In the tenth of our series on meetings with figures from labour history, Liz Wood encounters the Shropshire-born nurse and anti-Franco activist Gwendolyn de Puertas.

I first encountered the distinctively named Gertrude Gwendolyn Adams de Puertas about twelve years ago, when digitising Trades Union Congress archives on the Spanish Civil War. Gwendolyn Adams, a Shropshire plumber’s daughter and teenage milliner’s apprentice, was born in 1895. War changed the trajectory of her life for the first time in 1914-1918, when she volunteered as a VAD nurse.

Unable to settle back into Shropshire life after the First World War, Adams developed a career as an international biker ‘girl persuader’ – one of several women employed by the motorcycle industry during the 1920s to make long and arduous journeys across Britain and Europe to publicise the marques. In 1926 she travelled solo from Britain, across the Alps, to Venice, and in 1928 undertook a major journey to Spain – travelling from London to Gibraltar.

In 1929 Gwendolyn Adams settled in Barcelona and established a school, marrying José Puertas in 1931. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Gwendolyn Adams de Puertas gave up teaching and became a key administrator of the Republican aid effort, working for the Red Cross and acting as liaison officer between the Asistencia Social (the Republican government department of welfare) and the international labour movement’s International Solidarity Fund, distributing tens of thousands of pounds worth of aid from her base in Catalonia.

As the war ended, Adams de Puertas and her Spanish husband fled to the refugee camps in southern France, where she continued to try to provide aid for the exiles and, as a new war began in 1939, helped to evacuate women and children from Paris to the south of France. Returning to Franco’s Spain in October 1939, she was caught and imprisoned, eventually being released after nine months following unofficial lobbying from the British government. As with the first two wars, her third was spent in welfare work, this time in Hammersmith – Gwendolyn Adams de Puertas set up a Ministry of Health War Hostel and Rest Centre and trained nurses as a Detachment Commandant in the British Red Cross. After the war she returned to Perpignan to rejoin her husband, where she lived for the remainder of her life.

Gwendolyn Adams de Puertas lived a rich, supremely eventful, documented life, blazing her own path through the first half of the 20th century. And yet she is now barely remembered. Her story is one to be shared and I’d love to find out more.

Liz Wood is Project Archivist at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick

You can read all the Class Encounters in this series here.