Yesterday's Witness (1969)

During the First World War the Allies only allowed two women to live and work in the trenches of the Western Front. For three years Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker nursed wounded Belgian soldiers in a front line first aid post in the ruined town of Pervyse. MAIRI CHISHOLM, who was no more than 18 when war broke out, now recalls her time at Pervyse - the mud and the rain, the unceasing shellfire, and hair-raising ambulance journeys ferrying the wounded behind the lines. It was a far cry from what was generally expected of women, even in war time, and a significant victory in their long struggle for equal rights with men.

April 25, 1977, midnight

' Weeds, like U Boats, must be exterminated' says one of the more gentle captions in a remarkable recruiting film made in 1917 to try to persuade the women of Britain to join the Women's Land Army. In this programme, scenes from that propaganda film give us the official version of what life was like down on the farm during the Great War. But six of the original Land Girls themselves tell us what it was really like to leave home or escape from the slavery of domestic service - and then be confronted by the glamour of the pigsty and the milking shed

May 2, 1977, midnight

The Arsenal Girls were the women who worked at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich making shells and ammunition for the men in the trenches. The elite were the girls in the 'Danger Buildings', a group of isolated wooden huts out on the Thames marshes. There they handled the really dangerous explosives: cordite, and the TNT that turned faces and hands yellow in a matter of days. But there were worse dangers - the smallest stray spark might send the whole lot sky high. This is the story of six of those women who risked their lives daily to be Arsenal Girls.

May 9, 1977, midnight

Members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments - VADs-elegant, volunteer, amateur nurses who knew little more than how to roll bandages, were suddenly faced with the full reality of war as the first ambulance trains arrived from the front. 'There we were, plunged into the hospital and we were worked off our feet. Life seemed to be divided between work and sleep ... '. It wasn't all work and no play, though play was strictly limited. 'There was an edict that no VAD must go out with anybody male -unless there was a chaperone. You mustn't go to a dance, you mustn't do this, you mustn't do that ...' In this programme three VADs tell their story of that war and how ' nothing was ever to be the same again '.

May 16, 1977, midnight

1916: Bob Murphy, a railway goods porter, was called up. His young sister Ann took over his job. She is one of several Liverpool women who describe, 60 years later, the trials and tribulations of moving in to work on the railways, in munitions factories, in offices, on the trams, in engineering works: a world previously reserved for men. They are typical of tens of thousands of women and girls throughout the country: they needed the money, the breadwinners were away and the jobs just had to be done. They weren't consciously working for women's rights - but struck a resounding blow just the same.

May 23, 1977, midnight

Before the First World War women in uniform were good for a laugh and not much else. But girls did serve in the Forces and by the time they were demobbed in 1919, 100,000 of them had proved the scoffers wrong. First came the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, formed in 1916, then the WRNS and later the WRAF. For some girls, life in those brand-new Services offered a refreshing change from what had been considered suitable war work for women until then; for others it was a golden opportunity to escape the eagle eye of Victorian parents.

June 6, 1977, midnight