Hannah Snell
Britain has her own story of a woman who decided to serve for king and country but initially not for selfless reasons. Hannah Snell was born in Worchester, England in April 1723. A few years after moving to London in 1740, she married a man named James Summes. Together they had a child, a daughter, who unfortunately passed away a year later. Summes was not exactly a responsible father and disappeared sometime after Snell became pregnant. Snell then went in search of her one-time husband. It was then she learned that he may have joined the British Army.
Snell did not let this stop her quest and she enlisted the help of her brother-in-law, James Gray, to provide her with a set of men’s clothing and his name to enter into military service. According to her own personal account, she joined the 6th Regiment of Foot in Scotland. It was here that she was supposedly given 500 lashes for ‘neglect of duty’ in an incident where she supposedly prevented the rape of a local girl by another soldier. It was then that she left the army.
When Snell’s daughter passed away, she again felt the calling to serve and this time joined the Royal Marines. She was assigned to the warship Swallow that was assigned to a mission to capture the French colony of Pondicherry in India. After this action, she fought in another battle at Devicotta in June 1749. Snell was wounded eleven times during her service in India but her twelfth wound almost gave away her disguise. Having been shot in the groin she could not go to the regimental surgeon and supposedly either operated on herself or convinced a local woman to help with the makeshift surgery. Either way, her wounds were such that she could no longer actively serve.
In 1750, she returned to Britain and there she revealed her true identity to members of her unit. They may have been surprised at this announcement but this did not prevent them from convincing Snell to petition the head of the British army, the Duke of Cumberland, to grant her a military pension. What was a surprise was that her request was granted and she was discharged from the service with her pension – something completely of unheard of at the time.
Her tale spread quickly and she was convinced to sell her story to a London publisher with the title, “The Female Soldier.” From this point, she moved to the town of Wapping and briefly opened a pub calling it The Female Warrior. She married twice more in the following years and raised a pair of sons. In 1791, she began to show signs of what was now believed to be dementia and was admitted into an asylum where she died six months later.
