Jambusters (16 page)

Raising money is a running theme in war diaries and institute record books. Although the WI was not supposed to raise funds directly for war work, this was often ignored at an institute level. Some institutes regarded requests as a challenge and succeeded, over the years, in raising impressive sums of money, mainly through the purchase of savings stamps but often for a specific cause, such as the Spitfire Fund or Wings for Victory week. Stotfold in Bedfordshire had topped the WI ‘Savings Ladder’ in 1943 with a sum of £8,190 (£283,000 today) raised in just two years and of that total £3,446 (£119,000) was raised for Warship Week in 1942. As the village had a population of less than 5,000 this was remarkable.

Over the course of her life Mrs Sims served as a trustee for the Almshouses, was a parish councillor, a school manager, sat on the Parochial Church Council, ran the Brownies and Girl Guides, where she was respectively Brown Owl and Captain, she organised Christian Aid week for twelve years and took part in Meals on Wheels. This in addition to bringing up a family, managing a house on a wartime budget and with rations as well as helping to keep village spirits up during the six years of war.

She was not the only busy lady. Mrs Elsie Young, who lived until she was ninety-eight, was a stalwart of Bradfield village. She joined the WI the same year as Mrs Sims and helped out with the National Savings Scheme. When her husband was called up she took over his work at Bradfield College, which meant that she cleaned two classrooms before breakfast, washed up for 240 after breakfast, the same after lunch, collected the post from the various letter boxes and put the post on the bus for Reading. Then
her daughter, Pam, came home from school and after their meal they returned to the college to wash up after supper. At this meal ten boys helped, so Mrs Young enjoyed the evening wash-up.

After the fall of France at the end of June the fear of a Nazi invasion grew. Mrs Ward wrote the minutes for their June committee meeting. There had been an announcement that the children’s party would be held at Horseleas, Mrs Howlett’s house, on 11 July. This suddenly seemed optimistic: ‘I think when this announcement was made each of us wondered in our hearts whether by that date any children’s party would be possible or whether our lovely countryside would be suffering as that of France is suffering today.’ The reaction of parents was once again to evacuate their children, first from the vulnerable coastal towns and then overseas. Tens of thousands of children were sent on private and government schemes to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. These children faced a new and unseen horror as they made their journeys by ship: German submarines lying in wait that caused immense losses amongst merchant shipping bringing food and supplies to Britain.

Although food from the continent to the UK was disrupted during the autumn of 1939, it was not until the fall of Holland and Belgium and the capitulation of France that food exports from the continent ceased completely. Apart from bacon, eggs and butter, the single most sorely missed item in the kitchens of Britain was the common onion. Until 1940 the majority of Britain’s supply of onions had been shipped from the warm fields of France and Spain, where crops produced large yields. The end of onion imports led to a great surge in the desire to grow onions. It was successful only in certain counties where the growing conditions were favourable and there was, for the rest of the war, a shortage of onions. This had a big impact on the taste of food and Elsie Bainbridge remembered how dull their food was
when her mother was unable to purchase or grow onions. So valuable did they become that they were offered as prizes at WI raffles and there is a record of one being given to Lady Albemarle as a present. Mass Observation diarist Maggie Joy Blunt wrote on 18 March 1941: ‘Lady A was given an onion yesterday for her birthday. Her cook flavoured bread sauce with it and then used it for something else.’
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The Ministry of Food tried to encourage the commercial cultivation of onions and by 1941 the first crop was eagerly awaited. Unfortunately, the bad weather in August meant that the growth was poor and, worst of all, the onions were unfit for storage so that much of the crop rotted and people were bitterly disappointed. Marginally more successful was 1942 but there were never sufficient onions grown commercially and it was down to the allotment holders and private gardeners to grow their own where they could.

