Happy Birthday, You Awesome Bastard

October 4th, Dorothy Lawrence

Dorothy Lawrence,
October 4th, 1896

CW - S.A.

The story of Dorothy Lawrence is magnificent, sad and infuriating. Women who stand out in history tend to be labelled as either witches, bitches, whores or lunatics and Dorothy, despite her amazing story, not only fell foul of the latter two descriptions, but they locked her up for it. Society, and by ‘society’, I mean ‘men’ of course, just couldn’t handle the fact that a woman voluntarily went to the front lines of World War I, disguised as a man, to report on what was going on, but then she came home and had the audacity to try and write about it. That was bad enough for them, but then she really went too far for them and told them about the time, as a teenager, that she was raped. She was clearly ‘insane’ as the man she accused of assaulting her was a wealthy and respected member of the church, and everyone knows that wealthy and respected members of the church are the very last people who would ever rape anyone, right?

So they did the only sensible thing with such a wicked harpy and threw her in an asylum for the rest of her life.

That train is never late, is it?

Dorothy Lawrence was born on October 4, 1896, in Polesworth, Warwickshire, to Thomas Hartshorn Lawrence and Mary Jane Beddall, a couple who were not married. As an illegitimate child, she was adopted in 1909 by guardians of the Church of England, the affluent and respected Mrs. Josephine Fitzgerald and her husband, following her mother's death.

Aspiring to be a serious journalist, Dorothy succeeded in publishing several articles in The Times and Nash's Pall Mall Magazine. Despite the prevailing atmosphere of empowerment, her status as a woman significantly constrained her career opportunities as a news reporter. Although she regularly contributed to both publications, she was not permitted to have her own byline. Her journalistic endeavours were limited primarily to light entertainment and show business interviews. Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, she contacted various Fleet Street newspapers, hoping to report on the conflict. Still, she was ridiculed by editors who struggled to secure access for more seasoned male foreign correspondents.

Undeterred, Dorothy managed to persuade the editor of The Times to assist her in obtaining a passport to travel to Paris. Her resourcefulness was further demonstrated when she successfully convinced a courier to smuggle her bicycle onto the ferry. On Midsummer's Day in 1915, at 19, she departed for France to volunteer as a Voluntary Aid Detachment civilian employee, only to be rejected.

Subsequently, Dorothy left Paris and travelled to the smaller town of Creil to pursue her story. As a young woman travelling alone, she was met with curiosity and amusement by the numerous bored troops awaiting deployment. After approximately six weeks, she grew weary of the monotonous reality of war behind the front and decided to "get into the thick of it—right to the front of the front." She packed her bicycle and returned to Paris.

Determined to reach the war zone, she attempted to enter via the French sector as a freelance war correspondent. However, she was arrested by French police just two miles from the front line and ordered to leave the area. After spending the night on a haystack in a forest, she returned to Paris, concluding that she could only access the story she sought by disguising herself. Recognizing that her gender and youth limited the chances available to her, she realized that a radical transformation was necessary.

"I'll see what an ordinary English girl, without credentials or money, can accomplish."

Lawrence in 1915, posing as a soldier of the BEF

She befriended two British Army soldiers in a Parisian café and persuaded them to smuggle her a khaki uniform piece by piece within their laundry; ultimately, ten men participated in this endeavour, which she later referred to in her book as the "Khaki accomplices."

Dorothy then practised her transformation into a male soldier by flattening her figure with a homemade corset and using sacking and cotton wool to bulk out her shoulders. She convinced two Scottish military policemen to cut her long brown hair into a short, masculine style. To further alter her appearance, she darkened her complexion with Condy's Fluid, a disinfectant made from potassium permanganate, scrubbed her cheeks to create the appearance of a shaving rash, and applied a shoe polish tan. Finally, she enlisted her soldier friends to teach her to drill and march like them.

Dressed in a blanket coat and without undergarments to avoid detection, she obtained forged identity papers, reinvented herself as Private Denis Smith of the 1st Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, and set out for the front lines.

While taking refuge in a dugout, Dorothy Lawrence encountered Tom Dunn, a former coal miner from Lancashire who had become a Sapper in the British Expeditionary Force. Captivated by Dorothy's bravery, Dunn offered his assistance. Concerned for the safety of a lone woman amidst soldiers deprived of female companionship, he located an abandoned cottage in Senlis Forest for her to use as sleeping quarters. Throughout her ten days on the front line, she returned to this cottage each night, resting on a mattress and living on the rations and water that Dunn and his fellow soldiers could provide. For nearly two weeks in August 1915, she successfully camouflaged herself among Dunn's comrades, spending time in the trenches of the Somme, making her the only British woman known to have done so.

