‘So I married again’: Letters from British Widows of the First and Second World Wars

Abstract

This paper is based on an archive of almost eight thousand letters, based at Staffordshire University and known as the War Widows Archive: The Iris Strange Collection. The overwhelming majority of the letters are from widows of the Second World War but there are also over three hundred from First-World-War widows. In addition, there are hundreds of press cuttings charting the nineteen-year campaign which British war widows fought to obtain better pension provision; official correspondence; various service organization journals; war widows' journals from other countries; verse written by war widows; photographs; and a wartime diary kept by a British prisoner of the Japanese during his captivity. The archive has been arranged by subject for example, letters can be found under the heading 'pensions', and press cuttings are arranged chronologically. More detailed cataloguing will be undertaken at a future date. The letters may only be cited anonymously as some of the correspondents are still living and the various war widows' organizations are still functioning. Some of the older material is fragile, therefore access is limited to those actively engaged in research. (Application to consult the archive should be made in writing to Debbie Roberts, Tutor Librarian in the School of Arts, Staffordshire University Library, College Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 2XW.) The widows' letters were all written in the years between 1971 and 1992 to one person, a woman called Iris Strange. She was a war widow whose husband, Bob, was taken prisoner after the fall of Singapore in 1942 and died in captivity. The archive also contains their wartime correspondence as well as Iris Strange's unfinished autobiography. After her husband's death Iris Strange, and many other war widows who felt resentment at the harsh treatment meted out to them by successive governments, tried to get their voices heard by writing to individual MPs, newspapers, service organizations, even the Queen. It was to no avail. When Iris approached her MP during the 1950s, he told her there were thousands worse off than her and to stop complaining. As successive post-war governments refused to release the names of war widows it was difficult, without publicity, for them to find each other. This left them isolated and powerless. By contrast, the Australian government released the names of Australian war widows in 1945 enabling the War Widows Guild of Australia to be formed immediately after the war; consequently they became a powerful lobby group and soon secured excellent pension provision for their members. As the country began to recover from the devastating effects of the Second World War during the 1950s and 60s very little improved for British war widows. The average age of a Second-World-War widow was twenty-three years and the pension