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Minnie James (née Watkins)
Place of birth: Merthyr Tydfil
Service: Mother
Death: 1954, Cause not known
Notes: Minnie was married to William James in January 1891. They had six surviving children. Her three elder sons all served during the War. David was killed in September 1915, aged 24. Thomas died from wounds Christmas day 1918, aged 21, and Jack, who had been wounded too, died of tuberculosis in June 1920 also aged 24. rnIn 1938 Minnie James, then aged 72, was selected to represent all the Welsh mothers who had lost sons during the War, and to open The Temple of Peace.rn
Sources: http://www.walesforpeace.org/wfp/theme_TempleInternationalism.html
Reference: WaW0264
Mary Sutherland
Place of birth: London
Service: Forester, WLA, 1916 -17
Death: 1955, Wellington, New Zealand, Cause not known
Notes: Mary Sutherland was the first woman in Britain to gain a degree in Forestry. She studied at University College, Bangor from 1912 to 1916. After graduation (in the same year as Mary Dilys Glynne and Violet Gale Jackson qv) she worked in the forestry division of the Women’s Land Army, and from 1917 as an assistant experimental officer for the Forestry Commission. Following the contraction of the Forestry Commission in 1922 she moved to New Zealand where she worked for the newly formed State Forest Service.
Sources: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 1998.
Reference: WaW0314
Newspaper report
Report of Bangor graduates including Mary Sutherland, Violet Gale Jackson and Mary Glynne. North Wales Chronicle 7th July 1916.
Dorothea Adelaide Lawry Pughe Jones
Place of birth: Surrey
Service: Suffragist, Commandant, Ethnographer, Educationalist, Public servant, Church Warden, Heiress., VAD, 1914 - 1920
Death: 1955, Cause not known
Notes: Dorothea Pughe Jones, born 1875, inherited Ynysgain, Cricieth from her father in 1897. Following his death she attended Oxford University where she studied history followed by a diploma in ethnography. She was awarded a prize at the 1901 National Eisteddfod for a Welsh history textbook. In 1902 she was part of a British Government team inspecting education in the concentration camps for Boers in South Africa. In 1910 she was one of the founders of the Bangor and District Women’s Suffrage Society. She joined the VAD in 1914, initially as Quartermaster of Caernarfon, but volunteered for service in France in 1915. She was Commandant of the Hotel des Anglaises, the hostel for the relatives of wounded officers in Le Touquet, France, for which she was awarded the MBE. Whilst in France she was appointed Churchwarden in Cricieth despite objections that she was ‘a lady’. In November 1918 she was posted to Salonika as Principal Commandant of the VAD, until May 1920. After her return she was sent by the Government to research openings for women in Australia.
Sources: GB 0210 YNYSGAIN - Pughe-Jones of Ynysgain Collection of Deeds and Papers National Library of Wales Women members and witnesses on British Government ad hoc Committees of Inquiry Elaine Harrison, London School of Economics, Doctor of Philosophy, 1998.
Reference: WaW0320
Newspaper report
Report of Dorothea Pughe Jones’s return from South Africa. Cambrian News 8th May 1903.
Newspaper report
Report of meeting of AGM of Bangor and District Women’s Suffrage Society. North Wales Express 2nd December 1910.
Newspaper report
Report of Dorothea’s appointment as churchwarden. North Wales Chronicle 20th April 1917.
Newspaper report
Australian newspaper report of Dorothea Pughe Jones’s role in the enquiry into openings in Australia for women from the UK. The Advertiser 10th January 1920 Adelaide S Australia.
Winifred Margaret Coombe Tennant (née Pearce-Serocold)
Place of birth: Stroud
Service: Committee woman, suffragist, bard, spiritualist, patron, mother.
