Vera Laughton Mathews: WRNS pioneer & Blue Tapestry legacy

The life of Vera Laughton Mathews, who was Director of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) from 1939-46, and the lives of women in the world of maritime history are special. But the stories about them have not been fully told, often narratives are still weighted towards men, as Kate Mosse illustrated in Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries, her celebration of ‘some of the extraordinary women who also built our world’ 1.

Laughton Mathews, shown in Figure 1, in an edited extract from her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, written by Lesley Thomas in 2004, is recorded as:

Mathews, Dame Elvira Sibyl Maria (Vera) Laughton (1888–1959), director of the Women's Royal Naval Service’… As a girl, Vera Laughton joined the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, and women’s rights remained an important thread of her life thereafter... When the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was formed in 1917 she hastened to join it, and after an officer’s course went as WRNS unit officer to HMS Victory VI, a naval training depot at Crystal Palace...

There she kept a happy ship, inspiring her crew with confidence to tackle the daunting tasks now for the first time imposed on service women. She was also public-spirited, active in legislative reforms and arranging lectures on matters of public interest… With the reformation of the WRNS in 1939 Laughton Mathews was appointed director, with Ethel Goodenough as her deputy. During her service she travelled to virtually every establishment where Wrens were posted. The CBE was conferred on her in 1942, the DBE in 1945. Dame Vera, as she became, won great acclaim within the Admiralty, in parliament, and among her own Wrens for the humanity and common sense with which she led her force. After the war she worked to forge the Wrens into a permanent service, retiring in 1947.

Dame Vera’s capabilities were immediately called on by the post-war government: she was appointed chairman of the Domestic Coal Consumers’ Council set up when the coal industry was nationalized; and when the gas industry was nationalized, she sat on the South Eastern Gas Board, the first woman in gas management in Britain, a post she held until shortly before her death. 

 

Laughton Mathews was born in Hammersmith, Middlesex, on 25 September 1888, the daughter of Sir John Knox Laughton, a noted naval historian and Professor at King’s College, University of London and his second wife. In Blue Tapestry, Laughton Mathews’s autobiography and the subject of this article, Sir John is referred to by name and as ‘Father’ but ‘Mother’ never by her name; she was viewed as an exotic individual due to her Spanish-Italian family lineage, by turns energetic, volatile and well organised 2. In fact, Maria Josepha (formerly di Alberti) was distinguished not only by her intellectual and warm-hearted hospitality but was descended from Leon Battista Alberti, the Italian polymath humanist, architect and foremost initiator of Renaissance art theory. 

All five of the Laughton children of Sir John and Maria are noted as serving in the armed forces, whether the Royal Navy, WRNS or the Army, like many generations of military families inspired to continue to serve. In this case, inspired by Sir John’s reputation as a naval officer, author about meteorology and nautical surveying and of naval biographies in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 

During my tenure as Caird Research Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich (2021-22), I spent many hours in the Caird Library relishing the opportunity to delve into the objects and literature held in the archive and the library. My first introduction to Blue Tapestry was a copy with a precious signature by the author behind the front cover.  This book is from the second impression print run, published by Hollis and Carter in 1949 and is 293 pages long. The book was first published in 1948, but I have yet been unable to establish the number of copies printed in either runs or the original cost to eager contemporary purchasers.

However, this find was swiftly followed by the discovery, from the on-site Caird Library store, of a collection of images prepared for publication, not only from Blue Tapestry but, Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller, and Blue for a Girl by J D Drummond.  Being able to access these preparatory objects and proofs provided a glimpse into the decision-making behind these publications and reinforced, yet again, the importance of the visual representation of the WRNS, both public and behind the scenes. 

The joys of researching in Royal Museums Greenwich aside, I was inspired like those Wrens who purchased similar treasured mementos, to buy my own copy of Blue Tapestry from a second-hand online book dealer for £12.33. My copy (illustrated in Figure 2) is of the 1949 vintage and includes 31 black and white photographs. It is bound in dark blue buckram boards with spine title inscription and anchor in gold enclosed by a filigree double gold border. The dust cover is missing, and the book’s overall dimensions are 22 cm in height,15 cm in width and 3 cm depth, with some warping of the hard cover and yellowing of pages. 

