Lady Ursula Isabel d'Abo was an English socialite and aristocrat who served as a maid of honour to the Queen at the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1937. She received international media attention after her photograph from that day, standing alongside the British royal family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, circulated in the news. Reporters focused on her beauty and distinctive widow's peak, and an American wrote to the editor of a newspaper, asking "who is the girl with the widow's peak?" Her title of her book, The Girl with the Widow's Peak: The Memoirs (2014), played with this question.
Lady Ursula at Belvoir Castle in 1937, dressed in Norman Hartnell for the coronation
Belvoir Castle, where Lady Ursula spent much of her childhood.
West Wratting Park, the d'Abo's home.
The Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) was a voluntary unit of civilians providing nursing care for military personnel in the United Kingdom and various other countries in the British Empire. The most important periods of operation for these units were during World War I and World War II. Although VADs were intimately bound up in the war effort, they were not military nurses, as they were not under the control of the military, unlike the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service, and the Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service. The VAD nurses worked in field hospitals, i.e., close to the battlefield, and in longer-term places of recuperation back in Britain.
St John's VAD cloth embroidered insignia (1916)
First World War recruitment poster for Voluntary Aid Detachments
VAD nurse Olive Middleton, back row far right, in 1915 at Gledhow Hall, the estate of her cousin Baroness Airedale
Violet Jessop in her Voluntary Aid Detachment uniform