Britain extends conscription

On 5 March 1942 the House of Commons devoted a whole day’s sitting to a matter that official language called “woman-power”. The debate was opened by Malcolm McCorquodale, one of the two parliamentary secretaries to the Ministry of Labour and National Service, who set out the results of the first weeks of the Act that since December 1941 had allowed the state to call up women. Five million women had already registered, and 1.5 million of them had been interviewed at employment exchanges. Further interviews were proceeding at a rate of about 50,000 a week, and, leaving aside the uniformed services and civil defence, more than 35,000 women a week were being directed to work.

Under this date one sometimes reads that new conscription rules in Britain covered women and men up to the age of 45. That is not accurate. No new Act was passed on 5 March: the basis was still the National Service (No. 2) Act, which had received royal assent on 18 December 1941 and which introduced the conscription of women in Britain. That Act extended liability for military service to men up to the age of 51, but in practice the older age groups were not called up. As late as 30 July 1942 the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, stated that no man who had been over 41 at the time of registration had yet been called up, with the exception of doctors and dentists, who were called up to the age of 46. The extension spoken of in March in fact concerned women: registration at the employment exchanges was taking in successive, ever older age groups, up to women aged 41.

Registration and conscription

Two mechanisms need to be distinguished here, which the newspapers of the time, and later chronologies, often ran together. The first was registration. From the spring of 1941 women of successive age groups reported to employment exchanges, giving their marital status, number of children and current occupation, and the exchange could summon them for an interview and direct them to work in war industry. The second was conscription in the strict sense, introduced by the December Act: unmarried women and childless widows aged between 20 and 30 could be called up to the auxiliary services of the armed forces, to civil defence or to designated industrial plants. Married women and women living with children under 14 were not liable to compulsory service in uniform.

McCorquodale explained that for the time being women born in 1920 and 1921 were being called up, and that the first group of conscripts would join the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the army’s women’s auxiliary service, “in a few days”. Women aged from 21 to 34 had already registered. The 35-year-olds were due to report the following Saturday, 7 March, and women born in 1905 two weeks later. Registration was to reach the 1901 age group, that is women aged 41, and be completed by the end of June. Girls of 18 and 19 were also to register soon, and, under a separate youth scheme, girls aged 16–17 as well. That same day the President of the Board of Education, Rab Butler, announced in the House a circular to education authorities and a guide on the training and service of the girls due to register in March. It was these very rules that were invoked a few weeks later when the sixteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth registered at an employment exchange.

Women called up under the Act could choose between the uniformed services, civil defence and industry. According to McCorquodale, roughly half chose the military services or civil defence and half the factories. There were so many volunteers for all three women’s auxiliary services that even the ATS, whose needs were the greatest, had a waiting list for the first time. This mattered, because only a few months earlier the army’s service had had the worst reputation of all. Rumours circulated of promiscuity in ATS camps and of illegitimate pregnancies, and in 1942 the government set up a committee under Violet Markham to investigate living conditions in the women’s services. Its report of August 1942 found the rumours to be unfounded.

“Mobile” and “immobile”

Most of the debate, however, was taken up with everyday matters. The ministry divided women into “mobile” women, who could be sent to work in another region, and “immobile” women, tied to their homes. McCorquodale himself admitted that the poets of old would turn in their graves to hear that in 1942 young British women were described in two such categories. “Mobile” women were moved to where labour was short, for example from the northern and north-eastern regions to the industrial north-west. The ministry gave assurances that those leaving were seen off by officials and that reserved railway compartments, travel escorts and places in workers’ hostels awaited them. It conceded, however, that not everything was working as it should.

The women MPs who spoke in the debate pointed out that the mobilisation of women came with conditions. Labour’s Jennie Adamson said that if the state wanted to use the labour of British mothers, it had to provide them with nurseries, and these were being opened too few and too slowly. At the end of January there were 276 wartime nurseries in operation, even though the government had promised local authorities that it would meet the full cost. Dr Edith Summerskill ridiculed a situation in which the Minister of Health and the Board of Education had to persuade town councils in person to set up nurseries. Adamson also cited examples of women employed on heavy earthworks for little more than a shilling an hour. The Conservative Irene Ward criticised factories that took no care over appointing women personnel managers and demanded that women should sit on the committees planning post-war reconstruction, and “on the top floor, not in the basement”. The Independent MP Eleanor Rathbone asked whether the registration of the youngest age groups would serve only for record-keeping, or also for interviews and direction to work. The government replied that women with small children would not be called up, and it urged employers to take on part-time workers, which it described as a “national duty”.

Background: the war for manpower

The March debate took place during the worst period of the war for Britain. A few weeks earlier Singapore had fallen and German warships had passed through the English Channel. Winston Churchill’s government said openly that in 1942 the main constraint on the war effort would no longer be factories or raw materials, but people. The army, the air force and the navy needed ever more men, while at the same time the armaments industry had to grow in order to supply the Soviet Union as well. Every woman who replaced a man at a machine tool, in an office, in signals or in anti-aircraft defence freed him for front-line service. According to figures cited on 5 March, 1.5 million more women were already working in the munitions industry and other branches essential to the war than before the war.

Men were covered by other mechanisms. The registration of men for military service had begun in 1939, and the December Act replaced the schedule of reserved occupations with individual deferments and lowered the age of call-up to eighteen and a half. From February 1942 men could also be directed into the Home Guard, which had grown out of the Local Defence Volunteers. Men over forty, as Bevin said in February, were not yet being called up, and if that were to happen, they would serve in static and clerical posts.

Its place in the war

The registration of women went ahead as announced. By mid-May 1942 it had covered more than 6.5 million women, and by early July, as the House of Commons was told, about 8 million. According to Bevin, between 15,000 and 20,000 of them a week were going into the auxiliary services or to work in armaments factories. Registration was later extended to women up to the age of 50, and from the end of 1943 men were also directed by ballot to the coal mines instead of the forces. Meanwhile the upper age limit for the call-up of men to the forces, raised by the Act to 51, remained in practice largely on paper.

The March figures show the scale of a phenomenon that set Britain apart among the belligerents. It is generally accepted that no other Western country went so far in the compulsory mobilisation of women; Germany, despite its labour shortages, avoided compulsory labour service for women until 1943 and relied above all on forced labourers from occupied Europe. At the peak, nearly half a million women served in the British women’s auxiliary services, and several million worked in industry, agriculture and civil defence. The cost was broken families, work far from home and the persistent shortage of nurseries that had been discussed in the House of Commons on 5 March 1942.