6. ‘Giggling adolescents’ to refugees, bullets and wolves: Francesca Wilson finds a profession*

Ellen Ross

Francesca Wilson (1888–1981) came from a relatively well-off Newcastle Quaker family, but her father’s fur business was failing and she would probably have to be self-supporting in adulthood.¹ In her biographical writings she presents herself as a homely and bookish child with three lovely younger siblings; at school, Francesca was a talented and engaged pupil.² Her father supported her alone among the children in academic ambitions; he insisted that she go to high school, the Central Newcastle High School for Girls. In 1906, at the age of eighteen, Wilson began her history studies at Newnham College, Cambridge. In her cohort, only a third of Newnham graduates would eventually marry and, indeed, although Wilson went on to have an active love life, a global friendship network and a large family circle, she would remain single.³ Hence, finding sustaining employment was essential, and Wilson’s search for happiness in work provides the framework for this chapter. It first looks at her half-hearted choice to be a teacher, then at her exciting episodes as a relief worker on the continent, and finally at her success, by 1945, in redefining herself as a humanitarian relief professional. By that time Wilson had aided refugees at intervals from 1916 through to the late 1940s in the Netherlands, France, Tunisia, Serbia, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Germany and Spain.⁴ The trajectory of her life illustrates the expansion and modernization of humanitarianism that began with the First World War.

Wilson’s life also illuminates her generation of graduates emotionally and materially contending with an occupational marketplace that virtually cornered them into the teaching profession.⁵ When she left Newnham in 1909, Wilson was part of a gifted cohort of no more than a few hundred female Oxbridge graduates.⁶ In 1915, after just a few years of teaching, she rediscovered herself as a humanitarian aid worker on the European continent and did not return to teaching until 1925. Wilson and her many humanitarian contemporaries in this era of war and dislocation are admired for their courage, political commitment and compassion, but charting this generation through the problematic of their careers reveals another motivation for their service abroad: the stifling occupational landscape at home for even the best educated women.

Wanted: jobs for graduates

Many suffragists assumed that some women’s new civil status as voters in 1918 would simultaneously generate occupational equality for women, but this was far from the case. The fierce masculine determination from shop floor through to Parliament that pushed women of all social ranks working across a wide range of occupations out of their war jobs in 1918 and 1919 did not abate with time.⁷ Employment discrimination characterized the entire UK female labour market for decades, its extent monitored and fully understood by the activist women’s groups. The work lives of women were blighted by low wages, barriers such as protective legislation, the fact that there were lower benefits offered compared to men and marriage bars. In 1922–4 the average woman’s wage was 57 per cent of the male average.⁸ The situation had not improved in 1935, when feminist Ray Strachey published her study of careers for women.⁹

To be sure, interwar modernity brought about advances that richly benefitted Wilson and her friends: more comfortable clothing and a weakening of taboos about sexuality and the display of the female body; more opportunities for travel; greater access to birth control; more open discussion of homosexuality. For young girls there were new job options, more autonomy within their families. Discursive spaces opened up, giving the first enfranchised generation opportunities to display some of their talents in the 1920s and 1930s. Stories of female aviators, racing-car drivers and athletes could be found in movies, magazines and newspapers. Women demonstrated unprecedented participation in public life. They were political activists on behalf of peace, labour, democracy, children, health and women’s rights. Their voices could be heard on the BBC. They were a prolific generation of writers of fiction and commentary. The era created a cornucopia of new women’s organizations – political, educational and recreational – and lively feminist activism. More women were involved in local government, and there were opportunities to serve as magistrates and even as MPs. Women joined constituency parties, especially the Labour Party.¹⁰ But only handfuls could be found in the high-status and well-remunerated professions that Wilson’s male peers at Cambridge took for granted: in medicine, the higher levels of the civil service, law, art, music, architecture and so on – intellectually challenging work offering varied opportunities, both prestigious and well paid – the kinds of positions Wilson might have thrived in.

Ray Strachey’s statistical study of pay discrimination in 1935 concluded that ‘to earn £250 a year is quite an achievement even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience’.¹¹ Virginia Woolf read Strachey’s survey (1935) and references it with a bitterness that grew from page to page in her Three Guineas (1938). She concentrated her outrage on the specific salary of £250 that Strachey had acknowledged as ‘quite an achievement’ for even a gifted woman – a phrase which Woolf quotes verbatim three times in the next four pages.¹² Writing on behalf of educated women like Wilson, Woolf frames the battle against patriarchal power in terms of women’s access to the professions, personified in one young woman’s desire to become a doctor in the face of fierce opposition first by her father and later by several bodies of medical professionals.¹³

