The key members of the Subcommittee were its chairman, Lady Priscilla Norman, and its Honorary Secretary, Agnes Conway. However, Lady Haig, Lady Askwith, and Lady Mond were also contributors. Miss Monkhouse, Chief Woman Dilution Officer, representing the Ministry of Munitions, and Miss Durham, representing the Ministry of Labour, were both co-opted early on, as it became evident that the Subcommittee needed a knowledgeable and pro-active presence to co-ordinate official as well as anecdotal information-gathering from the diverse areas of trade and industry.

Florence Priscilla Norman (d. 1964) 

There are two main collections of papers documenting the life of this extraordinary woman. Her early life, c. 1873-1918, is recorded at the Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University (Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT), and papers covering her time as a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum, 1920-1964, are held by the Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum. The Imperial War Museum’s Central Archive also holds relevant material of her work as a Trustee. 

Family roots ensured that the future Lady Norman would be a liberal campaigner. Her grandmother, Priscilla McLaren (neé Bright) was a sister of the radical reformer, John Bright, and was herself a leading figure in the nineteenth century suffragist movement, founding the Scottish Division of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Sir Henry Norman (1858-1939) was a Liberal MP from 1910-1923, and Priscilla Norman was his second wife. They married in 1907. Lady Norman was Honorary Treasurer and Committee member of the Liberal Women’s Suffrage Union and on the Executive Committee of the Women’s Liberal Federation. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Sir Henry and Lady Norman immediately began planning to set up and run a hospital for wounded troops in France. The British Hospital at Wimereux, Boulogne, was the consequence and led to a batch of medals for Priscilla Norman – the 1914 Star, British War and Victory Medals, a Mention in Despatches and, in 1917, a CBE. (See BRCS 23.3 for an account of the hospital). 

With typical passion, Lady Priscilla accepted the task of Chairman of the Women’s Work Subcommittee. As a result of the first meeting of the Subcommittee on 26 April, 1917, she sent a handwritten summary to its members: 

The work which lies before us is very interesting. This Co. has been formed to officially collect catalogue and exhibit the war work of women so as to form a permanent historical record of their share in this greatest of wars…it would be an irreparable loss to this and to future generations if no public record of all this work were to be kept. Think of the things women have had the courage to take up during these last three years for the first time. It seems strange to us still and rather wonderful.

How soon will it be of such everyday occurrence that we shall cease to notice it at all!

How soon we shall forget that what called their courage forth was the depth of women’s sympathy for suffering - the intense desire of women to do something comparable with all that men were doing for humanity, for this country.

Perhaps the more menial the task the more noble the inspiration. For I am fully aware that women’s work has been to a large extent long, dull and monotonous.

We can all do brilliant things if the chance comes one’s way, but my admiration goes out to those who without the reward of either praise or pay did whatever they could to help. Men will perhaps say that our section of the proposed Museum won’t be of much spectacular interest – that women will have little to show of personal interest for all their hard work.

Well, never mind, it will be thrilling to thousands of women, generation after generation who will come to it to learn the kind of women we were and what we did.

…. Meantime we mustn’t wait for our splendid building. We have a splendid cellar here at our disposal for our records as we get them in. …So we feel we must start at once as we have already a good deal of past material to collect…

There is one last thing I wish to say that is important to us. In Miss Conway we have found an ideal Hon. Sec. who by her own University training and her previous war work brings to us the knowledge and the qualities of greatest service to us. She has most generously consented to devote a considerable portion of her time to the business of the Committee.

All the Museum’s Subcommittees were dissolved by the beginning of December 1920, and Lady Norman wrote personally to all the members of the Women’s Work Subcommittee to thank them for their efforts. Miss Durham’s reply to Priscilla on 18 December was simple: “As a member of the Women’s Work Subcommittee I do not feel that I in anyway, deserve any of the kind things which you say, as all the merit for the work done on the Women’s side rests with you and Miss Conway.” 

Lady Norman continued her work with the Imperial War Museum, and became the longest serving Trustee. Her interest in the Women’s Work Collection continued, but she also became a key member of the Artists Advisory Committee. During the Second World War, Lady Norman’s cellar once again came to the fore, and many of the Museum’s works of art were safely stored there in her country house at Chiddingford, Surrey, for the duration. She was also actively involved in the Overseas Evacuation Scheme, escorting two groups of children safely to America. 

In addition to her work for the Museum, Lady Norman was a member of the League of Nations Union and the National Adoption Society. Her interest in mental health issues led her to become the first woman to be appointed to the Board of Management of the Royal Earlswood Institution in 1926. She retired to Antibes, France, where she died in 1964.

Agnes Ethel Conway (1885-1950) 

Agnes was the only child of Sir Martin Conway and Katrina Lambard from Augusta, Maine.  She inherited her father’s thirst for adventure and travel, but this was tempered with a keen intelligence and diligence that made her a perfect and very fortunate choice for the Women’s Work Subcommittee. 

