War Office

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Employer Rosita Forbes
Having made several lecture tours in the USA (where she also sold as much journalistic writing as she could), she gave official lectures for the War Office in the Caribbean, the USA, and Canada...
Employer Ruth Pitter
During the first world war RP went to work as a temporary junior clerk at the War Office . The only part of this job she enjoyed was brewing the tea for fifty people. (She...
Family and Intimate relationships Daisy Ashford
DA 's father, William Henry Roxburghe Ashford (1836-1912), was a former official at the War Office .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
After he married Emma, Willie's step-children referred to him as father and they grew very fond of him...
Family and Intimate relationships Ray Strachey
RS 's husband had a nine-year-old daughter, Julia , from a previous marriage. He had been working for the railways in India, but was often unemployed until the First World War, when he began work...
Family and Intimate relationships Rosita Forbes
RF married as her second husband Arthur Thomas McGrath , another colonel, then on the War Office general staff. She wore black for the wedding, in mourning for Rosita Forbes, but she kept her...
Family and Intimate relationships Charlotte Godley
John Godley, who was a friend of Charlotte's brother Charles , was born in Ireland on 29 May 1814, most likely at Dublin. He was the son of an Irish landowner, whose family home...
Family and Intimate relationships Isabella Kelly
Her son William Martin Kelly turned out a disappointment. A recent biographer of Matthew Lewis discounts stories that William's relationship with his patron was sexual. William, however, appears to have suffered, in typical young-gentleman fashion...
Friends, Associates Isabella Kelly
Her friends or perhaps patrons included General Henry Seymour Conway (father of the writer-sculptor Anne Damer ) and his whole family.
Kelly, Isabella. A Collection of Poems and Fables. Richardson, 1794.
39-40
Matthew Lewis (though given his general view of fiction by women he may...
Material Conditions of Writing Dorothy Richardson
Aside from all this, Richardson found it difficult to write Dimple Hill because of her illness and breakdown she had suffered from. The summer before the collection was published, a young man renting the Odles'...
Occupation Muriel Box
As well as writing for film and returning to continuity work, MB embarked during the Second World War on a career as a director, working at first for Verity Films . This had been founded...
Occupation May Cannan
Before the war MC qualified herself as a VAD ; she took a number of exams under the auspices of the Red Cross and other organisations, and worked as a hospital volunteer. Before she was...
Occupation Mary Kingsley
Her primary object was to serve the British War Office as a war nurse. She had also arranged to act as a reporter for the Evening News and the Morning Post, though in practice...
Occupation Rose Macaulay
A year after taking this job she was transferred from the War Office to the Ministry of Information , where she worked as a wartime bureaucrat.
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins, 1972.
89
Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray, 1991.
160-1
She was then, because of her fluent...
Occupation Eleanor Rathbone
ER was among the chief administrators of the Liverpool branch of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Family Association (SSFA), the War Office department distributing allowances to the families of enlisted men.
Alberti, Johanna. Eleanor Rathbone. Sage Press, 1996.
40
politics Evelyn Sharp
ES was sent to Holloway in London for two weeks for breaking government-office windows in a suffrage demonstration: It pleases me still to remember that the War Office fell to my pacifist hand.
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head, 1933.
140

Timeline

21 September 1809
The political rivals Canning of the British Foreign Office and Castlereagh , who was about to be removed from the War Office , fought a dawn duel on Putney Heath south of London.
1862
A War Office and Admiralty committee recommended a system of voluntary treatment for diseased prostitutes, rather than legislating their medical care.
2 August 1907
The War Office instituted the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act, which would allow for a volunteer force ready to be mobilised in case of invasion or national emergency.
July 1908
The Territorial Force Nursing Service (TFNS) was established as part of the War Office 's 1907 Territorial and Reserve Forces Act.
October 1914
A speech by Elsie Maud Inglis effected the launching of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service , an organization which made it possible for women to exercise medical skills in military settings, and significantly...
October 1914
The British War Office and Home Office combined to halt the payment of the separation allowance due to soldiers' wives during their husbands' absence at war, if the women were deemed Unworthy.
May 1916
Under the leadership of Christobel Ellis , 20 women began driving army vehicles for the War Office under the auspices of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps .
7 July 1917
The Army Council Instruction No. 1069 formally declared the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was to substitute women for soldiers in certain home employment or on lines of communication overseas.
May 1940
The British embarked on a mass internment of enemy aliens, a category which included refugees from Germany and Austria.