In May 2012, following attendance at a performance of the musical “Bullets and Daffodils” about the life and work of WW1 soldier poet Wilfred Owen, I volunteered to help the little group of actors who travel around performing the musical drama. They also run a museum to the memory of Wilfred Owen called The Wilfred Owen Story, which is situated in Argyle Street, Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula in the north west of England. Wilfred was brought up and educated on the Wirral Peninsula and by a strange coincidence so was I. At the request of Dean Johnson who runs the Wilfred Owen Story Museum, I began researching women who wrote poetry during World War One for an exhibition held there in November 2012. I began by looking for a woman poet with a connection to the Wirral Peninsula and discovered that May Sinclair was born in Rock Ferry, which is a few miles down the cost from Birkenhead.
By the time WW1 broke out in Europe in August 1914, May was famous on both sides of the Atlantic as an author and poet. It was May who first used the phrase "stream of consciousness" to describe a literary work. Although she was by no means a young woman, May went to Belgium in September 1914 with the Dr Hector Monro Flying Ambulance Unit as Dr Monro's Personal Assistant. May also financed the unit. The experiences of the unit were such that within six weeks May was sent bak to England suffering from medical symptoms described as "Shell Shock". She wrote about her experiences and wrote two poems which she dedicated to the unit.
I began to add poets of other nationalities and am slowly building up a list of women poets of all nationalities and from many different countries, for this was the first time a war affected every country of the globe and every man, woman and child too. I'd love to know if you have poets to add to the list which you will find here http://www.femalewarpoets.blogspot.co.uk/p/female-poets-of-first-world-war-revised.html.
One of the poets for whom I have a great deal of admiration is Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Ella travelled to France to entertain the American troops in 1918. Can you imagine what it must have been like taking a liner across the Atlantic (no Jumbo Jets in those days) with the risk of torpedoes and mines sinking the ship at any moment? And practical everyday things like travel-size cosmetics and toiletries and light-weight cases did not exist back then. For younger women, Tampax and Lil-lets hadn't been invented yet either, but they were resourceful women and in spite of the terrible conditions they lived and worked in while in the various theatres of war, and in spite of being hampered by long hair, long skirts and high-button boots, they coped admirably and wrote about their experiences.
By the time the exhibition was up and running in November 2012, I was well and truly hooked on researching the poetry of the First World War and had started a weblog - www.femalewarpoets.blogspot.co.uk. People contacted me and asked for some of the exhibition panels and exhibitions were held in several other venues. I was also contacted by relatives of some of the poets on my ever-growing list.
I had also branched out to include some of the amazing women who were not poets - women like Mary Riter Hamilton, the Canadian artist who went to paint the aftermath, travelling to France in 1919. Mary's story was so incredible - she lived in a tin hut among the Chinese workers who cleared away the debris left by the conflict and helped to bury the dead - that I could not leave her out. Mary stayed in France for three years painting well over 300 pictures, her health suffered and she lost the sight of one eye but she did not give up. That is how the heading "Inspirational Women of World War One" came into being and I put together a book which features some of those women. I called the book "No Woman's Land" and started a weblog too - www.inspirationalwomenofww1.blogspot.co.uk.
The stories of those women is very inspiring and I feel we should celebrate their lives more. I think it is a shame that women in general the world over do not seem to have built upon the progress made during the First World War when the world needed women.
Lucy London, January 2015 Photo: One of Mary Riter Hamilton's pictures.
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