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The Women without Fear

Published Friday 8th July 2005

From left, Alexandra Muir and Emma Carpenter pose next to the painting of Eileen Harward at the exhibition in Banqueting House.

A special all female volunteer unit that helped to train agents dropped behind enemy lines during the Second World War has been commemorated with the hanging of a portrait in The Banqueting House in Whitehall.

Members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) paid tribute to their veteran colleagues by hanging a portrait of one of their members who served during the Second World War as part an exhibition at The Banqueting House.

"We were invited to donate a painting to be hung with the rest of the paintings here this weekend," explains Emma Carpenter, a senior designer for a software company and a FANY member.

"I think it is very nice because it brings the FANY to the forefront of people's minds. We are still here and we are still working with the Army and the emergency services. The painting that we've got on display here at the moment is one of the most beautiful paintings that we have."

The portrait is of Eileen Harward who was a Sergeant cook at Sandhurst during the war. Today's FANY members are involved in everything from communications, driving, first aid, languages and much more. All the members are females and are volunteers who don’t get paid for their commitment.

"We do this because we love it and we don’t get paid," says Emma. "We just love the spirit of the corps and meeting people and generally having a great time outside of work. We are affiliated to 2 Signal Brigade and we do some of their training."

Ceremonies honouring the past are absolutely imperative says Emma.

"It is our heritage, our history and is a great honour to remember those girls."

Part of that remembrance is their standard dress which is almost identical to the dress worn by FANY members during the 1940s. Both Emma and her colleague Alexandra Muir who works in an auction house, sport badges they earned at a parachute school in France where they trained with the French forces for two weeks.

For Alexandra, joining the FANY was the best thing she ever did.

"I'd just moved to London and I didn’t know many people here, there was something missing in my life really and this was it," says Alexandra.

"I was told about the Corps through a male colleague who knew some of the members in the Corps. He knew I have a military background because my father was in the Army. I thought it would be something worth trying. He put me in touch with the training officer and that was four years ago. I haven't looked back it's been great."

Alexandra says that ceremonies like the exhibition and the portrait are important because it lets people know what their veterans did during the war.

"It is important to show there are still people today carrying on that tradition. It's important to show young people that they can still do this sort of thing."

For Alexandra, being called to help out in an emergency became a reality when she was hastily scrambled to help in the aftermath of the London terror attacks.

"We were on standby and I was actually at our headquarters," she explained. "We were told to supply a shift of 12 members of the Corps at Bishopsgate Police Station, which is where the Casualty Bureau is.

"We had calls coming in that we then fielded. We spent all day at our headquarters making sure there were enough people at Bishopsgate. Those of us at HQ were making sure that there were enough members who could go in on those shifts and that there were enough people to take over when the shifts finished.

"We've been fielding emergency calls from people who were looking for someone who may have been involved in one of those incidents and haven't heard from them or who were working in that area. They then call the emergency number and it is FANYs on the other end of the phone and they take down the details."

The exhibition, at The Banqueting House on Whitehall, is open and free to the public. It runs from 08th July to 04th August.

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Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the end of World War Two

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