SAVING lives through lifeboat training, managing the slipway at HMS Attack or inadvertently meeting King George VI – it was all in a day’s work for former Wren Jean Rawson.

Mrs Rawson will be marking the 70th anniversary of D-Day at the Portland Heights, having lunch with another former Wren Val Watson and reminiscing about their time in service.

Mrs Rawson nee Moir, now 90, joined the Wren’s (Women’s Royal Naval Service) as soon as she could at 17-and-a-half in 1942 and was stationed at HMS Attack on Portland before and after D-Day.

She remembers that Chesil Beach was ‘nose to tail’ in landing craft before the day, then walking down to work on the morning of June 6 and everyone suddenly being gone.

Born in Hemel Hempsted and brought up in Surrey, Mrs Rawson moved to Weymouth in 2008.

There are two highlights that stood out during her years in service, the first being thanked for her work training Coxswains and First Lieutenants on motor gun boats how to use the new emergency rubber dinghies.

After a friendly fire incident in the Channel, involving three British craft mistakenly being fired upon by American forces, all lives were saved because the crews knew how to operate the emergency boats.

The first officer of the flotilla came to say thank you to Mrs Rawson, when she was stationed at HMS Attack. She had learnt about the emergency dinghies at HMS Raven in Southampton.

She said: “That was the best part of the war for me.”

In 1943 she was posted to HMS Attack on Portland as a Leading Wren working in qualified maintenance and in charge of the slip party.

The teams used to lift the motor gun boats out of the water to allow the carpenters to do repairs, before they would paint them with anti-fouling and camouflage them.

The Wren’s were taught the protocol that you should only salute while in uniform and wearing a hat.

Mrs Rawson recalls one morning on Portland, shortly before D-Day, walking across the dockyard to pick up some equipment on her own when a large car drove across the dockyard. She said: “On my side of the car in the front was Churchill, in the back was Eisenhower and behind Churchill on my side was King George VI and I didn’t know what to do – I had no hat on and I wasn’t in uniform.

“My jaw must have dropped down to my belly button.

“I couldn’t let my King go by without a salute.”

So Mrs Rawson threw her best salute.

She said: “Eisenhower leaned forward and roared with laughter at me. Churchill grinned.

“They thought it was hilariously funny - as did the King”

D-Day was so top secret that Mrs Rawson said they were not informed when it would be. The night of June 5 to June 6 on D-Day there were so many aircraft going overhead, Mrs Rawson said she got everyone from their accommodation into the air raid shelter as they thought they would be bombed.

Then the next morning the Wren’s turned up to work, but everyone had gone.

It was quite eerie, Mrs Rawson said, after all the activity and noise in the build up to D-Day.

It was the worst part of the war, she said: “The worst bit was coming down on D-Day and finding all the people we had had been working with for months had gone.”

She added: “We had no idea where anyone was. We knew they were gone, the whole place was cleared.”

Mrs Rawson went on to be posted to HMS Vernon in Portsmouth and worked wiring experimental mines.

On VE Day night they were told they could not go out, so she and the others in her accommodation climbed down the fire escape from their flats and snuck out to Guildhall Square to join in the celebrations.

They managed to get back without their superiors being any the wiser.

“It was fantastic,” she said.

Dorset Echo:

Mrs Rawson was presented with two medals for her time in service the 1939-45 Star and the Defence Medal.

She is very humble about the part she played in D-Day and the Second World War, she said: “I was only a minute part.”