The forgotten women poets of the Great War are given a voice again

When we think of the poetry of the First World War, names such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves immediately spring to mind, but I suspect most of us would be hard-pressed to name a woman writer from that period, aside from Vera Brittain.

So what about the women poets of the Great War and their voices? They seem to have been left out of the picture but Bradford-based writer, actor and storyteller Irene Lofthouse is seeking to remedy this. She has created a piece which she will be presenting as a work-in-progress at Bradford Cathedral next week to coincide with International Women’s Day.

Words, Women & War tells the stories of a group of extraordinary Yorkshire women, and their role in the First World War, through their poetry and memoirs. Lofthouse says the idea first began to formulate after she bought a copy of Scars Upon My Heart, a collection of women’s poetry and verse from the First World War. “It features the work of some known women poets but also includes verse written by ordinary women,” says Lofthouse. “There is some very touching stuff in there just about people’s lives and how they coped.”

One of the poets featured in the collection was Bradford-born writer and publisher Alberta Vickridge. “I am from Bradford and I’ve done a literature degree but I had never heard of her,” says Lofthouse. “That’s when I started to do some research.” In her lifetime Vickridge had nine volumes of poetry published, ran her own publishing company from an upstairs room in her home in Frizinghall and her work was admired by fellow writers such as JB Priestley and Agatha Christie. In 1917 she became a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse and wrote poems about her nursing experiences including Out of Conflict which she submitted to a competition in the Poetry Review. It was awarded first prize in January 1918, ahead of Wilfred Owen’s Song of Songs.

Lofthouse’s research into Vickridge led her to Leeds writer and publisher Dorothy Una Ratcliffe who had published some of Vickridge’s work. Among her many achievements Ratcliffe had been the youngest ever mayoress of Leeds in 1913. She married into the Brotherton family (her first of three marriages) and was instrumental in the setting up of the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, encouraging her uncle-in-law, wealthy industrialist Edward Brotherton, to start collecting books and manuscripts. “Alberta and Dorothy both achieved so much,” says Lofthouse. “But just a hundred years later we are only getting snippets of their stories.”

Words, Women & War will also be highlighting the experiences of poet and musician Eva H Longbottom from Halifax – whose memoir Lofthouse tracked down to Toronto University.

“A lot of those women wrote memoirs and they were hugely popular straight after the war but they seem to have largely disappeared.”

Another of Lofthouse’s discoveries is Harrogate-born Betty Stevenson who in 1917 was posted to Etaples as a driver and was killed in an air-raid the following year at the age of just 21. The piece also explores the experiences of Flora Sandes, the only British woman to serve as a soldier in the First World War. Originally from Nether Poppleton near York, she volunteered with a Serbian ambulance unit in 1914 and a year later enlisted with the Serbian army, rising to the rank of captain.

“I think that women’s histories are not the ones that generally get recorded,” says Lofthouse. “The effort made by women in World War One was vital and I think it is really important that these stories are heard.”

Words, Women & War is at Bradford Cathedral on March 8 at 7.15pm, tickets £5 01274 777720 and at Leeds Central Library March 11 at 2pm, tickets £5 0113 2476016.