Although there is no signature by the author, there are several clues to the book’s previous owner. It is dedicated in blue ink ‘To Jean with Love from Us All July 1949’ in an elegant careful hand. 

There are no other examples of writing, comments or even drawings throughout the text, however there are two inclusions of note. There is an address label ‘Mr & Mrs P. Hawkins, The Hedges, West Street, Barkston nr. Grantham, Lincs’ and, folded carefully inside the front cover, a newspaper cutting. The cutting is from the Daily Telegraph Saturday 20 January 1990, and is of a photograph of Mrs Margaret Holroyd, aged 92 with Chief Petty Officer Maggie Edson, the latter raising funds for the Royal Star and Garter Home, Richmond. 

This clearly treasured cutting is pictured below.

I know nothing about Jean, or Mr and Mrs P Hawkins, and little about Mrs Holroyd, except from the newspaper caption stating that the latter was Driver to Admiral Lord Jellicoe between 1917 and 1919 and was the fifth woman to join the WRNS. However, the presence of this faded folded cutting seems to me archetypal of what is so special about the history of the Wrens and the Royal Navy. This book evidently has had a real life and, as such, connects us with individuals who existed almost or just out of living memory. 

I was lucky enough to receive my copy with these inclusions. It is worth far more than its monetary value in terms of the questions it provides, for example: my own speculation on the owner, the gift givers and why did Jean keep this newspaper cutting safely stored in the book? Or did a family member take the cutting thinking of past loved ones to insert into a family heirloom?

Furthermore, why decide to keep the book itself for potentially over 41 years, and what memories did this object’s materiality and appearance trigger for the owner? These questions and more I hope to answer with further research. 

The written and visual contents of the book captured many aspects of the history of the Wrens, while conveying the personal journey to date of Laughton Mathews, almost from the beginning of the author’s life. It is comprehensive and detailed in its account of the WRNS until 1949, and the individuals, organisations and community of men and women involved. She gives us a glimpse of their attitudes; the evolving support of people whatever their gender, military status or institutional constraints and issues of negativity, in a time when social change and circumstances loosened the grip of conventionality, but only to a limited degree as she expounds throughout.

Laughton Mathews is an engaging and enthusiastic narrator and one speculates that her past career as a journalist, and the intellectual world and socio-economic background to which her family belonged, influenced her writing style. She was sub-editor of The Suffragette and acting editor early in her career, moving on to sub-edit a journal, the Ladies Field. Laughton Mathews also launched Time and Tide, a weekly political and literary review which supported feminist causes. She was a founder member and Life President of the Association of Wren and edited its magazine The Wren. 

She collates rich detail, rites of passage and critical life events offering interesting reviews of her work and those of her fellows and of her younger self. Although a piece of its time, with terminology and occasional assumptions with an Empire bias, Laughton Mathews shows us the value of studying lifecycles, in making events, legislation, organisational decisions, people and material culture, personal. Indeed, in the book she emphasises how ‘it makes a story more real to have a live personality attached to it’ 3. Her recounting of Chief Officer A Parker’s visits to the United States authorities and Headquarters Ship off Omaha Beach, the only woman to visit the ship, is fascinating and there are many more examples I could cite, including tragic accounts of deaths in service.

Going further, I believe in the power of life writing, through the telling of a life story and more with the material objects that relate to that life; extending from biographies, autobiographies and diaries to letters, media coverage and clippings, personal written and visual creative exposition and formal records, invitations, meetings, schedules, lists, pro forma, order books and reports. How this helps us to understand the past is a premise attested to by the Oxford University’s Oxford Centre for Life Writing contributors and theorists, and writers like Patrick Hayes, who summed up the importance of life writing in his blog on the Oxford University Press website in 2022. 

