TRAINING CORPS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 123, 27 May 1942, Page 4

TRAINING CORPS

YOUNG GIRLS PREPARED At the end of the last war Miss J. Curlett was chief of tlie Women's Royal Air Force with the Army of. Occupation on the Rhine, and " the last of the W.R.A.F.'s to be demobilised. Subsequently she became an educational organiser, and now she is right in the front line again as founder and organiser of the Girls' Training Corps, a nation-wide organisation formed to prepare girls of 14 to 19 for the women's services, civil defence and other war work. The G.T.C. began several months apo. when isolated branches were formed in industrial districts, but. it only became a national organisation with the blessing of the Hoard of Education in February. The G.T.C. is the opposite number of the various boys' training corps which have done so much to keep youths fit and interested during two and a half years of war. Girls of 1(1 and 17 will register, and they will be urged to join the G.T.C. A blue beret and a white tunic is the "uniform" of the corps, but Miss Curlett wants no militarisation. "Let us keep our femininity," she said. "The girls will have drill merely to give them a certain corporate quality and to prepare them physically for the Services, but they will not !>e regimented. We want the type of physical culture that will make graceful women of them—nut muscle-bound hobbledehoys."