Evening star. [volume], October 22, 1939, Page 7, Image 97

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
ESCAPE FROM THE SHADOW OF DEATH
How one woman planned the amazing evacuation
oi 2,000,000 British city children and invalids. She
is the Marchioness oi Beading, whose hordes oi
women defense workers term Britain's second army
by C. Patrick Thompson
ON Friday September first began one of
the strangest and greatest human
treks in all history. The threat of
Hitler’s swastika-emblemed bombers had
fallen suddenly athwart the crowded capital
and the industrial cities of Great Britain, and
all school children, all nursing and expectant
mothers, all hospital patients and all the blind
and crippled began moving out of the crowded
areas and dispersing over hundreds of miles
of countryside.
More than two million of them moved out
in that first war week end beginning Friday
and ending Monday September fourth. The
hundreds of London schools alone sent out
700,000 children. But there was no screaming
and no scurry. Column after column of
marching children, crowded automobiles,
motor coaches and busses moved quietly and
efficiently from their points of assembly to
their points of departure past workers sand
bagging police stations and post offices, past
soldiers guarding antiaircraft-gun batteries
under a blue sky displaying a new silver-gray
constellation of 2,000 barrage balloons. And,
just as efficiently, they were scattered over
the countryside, in the mansions, rooming
houses and cottages that had already been
earmarked for them.
The government played Pied Piper in this
measured human flow, with schoolteachers
assembling and escorting the school children.
But the chief shepherd was a tall dark-eyed
woman who for many months had pictured in
her mind this scene of moving millions and
had blueprinted it for smooth action when the
hour should strike.
She is the dowager Marchioness of Reading,
chairman of the Women’s Voluntary Services
for Civil Defense.
On that evacuation week end she worked
mainly from her headquarters in a sandbagged
office block in Westminster, but her hand
reached out to the congested and dangerous
districts of Tyneside, Clydebank, Southamp
ton, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Birmingham and
Leeds — to industrial cities, port towns and
naval bases.
There were no casualties and no slip-ups
in that evacuation because she had foreseen
everything down to the last detail and had
more than a hundred thousand women volun
teers trained and ready. The technical prepa
ration of that huge staff had included even
such items as having warm milk ready for
babies and comic sections for small boys.
In the midst of that unprecedented exodus
— on Saturday, September 2 — I sat talking
with Lady Reading in her office — and al
though one or another of her headquarters
staff of 150 was constantly popping in or out
with papers and questions and her telephone
, was almost continually busy, she remained
unhurried and efficient. The army of a million
women that she had built from the ground up.
and had provided with 40,000 trained leaders
in 1,200 centers — in the short space of sixteen
months — was doing the job she had trained
it to do. And so swiftly and efficiently did it
accomplish its first great task that by noon on
Monday, Britain’s big cities were like war
ships cleared for action.
On the last day of the evacuation Lady
Reading could take a minute off to assure
anxious mothers that their children were
being properly looked after. But it was only
a ‘‘minute.’’ With her evacuation machine
working smoothly she had a few other things
to attend to — enlisting another 6,000 volun
teer ambulance drivers, adding thousands of
women to the battalions of auxiliary nurses,
canteen workers and hospital workers, and
supervising the general expansion of her civil
defense army from a million to two millions.
For, although the evacuation workers were
the first to swing into action, they form only
one division of her entire army. This remark
able woman had to look forward to the time
when those swastika-emblemed bombers
might get through — she had to be sure that
when they did other sections of the Women's
Voluntary Services would be on the job, ready
to help clear gas-contaminated streets, to ren
der first aid and to rush the injured off to
emergency hospitals and attend them in those
hospitals. There is indeed no angle of civil de
fense that this women’s army doesn’t touch.
The Marchioness of Reading, who serves as
generalissimo of this vast army, is of French
Huguenot ancestry, the widow of a wise Jew
who became Lord Chief Justice of England,
Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary. She
was his secretary and chief of staff.
