Martin Cox - Fanys at war - the real charlotte grays.

F.A.N.Y.

The F.A.N.Y.
in
Peace and War

The Story of
THE FIRST AID NURSING YEOMANRY
19072003

HUGH POPHAM

First published in Great Britain 1984 by
LEO COOPER, then an imprint of Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Reissued in this new, revised edition 2003 by
LEO COOPER
an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street,
Barnsley,
S. Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright 2003 by F.A.N.Y. (P.R.V.C.)

ISBN 0 85052 934 4
Line drawings by Tim Jaques

Printed in England by
CPI UK

DEDICATION

This edition is dedicated to the memory of
Sheila Parkinson
Corps Commander 19641990

CONTENTS

To answer that convoluted question is one of the purposes of this book. That there is a certain amount of confusion in the matter may be judged from the following remarks recorded during its writing.

The FANYS? I remember them, of course, during the war. They dont still exist, do they?

Werent they sort of like the ATS?

Rather posh girls driving staff cars, I seem to remember.

They were started during the Boer War?

I had an aunt who was one.

Yes, of course I know all about the FANYS. They were widely regarded as sexually sophisticated, but only available to officers of very senior rank. (This from an ex-RNVR lieutenant.)

Werent they the same as the VADS?

The Japanese were as confused as anyone. This comes from a Tokyo paper of 1946, a time when the FANYS were running a number of canteens for the British and Commonwealth forces occupying the country:

Four beautiful English ladies wearing khaki uniform over their harmonious bodies talk about their impression of the water paradise, Matsue FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, is an army organized by female patriots of Britain who are proud of an old brilliant tradition and is so famous that it is distinguished among all the British forces They were as brave and meritorious as Joan of Arc in the Crimean War, who is world famous as a brave and gentle nightingale.

FANY is one of such womens troops and its history is old. It is the very origin that in 1907 they served in the rear riding on horseback They usually stayed in British Colonies, but during the Second World War they showed their active endeavour in the European Front, France and Belgium and the Far Eastern Front As truck drivers and aeroplane pilots their service did not fall behind mens and some of them are told, pitifully to say, to have died in the battle.

Whoever wrote that did not in fact do too badly. He got the title right, and the date of their founding; and though there is no record of a FANY Spitfire pilot, they did drive trucks and ambulances in both world wars, and nurse typhoid cases like the brave and gentle nightingale and drag the wounded out of exploding ammunition dumps, and drop into Occupied Europe as agents, and operate the wireless sets that maintained contact with them; and some of them, pitifully to say, did die in the battle.

Moreover, they do still exist, as a small, voluntary well-trained corps of women with specialized skills of the kind that tend to come in useful in such emergencies as wars, aircraft crashes, terrorist bombings, and other incidents of that kind. You will find them, for instance, training in the Central Casualty and Inquiry Bureau of the City of London Police, and if you were allowed in in certain highly secret army communications centres. More readily, you might come across them with their RT sets monitoring the progress of competitors at horse trials, or recording the scores at the TAVRs annual Courage Trophy, learning first aid and unarmed combat, or interpreting at gatherings of German functionaries and Brazilian trade delegations and Portuguese military missions.

You wont often see them in uniform, except when training or on duty with the services, and they dont go in for square-bashing though they can march in step when they have to, and they do know how to salute. They were once described by a senior army officer in the First World War, in a moment of bafflement, as neither fish, flesh nor fowl but damned good red herring, which may help to explain the confusion, if not much else. And no, they are not Sloane Rangers or lesbians or horsey girls from the Shires, or Amazons in army boots, or rampant feminists. They are modern in the sense that they have brains and like to use them and most of them have rather good jobs but they are also, some would say quaintly, old-fashioned in that they feel a sense of responsibility towards the society in which they live, and if and when this balloon or that goes up, would rather be doing something constructive than sit about wringing their hands. They also find that learning new skills, or using the ones they have in a different field, in the company of like-minded people, is quite fun. And where else, after all, as one of them remarked, can you learn map-reading or orienteering or rifle-shooting or Morse or unarmed combat for a subscription of five pounds a year?

The FANYs official title since 1937 is the Womens Transport Service (FANY). Accurate when it was introduced, it rapidly ceased to be entirely so, and now, when the Corps main interest is in wireless communications, is almost totally misleading. But as no one has ever used it except officially the point is purely academic. The FANYS they have always been, and will remain. If this should strike the reader as odd, one soon learns that almost everything about the FANYS is fairly odd, starting with the fact that their founder was a man, and a man, at that, whose origins and ultimate fate are wrapped in impenetrable mystery, and whose motives, even, are by no means entirely clear. With which opaque but stimulating nugget of information, we may proceed with the story.

We are delighted that HRH The Princess Royal, Commandant in Chief FANY (PRVC) has provided the Foreword to this revised edition.

The updating of F.A.N.Y. would not have been possible without the help of a number of people who provided new material, read and revised the first edition, researched data and photographs, and gave helpful advice during the preparation of this edition. Particular thanks are extended to Mark Seaman, late of The Imperial War Museum, and to Ailsa Camm, FANY archivist: to Anna Whitehead, Margaret Pawley, and Lynette Beardwood: and to the staff at FANY Headquarters.