Dorothy Lawrence
The English reporter who posed as a man to become a soldier during the First World War was born on 4 October 1896.
Dorothy Lawrence was 18 when she made her way by bicycle to the front lines on the Western Front in the hope of becoming a war reporter. Disguised as a British private, she worked for ten days as a sapper before surrendering herself, aware of the risk she posed both to herself and her confidantes.
High Command was acutely embarrassed that a teenage woman had simply cycled to the front. At Calais, six generals and 20 other officers took turns interrogating her. Following an attempted escape, some assumed she was a spy. Others were sure that only a prostitute, or, as they euphemistically put it, a ‘camp follower’ would go to the Front. In her naïveté, Dorothy did not know what the term meant and they talked for hours at cross-purposes.
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