Historians of women in education confront an ugly conjuncture at close range. ‘The world opened up by education subsequently closed down, leading to bitterness and resignation for some, and successful adaptation on the part of many others’, as Alison Oram soberly defined the situation for women graduates between the wars.¹⁴ Wilson did not do so directly, but some of her contemporaries spoke of their career disappointment. Mary Gavin Clarke was a Scottish Girton graduate who was slotted into teaching by her parents. She eventually became a successful high-school headmistress, but teaching did not come naturally to her: ‘I was prepared to do my best but did not look forward to a teaching career with enthusiasm or with any sense of vocation.’¹⁵ Oram’s teacher interviewees included several who would have preferred ‘medicine, art, academic research, archive work, journalism or law’.¹⁶ Carol Dyhouse’s respondents listed journalism, social work and the civil service as careers preferable to teaching.¹⁷ There is no doubt that Francesca Wilson would have chosen a different profession if she had left university in 1970 or 2000. The experiences she most sought were foreign travel, adventure and challenges. Wilson used words like ‘fun’ and ‘excitement’ in reference to work she loved, work which, as this chapter will argue below, made her happy. But this was not the language she used when describing her work as a teacher.

Women and the professions

Wilson did not want to become a physician or a solicitor. Perhaps journalism would have made sense as a profession for her; eventually, she did a good deal of freelance writing for newspapers and authored several books. But though some women had been managing successful journalism careers, Wilson does not seem to have considered it when leaving Newnham.¹⁸ Perhaps she knew something about the vicious gender politics of journalism in the early twentieth century, described so vividly by Sarah Lonsdale.¹⁹ In any case, Wilson found her final two years of university so absorbing that it seems she had not been thinking about her future career, and, like so many of her peers, she drifted into teaching without weighing up specific alternatives.

The modern profession of teaching, based on the mastery of specific skills and bodies of knowledge, was a construct that had developed in the nineteenth century as new discoveries accumulated in fields such as chemistry, medicine and public administration. Privileged social groups – almost always men and the wealthy – established and consolidated power in professions through restricting training opportunities and establishing entrance criteria; their monopoly was a source of prestige and income for their members.²⁰ The men who so passionately opposed higher education for women were surely displaying a fear that educated women, their peers, might become competitors in the professions they controlled, such as medicine, law and the ministry.²¹

Yet there is no doubt that secondary teaching, with its growing female workforce, fitted the model of a profession. Well-connected women were founders of the pioneering privately funded girls’ boarding schools, and educationalist Frances Mary Buss insisted that teaching be recognized as one of the ‘learned professions, and not simply a trade’.²² Girls’ secondary education was a growth industry in the late nineteenth century, with over 200 new high schools established by 1900.²³ Such schools, whether privately or publicly funded, continued to expand throughout the interwar period, especially after 1926, when the Hadow Report divided schools into primary and senior departments. Edith Morley’s 1914 Seven Workers in Seven Professions defined a university education as the ‘academic and professional training’ of a teacher, and the prestigious secondary schools tried to hire their faculty from among the relatively scarce graduates with honours degrees (Wilson’s was a second-class degree).²⁴ But female graduates with any kind of degree were scarce. In 1900–1901 there were 3,000 women university students in the entire country. A decade later, there were only 27,000 university students nationally, and they were overwhelmingly male.²⁵ So women teachers, whether in privately funded or state schools, were an elite in the female workforce, respected, secure and well paid.²⁶

Teachers stood out as the sole female professionals, at least in the formal sense of the word. Vera Brittain, so bullish on work for women – especially for educated women – reluctantly admitted in 1928 that 86 per cent of the total number of professionally employed women clustered in the two traditional fields of teaching and, to a lesser extent, nursing.²⁷ Handfuls of women had appeared in such fields as accounting and veterinary medicine, but numbers were so small that the women were showcased as oddities.²⁸ The legal profession, despite having been opened to women through legislation in 1919, was barely better: by 1935 there were only 116 female solicitors and only 79 female barristers.²⁹ The medical profession, the destination of so many fiercely determined women from the mid nineteenth century, boasted somewhat larger numbers, but almost all of the UK’s 2,810 women doctors in 1931 were general practitioners, excluded from hospital and academic positions.³⁰ A total of 744 women held higher civil service positions, with their comfortable salaries, in 1934. Social work was an expanding field, and one that interested Francesca Wilson, but while its US counterpart had begun a process of professionalization, this was not the case in the UK. Even in the 1950s the welfare workforce was still overwhelmingly amateur and unpaid.³¹ However, as this volume on precarious professionals amply demonstrates, women with or without university degrees managed to construct livelihoods outside of the formal professions – as writers, interior decorators, actors, designers, photographers – in what Brittain called careers ‘open to talent’.³²

‘Teaching was the career expected of the standard middle class Girton graduate at least up to the 1960s’, as Pat Thane presents it in her study of Girton from 1918 up until the 1980s.³³ Secondary-school teaching was indeed a popular choice. Many teachers would eventually earn that rare £250 annual income, or more; pay scales for teachers resembled those of the executive grade of the civil service. Furthermore, the differential in salary between female and male teachers, about 20 per cent, was probably the lowest in the labour market at that point.³⁴ Other benefits available to teachers were long holidays and chances for promotion. Dyhouse’s survey of women graduates from six non-Oxbridge English universities before 1939 found that, like the Girton graduates, large majorities became teachers – almost 80 per cent of Manchester graduates.³⁵ In 1931 half of all single professional women aged thirty-five to forty-five were teachers.³⁶

‘A sense of disappointment’: Francesca Wilson chooses teaching

Yet a significant number of young women choosing careers after university shunned teaching. While Wilson did not, she did find teaching and school culture uninspiring. It seems to have left her restless and perhaps bored; almost from the beginning she was looking for ways to add interest to her working life.