However, what I find incredibly striking is Laughton Mathews’s assertion that ‘I kept no notes or diaries, and the book has been written from memory, but I have the advantage of access to official records’ (p.9). Quite an achievement if so, although Laughton Mathews’s comprehensive and fascinating scrapbook, dated as compiled between 1939-47, held in the Caird Library, must have surely assisted when clarifying events, while consulting with as many Superintendents, Officers, Ratings, family and friends as possible.

Although her overarching drive was to communicate how exceptional, capable and deserving women were during their service life and what this life had given women to take into the future, Laughton Mathews does not shy away from controversy nor challenge. Evidently, she was an advocate for married women serving and detailed lesser-known stories of Wrens in trouble due to pregnancy, difficult love affairs (mutual, one-sided or predatory), unhappy in-service defaulters or those suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder 4.

She also goes on to discuss the impact of the Wrens in overseas women’s maritime services, with the modelling of the Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service (WRINS) on the WRNS and recounts instances of training Canadian, Danish, Dutch, French and Polish Wrens 5.

The number of Wrens who attest, in memoirs, oral histories and newspaper articles, to Laughton Mathews as a positive, inspiring and balanced force together with her full Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, suggest Blue Tapestry is a genuinely objective account. It is certainly a significant book, in making the world of the Wrens visible and in conveying the feeling, emotion and the narrative behind a person who saw a great deal and had considerable impact. 

I return again and again to the pages where she vividly describes seeing documents from the Auschwitz Camp and photographs in what she describes as the Nuremberg ‘Chamber of Horrors’ 6, preceded by her visit to meet Polish Wrens whereby ‘I was told that they used to scream aloud in their sleep, that it would take two years to bring them back to any semblance of humanity; I saw the numbers tattooed on their young arms’ 7. 

Laughton Mathews truly captures the essence of the founding of the WRNS and post war concerns but uses a fascinating example of alignment of the structure of the book with textile language. This not only provides a narrative arc but suggests what she might have been reading throughout this period of her life. The use of textile language in novels by Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf8 and in costume dramas, as explored by Deborah Wynne, as metaphors and narrative devices may have influenced her, although yet I have found no direct evidence for this9.

The book is structured as follows:

• Part One-The Loom: The frame is set up; Shuttle, bobbin, baton, comb.
• Part Two-The Warp: The threads are secured; The outline is traced on the warp; The weavers take their place; The warp is ready for weaving.
• Part Three-The Weft: The shuttle flies to and fro; The weaving school; Types of weavers; Colours bright and variegated; The patterns takes shape; Threads of gold; The design is finished.

I would like to think that the Scottish heritage of Laughton Mathews’s father might have influenced her, vicariously through the emergence of the artisan weavers, tapestry or otherwise, who became established in Edinburgh contemporaneously with her. Or perhaps, somewhat more obviously, her choice whether unconscious or not, might have been related to the well documented prevalence of textile skills and special courses attended by Wrens, with the caveat that weaving is rarely mentioned but embroidery, sewing, darning, mending, knitting and crochet are 10. 

But as she earnestly explains in the foreword:

In a beautiful piece of tapestry, a vast number of threads of varying colours combine to produce the finished picture. All threads are of equal strength; all colours are equally necessary to the pattern though some may be more obtrusive. It is for this reason that I have chosen the name of ‘Blue Tapestry’ for this story of the Women’s Royal Naval Service’ (p.10). 

This book led me, like so many Wrens and Laughton Mathews herself, on a journey. Their journeys were to ports, places and often unforeseen occupations and people, presenting a turning point in maritime history. The book serves to provide a valuable glimpse into how the WRNS operated and as a transition point for women and the Royal Navy.

