Mary Morgan

Service: Munitions worker

Notes: ‘There is one girl here [Pembrey], Mary Morgan, who gets the most appalling fits. She goes dead and stupid for a moment and then very red in the face, and then starts the most violent struggles, pulling at her own hair, scratching her own face, and twisting herself into the most violent contortions. It takes four or five of us to hold her down and prevent her from harming herself. The favourite ‘cures’ among the girls is to souse the sufferer with cold water, thump and slap her, shake her, pour hot tea between her teeth (although being unconscious she can’t swallow), stand her on her head (when she is purple in the face already) and last but not least sit on her ‘stummick’. This particular girl told me [Gabrielle West] after her last fit that she was so glad the policewomen had looked after her and kept the other girls away as last time she was that bruised in her inside that it made her sick for a week!’ Diary of Gabrielle (Bobbie) West, policewoman at Pembrey 10 March 1917

Sources: Ed Avalon Richards: Menus, Munitions and Keeping the Peace: The Home Front Diaries of Gabrielle West (Pen and Sword Publishing, 2016)

Reference: WaW0223

Gabrielle (Bobby) West

Place of birth: Bournemouth

Service: Cook / Policewomen, VAD, 1916 - 1917

Death: 1990, Cause not known

Notes: Gabrielle (Bobby) West was the youngest of five children of a clergyman. Initially she volunteered as a VAD cook, but could not afford to continue to work unpaid, so began paid work at a munitions canteen in London. When police women began to be recruited to work in munitions factories she and her friend Miss Buckpitt joined. After a brief posting to Queensferry NEF they were promoted to Pembrey in January 1917. Her account of her time at Pembrey paints a very full picture of what life was like for the workers there. See her account of Mary Morgan [qv] and her fits. In May 1917 she was transferred to the Royal Ordnance factory, Rotherwas Hereford. When she was 89 years old Bobby was recorded for the Imperial War Museum’s oral archives.

Sources: ed Avalon Richards Menus Munitions and Keeping the Peace: The Home Front Diaries of Gabrielle West 1914 -1917. Pen&Sword 2016https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80008574

Reference: WaW0308

Gabrielle West

Gabrielle (Bobby) West in police uniform. She is back row, second from left.

Pembrey

Gabrielle’s drawing of the danger buildings at Pembrey. ‘.. where the most dangerous work is done, the sheds are actually inside the hills.'

Sergeant [later Inspector] Guthrie

Service: Police Officer , Ministry of Munitions Women’s Police Service

Notes: Sergeant Guthrie began work at Pembrey in April 1917, having been a police officer for some time. According to Gabrielle West [qv] ‘Sergeant Guthrie is making this place uninhabitable, She is a most peculiar person: hair close-cropped like a man, thickset figure with no waist like a man, large feet like a man, and a sort of tenor voice like a man. The first two days, the girls wouldn’t be searched by her; they said she was a man detective, not a policewomen at all … Anyway, she is a great trial and very unbalanced.’

Sources: ed Avalon Richards Menus Munitions and Keeping the Peace: The Home Front Diaries of Gabrielle West 1914 -1917. Pen & Sword 2016.

Reference: WaW0444

Ministry of Munitions Women’s Police Service

Women police officers at a munitions factory (not Pembrey), Sergeant Guthrie may be back row, second from right.