Research built around the wartime diaries of June Spencer has been added to the London Ambulance Service Historic Collection, bringing a volunteer driver’s account of ambulance work during the Blitz into the service’s archive.
The research was brought together by history writer Naomi Clifford in Under Fire: The Blitz Diaries of a Volunteer Ambulance Driver. The collection preserves historic vehicles, photographs, documents, uniforms, equipment and other memorabilia relating to more than a century of emergency care in the capital.
Spencer was 19 when she joined the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service in the summer of 1940, as Britain’s civil-defence arrangements were being mobilised during the Second World War. She was first stationed at Ambulance Station 22 in Chelsea and later served at Station 179 in Battersea.
Her diary describes the practical routines behind the work as well as the dangers. She learned routes to hospitals, blackout driving and basic mechanics. Before shifts, she checked her kit, uniform and ambulance, and even pumped up the vehicle’s tyres. The account captures a job that involved preparation and waiting as well as urgent calls.
In one diary entry, Spencer recalled reaching an injured man trapped beneath rubble after a bombing raid. She wrote of giving him morphine, getting him into the ambulance and then finding that the engine would not start. Firefighters pushed the vehicle over glass and rubble so the journey could continue. The episode conveys how ordinary mechanical problems could become part of an already hazardous response.
Conditions at the Chelsea station were exposed: it had a glass roof, while crews drove through streets blacked out to limit visibility during air raids. Spencer’s writing also records the less dramatic parts of service life. After one night when Chelsea was heavily bombed, she peeled potatoes at the station. Some shifts passed without a call-out. In Battersea, her duties could include scrubbing ambulances, cleaning toilets, working in the canteen and waiting for the next job.
That mixture of danger and routine gives the diary its particular historical value. It describes emergency work not only at its most intense, but also the repetitive preparation, maintenance and domestic tasks that kept a station functioning. Spencer’s account places women’s labour within the wider story of wartime ambulance provision. More than 5,000 people volunteered for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service during the war, and women made up more than half of them.
The diaries also offer glimpses of a life beyond duty, including evenings with friends and meals at well-known London venues. Those details sit alongside descriptions of air raids and casualty care, showing how the rhythms of the city continued unevenly around the demands of emergency service. The contrast should not obscure the risks faced by crews; rather, it helps place their work within daily life on the home front.
Spencer’s career also links a personal record to the continuing history of London’s ambulance service. The present-day collection brings together objects and documents spanning more than a century, allowing the work of earlier generations to be understood through both equipment and individual accounts. Diary research can show how a vehicle was checked, how a station was staffed and how a volunteer experienced long periods of waiting punctuated by urgent calls.
The new addition is a record of one volunteer’s experience, not a complete account of every crew or every wartime response. Its value lies in the specific details preserved in Spencer’s writing and in the opportunity to read them alongside the service’s broader historical material. The account makes visible the practical skill, teamwork and everyday labour that supported ambulance work in a city under attack.
By bringing the diary research into its Historic Collection, the London Ambulance Service has added a personal perspective to records of its past. Spencer’s story moves between blackout training, bomb-damaged streets, station chores and moments of ordinary social life, offering a grounded view of the people who kept emergency care operating through the Blitz.
