Mary Soames

Mary Soames, née Churchill, was a Junior Commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service who served in mixed anti-aircraft batteries. The youngest daughter of Winston and Clementine Churchill, she served under the name Mary Churchill and took the name Soames on her marriage in 1947. Born on 15 September 1922. She joined the ATS in September 1941 and turned down a staff appointment in favour of serving with a gun battery. She served in mixed anti-aircraft batteries — units crewed jointly by men and women. The women worked the fire-control instruments: rangefinders, height-finders and predictors. Regulations of the day did not allow them to fire the guns, although it was their instruments that produced the data for every round. She began with a battery in Hyde Park. During the V-1 flying-bomb attacks of summer 1944 her battery served in London and on the coast, and afterwards moved to Belgium and Germany, where her service ended. She accompanied her father to Allied conferences on several occasions. She was appointed MBE (Military Division) in 1945 and married Christopher Soames in 1947. She later became known as a writer and biographer: her life of her mother, Clementine Churchill (1979), won the Wolfson History Prize. She was made DBE in 1980 and a Lady Companion of the Garter in 2005. She died on 31 May 2014, aged 91, the last of Churchill's five children.