The work of primary and secondary educators differs, perhaps, from that of many other professions in its deep emotional demands. Without seriously engaging with the enormous literature on children and pedagogy, it is safe to say that teaching in a school involves much more than a set of skills.³⁷ Though the profession changes from decade to decade, constants include close personal contact with the bodies, minds and emotions of children and the need to enforce discipline in some form; further, a teacher often works alone – that is, without another adult – in the classroom. It is a unique and difficult job. A happy and satisfied London headmistress in 1936 wrote that at the end of every day a teacher would normally be as exhausted as ‘a squeezed sponge’; the children would replenish her energy, she asserted.³⁸ Wilson, on a similar note but far less enthusiastically, said later that she had put great effort into motivating and awakening her adolescent students during her years as a teacher in Birmingham, ‘[b]ut it was exhausting. A hundred young things make inroads into one’s vitality’.³⁹

Job advice literature for women discussed the problem of the aversion to teaching among large numbers of female graduates. In a 1936 compilation on women’s careers the Hampstead headmistress quoted above declared teaching ‘a very happy job; but only “if you like it”’.⁴⁰ A 1912 pamphlet published by the Students’ Careers’ Association pointedly titled ‘Openings for university women other than teaching’ claimed prematurely that the emergence of new careers for women meant that teaching was no longer ‘the only possible opening’. Graduates would therefore no longer have to risk ‘a breakdown in health, or … a sense of disappointment and distaste for work’.⁴¹ Noted a different career manual, teaching was a fine career, but ‘for the person who does not like the job nothing is more detestable’.⁴² No more than half of the Girton graduates in Thane’s study who became teachers were enthusiastic about their choice. Many decades later, in the late twentieth century, female college graduates finally had access to a far wider range of occupations and collectively delivered a devastating denunciation of teaching as a career: the proportion of Girton graduates employed as teachers in the year 2000 was a meagre 2 per cent. ⁴³

Francesca Wilson, after earning the Cambridge teaching certificate, joined the teaching profession in 1912.⁴⁴ Her first position was a short, unhappy assignment at the coeducational Bedales School; she then moved to Bath High School for Girls from 1912 to 1914, followed by Gravesend County School for Girls. Her own evaluations of her new profession generally carried a negative valence. ‘Teaching should have meant more to me than it did’, she wrote in her autobiography, apparently referring there to her teaching life in Birmingham from 1925 to 1939; ‘[i]t stimulated me and I spent hours preparing my lessons.’ She believed that she had ‘some talent for teaching, and some success in inspiring young people’ and admitted that teaching could be ‘enlivening’. But there was also the ‘boredom’ of correcting papers and the irritation of ‘giggling adolescents’. With regret she admitted that she should have ‘taken a far greater interest in her students’. At least teaching was far ‘more human and worthwhile than working all day at a typewriter!’⁴⁵

Wilson’s mismatch with teaching did not undermine her classroom effectiveness or deprive her of any enjoyment in her work. She was energetic, certainly well educated and, according to some of her nieces, she had personality traits among those often recommended for teachers, such as a love of knowledge, an interest in children and a sense of humour.⁴⁶ Working at Bath High School with her close college friend Muriel Davies, Wilson experienced ‘considerable joy in teaching and discovered a certain dramatic talent in [her]self’. And at Gravesend, she ‘began to enjoy teaching and even felt a vocation for it’ – though within a year or two she sought an exit through her first relief assignment.⁴⁷

In 1925, after a break from teaching of nearly ten years, during which she was for the most part involved in the humanitarian projects described below, Wilson began what was to be the longest and happiest of her teaching positions. She became a senior history mistress at Edgbaston Church of England College for Girls (ECECG), one of three prestigious girls’ day schools in Birmingham. Her annual salary was £290.⁴⁸ She remained on the faculty there until 1939 – with several leaves of absence mostly for relief work in Spain. In many ways, it was a congenial situation. Wilson’s school head, Freda Godfrey, was flexible and warm, and her colleagues were likeable and helpful – but among the staff Wilson felt like ‘a rather freakish outsider’. She had arrived in Birmingham depressed and bitter after a failed love affair and was in any case probably too ‘modern’ and, in her tastes, too intellectual.⁴⁹ Nonetheless, the ECECG magazines covering those years depict Wilson as an active and inventive member of the community. She staged lectures for her students on current political issues and on one occasion participated in a dog show. The many field trips she organized, including an immersive visit to a colliery, perhaps showed the influence of the Montessori and New Education movements Wilson had encountered in Vienna in the early 1920s. Wilson’s performance as ‘a Chinese cut-throat’ in a school play was admired; in her classroom, she often dramatized historical events. Her enormous personal collection of Punch cartoons enlivened her lessons.⁵⁰ But, like a small number of the unfulfilled teachers whom Dyhouse interviewed, Wilson eagerly took the chance to leave the teaching profession when other job opportunities opened up.⁵¹