No sooner had the WI heard of the great onion blockade, or that is how they came to see it, than they organised onion seeds and sets to be distributed via the National Federation. Some areas, such as Dorset and Oxfordshire, are better for growing onions than others; Oxfordshire WIs harvested 13 tons in 1942. As researcher Stephen Rockcliffe explained: ‘The onions we grow today are largely the result of hybridisation, and known as short-day onions. This refers to the amount of daylight they require to grow. As any gardener will tell you, onions grow really slowly. The varieties available pre-war would not grow successfully in the UK – too cold, too wet, too dark in the early months of the year.’ And that was indeed the problem. Countless references in diaries and letters attest to the frustrations felt by the gardener and allotment holder over growing onions. It was not only the weather that affected their development, but pests and diseases such as onion blight. Mrs Milburn complained in her
diary, in July 1941: ‘We have worked so hard in the garden and a lot of it is in vain, it seems. I am particularly vexed with the onions, which have onion fly badly, and my own seedlings are dying off one by one.’
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The following year she gave up completely, miserable that her beautiful bed of onions had been attacked by the onion fly grub. ‘It was no use to leave them to be eaten off one by one, Hitler fashion, and I shall not grow them again. They were a back-aching job to plant out, and I have spent many hours on their culture – all for nothing.’
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While onions thwarted many gardeners, other vegetables were easier to grow and were used successfully to supplement the monotonous wartime diet. The Ministry of Food encouraged cultivation of potatoes, carrots and tomatoes and the National Federation distributed tomato seeds and bags of seed potatoes in great numbers each year, as well as thousands of packets of Suttons’ seeds that they obtained at special rates ahead of the planting season. Record books and county agricultural subcommittee notes list all the different varieties of seed that were available through the National Federation. In 1940 Suttons provided 10,000 collections of vegetable seeds, the price to members being 2s 6d (£5.74 today), which contained peas, broad beans, beetroot, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, leeks, lettuce, spinach
or
parsnip (members had to choose one or the other), onions and turnips. The quantities were sufficient to sow in a large vegetable garden or allotment, giving about eight rows of 25 feet and 200 plants of broccoli, Brussels, spinach, cabbage, etc. Were everything to grow from the seeds, this would have been enough to feed a family and supply a surplus, which could be sold at a local WI market. The government set high targets for WIs. In February 1940 East and West Hendred’s minutes secretary wrote: ‘The meeting was informed that the Government wishes each Institute to contribute by sale 2 cwt onions and 3 cwt
tomatoes above what members need for themselves.’ They decided to join with Harwell and work as a fruit-preserving centre so that they could get a sugar allowance. ‘Major Borwick has kindly offered to take market produce to the WI stall at Didcot therefore members should sow a surplus of vegetables.’

Edith Jones was a regular visitor to the Saturday market in Shrewsbury. She sold surplus produce that was not needed by the household or her neighbours and at times made a small profit. She grew peas, beans, broad beans and soft fruit in the summer. She planted cabbages, winter beans and onions and had an orchard outside the kitchen from which she harvested apples and pears. ‘It is late for planting cabbage but rabbits have been troublesome. Autumn sowing of beans is a new venture,’ she wrote in November. What they did not eat fresh or sell at the market she bottled, jammed, canned or pickled. Everything that she grew in the kitchen garden and orchard was used and from her diary it is clear that she was enormously industrious. Chris Downes remembered her larder with its stacked shelves: ‘there were salted kidney beans in jars, jams, cooked and uncooked meat, bottles of plums, damsons and pears. That was the only way that fruit and vegetables could be preserved and used throughout the rest of the year.’ With no electricity at the farm until the late 1950s there was no cold storage. Edith also kept hens. She was very interested in her poultry and made frequent mention of them in her diaries. In November 1939 she was delighted with a new trapdoor that Mr Tomkins had made in the fowl house ‘easier cleaning. 1/1.’, she wrote, presumably referring to the cost of the door.

As we have seen, the government made the decision to issue the same rations for every adult, deeming it iniquitous to differentiate between types of work carried out by members of the population. They believed it would make rationing more
acceptable to the British public and generally it worked. However it was acknowledged that certain types of manual work meant that people needed more food in order to be able to work efficiently. For men and women working in factories in the towns and cities this could be provided by the use of canteens where food could be purchased over and above rations. There was a dramatic increase in the numbers of canteens for miners and factory workers from 1,500 in 1939 to 18,486 in 1944.
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In addition there were the British restaurants which had been started during the Blitz and served up to 600,000 subsidised meals a day to urban workers in over 2,000 restaurants by 1943.

