The Girls' Training Corps No 816 (Bourne) Company

Among the lesser known of the pre-service units that operated in Britain during the last century was an organisation dedicated to the wider aims of citizenship for young ladies with instruction in home making, craftsmanship and public affairs. The National Association of Girls' Training Corps was set up by the Board of Education (forerunner of the Ministry of Education) during the early years of the Second World War (1939-45) with units in most cities and towns and No 816 (Bourne) Company was formed on 7th March 1943.

The company was organised on military lines with Dr Ruth C Finn as Commandant with other officers acting as adjutant and quartermaster. The uniforms consisted of black shoes, navy skirts, white blouses, navy ties and navy forage caps, and there were ranks and promotions for leadership and good conduct. 

There was also a lot of drill and many parades although there was a particularly strong community element in its objectives. In a message to her new recruits, Dr Finn, daughter of local general practitioner Dr John Galletly (senior), said: "It is hoped to train each cadet for service to the community, both as a woman and a citizen, and show her opportunities for immediate service, the motive of which shall be to provide out of her own leisure, leisure for others. Will you all remember this as you get older? Help young people wherever you find them. Our GTC will then be fruitful indeed."

The Girls' Training Corps took part in all of the ceremonial parades through Bourne during the Second World War, together with other uniformed organisations such as the Home Guard, the Red Cross, WVS, the Army and Air Force cadets and the St John's Ambulance Brigade, and they are pictured here in the market place parading their colours on Sunday 10th September 1944.

Typical training sessions were lectures on home nursing given by officials from the Red Cross, practical work on bed making at the mental hospital in St Peter's Road, drilling, talks on leadership, organisation and etiquette, ambulance work and stretcher bearing, sanitation, local government, map reading and the Morse code. The girls also had an active social life and the company celebrated its second birthday with a social and dance at the Corn Exchange in March 1944 when members of the Army Cadet and Air Training Corps were invited. There were also garden fetes, summer games evenings at the Abbey Lawn, and other events but all usually had a fund raising element for good causes, often the war effort. These activities included knitting for the WVS and for refugees in occupied Europe, picking rose hips for turning into syrup, farm work and by raising money to help the forces.

Highpoint of the winter was an annual pantomime and most of the girls gave up their free evenings to rehearsing for the show, one of the most successful being a production of Cinderella that was presented at the Corn Exchange on 10th and 11th January 1945.

Ceremonial occasions were also popular and the company turned out in strength on 22nd May 1944 to mark Youth Sunday, marching behind the army cadet band from Harrington Street for a service at the Baptist Church in West Street, each local church and chapel being chosen in annual rotation. A second parade was held that year on June 4th for Salute the Soldier Week, a national patriotic celebration of the army's role in the Second World War that was then in progress and several of the girls went on to regular military service with the ATS and the WRENS. There were other regular parades for the presentation of long service stripes and proficiency badges.

Training courses were also held outside the town, at Stamford, Lincoln and other venues, where the girls, many of them away from home for the first time, were treated to a taste of communal living, sleeping on palliasses on the floors of drill halls, doing their ablutions in washrooms and eating cookhouse meals prepared by the local WVS.

The Bourne company was presented with its own flag on Sunday 10th September 1944 by Miss Curlett, Director of the Girls' Training Corps, showing the blue, wine and black colours of the movement, and the handing over ceremony was followed by a parade to the Abbey Church where the flag was dedicated and blessed. Later that day, cadets from Bourne went by coach to a rally at Grantham where they were addressed by the director of the GTC, Miss Kathleen Curlett OBE, and afterwards there was a discussion on the future of the corps. All agreed that it should continue after the war but with modifications in the uniform and the basic training but this optimism failed to materialise.  Dr Finn resigned in April 1945 when she returned to her home in London to work and she was succeeded as commandant by Joan M Crofts who remained in office until the Bourne company disbanded soon after the war ended in 1945.