11th January 1957
PONTEFRACT GLOBE TROTTER

"Blossom" Womack is a Pontefract name known over half the world. For nine years "Blossom" - Miss Ada Womack - has travelled around the world as a friend to thousands of British soldiers, bringing to them a taste of home comforts. Miss Womack, whose mother lives in Harewood Avenue, Pontefract, is a member of the Women’s Voluntary Services, a part of whose work is to organise welfare facilities for troops. She has just spent her ninth Christmas overseas in that capacity and at present is stationed with the Royal Sussex Regiment, in Korea. There she has been making Christmas homely, and arranging such activities as an old-fashioned carol singsong on Christmas Eve, and festivities on Christmas Day. The soldiers christened her "Blossom".

For two years before joining the W.V.S. she was with the Field Ambulance Nursing Yeomanry, and during the last war she helped in the ambulance service in Pontefract. The present is her third tour abroad. She spent five years in Germany, some of them with the Allied Control Commission and travelled around Egypt and Iraq for two years, and went to bandit infested Malaya for 14 months. While in Malaya she had to have a bodyguard, and when she stopped at Cyprus, during the E.O.K.A. activities, the bodyguard turned up again. Later she served in India, and saw Calcutta and Rangoon. In Korea, she finds the weather the coldest she has known.

"During the day it’s 30 to 35 degrees", she says in a letter home, "and 12 to 18 at night. I’m told it’s going to be much worse. I have five blankets, a hot-water bottle, and a fleecy lined coat on my bed, and I still wake up in the early morning too cold to move. We are 5,000 miles from the U.K. and less than 500 from Russia - no wonder it’s so cold."

War orphans are a problem in Korea, she adds. "I have been to visit a small orphanage to take them some old magazines; they can’t read English, but they enjoy the pictures. The Korean kids are sweet and tough - they have to be - poor little devils. It’s survival of the fittest in this country." She calculates that there are thousands of orphans in South Korea alone, and although British and American troops have started orphanages, many children exist without outside help.

She hopes to visit Japan, and probably buy some souvenirs. "We have so many of Ada’s souvenirs we could start a museum", Mrs Womack told me at her home. Eastern swords, curved daggers, Buddha’s, carved ornaments, Austrian beer mugs, a cuckoo clock and a Korean Christmas card fill the parlour. "When Ada starts travelling we wonder what she’ll bring home next", smiled Mrs Womack. Even the Buddha was speculative.

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