COMMENT & ANALYSIS: OBITUARY - Catherine Benn.

HITLER wasn't much good with the opposite sex and he certainly wouldn't have been a match for the squadrons of women who swept from the bridge sessions, whist drives, golf courses, tennis courts and amateur dramatic societies to form a Dad's Army in frocks, or, more correctly, bottle-green uniforms, in the early days of the war.

By June, 1938, it had become obvious to most people that war was inevitable and the Women's Voluntary Service for Air Raid Precaution was formed.

Five prominent ladies were summoned to a meeting by the Marchioness of Reading. Among them was Catherine Benn, who had studied journalism at London University and was a volunteer with the Charities Aid Society.

She was the obvious public relations officer for the organisation which which would soon become the WVS for Civil Defence.

In this capacity, she was immensely successful. When war broke out, there were 336,000 members and by 1941 they had reached a million.

Although, like the Home Guard, they are now seen in the sepia of nostalgia, the WVS was a highly practical organisation, whose tasks included collecting pots, pans, jelly moulds and even artificial limbs for the war effort. Central to their work was helping to rehouse and comfort people who had lost their children in air raids. They made bandages, nursing gowns and pyjamas. They helped in the evacuation of children from danger zones and ran mobile canteens.

It was a time of improvisation. Rose-hips would be turned into a vitamin-enriched syrup for mothers and babies. Even old bones were processed into glue and fertilizers.

Catherine Benn was the daughter of Claude and Beatrice Newbald, from Wallington, Surrey. She married Glanvill Benn, chairman of a magazine publishing company, and they had a son and daughter.

She was appointed MBE for her war service. Golf was her leisure passion and she was both a fine player and administrator of the game in Surrey before the family moved to Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she persuaded parishioners to make more than 200 hassocks for St Peter's Church.

Catherine Benn, voluntary worker'

born July 2, 1910, died January 15, 2006