Humanitarian relief as vocational opportunity

‘The most interesting and stimulating of my activities was in relief work’, Wilson declared in her autobiography, and she felt lucky that this work did not then require diplomas or other credentials. At the beginning she was an amateur, her only qualifications being ‘education, a vaguely Quaker background and importunity’.⁵² She proudly pointed out that none of her competent British team aiding Serbian refugees in Corsica and Tunisia during the First World War had been trained as social workers, though all were graduates.⁵³

The period 1914–24, in which Wilson was almost continuously active in aid projects, has been called an era of ‘humanitarian war’: a period of disaster, forced migrations, starvation and disease extending years past the end of the fighting.⁵⁴ Humanitarian organizations had expanded and become a full component of the European state system, feeble antedotes to its nation states’ poisonous and bellicose politics. Some relief expertise had its origins in Britain’s imperial experiences, especially in Ireland and India; among international donors, the US and Britain were most prominent, but the thousands of aid volunteers came from a wide range of countries.⁵⁵ As one recent scholar put it, ‘[a]long with the victim, the rescuer was the other important figure born of the new humanitarian activism’.⁵⁶ Many of these ‘rescuers’ were women.

In August 1914 Belgian refugees landed with their meagre belongings at Tilbury, and this was Wilson’s chance to test the relief waters. She was moved by their stories and befriended a few young women who needed shelter. By 1915 she had applied for an assignment in Europe with the Friends, although she was rejected at this first attempt. Despite Wilson’s relative inactivity as a Friend and her odd childhood membership in the Plymouth Brethren due to her mother’s (but not her father’s) conversion, Wilson’s Quaker birth proved to be an important part of her lifetime cultural capital.⁵⁷

From 1916 to 1923 Wilson went from one relief mission to another. In 1915 Quakers and cooperating organizations assigned her to projects in the Netherlands, then France, and then to Corsica and North Africa with Serbs who had survived the deadly trek west when Austrian forces invaded. After the war Wilson spent a year in devastated Serbia itself. From late 1919 to 1922, she served as Hilda Clark’s interpreter in Vienna. Here, fifty to sixty workers, mainly British Quakers and Save the Children volunteers, ran a feeding programme for pre-school children.⁵⁸ In autumn 1922, Wilson was sent to the Volga province of Samara with the Friends’ Russian famine-relief programme, one of many agencies at work in Russia. It is estimated that 6 million people died there.⁵⁹ After this, Wilson reported on and travelled in the US and England with the Viennese pioneer children’s art educator Franz Cižek and his student art exhibit; she was now also a part-time journalist, writing mainly for The Friend and the Manchester Guardian women’s pages. She did not return to the classroom, to the new position in Birmingham, until 1925, at the age of thirty-seven.

Wilson documented her months in Republican Spain in so many ways – letters, reports, newspaper articles, sections of a book – and in them she demonstrates that humanitarian relief was indeed her vocation. Her connection to Spain began in the 1930s, in Birmingham, where she was an active opponent of Nazism, and in 1936 she joined the campaign for British aid to the beleaguered Spanish Republic. Touring Spain with a fact-finding delegation in the spring of 1937, Wilson was asked by the Friends to take responsibility for some of the refugees from the Fascists’ violent February invasion of Málaga.

Wilson’s assistance to thousands of refugee Málagans, carried out in the drab city of Murcia, reveals not only her dedication to the Spanish Republic as a cause – though, officially, the Friends were neutral – but also, as Siân Roberts points out, her deep interest in the Republic’s progressive and sophisticated educational policies, some of which Wilson, still a teacher, put into practice herself in Spain in the form of new schools, workshops, and literacy projects.⁶⁰ She deeply enjoyed relief giving as a form of work rather than of service, Christian charity or as Quaker witness. ‘I am shocked to think how little dedication I can find in myself,’ she wrote in her autobiography.⁶¹ She declared that she was not ‘high-minded’ like some of the relief workers whom she knew and did admire – here she listed her friend Margaret McFie, who founded and worked in a school for the blind in Serbia after the First World War, and Dr Katherine MacPhail, a friend and co-worker in Corsica, who founded a number of hospitals in Serbia. Francesca Wilson was sociable and generous, but her relief interest is best described as professional. She was eager for work that was demanding enough to ‘take me out of myself’.⁶² A sentence she added to the New York edition of Margins of Chaos, her account of her relief career up to 1943, seems to define the professionalism she was seeking: skill, hard work, service and enjoyment. She wrote, ‘[a]nonymity should be the ideal of the relief worker – her reward not only a good task performed, but all of the experiences and adventures she has in its performance’.⁶³ While Wilson valued service to others, she often grammatically structured it as incidental, an afterthought. As anthropologist Liisa Malkki put it more recently, describing twenty-first-century Finnish International Red Cross workers in her study, The Need to Help, it was indeed ‘a desire to lose themselves in sustained and demanding work’ that drew these (mostly) women to this profession.⁶⁴ They, too, were put off by terms that invoked righteousness and goodness. Some of the Finnish nurses most relished the periods in the field when extreme concentration and endurance were called for, which they called ‘the burn’ or ‘the burning’ – occasions for ‘intense and unpredictable creativity’.⁶⁵ In her sample of 150 humanitarian activist women of Wilson’s generation, historian Sybil Oldfield also emphasized the skill and focus they brought to their work rather than their altruism. True, the great majority of Oldfield’s sample had some kind of Christian affiliation, but they also shared an ‘exceptional problem-solving intelligence and the will and ability to co-operate in the field’.⁶⁶

