 Dorothy Lawrence's autobiography cover Now known as Private Denis Smith of the 1st Battalion Lancaster Regiment, Dorothy was accepted by Royal Engineers on the front at Albert. She worked shoulder to shoulder with troops there for 10 days, just 400 yards from the German front. It is thought she played her part by helping to dig tunnels during the opening stages of the Battle of Loos. Dorothy had been born out of wedlock in 1896 and brought up by her mother in London until she was orphaned in 1909. Educated at a private school in Salisbury, Wilts where she lived with her guardians, she aspired to be a journalist. On the front, she wrote in her diary: 'If my highly respectable guardian, living in that dear old Cathedral City coul){kind=link}
Armed with just a passport and a pencil in 1915, 19-year-old Dorothy Lawrence had taken a boat to France and tried to cycle to the Somme, hoping to expose the terrible conditions British soldiers were enduring
Her face daubed with shoe polish and her uniform padded to give her a manly silhouette, Dorothy Lawrence clambered into a trench on the Western Front.
This was the determined journalist’s second attempt to get a front-row view of the First World War.
Armed with just a passport and a pencil in 1915, the 19-year-old had taken a boat to France and tried to cycle to the Somme, hoping to expose the terrible conditions British soldiers were enduring.
She was stopped just two miles away and whisked off to Paris, where she hatched her plan to disguise herself.