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Experiences of the Great War

The adventure begins

When the First World War broke out, 18-year-old Mairi Chisholm had already been given a racing motor bike by her father. She decided to set off on it for London to see what she could do to help in the war.

A young woman on a heavy motor cycle must have been an unusual sight at the time.

This is how Mairi recalled these early days in an interview recorded for the Imperial War Museum in 1976, when she was 80:

'I rode to London … on my bike, and went to the Women's Emergency Corps … and there I started … it was entirely manned by women, as you might say by suffragettes, and who at once called off their campaign and put themselves at the disposition of the Government.'


— Extract quoted by permission of the Imperial War Museum.