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When Gabrielle West wrote diaries about her war to send to her much missed favourite brother in India she had no idea that a hundred years later they would be of interest to anyone. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, Vicar's daughter Gabrielle joined the Red Cross and worked as a volunteer cook in two army convalescent hospitals. She then secured paid positions in the canteens of the Farnborough Royal Aircraft Factory and then the Woolwich Arsenal, where she watched Zeppelin raids over London during her night shifts. Having failed a mental arithmetic test to drive a horse-drawn bread van for J. Lyons, she was among the first women enrolled in the police and spent the rest of the war looking after the girls in various munitions factories. Gabrielle wrote about and drew what she saw. She had no interest in opinion or politics. She took her bicycle and her dog Rip everywhere and they appear in many of her stories. She had a sharp eye and sometimes a sharp pen. At the end of the war she was simply sent home. She spent the rest of her life caring for relatives. She lived to 100 and never married. The First World War was her big adventure. These days, the reader might feel MI5 should worry about those detailed line drawings of the processes in the factories being sent by Royal Mail across the world ...but a hundred years ago?

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9781473870864

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Avalon Weston would like to add that she only edited this book. The words are those of her Great Aunt Bobby written in diaries from 1914 - 1917 which she carefully sent to her favourite brother, posted in India. ' By extraordinary chance I inherited the copyright of these diaries and all I've done was to transcribe them and provide some background information on the times and the family. The words are Aunt Bobby's not mine. She was a vicar's daughter in an Edwardian vicarage, who had no idea the First World War was on the horizon, but when it arrived it gave her the biggest adventure of her life, though she never left the British Isles.'

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