After 1914, humanitarian relief had become part of the discursive and occupational space in which Wilson and many of her cohort moved. Roberts demonstrates the intense concern with international relief among a community of Quaker women based in Birmingham between 1914 and 1924.⁶⁷ Periods of relief work were woven into many women’s careers, as they were into Wilson’s. Elise Sprott, for example, having joined the BBC in 1924 at the age of thirty-nine, had done war service in a Voluntary Aid Detachment followed by relief work with Hoover’s American Relief Administration, European Children’s Fund.⁶⁸ Relief colleagues were often recruited from among groups of friends or former classmates. A number of Wilson’s Newnham friends and contacts did stints with her aid projects: Marjorie Leon worked alongside Wilson in Vienna in the early 1920s, and Margaret Hume did research there on malnutrition; Ka (Katherine) Cox was a co-worker in Corsica.⁶⁹ Other aid workers in Europe between 1914 and 1939 included Florence Barrow, Violet Bonham Carter, Dr Hilda Clark, Kate Courtney, Margery Fry, Eglantyne Jebb, Eleanor Rathbone, Muriel Paget, Edith Pye, Maude Royden, Dr Audrey Russell and Evelyn Sharp. Hundreds, probably thousands, of others were involved in relief. Women from Britain would be found as aid workers – to mention only the European and Middle Eastern sites, in France, Serbia, formerly Ottoman countries, Greece, Austria, Poland and parts of Russia – during and long after the First World War. In the 1930s hundreds aided the Spanish Republic and the many thousands of Spanish escapees in French camps in 1939; others assisted socialist and Jewish refugees from the Nazis, or, in Wilson’s case, Poles who had fled to Hungary in 1939 and Jews who had arrived in Britain and needed help. Several women in Wilson’s long-lived and internationalist female generation were, like her, at work again in 1945.

The humanitarian workplace

What kind of day-to-day profession was ‘international aid worker’ when Wilson became part of it? The work required what Wilson relished: travelling to different places, meeting people far removed from her normal contacts and facing new challenges. In general, it did not pay well; most positions seem to have provided only transportation and living expenses. Wilson raised funds herself to support some of the programmes she organised in Spain. Relief often involved, Wilson said self-deprecatingly, ‘humdrum emergency stuff … children’s breakfasts, milk canteens, soup-kitchens, distributing dry rations, and clothing the naked out of cast-off wardrobes of Britain and America’. But, as noted above, like a well-chosen profession, a relief assignment could be an occasion for a satisfying deployment of skill and creativity: delicate collaborations with refugee leaders and local personnel; speedy analysis of local needs and resources; and competence at such tasks as accounting, filing and storage.⁷⁰

Wilson enjoyed aid work, but of course she witnessed many scenes of human suffering, a regular part of relief givers’ daily work lives: the wagons loaded with the bodies of those who had succumbed to starvation or disease in Russia’s famine; thousands of the newly orphaned in Russian children’s homes, without shoes, books, paper or pencils; sick children and young men dead or maimed in Spain; the haunted Jewish survivors of the concentration camps in 1945. Despair and burnout were lurking hazards for relief workers. What we would perhaps today label stress affected two of Wilson’s Murcia co-workers within a short period, one of whom was repeatedly ill with gastric complaints, and the other overwhelmed by anxiety. The first was a competent American Quaker administrator, the second an experienced and dedicated New Zealand nurse whose Spanish sweetheart went missing in action; both women had to return home.⁷¹

