Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps
Kathleen (Kitty) Rose Sollis is one of only three servicewomen, from the time of the Great War, known to be buried in the county of Gloucestershire. Despite having a standard CWGC headstone in Tewkesbury Cemetery her name does not appear on the Tewkesbury War Memorial.
Unfortunately her Service Record has not survived so very little is known about Kitty. However, we do know that she was born in 1898 in Tewkesbury, one of nine children born (by time of 1911 Census) to William Edwin Sollis (a brewer) and his wife Elizabeth. At the time of that census the were living at 88 Church Street, Tewkesbury but may have moved to number 69 by the time the CWGC Register was compiled in the early 1920s.
In 1917 the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was formed and from then until its disbandment in 1921, the members of the Corps undertook such duties as catering, storekeeping, vehicle maintenance, telephony, printing, clerical and administrative duties, thus freeing up male labour for combat or front line duties. They were the first women to serve in the Army in a non-nursing capacity and over 57,000 enrolled in the period 1917 to 1921. Kitty enlisted in Bristol (according to Soldiers Died in the Great War) and would probably have joined up early in the life of the Corps, having reached eighteen years of age in 1916. Her rank of ‘worker’ was the equivalent of a private soldier.
She died of influenza on 22 March 1918 in the Tredington Isolation Hospital, near Tewkesbury – a victim, no doubt, of the influenza pandemic which swept Europe in the final period of the war and just after. She was aged 20. According to the Cheltenham Chronicle of 30 March 1918 she had returned home to visit her sick sister, who was due to enter a rural hospital, was suddenly taken ill and was taken in to the above rural hospital, before transfer to Tredington.
Kitty Sollis has a standard CWGC headstone to mark her grave in Tewkesbury Cemetery. This bears the inscription that she served in Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The WAAC was given this title in April 1918, the month after Kitty’s death, so, technically, she should be recorded as a member of the WAAC.
Researched by Graham Adams 1 April 2013