Jambusters (24 page)

Wartime jam-making was an additional burden for busy housewives. The preservation centres were set up in villages or close to where supplies of fruit were found and the conditions that the women worked in were seldom ideal. The list from 1940 included halls, domestic science kitchens, huts, WI markets, police stations, cafes, packing sheds, garages and private kitchens of all kinds. Mrs Denys Blewitt lived at Boxted Hall near Colchester in Essex. A wealthy lady and an active member of her WI as well as of the Women’s National Citizen Association and the Conservative Party, she was very generous offering the hall when it was needed. From 1939 onwards for the rest of the war she made the kitchens in the servants’ quarters at the hall available for jam-making. There WI members made more than four tons of jam on seven stoves. Boxted Hall’s kitchens were well equipped and there was running water to hand, which was a boon. Where water was not laid on it was carried by relays of willing helpers to the ‘kitchens’ and the fruit very often had to
be picked by the women doing the jam-making. ‘At one centre half the members cycled five miles before breakfast to pick the fruit, other members prepared and served them breakfast and the rest preserved the fruit in the afternoon.’
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Miss Cox, who checked all the forms that came in from the preserving centres, found one that had a note apologising for her form being late but ‘my house was bombed and it was so difficult to find things afterwards’.

Lord Woolton visited preservation centres several times each season. His continued support and interest in their work was essential and the visits did much to sustain morale. In December 1940 he wrote to Lady Denman congratulating her on the success of the preservation scheme. ‘This was work of national importance demanding administrative ability of a high order at the Headquarters of your organization and local initiative and cooperation which are a fine example of democratic action at its best.’
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But the National Federation also sounded a note of caution about the preservation scheme. They wanted to ensure fair shares for everyone and equality was never far from their minds: ‘The Institutes have readily grasped both the importance of this piece of work, and the principle of share-and-share alike on which its products should be distributed. It is important that no one, member or non-member, should buy more than her fair share of these sugar-content foods simply because she is better off or has been able to supply more fruit than her neighbours.’
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This concern fed down to the counties and several had a discussion about fairness at county level. In 1940 members were allowed to buy back their jam at wholesale prices and the executive committees were exercised by the question of how much jam it should allow its members to purchase. Was it fair, they asked, to permit people to buy back as much jam as they had supplied fruit for?
This would discriminate against those who had produced less fruit and also those who would not be able to afford to buy large quantities. They also asked the question: ‘What safeguards are there that members getting jam cheap can’t sell it expensively?’ The National Federation recommended that everyone should be allowed the same quantity so that no one was treated unfairly. The following year rationing was introduced and there were no special privileges for anyone. That was easier for WI members but the public was unhappy. An article entitled ‘Making Jam at Home’ appeared in
The Times
in March 1941 explaining how the Minister had asked the WI to take on the task of preserving all surplus crops.

Already there is some feeling against ‘the plan for giving all available sugar for jam making to the Women’s Institutes and allowing none for private persons.’ Mrs Dulcibella Dalby of Castle Donington, Derby, writes that angry feeling will be aroused in people who are not members of the Women’s Institutes and there will be a sense of injustice at a small body of the community having the handling and control of all sugar for jam and bottling.
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The criticism was understandable but the WI had to undertake to keep the strictest checks on the amounts of sugar used and if any were lost it caused a tremendous headache for the Jam Committee, as was the case when Boxted WI could not account for 80lb in 1942. Mrs Blewitt was in charge of trying to find out what had happened as the local police had been unable to trace the missing sugar. On 9 February 1943 she wrote to her daughter: ‘I spent the afternoon with Nina yesterday. We were supposed to finish the Jam accounts, which should have been in by the New Year. I found a proper jam morasse, and as she had
not got the Pass Book, or looked at it all the year, we did not get very far. If we have to do it again I shall have to take on the account keeping, it is not conceivable to be so stupid at them as Nina!’

Hyde Heath WI in Buckinghamshire had a welcome surprise on 2 August 1940 when the Queen, who had requested to see a canning centre in operation, arrived to inspect their preservation centre. The canning shed at The Wick was cramped and hot but, as one observer pointed out, the Queen kept her cool. She asked lots of questions of Mrs van Kerkhoven, who gave the demonstration, and was very interested in learning how the fruit was being gathered from local gardens and orchards. Her lady-in-waiting wrote to Lady Denman after the visit to say how much she had enjoyed herself and ‘how greatly Her Majesty appreciated all the most valuable work they were doing’.
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At the end of her visit the members presented the Queen with ‘a gift of jellies, jams, bottled and canned fruit’.

Even where institutes had dwindling numbers of members, for example owing to compulsory evacuation from the coastal areas in 1940, women who remained tried to keep jam-making going. In Old Felixstowe there were only a handful of members remaining in the coastal town, yet a fruit-picking party visited the deserted gardens and sold the crops for their owners or for the WI. They said: ‘It is hard to carry on but in our quietness and confidence will be our strength.’
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Above all, jam-making caught the WI’s imagination. ‘No common pen can do justice to it’, one woman wrote of the great jam drive. ‘In Northamptonshire, one canning day, a WI copper was worked so hard it set the chimney on fire.’
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At another institute members complained of developing corns on their fingers through peeling pound after pound of pears and ‘Earls Barton centre has nearly reached the 2000th jam pot . . . while Marbury in Cheshire
made 1187 lbs of jam and filled 1132 cans of fruit.’ The scale of the industry was quite breathtaking and so was the enthusiasm and appetite for news of their work: ‘Wootton Bridge canning report shows 722 cans, 624 lbs jam and 228 bottles, plus a perfectly fresh jar of tomatoes bottled by a member 22 years ago. No wonder they sang the National Anthem!’

