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Dorothy was 14 years old and living as a schoolgirl in Portsmouth when war broke out. Aged 18, she helped with the Red Cross at their Number One First Aid Post, Red Cross, at Saint Mary’s Hospital every Monday night. In 1944 she joined the WRNS. She trained in Leeds and then was transferred to Southampton. She worked at the Port Radar Office and lived in the Southwestern Hotel. She was later moved to Lee-on-the-Solent and served in the Admiral Air Headquarters at HMS Daedalus.

Dorothy remembers being in bed on the morning and being told that war had just been declared on the radio. September 1st saw her evacuated to Houghton, near Stockbridge, where six children were billeted together in a large house with servants and a kitchen garden. She returned to Portsmouth in November 1939 and went to Daley’s School in the city. The Blitz of Portsmouth started on January 10th, 1940, but Dorothy particularly remembers the two big raids on March 10th. By then she had a job and went to work on her bike every morning. On that day she had to cycle a careful path around burning buildings and broken glass, and remembers standing and watching the Guildhall burning after the bombing the night before. During raids she often used to stand outside the shelter, watching the ‘planes going overhead. The front of their house was hit in a later raid in late ’41or early ’42 with the windows, doors and roof tiles blown out. They had builders in to do repairs to these and the family was able to carry on living in the house. The church near them, St Cuthberts, was hit twice in different raids.

One thing that Dorothy was adamant about was that they never gave up hope of a successful outcome to the war. Even when her family were told that her brother’s ship had been torpedoed or mined and no-one could find out if he had survived or not, they never gave up hope that they would see him again. Luckily he survived. Morale was high and Dorothy remembers Winston Churchill as having a remarkable influence on this, mainly via the radio. The general feeling was that everyone had a job to do, so you just had to get on and do it! Being in the WRNS was a social time and it was easy to make friends. When Dorothy was stationed in Southampton there were lots of USA servicemen which made for a lively time, and quite a lot of her fellow WRNS and other friends married GI’s and went to the States after the War.

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