Women's Royal Naval Service

WRNS included cooks, clerks, wireless telegraphists, radar plotters, weapons analysts, range assessors, electricians and air mechanics.

On 10 October 1918, nineteen-year-old Josephine Carr from Cork became the first Wren to die on active service, when her ship, the RMS Leinster was torpedoed.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Vera Laughton Mathews was appointed as the director of the re-formed WRNS in 1939 with Ethel (Angela) Goodenough as her deputy.

The WRNS remained in existence after the end of the war although Mathews retired in 1947[1] and Goodenough had died the year before.

In the 1970s it became obvious that equal pay for women and the need to remove sexual discrimination meant that the WRNS and the Royal Navy would become one organisation.

[3] In October 1990, during the Gulf War, HMS Brilliant carried the first women officially to serve on an operational warship.