Mabel Lethbridge

Mabel Florence Lethbridge
Portrait taken for Imperial War Museum by Colin Gill
Born	(1900-07-07)7 July 1900 Luccombe, Somerset, United Kingdom
Died	14 July 1968(1968-07-14) (aged 68) London, England, United Kingdom
Other names	Peggy Lethbridge
Occupation	Writer, street performer, estate agent

Mabel Florence Lethbridge O.B.E. (1900–1968) was a 20th-century English writer and business woman. She is the youngest person to date to receive the United Kingdom Order of the British Empire (O.B.E). awarded for her services in the Great War as a munitions factory worker. She was severely injured when a shell she was packing exploded and described her experiences in a series of autobiographies.

Mabel Lethbridge was born on July 7, 1900 in Luccombe, Somerset, the second youngest of six children of John Acland Musgrave Lethbridge (1869 - 1934) and her American mother Florence Martin (Mary) Cooper (d 1931). Her Grandfather was Sir Wroth Periam Christopher Lethbridge, 5th Baronet (1863–1950) and her paternal family were long established Somerset gentry.Her parents divorced in 1903 and the first volume of her autobiography conspicuously brushes over her childhood years although she later records that her father worked overseas in the Empire and that she had a peripatetic upbringing that variously included Kenya, Italy and Ireland. Her father was at one time a professional soldier and big game huntsman who had served in South Africa but by 1907 he was a declared bankrupt in Kenya. He abandoned his family thereafter and although he lived until 1934 he did not see his children again dying in poverty in Mexico . She suffered several years of poor health necessitating a period of convalescence in Ireland from 1909 to 1911 during which she received little formal education. She attended Haberdashers’ Aske's School for Girls describing her period as a pupil as a mixture of good friends, boredom, bad food and teaching that she loathed.

In 1917 Lethbridge took a job as a nurse at Bradford Hospital where she tended troops who had been injured and maimed in the War. Returning to London she applied to work at the National Munitions Filling Factory in Hayes, Middlesex lying about her age since she should have been barred had it been known she was under eighteen years. She volunteered for the dangerous work of filling shells with Amatol explosive. On 23 October she was working on a recently condemned machine that packed the Amatol into the shells. It exploded killing several workers and seriously injuring Lethbridge whose left leg was blown off. Although temporarily blinded she managed to apply a tourniquet to her thigh, an act that certainly saved her life. In recognition of her war time service she was awarded the O.B.E. at a ceremony in Maidstone in Kent in 1918. However her grateful nation did not approve an invalidity pension for Lethbridge because she had lied about her age in order to work at the munitions factory.