A Yesterday's Witness series of six programmes with women of the First World War. 4: Three VADs
Members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments - VADs-elegant, volunteer, amateur nurses who knew little more than how to roll bandages, were suddenly faced with the full reality of war as the first ambulance trains arrived from the front.
'There we were, plunged into the hospital and we were worked off our feet. Life seemed to be divided between work and sleep ... '. It wasn't all work and no play, though play was strictly limited. 'There was an edict that no VAD must go out with anybody male -unless there was a chaperone. You mustn't go to a dance, you mustn't do this, you mustn't do that ...'
In this programme three VADs tell their story of that war and how ' nothing was ever to be the same again '.
Narrator JOAN BAKEWELL
Film editor JOHN BOUSE
Producer STEPHEN PEET
Director BERNARD HALL