Death: 1956, London, Cause not known
Notes: Winifred was born in 1874; her mother, née Mary Richardson, was Welsh. She married Charles Coombe Tennant in 1895 and they lived at Cadoxton Lodge, near Neath. She became a member of the NUWSS in 1911 and later served on its committee, as well as chairing the Neath committee. During the war she was chair of the Neath Pensions committee and the Glamorgan War Agricultural committee; she was also interested in rural housing and penal reform (she became a JP in 1920). In 1917 she was admitted to the Gorsedd of Bards, taking the bardic name ‘Mam o Nedd’. She chaired the Arts and Crafts committee for the 1918 Eisteddfod, and later became Mistress of the Robes. She had become interested in spiritualism following the death of her baby daughter Daphne in 1908; this revived following the death of her eldest son, killed in Flanders in September 1917, aged 19. She became a well-respected medium though her identity was known only to a few people – she used the pseudonym Mrs Willett. She stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for the Forest of Dean in the 1922 general election, and was a staunch patron of Welsh artists, particularly Evan Walters.
Sources: Winifred Tennant: a life through Art Peter Lord NLW 2007.\r\nhttp://yba.llgc.org.uk/en/s2-COOM-MAR-1874.htm
Reference: WaW0268
Newspaper report
Report of Winifred Coombe Tennant’s election to the committee of the NUWSS, Cambria Daily Leader 8th July 1915.
Newspaper report
Winifred as organiser of the Glamorgan War Agricultural Committee, Herald of Wales 20th May 1916.
Newspaper report
Report of a meeting discussing rural reconstruction in Wales after the War. Herald of Wales 10th August 1918.rn
Newspaper report
Report of opening of the Art and Crafts Section of the National Eisteddfod, Neath 1918. Also Herald of Wales 10th August 1918.rn
Mary Elizabeth Phillips (Eppynt)
Place of birth: Merthyr Cynog, Brecon
Service: Doctor, Scottish Womens Hospitals, Royal Army Medical Corp, 1914 - 1919
Death: 1956, Cause not known
Notes: Born 1874, Mary Phillips, who took the name ‘Eppynt’ from the mountains near her birthplace, was the first women to train as a doctor at University College, Cardiff (1894 – 8), and subsequently worked in England. She was a supporter of NUWSS, and sometimes spoke at meetings. On 8th December 1914 she received a telegram from the NUWSS-supported Scottish Women’s Hospitals asking her to go to their hospital in Calais ‘at once’. She remained there until April 1915, when she joined the SWH at Valjevo, Serbia. She was invalided home with fever just before many SWH members were captured by the Austrian/Bulgarian army [see Elizabeth Clement, Gwenllian Morris]. In April 1916 she was appointed medical hospital at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Ajaccio, Corsica, where many of the refugees from the retreat from Serbia were accommodated. She served there for 14 months before returning to tour England and Wales raising funds for the Serbian Hospitals; she was a noted speaker in Welsh and English. In 1918 she went to London to work at the Endell Street Military Hospital in London, a 573-bed hospital staffed entirely by women, most of them suffragettes. After the War she became Deputy Medical Officer of Health for Merthyr Tydfil.
Reference: WaW0362
Dr Mary Eppynt Phillips
Dr Mary Eppynt Phillips in the uniform of the Royal Army Medical Corps, photograph taken in 1920. Imperial War Museum.
Telegram
Telegram asking Dr Phillips to proceed to Calais, 8th September 1914. National Library of Wales.
Newspaper report
Report of the award to Dr Phillips of the insignia of the order of St Java [sic, actually Sava] by the King of Serbia. Brecon and Radnor Express 22nd August 1918.
Cissie Cripps
Place of birth: Brecon
Service: Volunteer, Womens Volunteer Reserve Corps, 1915 - ?
Death: 1956, Montreal, Canada, Cause not known
Notes: Cissie was a chauffeuse before the war. She had two brothers serving in the army, and joined the Women’s Volunteer Reserve Corps in Folkestone in August 1915. In 1920 she emigrated to Montreal Canada, where she later married George Elsdon Mears and had three daughters. Thanks to Ian Sumpter.
Reference: WaW0374
Cissie Cripps
Cissie Cripps of Brecon, looking ‘very smart’ in uniform. Brecon County Times 12th August 1915.