My own journey began by taking what I viewed as a trip to meet Laughton Mathews. This is not as extensive as those of my muse, but it is one I began in the fine Painted Hall, Royal Museums Greenwich (formerly the Greenwich Training School) and, by contrast, the labyrinthine military authenticity of the Western Approaches Museum in Liverpool, based in the original buildings where she visited Admiral Sir Max Horton. Here, there is the Operations Room that has remained exactly how as it was left when the doors were closed on 15 August 1945. In this case, even so many years later, the relatively untouched building and rooms gave a distinct visual and atmospheric flavour of the features of her war time life, connecting me with her, and the people she met.

By standing in the underground rooms, operating during war time with re-conditioned air that was stuffy but ’better than in a submarine’, according to the male naval officer she spoke to, this real-world setting aided my understanding of the vivid accounts in Blue Tapestry and Dame Vera Laughton Mathews herself, the architecture itself helping to fill gaps between written and photographic material, oral histories and objects.11 

Books:

Douie, V. (1950). Daughters of Britain. London: George Ronald.

Drummond, J.D. (1960). Blue for a Girl: The Story of the W.R.N.S. London: W.H. Allen &. Co.

Hayes, P. (2022). The Oxford History of Life-Writing Volume 7: Postwar to Contemporary, 1945-2020. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mathews, Vera Laughton. (1949). Blue Tapestry. London: Hollis & Carter.

Miller, L. (1945). Wrens in Camera. London: Hollis & Carter.

Mosse, Kate. (2022). Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World. London: Mantle.

Unwin, V. (2015). Love and War in the WRNS. Cheltenham: The History Press. 

Websites and online resources:

Collins, K. (27 May 2016). Material Cultures of Research: Woven into the Fabric of the Text: Subversive Material Metaphors in Academic Writing. LSE blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/05/27/the-materiality-of-research-woven-into-the-fabric-of-the-text-subversive-material-metaphors-in-academic-writing-by-katie-collins/ 

Gardener-Chloros, P. (17 November 2022). Why be a Life Writer. Oxford Centre for Life Writing. https://oclw.web.ox.ac.uk/article/why-be-a-life-writer

Hayes, P. (15 November 2022). What is Life Writing and Why Does it Matter. OUP blog. https://blog.oup.com/2022/11/what-is-life-writing-and-why-does-it-matter/

Perry, E.G. (1991). Textile as Material, Method, and Metaphor in Virginia Woolf's Fiction. (Publication No. 9218886) Doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. https://www.proquest.com/openview/b54e0150632811e7fe4d2624fc0d6dc9/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Thomas, L. (2004). Mathews, Dame Elvira Sibyl Maria  Laughton(1888–1959). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34937 

Wynne, D. (2013). Literary Fabrics: The Textile Language of Novels and Costume Dramas. UKRI's Gateway to Research. https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FK00803X%2F1#/tabOverview 

Objects: 

Caird Library: 

Mathews, V. L (1949). Blue Tapestry. London: Hollis & Carter.

PBA7988.

Scrapbook kept by Vera Laughton-Mathews, Director of the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), 1939-1946.

NAI/3/36; MSS/78/176; NAI/3/37; NAI/3/37/1; NAI/3/37/2.

WRNS photographs - Images prepared for publications, 1950s-1970s - transparencies - includes images from Blue Tapestry by Vera Laughton Mathews, Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller, and Blue for a Girl by JD Drummond (31 negatives).

DAU/189; MS76/010950 – 1979. 

Figure List: 

Figure 1 Mrs Laughton-Mathews, CBE, Director Of the WRNS, Inspects WRNS at Royal Naval Air Station Hatston. 26 May 1942, HMS Sparrowhawk, Royal Naval Air Station Hatston.

Front Left Mrs Laughton-Mathews with the Commanding Officer of the Station, Captain Miles Cursham, RN. Photograph By  Priest, L C (Lt) ©IWM. Image: IWM (A 9108). 

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205142995

Figure 2 Blue Tapestry Personal Collection of Jo Horton, photograph by Jo Horton.

Figure 3 Mrs Margaret Holroyd with Chief Petty Officer Maggie Edson. Photograph by Stephen Lock ©The Daily Telegraph.