Widnes Wild Ladies Team To Commemorate WW1 Heroine

The Widnes Ladies team are honouring First World War inspirational woman Winifred Mabel Letts this season, following Wild club Poet In Residence Lucy London’s decision to sponsor the Most Valuable Player awards this season in her memory.

It is the third year in a row that Lucy has sponsored the MVP awards for the Wild women’s home matches and, in keeping with her other main activity – that of researching and raising awareness of the roles of women in the Great War – Lucy has once again decided to dedicate this year’s awards to the memory of another such woman.

For the 2018/19 season, the Wild women MVP awards were dedicated to the memory of Sarah MacNaughtan who single-handedly set up and operated soup kitchens in the war zones on the western front, and in 2019/20, the awards were in honour of Merseyside born Edith Smith who became the country’s first female warranted police officer during WW1 and later worked as a nursing assistant at a hospital in Runcorn.

Winifred Mabel Letts was born on 10th February 1882 in Salford, Manchester. Her parents were Ernest Frederick Letts, an Anglican church minister and his wife, Mary Isabel, nee Ferrier. After the death of Winifred’s father, the family moved to Ireland. Educated at Abbots Bromley School in Staffordshire, Winifred went on to study at Alexandra College in Dublin. Her career as a writer began in 1907 when the novels “Waste Castle” and “The Story Spinner” were published.

During the First World War, Winifred joined the Volunteer Aid Detachment and worked as a nurse at Manchester Base Hospital. She then trained as a medical masseuse – that is a physiotherapist in modern parlance – with the Almeric Paget Military Massage Corps. Winifred worked at Army camps in Manchester and Alnwick, Northumberland during WW1.

Talking about her choice of Letts to commemorate for this season’s awards, Lucy said;

“As the Wild club have a connection with the Physio Department at Salford University for this season, I felt it appropriate to commemorate Winifred as she was born in Salford and became a medical masseuse – which was the forerunner of physiotherapy.”

To see Lucy’s Poet In Residence poems about the Wild, click here.

To find out more about Inspirational Women of World War One, click here.