The Women Nobody Wrote Down

Denise Forward has spent years uncovering the hidden histories of Grimsby's women. Their names were rarely recorded, their work was rarely celebrated, and their stories were rarely passed on. She believes it is time that changed, and she has started a group to do something about it.

Where it all began

Denise Forward grew up surrounded by strong women. As a child, she spent holidays at her nan's, being taken all over to visit great aunts, sisters, cousins, and aunties. The visits followed their own quiet rhythm. The women would sit around the table and clean the brass ornaments together, taking turns, going from house to house each week. Loose tea was made in the teapot, a cosy placed on top, and they would sit and talk.

What they talked about were the stories. The same ones, sometimes, told again and again. The day Aunt Kate helped Denise's nan salvage what she could from her house in Church Place after it had been bombed. The afternoon of their father's funeral, when they all ended up crying and laughing at the same time. Serious things and funny things, often in the same breath.

Denise was young, but she was listening. When she got too close, she was told what children were always told: go outside, mind your own business, stop ear-wigging. Children should be seen and not heard. So she went outside. But she had already heard enough to understand that something important was being held in that room.

"All these strong women made a big impression on me. Most had lost children and husbands, lived through a war or two. They had little of their own but had pride and cherished what they had."

Those women, and the impression they left, are what eventually led Denise to start researching her own family history. That was around forty years ago. Over time she found things she was proud of, and things that shocked and hurt her. But she kept going, because the stories were there to be found, and she believed they mattered.

That lifelong habit of listening, remembering, and asking questions is what now sits at the heart of the Grimsby Women's History Group. Denise set up the group because she became convinced that the women of this town had been written out of their own history, and that somebody needed to start writing them back in.

The stories that were never told

Denise is clear about why she started the group. It is not because she thinks men's stories do not matter. It is because she noticed, over years of researching her own family history and the history of this town, that the women were almost always missing.

The men who went to war were documented. The men who went to sea were remembered. The men who made political history had plaques and streets named after them. But the women who held everything together while all of that was happening? They were largely invisible.

"The women we don't know about were actual heroes. I really do think that. Because they had such terrible lives."

Denise talks about the reality of everyday life for women in this town a century ago with the kind of detail that comes from years of research and a genuine love of local history. An average woman in the 1950s, she points out, spent around fifteen hours a day on unpaid labour. Not because she chose to be idle in the rest of her time, but because the work itself was so much harder. There were no washing machines, no convenience food, no affordable medical care. You boiled the water, you scrubbed the clothes, you peeled the potatoes, you made do. And when your children fell ill, you watched and hoped, because there was often nothing else you could do.

She talks about childbirth with quiet gravity. Look at the 1911 census, she says. Look at how many children were born alive and how many died. One of her own ancestors had eleven children and five survived. The losses were staggering, and largely unspoken.

A night that most people only half know

One of the stories Denise tells is one that many people in Grimsby will have heard of, at least in part. During the First World War, a Zeppelin was blown off course by a storm and dropped a bomb on a Baptist chapel in the town. It was a catastrophic night. Soldiers were among the dead. The wounded and the bodies were taken to a nearby church. The shops were closed in mourning. There was a large public funeral. That much is documented, and many people know it.

What most people do not know is what happened in the hours immediately after the explosion.

The women and girls of the Red Cross, along with the wife of a local pharmacist, went out on their bikes and knocked on doors. They gathered and went to the church, none of them refusing a single thing that was asked of them. What they faced was devastating. The injuries were severe and the scenes were harrowing. Not one of them walked away.

"Nobody ever mentions them. There is a plaque, and I don't even know the names of any of them. I think that should be remembered. I think there should be a plaque to them."

Denise tells this story not to shock, but to make a point. These women showed extraordinary courage and compassion on one of the worst nights this town had ever seen. They got nothing for it, not pay, not recognition, not a place in the history books. Their names, for the most part, are still not known.

Lives lived without a safety net

Denise is careful and thoughtful when she talks about the harder aspects of women's lives in the past. She is not interested in sensationalism. She is interested in truth, and in making sure that truth is not forgotten.

She talks about the fact that women experiencing violence at home had almost nowhere to turn. There were no support services, no legal protections that were routinely enforced, and a widespread expectation that what happened inside a household was a private matter. She tells a story about two elderly women on a street who stepped in to help a neighbour being attacked, when none of the men around them did. It says something about character, she says, and it says something about the impossible position so many women were placed in.

She also talks about women who were punished simply for speaking their minds. In Grimsby's own past, there are documented cases of women being subjected to public humiliation and punishment for behaviour that in men would have gone completely unremarked. Their names are there in the records if you know where to look, and Denise has been looking.

Legally, for a significant part of Britain's history, a woman could be sold by her husband. Grimsby is no exception to that story. It is a history that is uncomfortable to sit with, and Denise thinks that discomfort is exactly why it needs to be talked about. Not to dwell in it, but to understand it.

Her own family's story

Part of what drives Denise is personal. She grew up in a family full of strong women, and the more she has researched her own family history, the more she has realised how little she knew about the women in it compared to the men.

Her family lived on Hope Street, in the days when whole extended families would live on the same street or close to it. There was a real community there, she says, and a real sense that people looked out for each other.

She describes her great grandmother's daily routine with a kind of wonder. Every time a coal delivery came, the coal was brought in carefully, the shed was swept, the path was swilled down and brushed, and any remaining pieces were scrubbed. This was not unusual. This was simply what women did.

"She remembers her granny's house was clean all the time. And the food. That's what she remembers."

