22 Facts About Mabel Lethbridge

Mabel Florence Lethbridge BEM was a 20th-century British writer and business woman.

Mabel Lethbridge was the youngest person at the time to receive the British Empire Medal, an award affiliated to the Order of the British Empire, for her services in the Great War as a munitions factory worker.

Mabel Lethbridge was severely injured when a shell she was packing exploded and described her experiences in a series of autobiographies.

Mabel Lethbridge was born on 7 July 1900 in Luccombe, Somerset, the second youngest of six children of John Acland Musgrave Lethbridge and the American Florence Martin Cooper.

Mabel Lethbridge's Grandfather was Sir Wroth Periam Christopher Lethbridge, 5th Baronet and her paternal family were long established Somerset gentry.

Mabel Lethbridge's parents divorced in 1903 and the first volume of her autobiography is brief on her childhood years, although she later records that her father worked overseas in the Empire and that she had a peripatetic upbringing that variously included Kenya, Italy and Ireland.

Mabel Lethbridge's father was at one time a professional soldier and big game huntsman who had served in South Africa, but by 1907 he was a declared bankrupt in Kenya.

Mabel Lethbridge then abandoned his family and, although he lived until 1934, he did not see his children again, dying in poverty in Mexico.

Mabel Lethbridge suffered several years of poor health necessitating a period of convalescence near Ballinhassig and later at Coachford in Ireland from 1909 to 1912.

In 1917 Mabel Lethbridge took a job as a nurse at Bradford Hospital where she tended troops who had been injured and maimed in the War.

Mabel Lethbridge volunteered for the dangerous work of filling shells with Amatol explosive.

Mabel Lethbridge worked variously as a house maid, sold matches and hired a barrel organ to entertain crowds on Armistice Day in 1918.

Mabel Lethbridge's enterprise drew her into a criminal underworld that flourished in the aftermath of the Great War.

Mabel Lethbridge's liaisons included a romance with Silas Glossop, a civil engineer and one of the founders of Geotechnical Engineering in the UK and a long-standing affair with Colin Gill, who was commissioned to paint Mabel Lethbridge for The Imperial War Museum.

Mabel Lethbridge had recognised that people wanted living accommodation in Chelsea where her family resided and accordingly opened an estate agency with a prestigious address in Cheyne Walk.

In 1939 Mabel Lethbridge volunteered for the Ambulance Service working with her daughter Sue throughout The Blitz.

Mabel Lethbridge touched upon this work in her third and final volume of autobiography Homeward Bound published in 1967.

Mabel Lethbridge provided the abstract painter Sven Berlin and his wife with a cottage and a studio and championed Bryan Wynter, the latter subsequently marrying her daughter Suzanne in 1949.

In 1948 Mabel Lethbridge converted to Roman Catholicism and in 1962 her life was the subject of BBC's This Is Your Life.

Mabel Lethbridge died in London in July 1968 following yet another operation resulting from her injuries.

Mabel Lethbridge is buried at Longstone Cemetery, Carbis Bay, Cornwall.

In 1933 Mabel Lethbridge met and befriended the publisher Geoffrey Bles who persuaded her to recount her life in an autobiography Fortune Grass published by Bles publishing in 1934 covers the first twenty-seven years of her life.