I came across this really wretched account of Dorothy Lawrence’s life. She achieved so much, yet at the time so little was thought of her. Today we honour her courage and integrity.
Lawrence wanted to be a journalist and she achieved some success with articles published in The Times. She was living in Paris when war was declared in 1914. Lawrence contacted several British newspapers offering to work as a war correspondent, but all the editors refused to employ a woman to do what they considered to be very dangerous work.Lawrence returned to England and in 1915 disguised herself as a man and joined the British Army, under the name: Denis Smith. She served in the British Expeditionary Force Tunneling Company on the Western Front and then her true identity was discovered. The authorities detained her until she agreed to swear an affidavit promising not to tell the public how she had duped the army authorities.
On her return to England Lawrence published an account of her experiences, Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier, in 1919.In 1925 she claimed she had been raped by her guardian. Lawrence was not believed and she was sent to a hospital for the insane. Dorothy Lawrence died in poverty in 1964.