A woman of beauty, wit and culture,
/
accustomed to almost unlimited leisure (well
earned after nearly a quarter-century of hard
toil) she donned a green smock sixteen months
ago, moved over to a big desk in a bare office
and has been working an eighteen-hour day
ever since. She has not had time to dine out
five times in a year, and her lunch is usually
a sandwich at the desk or in her car.
This is the second war she has served in.
In the unorganized and unready Britain of
August, 1914, she left her home (her father,
Charles Chamaud, served the British in
diplomatic posts in Turkey and elsewhere)
and became a pantry maid. She took the
place of a volunteer soldier.
She is one of those rare human beings who
always learn something from their experi
ences. In that first job she learned self
discipline — and how to make mustard
properly. Before she started to build the
W. V. S. she had made herself mistress of
several languages, and had become an author
ity on Indian affairs, broadcasting, migration,
imperial relations and a few other subjects.
She had sat as a member of government
advisory bodies in these matters.
She sounds formidable, and in a way she is.
She exercises an immense influence through
her friends in high places, who respect her
opinions, and consult her; and she has a
natural force of her own. But there is no
vestige of the “important public woman’’
about her. She is strongly feminine — too
feminine to be a feminist. She has worked so
long in the background that she js still p little
shy and self-conscious in a public-woman
role; and if she can avoid personal publicity,
or meeting newspapermen, she does.
Notwithstanding the seriousness of her job,
she has a broad streak of gaiety, and she likes
to poke fun. With a big executive’s capacity
for hard, driving work, and a swift incisive
mind, she is able to hold her own in counsel
with statesmen and administrators; she knows
how to coax, and takes pleasure in it. It is,
probably, the FrenchwomajMn her.
The story of Stella Chamaud would be set
in chateaux in France, if her ancestors had not
been Huguenots. The French kings scattered
the Huguenots as the old Roman and the new
German oligarchs scattered the Jews. In each
case there was a human quality that the
ruling group feared: a high spirit and an
indomitable streak. Hence the presence of
Charles Chamaud in Great Britain.
His daughter, Stella, interested herself
mainly in women's welfare. She was once in
danger of overvaluing the intellect and the
earnest spirit — the inner and invisible qual
ities. Once, knowing herself to be well-fitted
for a certain prospective job, she rushed to
get it —wearing odd shoes. She didn’t get
the job. She never again made the mistake of
neglecting her appearance.
Attractive, energetic, diplomatic, accom
plished, she was thirty when she was proposed
as the woman member of the group Lord
Reading was taking out to India to 9olve the
problem of adjusting imperial Britain’s rela
tions with a reawakened India. This was in
1925.
Lord Reading was bom Rufus Isaacs. He
was the highest type of Jewish aristocrat,
breeding and strength of character in every
line of a face as fine-carved as a piece of old
ivory. Many years before he had had his
first glimpse of India from a cargo boat on the
Hooghly River. He was a cabin boy: he had
run away to sea. Back home again, he went on
the stock exchange, soon gave that up for law
and politics, rose to the highest law posts
under the Crown, became Lord Chief Justice
of England, and then Viceroy of India.
Loyalty to the country of his adoption
made him regard patriotism as .the highest
virtue.
Stella Chamaud found him a hard task
master. He gave intelligence and loyalty to
the State, expected both from those around
him. His first wife and Stella Chamaud
became great friends. He recognized the
talents of the woman member of his entourage
and gave her more and more to do. She became
his confidential secretary, then his chief of
staff. She drafted his speeches, worked up the
points.
Working with this man, lawyer, satrap and
statesman, on big jobs involving the lives and
destinies of hundreds of millions and the
future of an empire, she learned much. Their
lives and interests drew closer. She came to
care for him greatly.
Reading’s wife died — they had been
(Continued on page 15)
Atm*
Lady Reading works 18 hours a day
London mothers see their youngsters off to safety in the countryside. The whole evacuation was managed over a week end