Miriam Sabbage

Just sixteen years old at the start of World War One, Miriam, a bank clerk, was for the last year of the war working six days a week and giving up her Sundays to work as a St John Ambulance Brigade VAD at Princess Christian’s Auxiliary Hospital in South Norwood.

In 1919 the Daily Mirror launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman war worker and Miriam was the outright winner of the vast sum of £500, a silent movie contract and the launch of a successful career on the stage. The contest changed and shaped her entire life.

While her film, ‘The Bridal Chair’, was being shown in picture houses across the UK Miriam met Alfred Maflin, an Indian born sanitary engineer thirteen years older than her. It was an odd match and the marriage did not last long but Miriam gave birth to her only son. Peter was tragically killed in World War Two when the Halifax aircraft of which he was a crew member was shot down over Brest when attacking a German battleship.

Miriam later married Harold Bastick who had his own remarkable story to tell. Harold was a pioneer cinematographer of the silent movie era. In World War One as a member of the Royal Flying Corps he was captured by the Germans at Cambrai in 1917 and spent a year as a prisoner of war where he told the story of how he ‘posted’ home a fellow prisoner in a mail sack! In World War Two he served as an auxiliary fireman and was awarded the Kings Commendation for Brave Conduct for rescuing four people from a bombed out basement.

The lives of Miriam and her men were shaped by the fateful decision to enter the Daily Mirror contest and it is a story that is told in the little book “Miriam Sabbage – Her Story and Her Men”!

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