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Rachel Millet, auteur de "Spearette: a Memoir of the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit 1940-1945 ", éditions Fern House (31 juillet 1998)
Rachel Millet
Last Updated: 9:22pm BST 03/07/2003
Rachel Millet, who has died aged 89, was one of the redoubtable young Englishwomen with the Hadfield-Spears mobile hospital, which was attached to the Free French forces during the Second World War.
The unit was founded in 1939 by Lady Spears, wife of the Tory MP Major-General Sir Edward Spears, with financial backing from Lady Hadfield, who had done hospital work during the First World War. After the Fall of France it was withdrawn to England, where Rachel Millet (then Rachel Howell-Evans) was recruited as a driver and nurse to aid surgeons with the 1st Division of the Free French in North Africa.
Having been trained at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in London, she was shaken by the sight of shrapnel wounds at the Battle of Alamein; and when septic wounds attracted maggots, she had to learn to pretend to patients that the itching indicated they were getting better.
advertisementBut while she helped out on wards at busy times, her main job was driving the unit over long distances, sometimes as much as 1,000 miles. Her other task was to ferry around Lady Spears, the unit's formidable leader, who was happy enough bumping along in her back seat reading detective stories.
Temperatures in the desert could vary from freezing cold to a baking heat that sent drivers to sleep at the wheel. The Spearettes, as the French called these self-confident young Englishwomen, had a personal allowance of two gallons of water a week. This was double that of an Eighth Army soldier, but they learned to manage by adopting devices such as washing their clothes in petrol and their hair in paraffin.
It was at Tobruk, Rachel Howell-Evans wryly recalled, that her future husband claimed to have pulled her out by the legs from under her car where she had been doing repair work, and to have been greeted with a volley of oaths. Eventually, she calmed down and offered him a whisky; after the war she and René Millet, a Free French officer, married.
Rachel Howell-Evans and her faithful Ford, No 82, followed the Allies to Italy, where she was asked to join a small French Commando party landing in the South of France, a mission which led to her being awarded the Croix de Guerre. The party arrived at night on the wrong beach, and at dawn was attacked by American bombers who thought they were Germans.
But despite receiving a long cut on her leg, she was still amused to note that the French placed their steel helmets on their bottoms for protection. Later it was revealed that the beach where they were supposed to land had been heavily mined. The unit set up a first-aid post in the house of a collaborationist mayor, where they had the help of the local midwife and the local prostitute. They then moved steadily northwards with the Allied advance. At Nimes, Rachel Howell-Evans entered a chateau which had been a German headquarters and found a half-eaten meal on the table; after helping to finish it off, she used a bayonet to force open a locked room in which she discovered a full set of German maps of France.
Even though the Germans were in retreat, her diary recorded a litany of grim injuries as well as unusual encounters: two wounded young German officers died after refusing to allow her to give them plasma because she could not guarantee that the blood had not come from Jews or blacks; a Frenchman, who had taught himself English by reading Shakespeare, talked to her delightedly in a totally incomprehensible accent.
As victory approached, the unit fell victim to a row between Generals Spears and de Gaulle. Spears had helped the latter to escape from France in 1940, but they fell out over French misbehaviour in Lebanon and Syria later in the war. De Gaulle took revenge. He first ordered the name Hadfield-Spears to be removed from the unit's vehicles; then, when he heard French soldiers calling out Voilà Spears and Vive Spears as the unit passed by with the Union Flag flying during the victory parade in the Champs Elysées, he ordered the unit's immediate disbandment, even though it had been destined to go to the Far East.
The daughter of a solicitor, Rachel Howell-Evans was born at Trefnant, Denbighshire, on January 15 1914 and educated by governesses and at Westonbirt. After training as a nurse at Great Ormond Street for three years, she was a matron at a prep school when war broke out.
She resigned to work as a VAD at Tidworth, and then joined the Mechanised Transport Corps. For three weeks she was marched through the streets of London under the eye of a ferocious Guards' sergeant, and was taught first aid, map-reading and car maintenance before passing out as a lieutenant.
Rachel Howell-Evans was then posted to the Port of London, where she lived on a diet of conger eels before volunteering with two friends to join the Hadfield-Spears hospital. After purchasing, at her own expense, a great deal of tropical equipment, including a topi which she later threw overboard, she set off for North Africa. On the voyage, the wife of a French general so irritated the girls, by insisting on vetting their correspondence, that they took revenge by writing dirty stories in letters to fictitious addresses.
After Rachel Howell-Evans married René Millet in 1946, he joined the French diplomatic service. The young couple were sent first to Ankara, where she became a friend of the French author Romain Gary, and then to Johannesburg. In Bangkok she helped to start a centre for the blind, but her failure to speak Thai once led to a memorable faux pas: when she ordered a servant to bring some rolls from a cupboard for dinner, the guests found ping-pong balls floating in the soup.
Later postings were to Chad, Burma, Indonesia and Tunisia. Life could be dangerous. They were occasionally shot at, and once a bomb was thrown into the ambassador's office. Eventually Rachel Millet settled in the Suffolk village of Kirtling, so that their two daughters could be educated in England. Although Madame Millet continued to join her husband in his postings, she enjoyed being able to hunt and fish again. She became one of the first people to introduce Connemara ponies into England, ran a stud and helped to found the East Anglian Native Pony Society. In 1998 she published Spearette, a memoir of the Hadfield-Spears Hospital.
