THE YMCA at WAR
HIGHLIGHTING the YMCA work in wartime on the back of their 170th Birthday yesterday
MEET THE UNSUNG HEROINES OF WORLD WAR I
Behind the frontline of the Great War were an army of women playing a pivotal role in history. On the First World War centenary, meet the unsung heroines of WWI
Few events in human history have changed the world as quickly and as completely as the First World War. The conflict lasted 52 brutal months and involved over 100 countries. During that relentless stretch of slaughter, which saw 37 million human beings killed or wounded, the ideals of Edwardian Britain were ripped apart. An estimated two million women replaced absent men in the workplace, the remnants of a feudal society petered into history (into the void came the ideologies of fascism and communism) and the technological advances brought about from war seeped into every aspect of life from offices to farms, hospitals and factories.
While men fought a war of attrition in the trenches, the world became modern, and women were at the epicentre of change. The Representation of the People Act was passed in February 1918, allowing property-owning women over the age of 30 to vote, and in November of the same year – themonth the war ended – the Eligibility of Women Act allowed women to be elected to parliament. And while many women returned, some begrudgingly, to a life of domesticity once peace had been declared in Europe, the Great War showed in stark terms how women were equal to men in bravery, ingenuity and capacity to work. So in the centenary year of World War One we celebrate the women who lived, fought and died in the war, and changed the way the world viewed women.
Betty Stevenson (1896-1918), YMCA Volunteer known as 'The Happy Warrior'
As one of many women working unpaid for the YMCA, 19-year-old Betty Stevenson, a wealthy middle-class girl from Harrogate, Yorkshire, was determined to follow men into war. She moved to training camps near Paris where the YMCA provided rest huts and moral support for troops, before they returned to the frontline. Pre-war, the YMCA was an organisation run ‘for young men by young men’ but as the men who staffed these huts were enlisted, the job fell to women.
The YMCA Women’s Auxiliary was formed in 1914 as war broke out. By 1918, over 40,000 ‘ladies of the red triangle’ had served in the Auxiliary, all unpaid and required to cover their own expenses (it was a distinctly middle-class pursuit; Churchill’s wife Clementine was also a committed volunteer). A keen letter writer, it is largely down to Betty’s correspondence home, that we know so much about her. Educated at her childhood home in Clifton, York, Betty was dispatched to boarding school in Haslemere, Surrey at 14. Her work ethic was notable from as young as 15, when she wrote in a school essay dated June, 1911: “It makes a great difference to your life, if you have a vocation or not. If you have, it makes you feel as though you had some object or aim in your life or work.”
At 16, Betty travelled to London with her parents, both YMCA supporters, to bring refugee families camped out at Alexandra Palace back to Harrogate. Her initiative and hard work with Henry Brice – who organised the transport for the mission – would later help her secure a driving job with the YMCA. After Betty’s death, Brice said: “If I ever had an impossible task, I would have put Betty to do it. And [even] if she failed, you would have found her head erect and smiling.”
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