Pamela Joan Radford

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

Pamela Joan Radford (born 1908 in Dublin), like many of her colleagues, was the child of a military man (her father Charles Radford was an Army chaplain).

Pam’s nephew remembers her vividly: “Pam drove ambulances out of the garage in the King’s Road that is now the Bluebird – it was still an ambulance station after the war. Somewhere there’s a photo of Pam in uniform outside the garage (I’m pretty sure!),” he told me.

Sadly, the photo has not yet turned up, but here she is probably in the 1940s flanked by her younger sister Monica and father Charles. At the time war broke out in 1939 Pam, her mother Ada and her older sister Betty owned and ran a café in Lincoln’s Inn called Fickett’s (the area was once known as Fickett’s Fields).

In The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (published 1944) Portuguese historian Armando De Freitas Zuzarte Cortesão (1891-1977) made a point of thanking “Miss P.J. Radford” for her “varied assistance throughout this work”.

Armando, who had represented Portugal in the 1912 Olympics, had two marriages and three sons behind him and was a political exile from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Like many refugees, he volunteered for the war effort but at 50 he was too old for active service; he operated anti-aircraft batteries in London.

Pam and Armando married some time after 1944. At that time women lost their nationality on marriage, so she automatically became a Portuguese citizen. By 1959, however, the couple had separated – the final straw was a row over Pam’s beloved dog.

Vintage monochrome photograph, possibly taken in the 1950s or 1960s, of two middle-class middle-aged white people (a woman and a man) at a round couple. The woman, who wears a flower-print skirt and white blouse, holds a black dog. The man wears slacks and a large-check shirt — Pamela Joan Radford with her husband Armando De Freitas Zuzarte Cortesão. Apparently he hated her dog.

Pam returned to England and officially changed her name back to Radford. She died at Liss in Hampshire in 1973.

Under Fire: The Blitz Diaries of a Volunteer Ambulance Driver

A gripping account of life on the home front
“A writer who does their research so thoroughly and then wears their learning so lightly”
“Fabulous blend of diary accounts and social history”
The Blitz in London through the diaries of a volunteer ambulance driver, from dancing at the Grosvenor to incendiary bombs in the roof
In the summer of 1940 June Spencer volunteers for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service in Chelsea. Every night she writes up the day’s events in her diary, whether it’s driving in a hail of incendiaries, peeling potatoes for the crews, or loading broken and bleeding …