Career
Her career began in 1915 when she volunteered as a cook in the Women's Legion, an organisation founded by Lady Londonderry to provide "a capable and efficient body of women whose services could be offered to the state to take the place of men needed in the firing line or in other capacities".
She became Commandant of the Military Cookery section of the Legion, taking on more and more catering for the Army. In February 1917 she was appointed Controller of Cooks and seven months later brought all 7000 Women's Legion cooks and waitresses into the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, which had been formed earlier that year. Later she was appointed Controller of Recruiting for the WAAC and appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1918. In February 1918 she became Chief Controller of the WAAC at the War Office and five months later was promoted to Controller-in-Chief (Major-General), becoming the senior officer of 57,000 women serving at home and overseas. The Corps name was changed to Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps, of which she was elected President.
In 1919, Leach was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), the first Dame Commander of the Military Division. She retired from the QMAAC in 1920 and lived with her stepdaughters for many years in South Africa. She died at a clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland on 5 September 1956, aged 81.
Read more about this topic: Florence Simpson
Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)