HERSTORY: Dorothy Lawrence: From the Trenches to the Asylum

I’ve posted a few times now about extraordinary women from history who cross-dressed to achieve the unthinkable, This month’s Herstory is  a fascinating and tragic story of a woman who was determined to be a journalist, and if that meant taking on a ‘male’ identity, she was prepared to do it at any cost. Even at the cost of her sanity. 

Dorothy as a young woman (Wikipedia)

An ambitious young hack

Dorothy Lawrence was born in Middlesex in around 1888 but her exact origins are unknown, since she was adopted by a wealthy couple in Salisbury. She seems to have been well educated, and she had designs on becoming a journalist. She managed to get some articles published in the Times and The Pall Mall Gazette, but when the war started in 1914, she saw her opportunity. She would become a war correspondent! Unfortunately no newspaper would send a woman to the front lines. 

Dorothy was undaunted. She persisted, knocking on every newspaper office door along Fleet Street until the Times editor eventually was persuaded to pay for her papers to travel to France, on some vague pretext of writing an ‘entertainment’ piece, which was really the only sort of journalism women were allowed to do at this stage. This was the first evidence of Dorothy’s extraordinary powers of persuasion. 

The deception begins…

She travelled to France in 1915 and tried to join the Voluntary Aid Detachment but was rejected. She tried to get into the war zone nonetheless, and was arrested by French police and forced out. This is what made her realise she could only get a piece of the action if she were a man…

Dorothy was, you could say, reckless in her courage and astoundingly bold for her times. She was a woman alone, fraternising with soldiers during the war in a strange country with very limited French language skills. She would hang around coffee shops to try to befriend sympathetic soldiers to help her in her mission, and try to avoid being cast as a prostitute (!)

Eventually, through her skills of persuasion, she convinced two British soldiers in Paris to smuggle her a soldiers uniform. She then ‘transformed’ herself into a man, by flattening her bust using a home made corset and bulking out her shoulders with sacking. She cut her hair short, darkened her skin using shoe polish and even gave herself a fake shaving rash by scraping her skin.  She then asked her soldier friends to teach her how to drill and march like a soldier. You’ve got to admire her commitment to the assignment ! 

Dorothy as a ‘Private Denis Smith’ (Wikipedia)

The only woman on the Front Line

She got hold of forged papers and headed for the front lines as her new identity: Private Denis Smith, on a pushbike. Along the way she slept in forests and ditches but eventually after some days reached the trenches at the Somme to experience the front line. 

She was fortunate in finding good samaritan friends, such as a coal miner who found her a cottage to sleep in at night to avoid detection by the men in the army dorms, and rations of food to sustain her. He also found her work as a sapper with the British Royal Engineers at the front lines. Dorothy’s job was to dig tunnels and place bombs under enemy lines, highly skilled and very risky labour. -   although files by the Secret Service suggest she likely wasn’t involved in this sort of work at all, because it wouldn’t have been possible for a woman to do. But as so much of Dorothy’s account has been categorically dismissed thanks to a combination of embarrassment to the authorities and misogyny, I am inclined to believe that Dorothy WAS involved in the work she said she was, but this is something we’ll never truly know for sure. 

There is no doubt to anyone, however, that she was in the trenches, disguised as a male soldier on a daily basis, since it was there that she was promptly arrested after 10 days of service. .

Exposed and silenced…

She had suffered stress-induced illness as a result of the conditions in the trenches: freezing weather, bombs and lack of food had induced in her frequent fainting fits and chills. Knowing that if she visited the doctor she would be immediately discovered, she revealed herself to be female. She also said in her memoir later that she had wanted  to protect the men who had helped her.  As a result of her admission,  she was put under immediate arrest. 

She was interrogated as a spy and declared a prisoner of war, and then transported by horse across France  where she was interrogated a further two times. The British Army were completely flummoxed by her. Why would this woman, who was not a spy nor a prostitute, want to risk her life and arrest by going to the front lines? They had not encountered anyone like her before. Once she was confirmed as a journalist, she had to sign an affidavit to say that she would not write about her experiences at risk of jail time, and was extradited back to London. Interestingly, she travelled back to London on the same ferry as Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the WSPU who frequently fled to France to escape arrest, and she asked Dorothy if she would speak at a suffragette rally; which unfortunately didn’t happen as Dorothy was banned from speaking publicly. 