In her subsequent writings, Lawrence noted that Dunn found her employment as a sapper with the 179 Company of The Royal Engineers, a specialized mine-laying and tunnelling unit operating within 400 yards of the front line. While she claimed to have been directly involved in tunnel excavation, later evidence and correspondence from the period following her discovery by British Army authorities, including documents from Sir Walter Kirke of the BEF's secret service, suggest that she did not engage in this highly skilled work. Nevertheless, she remained active within the trenches in some capacity.

The sappers' uniform would have afforded Dorothy some latitude to navigate her surroundings—tunnellers possessed a certain right to roam. They were not bound by the same military regulations as infantry soldiers and could often appear without prior notification to the commanding officer of an infantry regiment, providing her with ideal cover.

The demands of her role, coupled with the necessity of concealing her true identity, soon resulted in Dorothy suffering from constant chills, rheumatism, and fainting spells. Fearing that her need for medical assistance would reveal her gender and jeopardize the safety of the men who had befriended her, she ultimately presented herself to the commanding sergeant, disclosed her identity as a female civilian, and was promptly placed under military arrest.

Subsequently, she was taken to BEF headquarters, where she was interrogated as a potential spy by a colonel who classified her as a prisoner of war. In response, she experienced an uncontrollable fit of laughter, which she later described as unavoidable.

From there, she was transported cross-country by horse to the Third Army headquarters in Calais, where she faced interrogation by six generals and around twenty other officers. While they did not share her amusement, the reports of the incident express a sense of silliness:

"So utterly ludicrous appeared this be-trousered little female, marshalled solemnly by three soldiers and deposited before twenty embarrassed men."

Unknown to her, the derogatory term "camp follower," which they employed to describe her, was military slang for "prostitute." She later recounted:

"We conversed at cross purposes. I was unaware of the term's meaning, while they remained oblivious to my ignorance, leading to frequent misunderstandings."

The men who interrogated her struggled to understand her motivations for undertaking such a dangerous journey to the front lines. She was transported to Saint-Omer for further questioning after her time in Calais. The Army, mortified by her breach of security and worried about the potential for other women to assume male roles during the war if her story became public, sought to suppress her narrative. However, Dorothy recognized the significance of her experiences and the potential for a compelling story that could captivate Fleet Street—provided she could secure publication.

A wary judge, concerned that she might divulge sensitive intelligence information, ordered her to remain in France until after the Battle of Loos. Confined within the Convent de Bon Pasteur for two weeks, she was ordered not to write about her experiences and required to sign an affidavit to that effect, with the threat of imprisonment should she fail to comply.

Arriving in London, Dorothy attempted to document her experiences for The Wide World Magazine, an illustrated monthly publication based in the city. However, the War Office swiftly curtailed her efforts and invoked the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 to prevent her from publishing her account. Consequently, Dorothy was prohibited from sharing her story through newspaper articles or public lectures until after the Armistice in 1918.

In the months following her return to London, she drafted a book but destroyed it in a fit of despair. Her physical health deteriorated due to septic poisoning contracted from contaminated water in France, and her mental well-being also suffered. She later described experiencing a "nervous complaint" that caused her to tremble so much that she found it difficult to hold a pen. It is plausible that Dorothy was grappling with a form of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her experiences in northern France.

By 1919, Dorothy was residing in rented accommodations in Canonbury, Islington, had secured a publishing contract with John Lane Publishers, and ultimately published an account of her experiences titled Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier. Although the book received a positive reception in England, America, and Australia, the reviews were generally unfavourable and remained heavily censored by the War Office. The Spectator magazine characterized Dorothy in its September 1919 review as a "girlish freak." As society sought to heal from the scars of war and transition into the Roaring Twenties, the book did not achieve the commercial success that Dorothy had anticipated.

By 1925, with no income and diminished credibility as a journalist, Dorothy's increasingly erratic behaviour drew the attention of the authorities. She privately disclosed to a physician that she had been raped during her teenage years by her church guardian's husband. Lacking familial support, she was placed in care and subsequently deemed insane.

Dorothy was initially committed to the London County Mental Hospital at Hanwell in March 1925 and was later institutionalized at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in Friern Barnet, North London. Her allegations against Mr. Fitzgerald were never taken seriously nor investigated further.

Dorothy remained confined in the asylum for a shocking 39 years until her solitary death at Friern Hospital in 1964. She was buried in a pauper's grave at New Southgate Cemetery. The location of her burial site is unknown.

It is conceivable that she was declared insane simply for daring to speak out about her allegations of rape and was perceived as a dangerous, subversive woman with psychiatric issues. Her behaviour in deliberately putting herself in danger by going to France and her seemingly wild accusations against a respected man of the church saw her simply labelled as 'mad'.

Dorothy's rape allegations were later considered sufficiently compelling to be included in her medical records, which are held in the London Metropolitan Archives.

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