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Field-Marshal Earl Wavell once remarked that The FANY Corps has the oldest traditions and the proudest record of all women's corps in this country, and therefore the greatest spirit' As their extraordinary story unfolds it becomes increasingly clear just how right he was. The FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) was formed in 1907 by an eccentric Sergeant Baker, whose vision of its role didn't extend beyond his own experiences in the Sudan Campaign. He envisaged a corps of nurses on horseback riding round battlefields succouring the wounded.

So the FANYs started life with an outmoded role and impractical training, and by any normal standards should have been ill-prepared for the massive and bloody slaughter of the First World War. Yet the FANYs were different, and from their eccentric beginnings to today's streamlined and efficient Corps they have evolved an uncanny way of anticipating what their use might be in the event of war or sudden civil crisis.

They crossed to France in 1914 with their own motorized ambulances, disregarding official hostility, and so became the first women to drive for the British Army. They set up hospitals, nursed typhus cases and dragged the wounded from exploding ammunition dumps. Their actions were characterized by hard work, humour and often heroism.

In the Second World War they distinguished themselves as 'the back room girls'---wireless operators and coders for SOE and, indeed, as agents dropped into occupied France, where we follow them, some to Dachau, others to spectacular escape. The FANYs served in forty-four countries, and their exploits in such unlikely spots as Singapore, Labuan and Java were often as exciting as they were bizarre.

Always voluntary and stubbornly independent --- and proud of both --- they changed their title between the wars to the Women's Transport Service (F.A.N.Y.), but are still, and always will be, the FANYs. Operating nowadays from the Duke of York's Headquarters in Chelsea, they have strong links with the City of London Police, the Territorial Army and the Royal Corps of Signals. Their strength today is not transport, as their name suggests, but wireless communications, at which they are notably efficient

Hugh Popham, poet, novelist, military historian and documentary writer, published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1944 when he was still a fighter pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. Since then he has written four novels, an account of his wartime flying, two regimental histories, a substantial history of British naval aviation --- Into Wind --- and various other books. His last, A Thirst for the Sea, was an account of the sailing career of Erskine Childers based on Childers' original logbooks. He found the FANY Corps an intriguing and fruitful subject, delighting in its uniquely British character, and was impressed over and over again by the courage, persistence and high spirits of members past and present Hugh Popham now lives in Cornwall, within sight of the sea.

CONTENTS Foreword by HRH The Princess Anne Prologue 1. The Sudanese Vision of the Mysterious Mr Baker (1907) 2. O Dreams! O Destinations! (1910-14): I. The Dreams 3. O Dreams! O Destinations! (1914-15): II. The Destinations 4. Convalescents, Convoys and Canteens (1915-16) 5. The Thunder of the Guns (1917-18) 6. Coping with Peace (1919-39) 7. The Shotgun Wedding (1932-39) 8. FANYs in Chains (1939-45) 9. The Free FANYs (1939-46) 10. The Secret FANYs (1940-45): I. The Back Room Girls 11. The Secret FANYs (1940-45): II. In the Field 12. FANYs Far and Wide (1943-46) 13. The End of Euphoria (1946-65) 14. Small, Compact, Efficient (1965-84) Appendix: Honours and Awards Bibliography List of Plates

BUCKINGHAM PALACE I hardly feel qualified to write an introduction to the first history of the Women's Transport Service (F.A.N.Y.) having only recently accepted the appointment of Commandant in Chief in 1981. I have a lot to learn and certainly this ingenious mix of an orthodox military history of this unique Corps with accounts of individual FANYs covering an extraordinary range of service throughout the world, is a delightfully informative way of learning. The theme which runs through the seventy seven years is one of meeting a challenge, however unexpected or dangerous and having surmounted it, finding, with surprise, that it had been an enjoyable experience. A theme that your previous Commandant in Chief, Princess Alice, Countess of Athione shared with the Corps for forty seven of those seventy seven years. Today's London based FANYs are on call to the City of London Police Major Incident Unit. They provide a back up Radio Telephone Team and clerks for their Casualty Bureau, and at the Moorgate Tube disaster in 1975 they proved their training and their worth in the valuable and rapid assistance that they gave. They also train as support teams in small Army communication centres when, in times of stress they can bridge a gap until Army Reservists are mobilised. So their history is not complete, the FANYs are alive and well and adding to their reputation all the time and this book is only the first of what I hope will be man y updated versions.

 

Prologue

WHO OR WHAT IS,
OR ARE, OR WERE,
THE FANY?

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 don't still exist, do they?'

'Weren't 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.)

'Weren't 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 women's 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 men's 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 TAVR's 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 won't often see them in uniform, except when training or on duty with the services, and they don't 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 FANY's official title --- since 1937 --- is the Women's 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.

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