Although she was forbidden from writing about her experiences at war, Dorothy was not about to waste her sacrifice! As you might expect given her previous form, she defied the authorities by trying to publish her account upon her return. But the War Office silenced her. In 1919 she tried again and this time managed to publish her memoir Sapper: Dorothy Lawrence, the only English Woman Soldier. The book was heavily censored by the authorities and did not become the commercial success she had hoped. So sadly, she was never able to profit or build her career from being the only woman on the front line during WW1. 

Dorothy arrested. (Disability Arts Online

Incarcerated

Her later life is almost as notorious, sadly, as her daring escapades during the war. Her physical health continued to decline following her experiences in the Somme. She had contracted septic poisoning from the trenches, and had developed, possibly as a result of the poisoning, a neurological condition that caused her to shake uncontrollably. These physical ailments no doubt led to her eventual mental health decline. She also,  - either because of her illness or because of her wartime activity -   became estranged from her adopted mother. So Dorothy now had nobody. 

In 1925 she came to the attention of the authorities due to her ‘erratic’ behaviour. She had confided to a doctor that she had been raped as a teenager by her adopted father but, instead of her accusation being taken seriously, she was deemed insane and committed to London County Mental Hospital.  From there she was transferred to Coney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in North London, and spent nearly 40 years there, dying there in 1964. Although we don't know her exact date of birth, we can infer that she had been committed since her late thirties roughly, and had died when in her 60’s/70’s. 

Tragically, she had no recorded visitors during her life in the asylum, and was buried in a pauper’s grave, and essentially, forgotten.   Even more shockingly, her experiences during the war and her book were instantly dismissed upon her committal to the asylum. How could anyone trust the memoir of a mad woman?   It was a desperately sad and  inauspicious end for a woman who was clearly very driven, intelligent and achieved something she should really be widely recognised for.

The Truth…

So what happened to Dorothy? What went wrong? Well a simple and logical interpretation is that Dorothy’s illness was either caused by a contraction of an illness at the Somme, or as a result of war-induced PTSD or indeed, due to a combination of both these things. Many WW1 soldiers tragically went ‘insane’ and were committed following the horrors of the Great War.  At a time when psychiatry was in its infancy, PTSD and related mental health conditions were not well understood. 

But Dorothy’s story is even more complex than that, because she was a woman. A woman who defied the patriarchal establishment and embarrassed the authorities by smuggling herself illegally into a war zone. A woman who was from infancy rejected, abused, diminished and eventually, silenced and erased entirely by being declared insane and institutionalised.  How can these experiences not take a toll? For someone mentally fragile and traumatised, it’s little wonder she became so unwell. 

The former Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum (Wikipedia)

Recognition at last

After being forgotten for 80 years, Dorothy’s story was unearthed in 2003 by a descendent of one of the soldiers who had helped her during her war deception. Her memoir was ‘rediscovered’. Further ‘proof’ of what she said in her memoir was provided by letters from the Head of the Secret Service at the time, describing Dorothy’s actions. Her medical records including her rape allegations were then found in the London Metropolitan Archives. 

As a result, Dorothy was included for the first time in an exhibition at the imperial War Museum, and has since had two plays and a film made inspired by her story. And I’ve no doubt there’ll be many more. 

There are numerous stories of women’s heroic actions during the wars, but not many of these women were abused adoptees who cross dressed and were then not just disbelieved but declared insane and abandoned in the way she was. And there were certainly none that spent time in the trenches, like she did. I think it is fair so say that history has failed Dorothy and not honoured her as it should have done.  

But by writing this and bringing her story to a wider audience, I am doing my bit to change that. Because more of us should know what, in Dorothy’s own words;  

“…an ordinary English girl, without credentials or money can accomplish” 

Thats it for this month’s Herstory. I hope you enjoyed it.