Wartime teenager was made of the ride stuff
A big bike and a big responsibility for one so young. But this was wartime and 18-year-old Felice Dowden rose to the challenge.
Felice was a motorcycle dispatch rider in the ATS – that is, the women soldiers of the Auxiliary Territorial Service – back in 1941 and served somewhere in the West Midlands in an anti-aircraft motor transport company.
This photo from our archives was carried in the Star on November 28 of that year. The location will have been in our region but wartime censorship meant it was not stated, which leaves us hoping to piece together some clues, and perhaps tap into very long memories, to pinpoint it.
Our correspondent interviewed Felice, described as a "former nursemaid from the south," in her crash helmet, slacks, weatherproof leggings, jerkin and muffler.
"When I talked with her at her billet in a former old manor house she told me that she had never ridden a motorcycle before she volunteered. Now Felice not only rides a motorcycle, but she has to maintain it in running order."
Members of the company – we're talking about company in the military sense of a unit of soldiers – were taking over most of the transport work at a divisional headquarters, driving staff cars and utility vans, and six were driving ambulances. When not driving, they were responsible for making sure their vehicles were in good running order and well turned out.
The company's officers and NCOs were all drawn from the former First Aid Nursing Yeomanry which had lately been incorporated into the ATS.
While Felice was not herself local, maybe some of her colleagues will ring a very distant bell for an old reader or relative familiar with a departed loved one's wartime stories.
One was "known to many former patrons of rollerskating in Dudley and Wolverhampton as a professional skater."
There was a Cambridge student, a dress designer, a saleswoman at an exclusive West End store, and our correspondent reported: "In the sitting room, while their companions sat round the fire after supper, Private T, who used to play in a dance band, obliged with requests for all the latest numbers sung by Madeline, former private secretary to the sales manager in Birmingham of an oil firm, and who has broadcast on a number of occasions."
The officer in charge of the section was a qualified masseuse, and her sergeant formerly worked for a Harley Street radiographer.
At least the motorcycle isn't a mystery. It's a Matchless. During the Second World War, Matchless manufactured 80,000 G3 and G3L models for the armed forces.
