For Women's History Month, we're shining a light on some of the women from our archives who deserve to be celebrated. Dr Michelle Johansen, our Interpretation Manager, has chosen to highlight the friendship circle of Edith Wensley.

Edith was the daughter of celebrity detective Frederick Wensley, whose archive we hold. The Wensley archive provides a fascinating record of one man’s policing career. It is also a family archive, containing unpublished correspondence from the 1910s and 1920s. Much of this correspondence was sent to Edith. There are dozens of candid and brilliantly entertaining letters written by Edith’s circle of working and lower-middle class friends.

During WW1 these young women entered the workplace for the first time as nurses, secretaries, and administrators. They fired off letters to one another in their lunchbreaks, or in the office while the boss’s back was turned.

At once hilarious and moving, their letters offer a selection of highly personal takes on overbearing managers, nights out at the cinema, crushes on local boys, and zeppelin raids over London.

Edith lost both of her brothers during the war, and all of her friendship circle suffered similar losses. Yet the letters sent by Bobbi, Daisy, Doll, Baby, and Freda are completely lacking in self-pity. Rather they provide a powerful reminder of the vitality and optimism of youth, and rare insight into female friendship in the early twentieth century.