Relief givers themselves were not immune from the material dangers and hardships facing the refugees, though humanitarian aid work today may be still more dangerous.⁷² In 1919 Wilson made a winter trip from Dubrovnik to Belgrade, travelling in cattle wagons or in wrecked trains without windows, seats or heat.⁷³ The story of her frightening night encounter in a sled with a wolf closely following ‘in the middle of the lonely steppe’ with which she entertained other Russian humanitarians also became a favourite of her young nieces.⁷⁴ In Russia in 1921–2 many relief workers, like the local population, lived without basic sanitation or heat. A group of American Quakers there managed to keep themselves warm by chopping up and burning thirty-five abandoned log houses.⁷⁵ State and military violence were also a threat to aid workers. In 1940 Wilson was jailed for a terror-filled night in Hungary while attempting to help Polish refugees there. Some humanitarians were hit by stray bullets; others came under deliberate enemy fire. This was the case with Wilson’s lifelong friend the physician Audrey Russell, who was among thousands shot at repeatedly from the sky by Franco’s gunners as she escaped from Catalonia in 1939.⁷⁶ Invading Italian armies in Serbia in 1941 captured Wilson’s co-worker from her First World War days, Dr Katherine MacPhail, who was running a children’s hospital there.⁷⁷ Disease was a still greater threat. Evelina Haverfield, who had paraded as Joan of Arc on horseback in a suffrage demonstration and founded the Women’s Reserve Ambulance Corps and the Women’s Voluntary Reserve – died of pneumonia in 1920 at an orphanage she had established in Serbia.⁷⁸ Before DDT became available in the 1940s – its dangers then unknown, it was used with abandon – to quickly delouse thousands, typhus was probably the biggest danger to relief workers or refugees. It caused millions of deaths in the Russian famine of 1922 and Wilson would have been fully aware of the intense suffering of its victims. Typhoid fever and pneumonia killed artist Mabel Dearmer, who was nursing in Serbia, in 1915, and four members of the Serbian Relief Fund’s Skopje hospital staff; Violet Tillard and Muriel Candler were among those who died nursing typhus victims in the Russian famine district.⁷⁹

Women and the humanitarian infrastructure, 1914–39

In Wilson’s early years in the field, international aid operations were growing in complexity and size. Save the Children, founded in 1922, was incorporated as a separate international body a few years later. In famine-beset Russia in 1921 Herbert Hoover was again at work on a large scale after taking charge of supplies to Belgium during the war and, later, to Germany and Austria.⁸⁰ Greece and the new Middle East mandates were also settings for enormous humanitarian undertakings in response to post-war Turkish violence and mass expulsions. Among the largest operations in the Middle East were those of the American Red Cross, Near East Relief, the American Women’s Hospitals and – after late 1923 – the League of Nations Refugee Settlement Commission, all of which spent millions and supported hundreds of thousands of refugees.⁸¹

As relatively new enterprises, and often hastily enlisting personnel, many humanitarian organizations accepted women applicants. Relief work was, according to Keith Watenpaugh, ‘a new and to some extent gendered practice’.⁸² Well-off European women had a long association with aiding the needy and had been involved for decades in early forms of social work practice. And, of course, many talented women found themselves locked out of interesting and well-paid professional work in their home countries. The gender landscape in relief organizations thus differed dramatically from that in most of the professions. The growing literature on structures of humanitarian relief before 1939 includes several female-run organizations, including the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (founded in 1914) and the American Women’s Hospitals (founded in 1918) – signs of female enterprise and also of their exclusion. Quaker relief teams in First World War France, though often headed by men, were probably the most gender-mixed of their era; Save the Children was also mixed, but Hoover insisted that his famine-relief personnel in Russia be all male.

Assets for aid work that were usually unremarked were Wilson’s and many other relief practitioners’ class background. Oldfield’s survey of 150 humanitarian women of this era found very few (only twenty-five) from modest family backgrounds.⁸³ Middle-class and rich women had access to incomes that could subsidize at least some volunteer or low-salaried work and they had absorbed traditions of travel and of authority in foreign lands. Many of them were comfortable outdoors and knew how to ride, hunt and fish. They could cope with cold and discomfort (Wilson was fond of both), a capacity fostered perhaps by the nation’s chilly country manor houses.⁸⁴ Many had a fluent knowledge of two or more European languages, usually French and German. With her low, rather loud voice and remarkable language proficiency, Wilson proved invaluable as a translator, troubleshooter and investigator. She was fluent in French and German, learned Serbo-Croatian in 1917–18, Russian in 1922 and Spanish in 1937. Her quintessential relief technique was to roam around and talk to people, hearing their stories and finding out their concrete needs. Wilson disapproved of the mainly monolingual American relief workers she had met, who were often flanked by translators and gravitating toward desk jobs over fieldwork.⁸⁵

Murcia

To demonstrate the ways in which relief work provided Wilson with the enjoyment and stimulation she missed in her first profession, this chapter includes a brief narrative of one of her projects in Republican Spain. The specific crisis to which the Friends were responding took place in February 1937, when at least 100,000 inhabitants of the southern city of Málaga and its notoriously impoverished hinterland escaped in terror and panic as Francoist troops invaded the district. Carrying babies and household goods, they were under fire from the air and from battleships as they raced along the single narrow seaside road on which they were permitted to travel the 110 miles to the Republican zone.⁸⁶ As many as 5,000 died during the seven- to ten-day trip. The first large Republican town the refugees reached, Almería, offered them food and medical care through British Hispanophile Sir George Young’s British Universities Ambulance Unit. Almería officials soon sent some of the refugees on to Murcia, a garrison town a few hours’ drive away, and already crowded with refugees.⁸⁷