The year 1940 was a particularly good one for fruit, especially plums, and the quantities of jam and fruit pickled, canned and preserved were impressive. In perspective, that would have been sufficient to supply 2 million adults with a year’s ration of jam based on 1/4lb of jam every two months. The National Federation felt proud that its members had responded so enthusiastically to the Ministry of Agriculture’s call for increased production.

Germany launched its
Luftschlacht um Grossbritannien
, translated literally as ‘Air battle for Great Britain’, in July 1940, first targeting British shipping centres and coastal convoys. Winston Churchill announced to the House of Commons ‘. . . the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’ It was the first campaign to be fought entirely by air forces and it represented one of the most significant battles in the war. Germany failed in its objective of destroying Britain’s air defences. There is no doubt that the success of the Royal Air Force in preventing the Luftwaffe from gaining air superiority ended the threat of an invasion.

In August Mrs Milburn wrote of the Battle of Britain in her diary: ‘We hear on the news of airmen’s experiences during these exciting flights, usually told very calmly, quickly and tersely. Tonight we hear that in fighting round our south-east and south coasts, as well as over Berkshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire, the Germans have lost 57 planes and our losses are 9 here and 14 on the continent.’ The next day, 14 August, she
wrote: ‘Yesterday’s “bag” of Nazi planes was 78 to 13 of ours. And everybody was tired today because we have all been up the best part of the night.’ Dugouts, air-raid shelters, Morrison shelters all became an everyday, or rather every night, reality for millions of civilians up and down the country for the next few months as the Germans launched attacks on industrial targets and cities, with often devastating effect. There are thousands of accounts of people hunkering in shelters, some cold and damp, others like Mrs Milburn’s bunk hole which was eventually rendered quite comfortable. In London thousands slept in the Underground stations; in Manchester Patricia Kelly hid in an underground canal while the world exploded around her. She had gone home from the safety of Cressbrook to spend Christmas with her parents.

In London during one raid alone on 19 December 1940 almost 3,000 people died. The cost of the Battle of Britain in civilian lives was high. Between July and December of that year over 23,000 people were killed and 32,000 wounded. Yet for some it was exciting. Schoolchildren would regularly flock to sites where enemy aircraft had crashed to pick up souvenirs. Elsie Bainbridge in Cumbria had a close encounter. In January 1940 a British plane crashed in a field next to her house in a severe snowstorm. Elsie was in bed with whooping cough and her mother in bed with flu.

We heard this plane over the roof top. Next thing I heard my father shouting to my mother ‘the plane has crashed’. It had hit a hedge and took the hedge half way across the field. When they went over to the plane they expected to see someone injured or worse but all they saw was a notice saying ‘danger, bombs on board’. The next thing they saw were footsteps across the field and so they knew whoever it was had escaped. It was a New Zealand pilot who walked to the next door farm but there was no one in so he walked into the village. Very few houses had phones in those days but fortunately the first house he came to was the only one in the village with a telephone. So they reported it to the police who came and cordoned off the plane and guarded it day and night until the bombs were dismantled and then they took it away. The thing that made my brother and I feel awful was that we couldn’t go to see it because we were ill. My father took us to see it when it had been dismantled but when we got back to school lots of the children told us how they had come to see the plane when it had crashed and how they had got bits of Perspex off it as souvenirs. We were very fortunate it didn’t land on the house.

My own mother recalled seeing a plane coming down close to Ellesmere Port. She and her brother, Patrick, jumped for joy as they saw the swastika on the tail when it spiralled down in a plume of smoke. ‘Now I think that is an awful thing to have done but at the time, we were just children, and this was an enemy plane and one of our “boys” had got it. I do not know what happened to the pilot.’

The Battle of Britain coincided with the fruit harvests and some WI members had become so engrossed in their work that they regarded the war as an interference rather than a threat. East Kent was in the danger zone during the autumn of 1940 as the Luftwaffe was locked in aerial battle with the RAF, often overhead, but it did not stop one WI member from expressing her frustration. Her husband was a surveyor of farms for the War Agriculture Committee and her job was to chauffeur him around the county. She also had responsibility for boys and Scouts billeted in various empty cottages in her village, and life on the farm and in the garden was busy as well. Yet, as she wrote, ‘all these things have been interrupted day after day five or six times with
incessant fighting. At first I was dreadfully afraid; it was horrid, my tummy kept shivering and after the fight was over my knees went weak and I had to sit down. But after the first day or two, that all wore off – and the only thing we all feel now is so
cross
at the waste of time. Just as you’ve got your ladders fixed in the plum trees, over they come. We stay put; but when they start with the machine guns low enough to see them, then the men make us come indoors until
that
scrap is over, and it just makes me mad.’
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She said she would stay put in Kent, even though the danger from air raids was evident. ‘The people of East Kent are grand,’ she wrote, adding: ‘not one in our village have I heard doubting that we can hold on longer than “That Man”.’
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Nothing could embody this attitude of defiance more than the tale of Hawkinge WI in East Kent. Before the war it had been a large institute with over a hundred members but being just three miles from Folkestone it was in a vulnerable area. A large number of families evacuated further inland and thus numbers dwindled so that by the summer of 1940 the membership was just five. These five women had a canning machine, which the institute had acquired in anticipation of the fruit harvest. The county federation offered to buy back the machine but the women refused politely, saying that they intended to use it. Cicely McCall told their story:

And use it they did. They picked their own fruit and the fruit from the gardens of their evacuated members. Their preservation centre was a farm kitchen, and they jammed and bottled and canned. The Battle of Britain raged overhead, so they took it in turns to go to the air raid shelter when the bombing was too intense. One day when the jam was on the boil, and a fresh lot of raiders roared overhead, the youngest member said to the others: