WWII began when Betty Mitchell was about 13 years of age.  She remembers picking potatoes with the girls as all the men had gone to war.  Betty left school at 15 and did various short-term jobs until she got a job as a telephonist with the GPO; she was then called up to join the army at the age of seventeen. Betty started training at Maryhill Barracks before being sent to Dunblane to continue her training. She then went to several barracks around England. Asked how well she settled into army life, she says:

       “It was a good life, after, you got used to it. You got used to the discipline. The crying stopped, because crying wasn’t going to make it any better. You knew you had to get used to it.”

Women also played their part

Betty was an army telephonist with the Auxilery Territorial Service (ATS), and she also did some courier work, which she isn’t allowed to discuss. Nor can she tell us about her war work abroad, though she did mention that some of that work involved “more or less picking people up, by boat, whatever. That’s what one of my medals was for.”

Betty describes her experiences during the war as “an incredible journey, really incredible. Not something I’d ever visualised….  It’s not something I would have liked to have missed, because it made me what I am today.”

Elizabeth (Betty) Mitchell