This article accompanies Ellen Ross and Tammy M Proctor’s piece ‘The Thrill and Agony of Relief: Quaker Women’s Foreign Service and the History of Emotion Free’ in History Workshop Journal Volume 99 (Spring 2025) (open access).
In late January, 2025, only days into his new presidency, Donald Trump shocked the world when he stripped the U.S. Agency for International Development of nearly all of its cash and personnel. My colleague Tammy Proctor and I had just published an article in History Workshop Journal Volume 99 on humanitarians in the early twentieth century, so we thought not only of the millions of people the U.S. had deprived of food and medicine, but also of the frustrated, worried—and now unemployed—aid givers. Our article is about three British Quaker humanitarians: Dr. Hilda Clark (1881-1955; of the Clark shoe family); Edith Pye (1876-1965; longtime President of the Royal College of Midwives and relief administrator); and Francesca Wilson (1888-1981), the figure I focused on for my part. She was a Cambridge graduate, an anti-Nazi activist, and a secondary school history teacher.
Wilson’s relief career began in 1915, when she temporarily put aside her teaching to work in wartime projects: she helped provide country holidays for French children, and safety for Serbian civilians and for wounded Serbian soldiers who had escaped especially cruel fighting in the same war—adding Serbo-Croatian to the list of modern languages she knew. After the First World War Wilson worked in Vienna, along with Edith Pye and Dr. Clark, attempting to mitigate the massive child starvation in the city. Then Wilson moved to Birmingham—with its large Quaker community and politically active citizenry—and resumed her career in teaching.
I focused on Wilson’s months carrying out relief in Spain, from 1937 through early 1939, where a newly formed Republican government had been under attack since July 1936 by right-wing forces—soon to be led by General Francisco Franco and joined by Hitler and Mussolini. International observers recognised the global importance of Spain’s effort to sustain its Republic and eventually thousands of mostly young people from all over the world came to Spain to fight or otherwise contribute to the Republican cause. Some of these volunteers included family friends in Detroit, Michigan, where I grew up!
In the spring of 1937 in the southwestern province of Murcia—now a main source of fruit and vegetables for the European Union—British Friends and eventually American Quakers assisted thousands of refugees from the southern city (now holiday town) of Malaga. Franco’s armies had captured the city with great brutality, and thousands of terrified and unequipped civilians fled, headed for territory that remained under Republican control. The journey, on a narrow unsheltered seaside road, and often under Fascist fire, was about 125 miles; the escaping Malagans—mainly women and children—were bombed from the air and sea. Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune had been heading south on that road when he encountered the exodus. His driver, Hazen Sise, took remarkable photos of the exhausted and dying civilians, which he called The Crime on the Road Málaga-Almería and published immediately in Madrid in three languages.
As she greeted those arriving in Murcia, Wilson heard some of the refugees’ painful stories. Wilson decided to serve daily breakfasts to the children at the shelter where they were staying. The first few days were chaotic, she admitted in her reports and in an article in the Manchester Guardian, but she soon collected helpers and new skills. Despite the cruelty Wilson witnessed in Spain and the Republic’s heartbreaking eventual defeat (Spain remained a harsh dictatorship under Franco until 1975), Spain was the highlight of Wilson’s relief career. She found the work itself creative and challenging—chatting with the vivacious Spanish children, meeting Spanish officials and American colleagues, hammering out cultural differences with Spanish doctors, listening with sympathy to the escapees’ stories, organising self-help courses in dressmaking and other useful skills, founding schools and camps for children. In her partially-drafted autobiography, published posthumously in 1993 by her niece, and in her letters, Wilson wrote about her time in Spain in superlatives. She described the utmost enjoyment and pride in establishing and equipping a special hospital for the many children who arrived in Murcia sick or injured from their journey.
Wilson left Spain early in 1939. The final victory of Franco’s armies in March of 1939 led to an exodus of hundreds of thousands of terrified Spanish men, women and children into an unsympathetic France. Wilson and the Quakers had time for a few relief tasks in Europe but rushed back to Britain on September 3, 1939.
