WAR SERVICE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 11933, 27 January 1936, Page 4

WAR SERVICE

CRIPPLED GIRL’S STORY. Although a cripple, Mrs Bertha Sidaway, of Geoffrey-street, Whitburn, near Sunderland, served in the British military forces during the war. The claim of Mr John Blrick, of Sunderland, to be the only one-leg-ged soldier to have served prompted Mrs Sidaway to reveal her experience. When Mrs Sidaway was a baby she met with an accident which resulted in her leg being taken off below the knee.

She was 17 years old and unmarried when she made an application with a friend to join the Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Corps. After an examination she was accepted for service, despite her disability, and was transferred to the Women’s Royal Air Force.

She was engaged in the work of repairing aeroplanes, and with other women she was subject to military discipline, and had to march from the barracks to workshop. Mrs Sidaway recalls an occasion during the winter when she lay in the snow for hours repairing the wing of a ’plane which was urgently required. When Armistice was declared she hoped to get her discharge papers, but she was sent to an Air Force Exhibition at Leeds, in aid of widows and orphans, and later spent some time in Scotland on similar work.

Mr Harry Sidaway, her husband, served in a Yorkshire regiment.