In Murcia, local welfare officials had been helping the Málagans, but the first foreign aid worker on the scene in late April 1937 was Francesca Wilson, who, according to her friend the academic Hispanicist Helen Grant, had volunteered for the job when it was proposed to her.⁸⁸ Earlier, the two women had been travelling in relatively peaceful government-controlled Catalonia and visiting well-tended experimental schools. Now, with Grant back in England, Wilson confronted a new aspect of the civil war in the form of approximately 4,000 cold, ill and hungry Málagan refugees sheltered in an abandoned and mostly unfinished apartment block. It was ‘a horrible state of affairs’, she wrote to Grant on 23 April, ‘so incomparably much worse than anything we saw before’.⁸⁹ Yet within just days Wilson’s mood changed to elation, and she later declared that it was ‘the privilege some inexplicable fate gave me when I arrived alone in Murcia’. The work there was enthralling, she implied: ‘I got sucked in to start work for Málagan refugees in Murcia, and over-stayed my leave [from teaching].’⁹⁰ Though she returned to Birmingham in June, within a few months Wilson was back in Spain, declaring, ‘Murcia still had my heart.’⁹¹

Recognizing the Málagans’ extreme deprivation, Wilson had to exercise agency. She planned to supply breakfasts (cocoa and three biscuits each) to approximately 700 refugee children and to lactating and pregnant women. Her first effort to get the provisions she needed through Sir George Young in Almería was a wild-goose chase, with Young away from the clinic’s premises.⁹² Wilson’s initial haste and frustration might suggest panic at the suffering that surrounded her; her subsequent single-minded focus on locating supplies indicates an experienced humanitarian worker’s skill at what is today called ‘affect management’.⁹³ She made contact with the representatives of the Friends and the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief – sharing facilities in Valencia – and within six days had a lorry full of condensed milk at the door of the Murcia shelter, a supply that did not diminish. Wilson’s first panicky postcard to Grant is dated 23 April; her excitement is unmistakable in another dated 8 May, not much more than two weeks later and after she had made contact with the Friends office: ‘Tremendous rush of work here. Its [sic] rather exciting. Greatest imaginable need. Valencia’s splendid, sending along tons & tons of food.’⁹⁴ Was Wilson experiencing the exhilaration of ‘the burn’, in the Finnish nurses’ parlance?⁹⁵

‘Feeding the hungry’ was the default activity of the relief worker and Wilson had done this many times during her humanitarian career. But the traumatized, hungry and disoriented Málagans, despised in northern Spain as illiterate and uncouth, presented particular problems. Wilson’s several accounts of this first Murcia project represent her as enthusiastic and collaborative but also as a risk-taker, too ambitious for the situation. Her confidence in her skill and experience probably explains why she made surprisingly little effort in her written accounts of these events to portray herself as a seasoned relief professional. Probably the Málagans’ reputation for ‘wildness’ gave Wilson authorial leeway, though – unlike some other British observers – she wrote of them with affection. Her concern here seems to have been to write a lively and publishable narrative rather than displaying mastery in the field. Her early difficulties included trouble recruiting helpers among the local population. Another setback was finding that her unwise distribution of information cards to the mothers had led to a mass boycott of the programme. The breakfast project lacked cups, saucers, tables and benches and the Murcian relief officials with whom she conferred advised her to wait until these could be supplied. But, anxious to help, Wilson decided to serve the cocoa in soup bowls. She wrote frankly to the Friends in London of her impetuosity, ‘I wouldn’t listen. I said I had come to feed the hungry and I would feed them all – at least all the children.’ Not surprisingly, when the hot drink was first served to a large group (after a smaller turnout the first day) and in cups, there was great disorder, even danger, as children and mothers scrambled around the hot vats of cocoa. At one point Wilson asked the local welfare committee ‘to send me Carabineros’, hardly a feather in a relief worker’s cap and ignored by the deadpan local committee. Some of the children pushed and fought, but the mothers were still more violent, ‘tearing each other’s hair and the clothes off each other’s backs. They shrieked and gesticulated. It was not a breakfast – it was hell.’⁹⁶

The breakfast programme Wilson set up did succeed. The arrival of two young British women skilled at entertaining children as they waited in line and the Málagans’ growing confidence that the breakfasts would continue ensured that the meal became orderly. It was extended to adults and to other shelters in the town and a second daily meal was now also provided. Wilson wrote with pride to Friends House in mid-June 1937 that the cocoa served at all the shelters was ‘a good strong mixture as I did not want hungry people to be fobbed off with a weak drink’. She went on, ‘[i]t is very satisfactory to feel that 2,000 people who would otherwise be without breakfast are being fed, largely through the generosity of the Cadburys’.⁹⁷ Over a total of about nine months in Spain across four different visits to Murcia and its environs Wilson sustained extraordinary creativity and energy. Her second project, immediately after the breakfast programme was up and running, and carried out within a week or two, was to initiate and equip a hospital for thirty children. In addition, Wilson organized workshops in which adults and teenagers could learn to sew clothing or make sandals for themselves, and helped build, equip and staff seaside camps for older children, often raising funds through newspaper advertisements and public speaking in the UK. (One of the camps was at the seaside near Benidorm, then a tiny village.)

