Ann Bonsor shares her experience of joining the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and undergoing complex training as a wireless telegraphist. Despite challenging shifts in confined spaces, Ann and her colleagues enjoyed their work. Sent to various locations including Algiers, Corsica, the south of France, and Sicily, they also worked at SOE bases in London and Cairo. Many women couldn't keep up, but Ann persevered, maintaining both her position and an active social life. Her time with FANY was exciting but also a reminder of the serious nature of their work. After 15 months in North Africa, Ann was transferred to SOE in Bari and then Sienna. As work slowed, she set up an educational course for younger FANY members. Ann fondly recalls her time in FANY as a tremendously rich experience.

At the age of seventeen, with the knowledge that she wouldn’t have an address, and her parents wouldn’t know where she was, Eileen Simpson became a FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry). After training at the SOE centre at Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire, Eileen tells how she went to work at Norgeby House in Baker Street, London, the SOE’s main WW2 control centre for the European country sections. There she spent three years, working in a team with three other women, coding messages sent to operatives in the field, and compiling schedules and frequencies for when SOE agents across Europe should send their messages. Eileen remembers having to be careful not to get too attached to agents due to the heavy loss of personnel, and being all too aware that you shouldn’t discuss work when ‘you’ve got other people’s lives in your hands’. Working six and a half days a week, including through Doodle bomb raids, and the time a V-2 rocket landed on Marylebone Station, the women formed a close-knit group which resulted in lifelong friendships. Eileen recalls being very aware that they had something to work for, and despite having very little time off, she says she ‘loved every minute!’

Mildred Schultz recalls how she grew up on a farm and went to school in Walton-on-Thames. She attended a business college in Kingston and from there worked at a shipping company in Cobham. Even though her job was protected, she volunteered and joined the Inter-Services Research Bureau. She explains how she went to work at S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) headquarters in Baker Street London, realising she was working for the resistance movement, reading and destroying reports. Asked if she would travel abroad, Mildred said ‘yes’ and undertook FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) training at Chicheley Hall in Bedfordshire. From here she was sent to Italy for further training on a boat and describes how they were pursued by U-boats, bombed and machine gunned. In Italy she became the PA to the man in charge of maps and equipment, and then worked as an assistant to the Admin Captain Amos. She recalls spending a snowy Christmas in Monopoli and then onto Siena to the Headquarters of Number 1 Special Force, taking a perilous jeep journey up a mountain road with boulders near the front-line with guns aimed at them. On a lighter note, Mildred remembers a makeshift Christmas service under a derelict chapel with many nationalities, some of whom had escaped from Prisoner of War camps, and also Germans who had escaped and given up, all singing carols together.