Marjorie Helen Hinchliffe Wells

Wimbledon born Marjorie Helen Hinchcliffe Wells, the daughter of an ‘inside stock jobber’, served at the Camiers base in the Pas de Calais. This was the largest base of its kind in France and served as a training base, a depot for supplies and a medical centre with almost twenty general hospitals.

Born in 1894, Marjorie was some years older than many of the WAACs and had already worked as a voluntary nurse in England before applying to join the Auxiliary Service. She was educated at a private boarding school, Wycombe Abbey. After leaving school she had had a number of clerical jobs before volunteering to join a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) of the Red Cross in July 1916. She would have received training from the Red Cross before being posted to Weir Hospital in Balham, where she was a volunteer nurse until November 1917.

In early 1918 she applied for the post of Assistant Administrator in the WAAC. At the time she was living at home with her mother, Margaret Wells, and two sisters at Sleepy Hollow, Kingston Road, New Malden. She was accepted into the service in June 1918. Her service record at the National Archives is incomplete and there is no documentation about her posting. However her uncle, the writer and polymath Edward Heron-Allen, recalls in his Journal of the Great War that his niece ‘Peggy’ trained as an administrator and was sent to Camiers in 1918. He wrote that rumours abounded about the treatment of young girls taken prisoner by the Germans and he recalled Peggy’s anxiety lest she suffer the same fate. Heron-Allen didn’t approve of young women being sent to the war zone and recalls that ‘I gave her a tabloid of cyanide of potassium, so that she could kill herself if she should fall into the hands of the Germans and see outrage inevitable’.

Although there is no formal record of Marjorie’s work at Camiers, it is highly likely that she worked as a nurse at one of the military hospitals there. Files at the National Archives include her Medal Card which confirms her role of Assistant Administrator and states that she received the British War Medal. This medal was awarded to officers and service personnel of the British and Imperial Forces who either entered a theatre of war or entered service overseas between 5th August 1914 and 11th November 1918 inclusive.

Records show that she married civil servant Peter Donald MacPherson in Calcutta in 1927. She returned to England in 1938 and died in Cornwall in September 1965. She pre-deceased her husband and her estate at her death was valued at £65,218.