On her fourteenth birthday Agnes had the misfortune to suffer an accident and fractured the base of her skull leaving one side of her face disfigured and drooping with a paralysed nerve. However, she bore this disability with remarkable fortitude. Indeed, it led her to a greater understanding of and empathy for those wounded during the First World War. 

As little as a year after her accident and only recently recovered from a near fatal dose of diphtheria, Agnes accompanied her father to Switzerland, climbed the Breithorn, and enjoyed a tour of northern Italy. On her return, Agnes turned to her studies, having determined to get into Newnham College, Cambridge. [Her father was now Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University.] She succeeded in passing her entrance exams and entered college life in October 1903. This is where her love of archaeology was born. 

On leaving Cambridge, Agnes moved back to her parents, who were now living at Allington Castle, Kent. A partial ruin when purchased in 1904, the project of restoring it was now her father’s main occupation. Agnes was still restless to see the world, but when her father was asked to write a child’s book on art, she happily took on the bulk of the work. This was published in 1909 as How to look at pictures. 

In 1912 and 1913, a Swiss doctor in Geneva looked once again at Agnes’ facial disfigurement and performed a couple of operations on the nerves of her face and shoulder, and a great improvement was made. Recovering in Rome, she arranged to travel to Greece with a friend, Evelyn Radford and, together, they toured the region. Her account of this adventure was published in 1917 as A ride through the Balkans. 

Soon after her return from Greece, war was declared against Germany. Agnes immediately began helping a Voluntary Aid Detachment equip a hospital at Maidstone. A few months later she was making plans to help Belgian refugees. At the end of November 1914, she and her step-aunt, Isabel, were equipping a house in Buckingham Palace Gardens as a convalescent home for Belgian soldiers. This work continued until the summer of 1916, when the government relocated all such Belgian nationals to hospitals near Rouen. Her commitment and hard work won Agnes the recognition of an MBE and the Médaille de la Reine Elizabeth. Agnes had begun to shift her work towards the academic sector and began running a Register of University Women for War Service under the umbrella of the Federation of University Women. Promotion of university careers for women and equal opportunity remained a cause dear to her heart after the war. 

When Sir Martin was asked to become Director-General of the newly created war museum in 1917, he immediately determined that his daughter should be involved too. Mond soon invited her to become Honorary Secretary of the Women’s Work Subcommittee, working with Lady Norman. Having already drafted a scheme for the women’s group, which had been sanctioned by her father, Agnes accepted Mond’s offer and took up her post on 30 April 1917. She began work immediately by collecting as much as she could on the work done with Belgian refugees. The Women’s Work Collection continued to take up much of Agnes’s time until 1926. In the meantime she had written a piece on the history of women’s war work for inclusion in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and acquired an M.A. for her thesis on Henry VII - which was eventually published by Cambridge University Press in 1932. 

However, the defining moment in her post-war life was the occasion of Agnes’s first sight of Petra on 2 March 1926. This was the culmination of her first tour of the Middle East. Back in England and keen to find out more about Petra, the Director of Antiquities in Transjordan, George Horsfield, came to Allington in August to discuss the possibilities of work at the site. A Petra Excavation Committee was formed and, after much hard negotiation and money-raising, work began on the dig in March 1929. The friendship between George and Agnes blossomed with their shared passion for archaeology and Petra, and they married in 1932, settling in Jordan until George retired in 1936. At the time of her marriage Agnes was forty-seven and George three years her senior. The naming of one of the reclaimed buildings as the “Conway Tower” commemorates the work Agnes did at Petra. 

Agnes returned briefly to London in 1936 for the official opening of the Imperial War Museum at its current site in the old Bedlam Hospital in Lambeth Road, South London, but her involvement with the collection was largely over. Returning to England in 1939, the Horsfields spent a few years in Dublin and Northern Ireland, before returning to Allington for the latter half of the Second World War. Agnes did some charitable work at Blackheath, while trying to work on an account of the Petra digs. 

In 1949 she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and she finally died on 2 September 1950. 

Further reading:
Joan Evans, The Conways: a history of three generations (London: Museum Press, 1966).
The family papers were presented to Cambridge University Library.

Violet Mond (d.1945) 

Violet Goetze, like the Mond family, had German roots. Unlike the Monds, the Goetzes were not Jewish. However, Violet’s brother, Sigismund, a painter, was accepted into the Mond’s circle, and he, in turn, introduced Violet. Violet charmed both the elder and younger Monds, and immediately accepted when Alfred Mond finally proposed. They married in 1892. By all accounts Violet was beautiful, determined and ambitious. She worked hard to promote her husband’s political career and used her influence with Lloyd George to secure Alfred’s appointment to ministerial office in December 1916. As First Commissioner of Public Works, Mond proposed the idea of a national war museum in February 1917. It was, therefore, natural that she should wish to play an active part in the success of this venture. 

As a member of the Women’s Work Subcommittee, Lady Mond was asked to undertake the gathering of information on home hospitals. She appears to have been very diligent with regard to this responsibility, and drew up a questionnaire to be circulated. The fruits of this labour can be found in the BRCS section of the Women’s Work Collection.