Elizabeth Carrington

A series of short biographies of women and men who served as ambulance drivers and assistants in Chelsea, London, during the Second World War.

Elizabeth Carrington, born in 1917, sister of Baron Carrington of Upton (Lord Carrington, who served under Thatcher in the 80s), drove for the LCC Ambulance Service (London Auxiliary Ambulance Service or LAAS) in 1939. She is listed as living at 50-61 Burton Court in Chelsea.

Elizabeth Carrington, a debutante of 1935. Credit: The Bystander, 1 May 1935.

Elizabeth did not stay long in the LAAS. She joined the Mechanised Transport Corps (a civilian uniformed organisation that provided drivers for government departments and other agencies and drove ambulances) and was attached to the American Ambulance. This service was set up after the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940 by Gilbert H. Carr and raised £140,000 from US citizens in London alone. The fund purchased 300 vehicles (ambulances, surgical units and first aid mobile posts and had nearly 400 British women working for them.

In 1943 Elizabeth Carrington married William Lionel Dove, a Liverpool GP serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps. She died in Liverpool in 2004.

Under Fire: The Blitz Diaries of a Volunteer Ambulance Driver

In this collection of essays, Naomi Clifford explores the lives of women whose stories we have forgotten or have never known. Meet Eliza Fenning, a servant whose ability to read proved fatal; teenager Maria Glenn, dragged through the courts by a vengeful would-be suitor; Susanna Meredith, who devoted herself to improving the lives of convicted women; Margaret Larney, pregnant and condemned to death; Mary Ashford, whose woeful end was staged on the opening night of a famous theatre; and French anarchist Louise Michel, welcomed, to the consternation of the great and the good, on a fact-finding visit to a London …