Felicity’s ‘terrible mistake’ saw her join the war effort

Seventy-five years after Victory in Japan Day – which will be marked on August 15 – TOBY PORTER talks to 97-year-old veteran Felicity Medland, from Balham. Felicity was a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) – the regiment which HM The Queen joined – from 1941 to 1945. She remembers her life in Balham before joining, and what happened after.

Felicity Medland only joined the women’s part of the army because she didn’t want to work in a factory.

She had made what she calls a “terrible mistake” with the wages of the company where she was working in Streatham.

She was told she would have to go back to the factory floor. But in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) of the army – now the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) – she was able to contribute to the war effort.

This year, she will be one of the oldest former army veterans marking the end of the war with Japan.

And things worked out well for fearless Felicity. “I had the time of my life,” she said. “I sailed through the war without seeing any combat.

“Enlisting during the war did not worry me as much as other people because I was only young.

“I took it in my stride.

“It is strange to think of it being 75 years. I’m 97 now so it is a long time ago.”

Within three years of war’s end, in 1948, she met the man who would become her husband, Paul Edwards, at agricultural college and they later had four sons and ran a farm on the Isle of Wight, where she now lives.

But her other memories of the war are before she joined the ATS, going to Ravenstone School in Balham from the family home in Childerbert Road.

Her dad, Harry Edwards, who was raised in Shipka Road, Balham, became a famous spiritualist healer who, by the end of the war, was pulling in big crowds – and, in 1948, attracted more than 6,000 to an event in Manchester.

During the war, though, he owned a printers and stationers shop opposite Du Cane Court in Balham High Road – the premises has since been turned into an entrance to other properties.

“People used to come to the shop in Balham and ask to be healed,” recalled Felicity. “Dad started going to meetings in church halls and then giving demonstrations – and then the newspapers picked up on him.”

A piece by journalist Hannen Swaffer, known as “the Pope of Fleet Street,” gave him worldwide fame and, after that, he never stopped being in demand. Felicity had left Ravenstone school at the age of 14 in 1937 and worked for the Milk Marketing Board.

The board moved to Thames Ditton so she had to get the Northern line to South Wimbledon and then hitch hike the rest of the way until the war broke out.

The family home was destroyed by a V2 bomb which wiped out nine houses. It blew all the windows and doors out and covered everything in soot.

Felicity’s two sisters and brother had been evacuated, but the youngest sister, Barbara, came back because she didn’t like where she had been placed in Three Bridges near Gatwick.

She was sitting at home knitting with her mother – listening to an aircraft overhead – when the Balham underground disaster happened on October 14, 1940.

She said: “Suddenly there was a tremendous crump and the house seemed to lift up for a split second and then settle down again.”

More than 60 people were killed in the bombing, hundreds injured – and more were hurt when a bus fell into the resulting hole.

“We didn’t know what happened until the next day,” said Felicity. “You certainly wouldn’t have gone out during raids. We didn’t see the damage until the next day. I didn’t know anyone who was involved, thankfully.

“It was like hearing the sound of war at its deadliest. Flying fortresses filled the skies.”

She was working at Smiths Meters in Rowan Road, Streatham Vale, when she said she made a terrible mistake with the wages.

“I suffer from number blindness and was told as a result that I would have to work on a lathe on the factory floor,” she said. “It was a protected profession so I could have ended up doing that for the entire rest of the war.

“So I shot up to Curzon Street in central London and joined the ATS – out of desperation.”

Felicity stayed in the service from 1941-1945. She was stationed at Arborfield, Berkshire, as a projectionist. Her work involved educating the troops about mechanical engineering for some of the army’s best known tanks, including those used in the Normandy invasion.

Soon after the war, the family moved to Surrey when Felicity was in her early 20s.

Her father’s healing took place in the front rooms of Burrows Lea, in Shere – he was receiving 10,000 letters a week asking for help and distance healing.

During the Festival of Britain, 1951, he appeared at a packed Royal Festival Hall.

“I still think of myself as a Londoner,” said Felicity. “I always think of the days in Balham – when I lived there it was a gracious place with privet hedges and lovely railings along the road, but all that went for the war effort. I found out later that none of the railings ever got used, which is very sad.”

The WRAC Association (charity) continues to run its Find Our O.A.Ts campaign to find the eldest surviving British female veteran, wherever she is in the world, so that this woman can be appropriately thanked.

The charity also continues to run its Buddy-Buddy scheme, whereby older female veterans are being supported through the coronavirus pandemic by younger women who serve in the forces.

For more info on the WRAC Association, go to www.wracassociation.org.uk