On August 22, 1944, a rather skeptical young Wren assigned to the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War was about to make her way to a post on the Isle of Man, not at all certain whether she wanted to be there. Kathleen Oates, aged 22, had applied for a transfer away from her Liverpool base, where an exciting start to her working life had deteriorated into a routine office job. The Isle of Man, where her parents and grandmother had holidayed, was hardly her idea of seeing the world.
But she hadn’t foreseen that she would fall in love with the beauty of the island and couldn’t have imagined coming to appreciate life at the Ronaldsway airbase as much as she did. She wrote dozens of letters to home during her posting, which provide a unique commentary on the operations at Ronaldsway, the atmosphere in Kathleen’s camp, and what life was like on the Isle of Man 80 years ago. Her daughter, CHRISTINE SMITH, pores through her mother’s letters for the first in a series of features based on Kathleen Oates’s writing.
.. Eighty years ago last week, Wren Kathleen Oates took the ferry over to Douglas and started her first letter home.
It was a long letter because she wrote it over several days—and because she had a lot of first impressions to tell her family in Leicester: Granny, Mum, Pops, and younger sister Dorothy. She described the camp where she found herself, near Ronaldsway, and her first impressions of Castletown and Derby Haven. Her status at the aerod.