Figure 6.1. ‘Malagan refugees at breakfast in Pablo Iglesias, Murcia, 1937’, in Francesca M. Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars (New York, 1945), opp. p. 176.

As Wilson later noted, her months in Spain were ‘the most creative time’ for her. The breakfast programme ultimately gave her a great deal of pleasure and she felt a special pride in having rapidly organized staff and supplies for the badly needed hospital. Much later, she wrote, ‘The most privileged of relief workers are those who are the pioneers, the first on the scene of a disaster. This privilege some inexplicable fate gave me when I arrived alone in Murcia, soon after the wild hordes of refugees from Málaga had arrived there.’⁹⁸ In reading her communications while she was at various relief sites, and her later reflections on Spain, it is clear that Wilson often experienced the excitement of ‘the burn’; or, to invoke a different vocabulary, she was happy. If we follow feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion, happiness is not a fixed state but instead the attainment of a longed-for status or situation – one Wilson had perhaps been seeking since she left university – and that situation was carrying out humanitarian relief, with the Spanish setting particularly enjoyable and fulfilling.⁹⁹ Wilson often wrote of ‘happiness’, ‘fun’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘joy’ in accounts of her months in Spain. Clearly, she had found the right ‘profession’.¹⁰⁰

Advice to relief workers, 1944

The year 1945 crystallized Wilson’s identity as a humanitarian specialist. During the Second World War she had been based in London with the International Commission for War Refugees, helping displaced people find housing and training Quaker relief personnel.¹⁰¹ Now in her mid-fifties, she joined the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as a principal welfare officer and, with her team, started out on 7 May 1945 for Germany from UNRRA’s training centre in Normandy. The following year, in recognition of Wilson’s mastery of Serbo-Croatian and her knowledge of Serbian history, UNRRA asked her to tour its programmes in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

As the Allies’ enormous relief structure was taking shape in 1943–4, Francesca Wilson displayed her humanitarian expertise by compiling a guide for the thousands of workers whom UNRRA and other agencies would eventually employ. The guide was included as an appendix to Wilson’s autobiographical account of her own relief career, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars.¹⁰² The appendix was also published as a separate pamphlet, Advice to Relief Workers Based on Personal Experiences in the Field, which includes a bibliography and detailed practical guidelines, such as ‘All drugs should carry the chemical formula and dosage in the language and system of the country in which they are to be dispensed.’¹⁰³ Another recommendation reflects the moments of disgust and dismay Wilson and her colleagues must have experienced in Corsica in 1917, and elsewhere. In war zones, she says, there are very few babies as rates of conception are low and mortality high; the ‘vast amount of exquisite baby clothing’ sent to stricken populations is an utter waste. She emphasizes the value of craft supplies in helping refugees to keep busy and productive: raw wool, leather, cloth, yarn, shoemaking equipment and raffia. Refugees are desperate for news, so radios, with loudspeakers if necessary, and newspapers are essential. Wilson stressed that most relief work can and should be done by the refugees themselves; aid workers must promote self-government and initiative. In a broader register, she articulates the need for an international charter guaranteeing refugees’ rights, invoking in particular the thousands of Spanish exiles who had escaped to France in 1939 and were ‘left to die on the sands of Argelès’.¹⁰⁴ In the nearly four decades remaining of her life Wilson was a vigorous advocate for refugees through broadcasts, lectures and articles; she wrote several books on their history, needs and rights.¹⁰⁵

True, in her 1944 guide and her bid for recognition, Wilson mobilized her experience rather than her credentials. Yet her authority was acknowledged by J. L. Hammond, historian and journalist, in the book’s foreword, in reviews and, later, in obituaries of Wilson.¹⁰⁶ UNRRA had hired Wilson as a principal welfare officer – with a male assistant. She wore UNRRA’s khaki uniform with ‘scarlet shoulder flashes’, collected a large salary (for a woman) and confidently published her own judgements on the skill and energy of many of her co-workers.¹⁰⁷

On the last page of Advice to Relief Workers Wilson commented on the kinds of skill and on the professions that equip people for relief work:

[A]ny experience in organizing or dealing with people in numbers may come in handy. Teachers make good relief workers if they have not become rigid. There are many linguists among them, interested in the cultural lives of other peoples. Moreover, relief work often concentrates on youth where their experience is invaluable. ¹⁰⁸

Wilson was, a bit reluctantly as the word ‘rigid’ suggests, acknowledging the powerful links between her two professions.