miss josephine Butler

WITH the outbreak of war, it was a case of all hands on deck. Sexual stereotypes of the time were broken down and cast aside as gainful employment was found for anyone who was able-bodied.

For Mrs Josephine Mees, of Pannal Ash Road in Harrogate, the war was to bring a rapid change in her teenage life.

The day war broke out, she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Josephine Butler returning home after a holiday beset by rumour and fear.

As Mrs Mees recalls, it was an anxious time: "On September 3. 1939, the talk was all of those young men who had to go off to war, my brother included."

"There was no time then to bother about young schoolgirls, but we soon showed our worth to the country," she said.

Little did she know however, that within two years she would be riding a 500cc motorcycle around London training to be a WRNS Despatch Rider with the men of the Auxiliary Fire Service.

After her spell of training, Josephine was sent up to Scotland. to the port of Greenock on the Firth of Clyde.

Her job was to carry sailing orders to the ships in dock.

She also took urgent signals to outlying stations in the remote hills of the West of Scotland.

It was hard, demanding work for the young women — soaked to the skin, lost on hilly tracks with occasionally only the sound of sheep and distant bagpipes for company.

Six riders kept a 24-hour watch, which included escorting visiting VIPs, some of whom travelled in the sidecar bikes to save petrol; Josephine remembers carrying Lord Louis Mountbatten on several occasions "with his long legs bent double in the little sidecar."

Despite slithering about at all hours on the greasy docksides and all the rain and hardship. Mrs Mees was enjoying herself — so much so that she signed on after the war to stay in the service.

Family illness forced her to leave her motorcycle behind for good in 1947, but the ties with her past proved to be strong and in 1987, 40 years on, she attended a WRNS reunion in Harrogate.

To her delight, she discovered that the girls she had been with all those years ago on the Clyde lived only a few miles away.

"The grey hairs vanished and the wrinkles smoothed away, once again we were those teenage girls, who were not very important on September 3. 1939." she said.