Rachel Millet died on June 1. Her husband died in 1967, and she is survived by her daughters.
Source : www.telegraph.co.uk 
Spearette Reviewed
by T. Bulckley
This delightful book is mainly a vivid account of the personal experiences of the author (née Howell-Evans) from 1942-5 as a driver-cum-nurse in the Hadfield-Spears Hospital, an integral part of the 1st Free French Division. But it also contains interesting comments on human relations within a busy mobile divisional Hospital of mixed nationalities, and on their reception after landing in France, which varied from wild joy and generosity to indifference or outright suspicion.
It is no book on strategy or military tactics, but much on the tactics of survival in the desert and later in the snow, and especially the subterfuges needed for cutting through the 'red tape' that exists in all armies.
The hospital, founded by Lady Spears, was the third hospital that she funded and presented to the French Army. It consisted of French officers, British nurses and driver/VADs, quakers (mostly conscientious objectors), and colonial other ranks from Chad and Senegal. 'Spearette' was the French nickname for the Hadfield-Spears girls. It is an exciting story as the hospital follows the Division from Alamein to Tunisia and into Italy. In July 44 they were pulled out for the South of France Invasion (ANVIL) for which the author became an 'honorary commando' and landed on the wrong beach - luckily as it turned out - in a real 'fog of war' situation.
When on the move their ancient vehicles were always breaking down and the girls had to rely on a shrewd mixture of guile and charm to 'acquire' spare parts, and enormous improvisation. The hospitals admittance figures give an idea of their intense activity during pitched battles. The book is full of humour and makes entertaining reading.
by Richard Gott
As the Second World War fades from popular memory, a clutch of fresh stories has begun to emerge, written by those who were fully involved on the stage but had what were sometimes perceived as 'bit' parts. 'Subaltern studies' have already become a familiar part of the revisionist histories of the Indian empire, and now the surviving participants of the great army of camp followers during the Second World War - drivers and cooks and nurses - are being prevailed upon to tell their own stories. No force, ancient or modern, could have hoped to survive without them for more than twenty-four hours.
Rachel Howell-Evans was one of these essential also-rans and her reminiscences, peppered with extracts from her diaries of the time, turn out to be a sparkling tale of what might be described as the 'up-side' of war, the opportunity that many people had to have their entire familiar world turned inside out, emerging at the other end wholly changed - indubitably for the better. 'When the second world war was declared,' she writes, 'I was on holiday from my job as head matron at a boys' preparatory school in Northamptonshire.' Three years later she was in Cairo, working for the Hadfield-Spears Hospital, a story in itself. By the wars end, the lovely Rachel had driven up the whole of Italy and landed on a beach in the south of France, as an honorary commando, and encountered the presumably equally enchanting Colonel René Millet of the Free French forces, who eventually became her husband.
The 'Spearettes' of her title were the girls who worked for Lady Spears, the extraordinary American wife of Louis Spears, then the British representative with the Free French in Lebanon and Syria. We often forget that, although wars tend to be run by great state machines, a huge amount of private enterprise activity has also to be mobilised. Lady Spears had funded and run her own hospital during the First World War and, although she had lost her personal fortune during the Wall Street crash, she was determined to run another hospital in the Second. Securing some money from Lady Hadfield, who lived in a villa in the south of France, she established her Hospital, first in Lorraine and then in Syria.
Lady Spears has already told her own story of life running a hospital in the desert in Journey Down a Blind Alley(under her maiden name Mary Borden), but Rachel Millet's tales come from a different perspective, often from behind the wheel. She worked as a nurse, but she was also a driver, steering through traffic while Lady Spears sat in the back reading detective stories.
The private enterprise hospital lived a charmed life, yet the dramas were manifold. Lady Spears and the staff liked to have British nurses, but the authorities thought otherwise, endlessly dumping unsuitable French women upon them. General de Gaulle maintained a personal vendetta against General Spears which often seemed to extend to the hospital and its directrice. When 'l'Ambulance Spears' turned up at the victory parade in Paris, and was applauded by a crowd of wounded men, de Gaulle ordered the entire unit to be closed down, and the British personnel to be repatriated immediately. It was a strange form of gratitude for a freelance operation of inestimable value to the Free French.
Liberated France was a strange country, ambivalent about liberation. Rachel Millet does not mince her words. At one stage the hospital was billeted on the Chateau de Gramont, run by 'the least co-operative and most inhospitable of all the people we came in contact with in France.' She notes that 'sadly, many of the French aristocracy behaved badly during the occupation,' and seem to have offered no thanks for liberation. At lunch with a princess in Cannes, she finds that the other guests gave 'the impression of not caring who won the war as long as they were able to continue their lives of pleasure and gaming.'
Britain too was a foreign country to someone who had just spent three years close to the front line. When she finally gets a month's leave in England, in November 1944, and has a couple of day's hunting, she finds her parents preoccupied with other things: 'I did not fit into life with my parents at all - they were more interested in when the sweep was coming, or that I had eaten their ration of butter, than in hearing about my adventures.' Let us hope that Rachel Millet's grandchildren appreciate those adventures rather more.
Source : www.fernhouse.com 
Laurent Laloup le vendredi 20 avril 2007 - Demander un contact Recherche sur cette contribution | |
