In memory of
Barbara, Lady
Howard-Dobson
née Mills · “Bar” · WAAF driver & diarist · 1921–2004
Before she was by his side, she had a war of her own.
A young WAAF driver in wartime London, at the wheel of staff cars through the blackout — and, all the while, a diarist with an eye and a wit entirely her own.
In the autumn of 1941, Barbara Mills’ call-up papers arrived — on her birthday, the 31st of October. That November she went for basic training at Bridgnorth, then to Blackpool, where she learned to drive, before spending the next year at the wheel of military transport for 4MT in London, ferrying senior officers and doctors through the thick of the war.
All the while, she kept a journal — eight small notebooks, found in a bundle by her daughter long afterwards. Five years before she would marry Patrick in 1946, those pages already hold the whole of her: not a general’s wife, but a young woman of enormous energy and humour making the most of a world turned upside down. Her son Peter, who later gathered the diaries into a book, wrote of her as “the most active, dynamic and downright busy person you could ever wish to meet” — to whom “idleness was an alien concept.”
She and Patrick were married for fifty-eight years. They competed in horse trials, raised three children, and in later years patrolled the Channel and the North Sea together aboard “Ready About”, making their final two-handed crossing when she was well into her seventies. She died in August 2004, leaving, in Patrick’s words, an enormous hole in his life. He was who he was, in no small part, because of her.
My call-up papers came this morning — how thoughtful of the air-ministry to remember my birthday.
Barbara Mills · the first line of her diary, 31st October 1941
The book
A WAAF at the Wheel
The wartime diary of Barbara Mills · edited by her son, Peter Howard-Dobson · 2008
In the summer of 1941 two young women, their boyfriends already gone off to the war, tossed a coin outside the recruiting office and decided they’d join the WAAF rather than the ATS. That November, Barbara Mills and Felicity Dobson set off for basic training at Bridgnorth in Shropshire. Barbara kept a diary of their experience there and in Blackpool, where they learned to drive, and on through the next year as she took on driving assignments for 4MT (London). Her journal provides a fascinating glimpse of life in wartime Britain, and the undercurrents of social change that the post-war world would bring. Above all, it’s an intensely human account of a young woman making the most of the world in which she suddenly finds herself.
Her son Peter gathered his mother’s eight wartime notebooks and published them — an act of holding one life so that it would not be lost. It remains in print.