Gladys Maud Feiling (née Norman)
Place of birth: Bleddfa, Radnorshire
Service: Official, WAAC / QMAAC, September 1917 - September 191
Death: 1958, Cause not known
Notes: Gladys Feiling, born in 1879, married Cecil Feiling, a London solicitor in 1906 but seems to have been childless and describes herself as ‘quite independent’ in her application to become a WAAC officer in 1917. The papers connected with her WAAC career survive, though damaged, in the National Archives. After a medical and training which she passed with only 69% she is described as having ‘very little experience of any kind’, but of being ‘the right type to go to France’. By 1919 she was a Deputy Controller of QMAAC, and was awarded the OBE in June 1919. She seems to have served in the ATS in WW2.
Sources: National Archives WO 398/75/6, https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/35017/supplement/7105/data.pdf
Reference: WaW0209
Gladys Maud Feiling
Photograph of Gladys Feiling collected by the Women’s Subcommittee of the Imperial War Museum.
reverse of photograph
Reverse of photograph of Gladys Feiling outlining her career In the WAAC/QMAAC. Photograph collected by the Women’s Subcommittee of the Imperial War Museum.
Evelyn Margaret Abbott
Place of birth: Grosmont, Monmouthshire
Service: Nurse, Scottish Womens Hospitals, January - June 1916
Death: 1958, London , Cause not known
Notes: Evelyn, born 1883, was the daughter of the Grosmont school master. A professional nurse trained in London, she spent six months working at the Scottish Women’s Hospitals hospital at Royaumont Abbey north of Paris. Follow the link to see the hospital on film
Sources: http://movingimage.nls.uk/film/0035\r\nhttp://scottishwomenshospitals.co.uk/women/
Reference: WaW0248
Beatrice [B] Picton Turbervill (Picton Warlow)
Place of birth: Fownhope, Herefordshire
Service: Temperance and welfare worker, munitions hostel warden, H M Factories, before/cyn 1916 - 1918
Death: 1958, Cause not known
Memorial: Ewenny Priory, Ewenny, Vale of Glamorgan
Notes: Beatrice was the twin sister of Edith Turbervill [qv]. As a young woman she kept to her original surname of Picton-Warlow; her father changed the name when he inherited Ewenny Priory in 1891. Before the war she was a keen promoter of temperance, and was the Chair of the Cardiff branch of the British Women’s Temperance Association. In 1916 she was appointed head of one of the new munitions workers’ hostels in Woolwich. A year later she moved to Coventry as Warden of the Housing Colony for Women Munitions Workers, a large undertaking with a staff of 200, and some very unruly young workers. The ‘wild Irish-Welsh inmates … flung food and china and table furnishings at the waitresses, at each other, and through the windows’. However the Welsh Miss Picton Turbervill and her colleague the Irish Miss MacNaughton sorted the establishment out. At the end of the war she was on a lecture tour in the united states, speaking about Welfare Work in Britain. For many years after the war she was involved with Dr Barnardos.
Sources: Monthly Labor Review Volume 7 Issue 6 [US]
Reference: WaW0443
Newspaper report
Report of the AGM of the Cardiff branch of the British Women’s Temperance Association, Beatrice Picton Warlow in the chair. Evening Express 18th January 1901.
Monthly Labor Review
A report of the work of Beatrice Picton Turbervill (and her colleague Miss MacNaughton) appeared in the American journal the Monthly Labor Review.
Gwladys Perrie Williams (Morris)
Place of birth: Llanrwst
Service: Educationalist, administrator, WLA
Death: 1958/07/13, Cause not known
Notes: Born 1889 to Welsh speaking parents, Gwladys was the star pupil at Llanrwst County (one of only two members of the 6th Form there), and a graduate of University College Bangor. She was awarded a fellowship to study mediaeval French at the Sorbonne, Paris, and received a DLitt in 1915. Her edition of Le Bel Inconnu (1929) is still read. Back in Wales 1917 she was appointed WLA organising inspector in South Wales. Gwladys was admitted to Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in 1918. She published ‘Welsh Education in Sunlight & Shadow’ (1919), comparing Welsh and French Intermediate education based on her own experiences. It includes a large number of Central Welsh Board examination papers from Junior Certificate to degree level. She married in 1918 [Sir] Rhys Hopkins Morris, first head of BBC Wales and MP for Carmarthen West, but kept her own name professionally. They met at Bangor University.
Reference: WaW0415
Newspaper report
Report showing Gwladys Perrie Williams’s school achievements. The Weekly News 27th December 1907.