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| Munition girls: Their badges read: Speed up guns and ammunition |
I’m researching Canary Girls, the story of the million or so sassy munition workers in Britain, Canada, Australia and India whose wartime contribution was never recognised.
One, Mabel Lethbridge, had her leg blown off by a faulty machine at an armaments factory in Hayes, Middlesex in 1917. “I saw my leg had gone . . . I wasn’t blind then,” she writes in Fortune Grass.
A year later “Peg-leg” Mabel is hiring a barrel organ from Pasquali’s, Clerkenwell, London (two bob a day) and busking for a living.
She busked around the city with this sign pinned to her jacket: “Lost a leg and sustained numerous other wounds in a munition explosion in 1917. You needed my help then! I need yours now!” Seems she did all right.
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