The WRNS: A history of the Women's Royal Naval Service

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The WRNS reached its largest size in 1944, with 74,000 women doing over 200 different jobs. 303 Wrens were killed on wartime service. After the war the WRNS was made a permanent part of the Royal Navy, but women did not serve in Royal Navy ships until the 1990s.

Traditional army and naval officers earn their stripes over time. They are usually gold or crimson, but the Wrens had their own officer stripes in blue. Officers' stripes were identical to those on navy officer uniforms, with some having a symbol on the top stripe and others not. 2. 74,000 Wrens officers were involved in World War Two She discovered that they remained undetected because, having shot their torpedoes, they submerged to 720ft – out of Royal Navy radar range.

One of the slogans used in recruiting posters was "Join the Wrens—free a man for the fleet." It was integrated into the regular Royal Navy in 1993 when women were allowed to serve on board navy vessels as full members of the crew.

Captain Johnnie Walker, a British escort commander, had invented the Buttercup tactic, which involved escort ships moving outside a convoy and firing flares whenever a U-boat was spotted. After a 20-year hiatus the WRNS were re-constituted on the outbreak of World War II to release men from shore duties to boost the numbers available to serve afloat. The new Director was Dame Vera Matthews CBE, in post from 11 April 1939 to 1946, who had previously served in 1918, receiving an MBE for her work at HMS Victory VI, the basic training base at Crystal Palace in South London. During WWII Dame Vera was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1942 for her training work with the Free Dutch Women’s Volunteer Marine. By 1944 women were undertaking over 200 different jobs, including catering, secretarial, telegraphists, radar plotters, weapons analysts, range assessors, mechanics, despatch riders, piloting transport aircraft and most famously employed as code and cypher breakers at Bletchley Park, working on the world’s first large-scale computer called Colossus. At its peak 75,000 women were serving by 1944 and when Dame Vera retired, over 100,000 women had served under her leadership, of which 303 were killed during the hostilities. But Vera was an early-doors ­feminist. She was writing for the Suffragette, she was pushing the ­envelope for women.” Trainee Writer Brittany Walker, aged 23 from Norfolk, said:“It’s been nice hearing the ladies’ stories of how things were in their day. Their initial training was different compared to what we have to do, particularly the physical element.”

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a b Thomas, Lesley (2004). "Mathews, Dame Elvira Sibyl Maria [Vera] Laughton (1888–1959)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/34937. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

On 10 October 1918, nineteen-year-old Josephine Carr from Cork, became the first Wren to die on active service, when her ship, the RMS Leinster was torpedoed. By the end of WW1 WRNS had 5,500 members, 500 of them officers. About 2000 members of the WRAF had previously served with the WRNS supporting the Royal Naval Air Service and were transferred on the creation of the Royal Air Force. So for the U-boats to be so accurate in their aim, they had to be already inside the convoy. But how were they getting there? See WIKI Women's Royal Naval Service Information shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License - see Creative Commons Licenses Other Wrens offered to relieve her of monitoring the Oribi, but Christian refused. She adds: “Naturally, I needed to stay there.” The WRNS remained in existence after the end of the war although Mathews retired in 1947 [1] and Goodenough had died the year before. In the 1970s it became obvious that equal pay for women and the need to remove sexual discrimination meant that the WRNS and the Royal Navy would become one organisation. The key change was that women would become subject to the Naval Discipline Act 1957. Vonla McBride, who had experience in human resource management, became the Director of the WRNS in 1976, and members of the WRNS were subject to the same discipline as men by the next year. [3]In the 1970s, the prospect of a women ever commanding a warship at sea was out of the question but only a decade later, as the Staff Officer of 706 Naval Air Squadron, Sue took part in one of the first experiments of women at sea with her division of Wren Air Mechanics at RNAS Culdrose. HMS Raleigh was the home of initial naval training for Wrens, as they were affectionately known, from 1981 until training for men and women was amalgamated in 1990. Patricia Davies (cryptographer) co-wrote Codebreaking Sisters. Patricia and Jean Owtram (2020) London: Mirror Books. ISBN 9781913406059 Wrens were initially recruited to release men to serve at sea. This was reflected in the recruiting slogan 'Join the Wrens today and free a man to join the Fleet.' As the wartime navy expanded, the WRNS followed suit, taking on tasks that the Royal Navy had previously considered beyond their capabilities. WRNS responsibilities included driving, cooking, clerical work, operating radar and communications equipment and providing weather forecasts. The Naval Censorship Branch was staffed by WRNS clerks and censor officers either worked in mobile units or in London. Many Wrens were involved in planning naval operations, including the D-Day landings in June 1944.