THE Auxiliary Territorial Service was a vital service throughout the 1940s.

It was first formed in 1938, as a women’s voluntary service, but during the war took on Army support services too - the Queen joined its ranks and drove an ambulance.

After 1945, the fit and willing young women who signed up acted as voluntary workers/home guards.

We’ve heard this week from Michelle Pickering, nee Woodacre, whose sister Edna joined the ATS in Blackburn in 1947, when she was just 17.

The barracks were based in the town and their training base, Bovington Camp, was out in the countryside.

Said Michelle: “After six years of fighting, Britain was ravaged and after 1945 the ATS assisted with the many things required after any horrific war.

“Demobbed servicemen would go to them and collect clothing, seek lodging advice or employment information.

“In those days almost every town had a theatre, with resident actors and chorus girls, one day a few of the chorus girls from the Palace Theatre on the Boulevard visited the young ATS recruits to show them the techniques of applying what little make up and lipstick that was available.”

This picture shows three of them explaining to Edna at the back and her pal Dorothy, how to apply lipstick, which was ‘like gold dust’ in the 1940s.

There were only two perfumes available at the time too, who remembers Soir de Paris, that was sold in a tiny blue bottle with a rubber stopper and California Poppy?

Edna was born in 1930 to Mary Ann and Joseph Woodacre and attended Audley Council school; the family of six - there was also her sister Ann and brothers Robert and George - lived in a two up, two down home in Crown Street, Blackburn, with only a cold water tap, gas lighting and a tippler toilet in the yard.

It wasn’t until 1949, when Michelle was born, that the family was given one of the first post-war council houses on the new Higher Croft estate in Roman Road, with a bathroom, three bedrooms and surrounded by fields.

After leaving school at 14, Edna worked for a time at Greenwood’s in Blackburn market hall, which sold books, periodicals and records, but the pay couldn’t compare with the wages in a mill and she went to work as a weaver, marrying in 1953.

A mother of four, it was the years of ‘kissing the shuttle’ and inhaling cotton dust that brought about her premature death at the age of 52 in 1982.