Military wives girlfriends strip charity calendar injured servicemen

Perfect pin-ups: Military wags roll back the clock to raise cash for injured servicemen
By Daily Mail Reporter

While their husbands and boyfriends are away fighting, a group of army WAGs have found their own inventive way to do their bit.

Fifteen women, mostly the wives and girlfriends of men in the armed forces, are posing as 1950s-style pin-up girls for a charity calendar to raise money for injured troops.

More than 300 women volunteered to be photographed for the calendar, most of which was shot at the Help For Heroes recovery centre for injured service personnel at Tedworth House in Wiltshire.

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Miss April: Rosie Burke does her bit to raise funds to help injured troops

The calendar is an even split of Army, Navy and RAF girls, and aims for a ‘cheeky (yet still tasteful) style, emulating some of the works of the classic Pin-up artists.’

Lucy Jerwood, 31, whose husband Sergeant Philip Jerwood, 34, survived two bomb attacks in Iraq, was so relieved her husband returned home safely that she sold their family car to help pay for the printing bill of the calendar.

‘I’m one of the lucky ones, my man came home in one piece,’ she said. ‘But so many of our men have come back with appalling wounds. We want to do what we can to help and if that means some girls looking a bit saucy to raise some money, that’s fine.’
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Helping heroes: Miss August (Vicki Cartwright) and Miss February (Peta Todd) were picked from over 300 volunteers

Sergeant Jerwood, of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, had his first brush with death in Iraq in July 2007 when by chance he swapped jobs with his good pal Lance Corporal Darren Flowers.

Darren, 25, nicknamed ‘Daz’, from Northern Ireland, was fixing vehicles in Basra Palace, an Army base in the heart of the city, where Phil had originally been ordered to be, when he was killed by shrapnel from a mortar attack.

Two weeks later Philip was on a patrol when his Challenger armoured vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.
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Miss July: Lucy Waddington's outfit is inspired by the Pin-ups of the 1940s

But in a second amazing stroke of luck the device failed to detonate fully and everyone on board survived.

‘Phil doesn’t mind me using our cash from the car to get the calendar out on sale,’ says Lucy Jerwood. ‘ We had hoped a big business might sponsor us, but with the way the economy is at the moment that’s not happened and someone’s got to come up with some money. What better cause could there be?’

Miss February may already be a familiar face to many of the troops out in Afghanistan. She’s glamour model Peta Todd, the girlfriend of world road race cycling champion Mark Cavendish.

Peta, 24, was so moved by the plight of injured veterans after meeting some on a visit to the Headley Court rehabilitation centre near Epsom, Surrey, four years ago she became a dedicated fundraiser and patron of the Help For Heroes charity.