Dorothy Lawrence

Dorothee Lawrence

Dorothy Lawrence (born October 4, 1896 , † 1964 ) was an English reporter who disguised herself as a man and pretended to be a soldier in order to be able to report from the front lines of the First World War . Little is known about her life before and after these front-line experiences, which she described in a book published in 1919.

Early years

Probably born out of wedlock, Dorothy Lawrence was placed in the care of a Church of England guardian as a teenager . Later, in the 1920s, she accused her guardian of raping her. Before the war she started working as a journalist and published several articles in the Times .

War correspondent

Disguised as a soldier

After the outbreak of war she wanted to report from the front, but this was rejected by several London newspapers. So Dorothy Lawrence set out for France in the summer of 1915 on her own account. She left London on a bicycle she bought for two pounds . She spoke little French and had hardly any money with her.

She took a ferry across the canal and cycled towards the front. She came to Senlis via Creil , where she first heard gunshots . Here she was asked by the police to turn back, whereupon she fled to the nearby forest. Startled by rats that night, she interrupted her plan and first went to Paris .

She found support in Paris. A group of British soldiers whom she called her "khaki accomplices" got her a uniform and taught her to march. However, the men assumed that Lawrence would not make it to the front.

With short hair, an official permit and a forged identification tag with the inscription “Denis Smith. No. 175331. First Leicester Regiment. Roman Catholic ”she set out for Béthune , where the German army had been stopped, but after a wrong turn came to Albert ; the Battle of the Somme was to begin here a year later .

Lawrence met British soldier Tom Dunn, who helped her get to the troops. At night she slept in an abandoned hut, during the day the two of them marched with their comrades to the trenches. When Lawrence, exhausted, feared that she might be ill or wounded and subsequently exposed, she went to the supervisor of the unit after ten days and revealed herself. As a prisoner of war she was interrogated many times and then sent back to England.

Later years

She was only allowed to publish her adventure after the end of the war, even then only in censored form. The hoped-for commercial success did not materialize. Destitute and without a family, she was admitted to a closed institution in Barnet in 1925 after suspicious behavior. Here she died 39 years later. Her grave site is unknown today, as is the exact date of her death.

It wasn't until 2003 that Richard Bennett, the grandson of one of the soldiers who had helped Dorothy Lawrence in France, found a reference to her in the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham . Since then, historians have been collecting material for a biography of Dorothy Lawrence.

literature

• Dorothy Lawrence: Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: the only English woman soldier, Late Royal Engineers 51st Division 179th Tunneling Company BEF , 1919 (available online)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Lawrence Marzouk: Girl who fought like a man . The Times , November 20, 2003
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Sarah Oliver: She fought on the Somme disguised as a Tommy, so why did Dorothy die unloved and unlauded in a lunatic asylum . Daily Mail , January 11, 2014 (English)
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Anna-Lena Roth: A soldier named Dorothy . one day on Spiegel Online, January 15, 2014