Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store (1944)

 

 

 Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store 1944 Oil on canvas (1' 4" x 1' 8": 40.6 x 50.8 cm) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

In the summer of 1944, while Allied troops were fighting furiously to drive the Germans out of Normandy, Evelyn spent some weeks carrying out a commission by her employers, the War Artists' Advisory Committee, to record the activities of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Perhaps with some intervention from her RAF officer husband Roger Folley, then serving with 488 (NZ) Squadron at RAF Colerne, in Wiltshire, she set up her easel at nearby RAF South Cerney. Her visit was not a success. Despite the WAAF being popularly, and proudly, presented as working on equal terms (apart from combat) with the men of the RAF, she was barred from access to operational areas. Her experience was thus restricted to observing and recording ancillary activity centres, the canteen, the sick bay and - as here - the clothing store. Neverthless it was here that she found, or was directed towards, something quite extraordinary, something unexpectedly potent in her promotion of women's interests and improvement of their status.

 

* * *

Evelyn has taken her stepladder to give a top-down view of a WAAF clothing store. The central figure is especially interesting. Her single-strip epaulette slide shows she holds a commissioned WAAAF (three As, please note) rank, that of Section Officer, while her shoulder flash reads, unexpectedly, AUSTRALIA. What is she doing here, on the other side of the world from her home, in a clothing store?

 

 Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store: Detail showing 'AUSTRALIA' shoulder flash

 

She would have volunteered for the WAAAF, possibly in response to the threat from Japan, some time after March 1941. The WAAAF training centre in Melbourne, to which she would have been posted, instructed aircraft maintenance staff, munitions workers, electricians, telegraphists, radar operatives and staff in many other areas requiring high levels of technical and scientific skill. She would have been paid at least one third less than RAAF male staff in equivalent positions.We don't know in what technical or scientific skill our WAAAF officer has been trained, but it's unlikely to have been the supervision of a clothing store in southern England. As far as is known, she is the only Australian WAAAF officer to have been painted by a British war artist. We don't know who she was.

 

Let's look more closely at this clothing store. It has an air of desperation about it, as though the clothing store at RAF South Cerney was the only place in which a married, female civilian artist with slightly bohemian leanings might safely be let loose.

 

It's a gloomy, prison-like place. It's not certain where the light comes from; certainly not from the tiny windows set high in the walls. Maybe we have one of Evelyn's visual puns, a particularly powerful one: the light comes from Evelyn herself, from the direction in which she, the artist, is casting light - as we shall see in a moment - on a contentious problem most keenly evident in a clothing store. 

 

There are three theatres of action: on the extreme centre left a WAAF is trying on a tunic that appears to be too large for her. She bears some resemblance to a WAAF whose portrait Evelyn painted while at RAF South Cerney, entitling it Portrait of an Airwoman, which now hangs in the RAF Museum, Hendon. It's not the best portrait she ever painted, but perhaps in this also Evelyn was making a point: her tunic is just as lumpy as in the clothing store picture (if indeed she is the subject), we can be happy for her Airwoman that her rosebud lips pass muster and that her engagement ring points to a brighter future, but that forearm chevron, denoting Good Conduct...well, we're not very far from Brownie badges and certain top-down attitudes that did not exist in the parent service, the all-male RAF.

 

Portrait of an Airwoman 1944 RAF Museum, Hendon

 

The second theatre of action concentrates on the extreme right, where a trousered figure, maybe indicating a change of attitudes to women's wear at institutional level, is poking disconsolately at discarded clothing which World War 2 RAF uniform buffs may be better able to identify than I, though similarly baffled by the pink strips.

We're led into the third and principal theatre of action by one of Evelyn's SW-NE diagonals, in this case a queue of WAAFs. The queue leader, whose neckwear is ambiguous, is pointing very obviously at the collar of her blouse or shirt, while the Australian Section Officer looks on rather blankly. 

 

As well she might. She is dealing with a recurring problem, legendary at the time among British WAAFs; that Evelyn has chosen to paint it is authentication in itself. The pale blue uniform shirts, to which separate collars were attached by means of studs, were cut to men's sizes and shapes. This meant that a shirt with a chest measurement generous enough to accommodate WAAF busts had a collar measurement correspondingly larger than the female neck it was supposed to enclose, so that it was impossible to do up the black uniform necktie without leaving an ugly and draughty gap between throat and collar stud. To combat this unthinking chauvinism many WAAFs preferred to buy their own blouses privately, trusting to a colour match acceptable to Section Officers and suchlike. We are not told how our Australian dealt with the problem. It's enough that we should be made aware of it.

Evelyn didn't enjoy her time at RAF South Cerney. She complained to E.C.Gregory, then secretary of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, that despite official security clearance she wasn't allowed to record WAAF activities in operational areas. This restricted her activities to such an extent that her only output from the time she spent at RAF South Cerney was Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store and several portraits of WAAFs and nurses associated with the RAF. 

 

I think Evelyn felt diffident about this picture. Maybe signing it 'E.D.' instead of her usual 'Evelyn Dunbar' points to this uncertainty. The problem over gender-sizing, prevalent in the earlier 1940s, had largely gone away by the time she finished painting it. With a non-existent problem to highlight the picture had lost its point and its impact. In fact Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store was the last of Evelyn's war paintings to be submitted: painted in the early autumn of 1944, it was not handed in until January 1946. But she hasn't wasted her time: of all her wartime images (except perhaps A Land Girl and the Bail Bull) Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store carries the strongest messages of the inferior status of women. 

With thanks to Penny Summerfield for her contribution.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

  EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
  by Christopher Campbell-Howes

  is available to order online from:

 Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

  448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30