Jenny Conlon meets Kate Adie to discuss her latest book and the legacy of women in wars
I had the pleasure of meeting the national and international award winning TV and radio reporter and former Chief Correspondent for the BBC, Kate Adie, on a Tuesday afternoon in the Army & Navy Club on London’s Pall Mall. Kate’s career is a legacy in itself but we caught up to chat about her latest book Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One. Kate’s job has taken her into many dangerous situations but she explains the humanity that she’s experienced even in the most precarious of situations, “It’s a job that takes you into all types of situations, sometimes very unexpectedly, and you come across people in often very extreme circumstances. What I take from it is that people are very generous, that people are very kind and there’s hospitality from the poorest people. You
get help from people who don’t know you from Adam and who are willing to give a stranger all kinds of assistance.”
Recalling her time in Sarajevo, Kate describes the moment when she discovered the spot where World War One began, “One morning there was a terrible amount of shelling, buildings on fire and artillery and small arms fire. One of my colleagues grabbed me and said, ‘You’ve got to come and see this,’
and he insisted that I crawl 100 yards on the pavement towards the river under fire. We got to the river – a dangerous area because the front line was just across from us – and I asked what we were looking at. We got there scrambling on our tummies and he said, ‘Look! Look! Look in the pavement!’ In the pavement on the corner there were two concrete footprints. It was on those two footprints that Gavrilo Princip the Serb student that shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and that started World War One.
Here we were 70 to 80 years later on the same spot and there’s another major war going on.”
On her observations on women’s role in wars, Kate continues, “One of the things you’re very conscious of is that it’s still a very male world. Particularly when it comes to conflict. Historically men have always taken up guns and gone to war. But the more you look at history, you see that women in many instances
played a part but because they’re not the traditional soldiers in a uniform with a gun on the front line, people sort of say ‘Oh, you know, the women are at home.’ Particularly in World War One and as we approach a number of anniversaries, you think back to it and we are very conscious we are going to commemorate all the big battles. Yet it’s a fact of life that the war would not have been won if women
had not worked for the war. Millions did and there’s very little recognition of it.”
She continues, “Huge numbers of women went to work for the first time in factories during the war. When you’re a reporter and going around the world, I’m very conscious that conventional things get noticed particularly in conflict. You then look and say ‘Hang on I’m reporting the whole of the place’. Life has gone completely upside down and when you look behind the front lines, what you see is that nobody is living an ordinary home life, so if you’re going to write about war you should write about the lot.”
“There were no lady architects before World War One, there were very few women doctors, there were no women lawyers, there were no women university lecturers, they were not thought to be capable of it. It’s quite a lot of what I picked up when reporting conflict. War is quite curious, it both destroys homes but it often strangely provides an opportunity for the unusual, in this case, for women to do something different. It’s really the groundwork for everything that you see today when you have women who are gaining an equal place in society.”
“We are not there yet though. So much started with huge numbers of women a hundred years ago joining trade unions for the first time. Quite often pay rises were given to men and the women were just ignored. So many of those foundation blocks were laid in World War One and it makes you think about
how far we have come today. I reported the first female chief constable appointed, first female prime minister, the first woman to go into the fire service. When I was growing up, women wouldn’t do this,
so it’s quite fascinating, particularly when you know the background to it and how long it’s taken.”
