On Saturday 25 October, Active members and Associates came together with supporters and friends at St Paul’s Church Knightsbridge to mark Corps Day; the anniversary of the official start of the FANYs’ wartime service. The service was conducted by the new Corps Chaplain, The Rev’d Dr Mariama Ifode-Blease.
Corps Day is held every year as close to 27th October as possible to remember the day when Grace Ashley-Smith, the Corps Commanding Officer, acquired an ambulance and sailed to France with six FANYs after their offers of help were refused by British Army contacts. The FANYs crossed to Calais on 27th October 1914 to drive ambulances for the Belgians and the French, and on 29th October, they took over a dirty and decayed convent school opposite the Church of Notre Dame, called Lamarck Hospital. Find out more about Corps’ history here.
To mark the day, a remembrance service was held in St Paul’s, followed by the laying of a wreath at the FANY Memorial, which was laid by members of FANY SOE Veteran Odette Hallowes. Odette Sansom (later Churchill, later Hallowes) was one of the FANYs who was sent into occupied France as an agent in WWII; thirty-nine of the 50 women sent into France were FANYs. Odette was arrested after seven months, and brutally tortured – with a red hot poker on her back, and her toenails pulled out – but somehow she managed to convince the Gestapo she was married to Peter Churchill, another agent with whom she had been arrested, and that he was closely related to Winston Churchill. She was sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, where she was kept in solitary confinement in a room next to the furnaces, and with the heating turned on full blast throughout the summer to try and break her. She survived pneumonia and the war and lived to become one of our most venerated veterans.
We were delighted to welcome our Guest of Honour, the Commissioner of the City of London Police, Pete O’Doherty and after the service, a celebratory lunch was held at Wellington Barracks with prizes and cups awarded to members for their service over the past year. We were honoured to welcome FANY SOE Veteran Joyce Wilding to the lunch, where she presented the prizes and cups. Joyce was accompanied by Katherine Minchin who was Guardian for the late Laura Lean.
