The Debutante Who Drove an Ambulance Through the Blitz, and the Diary That Survived Her

In September 1940, a nineteen-year-old who had been presented to the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace two years earlier was crouched behind the wheel of an ambulance in Chelsea, trying to get the engine to turn over while firemen shoved the vehicle across broken glass and rubble. June Spencer had just loaded a man pulled from beneath a bombed building, given him morphine, and now needed to get him to hospital before the night’s raid caught up with both of them.

She described helping an injured man who had been trapped beneath rubble after a bombing raid.

Her own account of what happened next survives in a single line of diary shorthand: “Gave him morphine, got him into my ambulance and the engine would not start. Got some firemen to push it over heaps of glass and rubble and off we went.”

That diary, kept almost nightly through some of the worst months of the Blitz, has now entered the official record of London’s emergency services. Historian Naomi Clifford drew on it for her book Under Fire: The Blitz Diaries of a Volunteer Ambulance Driver, and the book has recently been added to the London Ambulance Service Historic Collection, the Trust’s own archive of vehicles, documents and memorabilia stretching back more than a century.

June had joined the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service, part of the capital’s civil defence effort, in the summer of 1940, when she was nineteen.

A year earlier, in 1938, she had been presented to the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace as a debutante, the kind of young woman expected to drift from ball to engagement rather than into bombed streets. Instead she was posted to Ambulance Station 22 in Chelsea, and her introduction to the job was entirely practical. In one diary entry she recalled collecting her tin hat and gas mask before learning the routes to hospitals across London, and she was trained in driving through blackout conditions and in basic vehicle mechanics. Before every shift she checked her kit, her uniform and her ambulance herself, down to pumping up the tyres.

Chelsea gave her little cover. The station itself had a glass roof, and crews drove through blacked-out streets with almost no protection from falling incendiaries. Clifford’s research, built from diary entries that June herself kept brief and unembellished, traces her journey from that first nervous fortnight of training into the frontline work of the raids that followed, work for which nothing in a debutante’s upbringing could have prepared her.

What makes the diary distinctive is not the horror, which June barely dwells on, but the whiplash sitting next to it. The night after Chelsea was heavily bombed, she was back at the station peeling potatoes. Off duty, she met friends for drinks at The Ritz and dinner at The Savoy, and her wider circle, documented in Clifford’s research, included the novelist Mary Wesley, whom June encouraged at a Cornwall house party to write a book about her friends, advice Wesley eventually turned into The Camomile Lawn. Some shifts produced nothing at all. After a later move to Ambulance Station 179 in Battersea, June’s diary records scrubbing ambulances, cleaning toilets, working in the canteen, and waiting, often for hours, for a call that never came.

She was one of more than 5,000 people who volunteered for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service during the war, over half of them women, drawn from across the capital and from strikingly different lives: shop assistants, artists, taxi drivers, housewives, and, in June’s case, a Chelsea debutante with a dressmaking business on the side. The pay scale said plenty about how that labour was valued at the time. Full-time women volunteers received £2 a week, against £3.25 for men doing the same job, while part-time volunteers of either sex were paid nothing.

The diaries themselves came to Clifford through June’s own daughter, who gave the historian access to the private notebooks her mother had kept. What emerges, across a book built from entries that are often only a line or two long, is a portrait of stoicism that turns out to be only half the story: a young woman doing genuinely dangerous work by night and trying to hold together an ordinary social life by day, because the alternative was to stop and think about what the night had actually involved.

For more London arts and culture, visit EyeOnLondon at eye-on-london.com

Follow us on:

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest videos & updates!

We value your thoughts! Share your feedback and help us make EyeOnLondon even better!