Leading Aircraftwoman in the WAAF and one of the first black women to join the British Armed ForcesPosted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, United Kingdom, Women on 2015-10-18 21:41Z by Steven |
Leading Aircraftwoman in the WAAF and one of the first black women to join the British Armed Forces
The Independent
2015-04-06
Lilian Bader (1918-2015)
Bader trained as an instrument repairer, became a Leading Aircraftwoman and soon gained the rank of Acting Corporal.
I first met Lilian Bader at the Imperial War Museum in 1991 at the launch of Colin Douglas and Ben Bousquet’s book West Indian Women at War. She was the only black Briton interviewed in the book. Feisty, outspoken but not without a sense of humour, Bader was proud of the fact that, by the end of the 20th century, three generations of her family had served in the British Armed Forces.
She was born in 1918 in the Toxteth Park area of Liverpool to Marcus Bailey, a merchant seaman from Barbados who had fought for the British in the First World War, and Lilian, her British-born mother, whose parents were Irish. The Baileys had married in 1913 and Bader was the youngest of their three children. In 1927, Bader and her older brothers, Frank and James, were orphaned – and she was raised in a convent where she remained until she was 20, because no one would employ her. However, she was determined to overcome racial prejudice.
She found employment in domestic service, but, when the war broke out, she joined the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) at Catterick Camp, Yorkshire. She was enjoying herself until she was asked to leave when her father’s West Indian heritage was discovered by an official in London. For weeks her supervisor avoided informing her of this decision – but eventually he had to tell her the truth, and release her…
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