delight she was accepted in March 1941.

After a period of domestic work cleaning the quarters of WAAF officers stationed in York, she was told that she had been accepted for one of the new trades being opened to WAAFs, that of Instrument Repairer. After successfully completing her training course and being promoted to Aircraftwoman First Class (which doubled her pay), she spent the rest of her time in the WAAF checking for leaks in the aluminium pipes on which so many instruments in a plane depended, eventually rising to the rank of Acting Corporal.

In her memoir of her service days, written for the Imperial War Museum in 1988, Lilian doesn’t report any incidences of racism, though she does remember ‘a witty cockney in York’ calling her ‘Cherry Blossom’, after the shoe polish! She said this didn’t bother her, as no one else used the name. However, when she realised that everyone in the service was known by a nickname, Lilian herself chose ‘Cherry,’ explaining ‘as I had always been aware of the incongruity of my own name, shortened by classmates to Lily, I voluntarily…christened myself Cherry.’

During her service, she met and married Ramsay Bader, the son of an African father who served in WW1 and an English mother. Ramsay was a D-Day tank driver in the Essex Yeomanry. Lilian was discharged from the WAAF in February 1944 as she was expecting her first child. In later years, Lilian obtained a degree and became a language teacher. During her life, she dedicated herself to fighting racism and to ensuring that the service of Black and Asian people in both World Wars was not forgotten. Lilian died on 14^th March 2015, aged 97.

Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was the daughter of Inayat Khan, an Indian classical musician and the leader of the Sufi order in the West, and Ora Ray Baker, an American of British ancestry. Born in Moscow on 1 January 1914, Noor and her family moved to Paris six years later. They lived in London during WW1 and then returned to Paris, where Inayat Khan died in 1927. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Noor, her brother Vilayet and sister Claire came to England, where they hoped to engage in war service. Vilayet initially intended to join the RAF but his eyesight was too poor, so he joined the Royal Navy instead. Changing her first name to Nora, Noor enlisted in the WAAF in November 1940, training as a wireless operator and initially serving on a bomber command station. From there, because of her fluency in French, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive, which was set up in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe and to aid local resistance movements.

Noor was the first female radio operator to be flown into occupied France. On the night of 16^th/17^th June, 1943, she took off in a light plane, and landed safely. Unfortunately the section of the resistance that she joined had been betrayed to the Gestapo. After evading capture for three weeks, Noor was arrested in Paris, interrogated, imprisoned in Dachau and eventually executed by firing squad along with three other female agents. Posthumously, she was awarded the George Cross and the French Croix de Guerre with Gold Star. Noor’s full, inspiring life story is told in Spy Princess by Shrabani Basu.^[6]Shrabani Basu, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan, Sutton Publishing, 2006.

Conclusion

Looking at the experiences of these twelve women, it seems that, despite the colour bar, enlisting in the ATS or WAAF early in WW2 was not impossible for women of colour. Most of those who had arrived in Britain from other parts of the world appear to have been accepted without hesitation, perhaps because they were the daughters of middle-class parents, many of whom had studied at private schools in Britain. Some recruiting officers also appear to have been willing to enlist British-born women of colour on the same basis as their White friends and neighbours.

Whether their skin colour had any bearing on their progression in the forces is unknown. Apart from Noor Inayat Khan, who was granted an honorary commission as Assistant Section Officer in the WAAF just before she was flown into France – possibly in the hope that it would help to protect her in the event of capture – none of the others appear to have risen to commissioned officer status, although some reached the non-commissioned rank of Corporal.

Apart from the few recorded racist incidents, once they had joined the relevant services these women appear to have been accepted by their officers and colleagues and to have enjoyed their time in uniform, experiencing little aggravation of a racist nature.

I suspect that there were other women of colour, as yet unknown, in the ATS and WAAF in the early years of WW2 and I hope further research will be done to discover their stories.

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This article could not have been written without the help of Bill Hern, who provided additional details about Ivy Belboda and Hylda Lumsden, as well as alerting me to the story of Mildred Milne.