Wilson now turned her energies to Britain’s relief needs—and I imagine she took time to edit her notes on Spain. As candidates gathered for interviews for high-paying postwar relief jobs with the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Wilson noticed how many more women in the group had experience in dealing with refugees than did men. Yet, she was one of very few British women chosen. On May 7, 1945 (VE Day), she and her international team of relief workers, women and men, were on their way to the American zone in Germany. Military officers there administered enormous camps, accommodating the millions of now free forced laborers or prisoners of war—mostly from Eastern Europe—who had worked for the Germans. Wilson also met thousands of Jews who had been released from concentration camps, some of whom had been brutality attacked when they tried to return to their homes; they had ‘escaped’ to Germany. Radios and P. A. systems she declared wonderful improvements for those involved in relief.
Wilson was back in England in 1946. Would ordinary life be dull for a former relief worker? Could she earn a living as an author? The Second World War itself supplied Wilson with income and recognition for some years. Her wartime journalism and knowledge about refugees made her a woman of interest. On my research visits to the London home of Wilson’s niece, where some of her papers were being stored, I read piles of letters, requests that she lecture about UNRRA or about the newly established United Nations, or about the millions of refugees remaining in camps years after the war’s end. One of her first books published postwar was In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and Between Three Wars, which looks back on the years between 1915 and just weeks before World War II began, and includes her months in Spain. It went into four editions (including a U.S. edition).
Wilson had begun compiling dense notes that she had made about her relief work into a Penguin Book, Aftermath: France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia 1945 and 1946. The last third of the book describes her visit under UNRRA auspices to the newly established Communist Yugoslavia under Tito. Surely her knowledge of Serbo-Croatian and post-World War I years spent in Serbia made her UNRRA’s choice as an authority on this subject.
The UK workforce was not very welcoming to women for most of the twentieth century, yet Wilson’s post-1945 writing career was a success. I recognised her authorial professionalism in the accuracy of her typing and her ability to manoeuvre three carbon copies at once when I had opportunities to look through some of her manuscripts in London.
In the 1950s, as the war might have been losing some of its fascination for readers, Wilson published two books in the fifties which dealt with refugees and escape: They Came as Strangers: The Story of Refugees to Great Britain (1959) and Strange Island: Britain through Foreign Eyes 1395-1940, a sort of coffee-table book. Women journalists were often restricted to the ‘women’s pages’ of daily newspapers, and Wilson did her best with these.
She also wrote for The Listener and the Manchester Guardian on various topics. She toured a relief camp in Germany for the mainly young men who had escaped the tanks that ended the Hungarian uprising of 1956 against its Communist government. A 1959 vacation with friends at ‘Glacier Park’ in the U.S. called for a different kind of writing. Later, she was in Israel reporting on the care of the elderly and on the lives of Yemenite immigrants.
When she was eighty, in 1967, Wilson undertook a larger project: a biography of Eglantyne Jebb, founder, in 1919, of the Save the Children relief organisation. Jebb’s niece, Eglantyne Buxton, had asked Wilson to write the biography to celebrate her aunt’s innovative relief work, focused on a system of child ‘adoption’. Instead, Wilson presented the Jebb family as a whole as an exemplar of an endearing Victorian gentry family of the past: its dress codes, childrearing, its pets, and its Shropshire country mansion. The book was a particular disappointment to Buxton, who had hoped for more attention to Eglantyne’s relief work, which she thought had been insufficiently appreciated.
Wilson, whose life had enfolded over many decades of peace and war, and who had retired from relief work in 1946, probably, by the late 1960s, saw philanthropy as ‘history’.
Note: Citations to Wilson’s papers, which I saw when visiting the home of her niece, Elizabeth Horder, who died in 2017, are made with the permission of Wilson’s great grandnephew, William Horder.