Mum’s Army: The long battle for recognition

It wasn't just men who responded to the call to join the LDV

It was not just men who responded to War Minister Anthony Eden’s broadcast to join the Local Defence Volunteers (which we’ve spoken about before), better known by many of us as the Home Guard or Dad’s Army.

Women too were among those who were reporting to local police stations within minutes of Eden’s appeal.

However, it had never been the Government’s intention that women should enrol. A strange concept given that many women were already working in munitions, or in civil defence, and others were enlisting in the women’s armed forces.

In June 1940, the Government went as far as to announce that women could not be enrolled into the ranks of the Home Guard.  Yet in the same month the Upper Thames Patrol was established, and, as male recruits were thin on the ground, it readily accepted women.