Miss Gladys Evelyn Warren

Gladys described herself as the Editress of 'The Whitwar', having created the magazine in 1903 when she was just 12 years old.

She was passionate and wholey committed to supporting the poor and sick on the Little Folks ward of the North Eastern Hospital for Children, that being the purpose of her magazine. Quite how she came up with the idea of raising funds and securing material niceties for the children I will never know; her idea to create blanket knitting and judging the 'best toy' competitions so that her readers would send in their entries (resulting in donations to the hospital) was quite something!

A prolific writer, craft-maker and competition entrant

As well as having her own publication, she was a great contributor to other benevolent endeavours working with the same aim of helping sick and poor children. She was an early subscriber (number 67) and frequent entrant to competitions run in The Children's Salon section of The Gentlewoman magazine (which will be covered in more detail elsewhere) between at least 1906 and 1911. She was awarded medals for piano and literature by H.R.H. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, in 1912 and also around that time is known to have had articles published in some of the most widely circulated magazines of the time, including:

• The Windsor
• The Lady
• The Gentlewoman

We don't know how many issues of the Whitwar were produced or exactly how long it lasted; the last mention we found of it in newspaper archives was from 1908 where it was noted that it was now a bi-annual production, instead of quartley as it had started five years before. By this time Gladys would have been around 17 years old.

Early life

Her birth was registered in Barton Regis, Gloucestershire, England in the last quarter of 1891, the daughter of Algernon Warren and Rowena Minlan Coates. She was baptised on 25 April 1892 at St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. The family, at that time, had been living at 6 Windsor Terrace, Clifton, and her father was employed as a merchant.

Gladys’ literary endeavours were undoubtedly influenced by her family. They had come from South Wales, moving through Bristol to London over the course of a couple of generations.

In his retirement from business, her father Algernon Warren, had authored ‘Commercial knowledge, a manual of business methods and transactions (1901) which was followed by Commercial travelling, its features, past and present (1904). It was whilst he was writing his second book that Gladys embarked on the ‘Whitwar’ project.

Her uncle, Sir Herbert Warren KCVO, held the post of President of Magdalen College, Oxford from 1885 to 1928. Sir Herbert was a regular contributor and reviewer of books for ‘The Spectator’ – a weekly magazine that began in 1828 and still in publication today. Algernon was also said to be an ‘old friend and supporter of that paper and an occasional contributor’.