Her mother has a memory of being called inside as a child because a radio programme was on. All the children came in and sat around the table and listened, and they were scared because it was adventurous. That small detail, she says, speaks to something that has been lost, a kind of shared family life lived in close quarters, where even the arrival of coal was an event.

The detective work she loves

Denise is a natural researcher. She will spend hours going through census records, newspaper archives, family documents, and local history collections to find the details that bring a story to life. She recently helped a friend trace a great grandmother who had a motorbike accident in Hull in around 1918, a woman who had the money and the nerve to own a motorbike and sidecar at a time when very few women did. Nobody in the family had ever known that story. Denise found it in a newspaper archive.

She talks about the 1911 census as one of the most powerful documents she has worked with, because it records, alongside children born alive, the number of children who did not survive. Those numbers, family by family, row by row, tell a story of grief and endurance that most history books do not begin to capture.

She has a photograph of her mother as a baby, taken just before the First World War, with her great grandmother beside her. The great grandmother's face is serious, her expression somewhere far away. Denise looks at that photograph and thinks: what was she thinking? What had she already been through? What did she think was coming?

That is the question that drives the group. Not just names and dates, but the texture of lives lived.

The stories she wants to tell

One of the things Denise is most passionate about is the way that Grimsby's own wartime history has been only partially told. Most people know the broad shape of it. What they do not know is how much of that story involved women, and how much of it has never been properly recorded.

Take May Erickson. German-born, and believed to have been married to a Dutchman, she was living in Grimsby when she was recruited by German intelligence during the Second World War. She was used as a post box, a go-between, passing information on behalf of those who had recruited her. What they did not know was that she had told the man she worked for, and had gone to British intelligence as well. She became a double agent, feeding the Nazis false information while working for the other side. She is mentioned in a book on the subject, believed to be called All the Little Foxes, and described in contemporary records as a luxurious curly-haired brunette. It is a remarkable story. Most people in Grimsby have never heard her name.

There was a significant amount of intelligence activity centred on Grimsby and the surrounding area during the war, and Denise believes there are more stories like May's still waiting to be found.

"This town is full of extraordinary stories that have simply not been told yet."

Another story that Denise wants to see properly remembered is the sinking of the Lancastria. In June 1940, as the fall of France was unfolding, the Lancastria was loaded with refugees and military personnel, including patients from what had been functioning as a hospital ship. The Luftwaffe attacked and sank her. The loss of life was catastrophic, far exceeding that of the Titanic, and the British government suppressed news of the disaster at the time, believing it would be devastating to public morale.

What happened next is part of Grimsby's story. A local trawler, the Cambridge City, sailed into the chaos and began pulling survivors from the water. The men she rescued were in a terrible state, many of them covered in oil, badly burned, some of them with nothing left. Around 800 men were brought aboard a single Grimsby trawler. The ship was so full you could barely move on deck.

First-hand accounts describe children in the water being fired at by machine gun. The crew of the Cambridge City went back again and again. They did not stop. The survivors, despite everything they had been through, are recorded as singing Roll Out the Barrel to keep their spirits up.

It is a story of extraordinary courage on all sides, and it is barely known. The suppression of the news at the time meant it never entered the public consciousness in the way it should have. Denise believes it deserves to.

These are the kinds of stories she is building towards. Some involve women directly. Some involve the community this town has always been. All of them speak to a place that has been through more than it is given credit for.

What the group is doing

The Grimsby Women's History Group is still in its early stages. It has only held its third meeting. But it is already gathering pace, and Denise's ambitions for it are clear.

She wants to document the stories before they disappear. She wants to interview women about their mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, aunties, and neighbours, the women whose contributions were real but whose names are not on any plaque. She wants to record those conversations and make them available to people in a lasting format, whether that is online, on video, or in some kind of archive that young people can actually access.

She is also thinking about education. She tells a story about explaining to her grandson how people used to do the washing, the boiling, the scrubbing, the mangling, the rinsing, and the look on his face when he realised that what now takes twenty minutes used to take most of a day. She wants young people to have that moment of recognition. She wants them to understand what was normal, not so long ago.

A living museum for the women of this town

Denise's bigger dream is a living women's museum in Grimsby. A space where the stories are there, documented and accessible, where people can come and understand what ordinary life looked like for women in this town across the generations. Not a museum about famous women, though there are those too, but about ordinary women. The kind who spent their evenings washing by lamplight, who raised children through illness without medicine, who stepped forward in emergencies without being asked, and who were forgotten almost before the moment had passed.

"I would like to educate young people and girls about the lives of our ancestors. They've got absolutely no idea. And they should know."

She is under no illusion that this is a small thing to do. But she is already doing it, one conversation at a time, one story at a time, one group meeting at a time.

A town full of stories that deserve to be told

Denise is not someone who thinks Grimsby has nothing to offer. Quite the opposite. She thinks this town is full of extraordinary stories that have simply not been told yet. Her research is part of that. The group she has built is part of that. The conversations she is encouraging are part of that.

She has a phrase she comes back to: the women we don't know about were actual heroes. It is worth sitting with that. These were women who got through things that most of us cannot imagine, without complaint, without recognition, and almost without trace. Denise Forward is determined to change that.

But she is clear that this cannot be one person's project. In her own words: "I would like a group of women to be involved in this, because it's not me. It is for the women of this town, and I think we need a group. Many hands."

If you would like to be part of the Grimsby Women's History Group, whether you have a story to share, a photograph to bring in, research skills to offer, or simply a feeling that this matters and you want to be involved, Denise would love to hear from you. This is a project for the women of this town, built by the women of this town. Get in touch by emailing jose@our-future.io or visit pages.our-future.io/communitynews for more stories from across North East Lincolnshire.