(b. 1885)
Army signaler with the British Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in France during World War I. After the war Onions became a pacifist.
In 1917 Maude Onions and a small group of women arrived in Boulogne, France, to replace men as signalers at the front. Formed in 1917, the purpose of WAAC was to send women abroad so that men could work closer to the battlefield.
In 1918, the Boulogne building she worked in was destroyed by a German raid. For six months during the last German offensive she was stationed in a small French village near Calais. On November 11, 1918, she signaled to the Allied armies in the field to cease hostilities.
While in France she played the piano at the Red Cross canteen and provided music for the military services at the English church in Boulogne.
Following the war, Onions recollected many of her conversations and encounters with soldiers in a recording, which she considered a pacifist effort to prevent another world war. Onions described the experiences of men at the front as they related them to her, as well as her own emotional transformation, which lead to her pacifism. Her contact with soldiers and work in the war enabled her, though her book, A Women at War: Being Experiences of an Army Signaller in France 1917—1919, to provide a link between the public and the battlefield.
