16 Incredible Photos Show Daily Life of British Women War Workers during World War One _ UK

   
Women war workers, including the distinctively white-capped and aproned VAD nurses, parade outside Buckingham Palace in 1918.

 

Members of the Women's Royal Air Force arrive at Buckingham Palace, London, to attend a party for war workers in 1919.

 

Female ambulance workers, such as this group photographed in November 1915, served both at home and on the front line.

 

While some women became nurses, others worked in hospital workshops, such as this one at the Kensington War Hospital, making prosthetic limbs.

 

950,000 female workers were employed in British factories, including this worker, pictured making shell cases in a Vickers factory in January 1915 .

 

400 women died in munitions factories, between 1914 (when this image was taken) and 1918, when the war ended.

 

Exposure to toxic sulphur left many workers with yellowed skin, while others were killed in explosions. One 1917 incident killed 73 and flattened 900 homes

 

Despite being paid less than their male counterparts, many of the female munitionettes undertook dangerous and fiddly work.

 

Members of the Women's Fire Brigade with their Chief Officer photographed in their uniforms beside an extinguished fire in March 1916.

 

Members of the Women's Fire Brigade are put through their paces during a fire drill with hoses and extinguishers at full force in March 1916.

 

A member of the Women Porters At Marylebone Station Group, pictured in 1914 giving a Great Central Railways carriage a thorough clean.

 

Women employed in the transport industry increased by 555 per cent during the war, and included this pair of female porters at Marylebone Station in 1915.

 

As this 1917 photograph shows, female war workers didn't just run trains and buses - they fixed and maintained them too.

 

As part of the war effort, old paper had to be reused. These women are pulling apart old ledgers belonging to the London & South West Railway.

 

The paper, as this photo taken on the 16th April 1917 shows, then had to be sorted into piles and stored.

 

Women even took on tough, physical roles such as moving rubble, as seen in this photograph taken in Coventry during 1917.