This did not help the farm labourers and other workers in the countryside. These people usually took their midday meal with them from home, using their weekly cheese or bacon ration. In 1942, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, enlisted the help of the WVS, who developed the Rural District Pie Scheme, through which they took meat pies to the workers in outlying villages and farms on certain days of the week. As the Denbighshire County Secretary explained to the president of Trefnant WI, it was designed to provide ‘country workers with meals outside their rations, thus bringing them into line with industrial workers who have access to work canteens etc. Moreover the Ministry of Food realises that the provision of carried meals for men and women working long hours in the fields has become a very real difficulty for the house wife, and hope that the pie scheme will help to overcome this.’
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The WVS was active in small towns but not in remote rural villages so that the WI’s help was needed to make the scheme work as the government had intended.

The plan was to find a local baker who would agree to bake the pies, which would be made by volunteers. Distribution would be the responsibility either of the baker or of volunteers who would be prepared to drive, cycle or walk around the villages taking pies
to agreed drop-off points where they would be sold to local workers. The scheme would only work, the Denbighshire committee told the WIs and other bodies, if farmers, farmers’ wives and farm labourers bought in to the idea of the pie scheme from the outset, so the presidents were encouraged to ensure as many people as possible were aware of it. Almost all counties were involved in the pie scheme and the profits from the sale of pies made a tidy sum for individual institutes, which they were free to dispose of as they wished.

Betty Houghton in Chiddingly in Sussex was a young WI member in the war, joining her institute at sixteen. One of her duties was to distribute pies. There was a beautiful oast house in the village with an empty ground floor. ‘Every Thursday we would meet up to take delivery of the pies, which came from the baker’s. They looked a bit like Cornish pasties and we would sell these to anyone who came to buy them. The art was deciding how many to order each week so that you did not run out too quickly but so that you did not have a large number left over either. They were very popular as I remember,’ Betty said.

Margaret Wright, like Betty, remembered the pie scheme. Her mother was an active member of the WI in Mobberley, Cheshire, and many of Margaret’s wartime memories revolve around the activities of the institute: ‘I remember the pie-making machine that squashed the pastry into pie shapes and made a lid for them. They were very popular.’

Cheshire records show that one million pies were sold by their institutes in 1944 but the bureaucracy was enormous. Burton and Puddington’s annual report for 1943 complained: ‘The Pie Scheme admirably illustrates the Love of Forms that seems bred into the bones of all Ministries, since the Pie Returns have to be made out on 6 different forms and sent to 5 different places every 8 weeks! If returns are late, back comes another form.
Sometimes they even decide they want something quite different . . .’ Hilary Morris of Burton WI did some research in 1995 into the pie scheme on the Wirral:

Pies had to be ordered in advance, and were distributed in Willaston from the Institute or the War Memorial Hut twice a week. The prices were 4d for small pies and pasties, and 1s 4d for large pies. The prices went up by 1d and 4d respectively in 1947, and the scheme continued in Burton until 1947, and in Willaston until 1949.

Huge numbers of pies were sold. In May 1943, 545 were being distributed weekly in Burton and Puddington, and in June the grand total was 2,914. Willaston was a little behind, selling 2,421 in June, but by August nearly 1,000 were being sold each week. By the end of the war, Willaston had sold 128,000 pies, and by the end of the scheme another 62,000. In Cheshire, in 1944 alone, nearly a million pies were sold.

And what was in these pies? The meat ration for cafes, canteens and restaurants was one pennyworth per person per meal or about an ounce in each pie. The rest of the filling would have been vegetables and potatoes. ‘Perhaps they resembled the famous “Woolton Pie”, which was described by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Sir Sydney Jones, as looking on the outside exactly like a steak and kidney pie, on the inside it looked just like a steak and kidney pie – without the steak and kidney. I have enquired from people who were in Willaston at that time, and although they remember that pies were sold, no one has admitted to actually eating one,’ wrote Hilary Morris.