Jambusters (25 page)

‘You go this time. Go on. I’ll stay and watch this boiling.’

So she stayed and stirred and defied Nazidom.

‘You see,’ she said afterwards, ‘they had children and I haven’t.’

But she didn’t think she was doing anything spectacular. None of them did. ‘We didn’t think anything of it,’ they said. ‘We couldn’t go away and do war work, and we thought, well, we could do
that
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This story must be one of the most famous in the history of WI jam-making and it was symbolic of the kind of defiance that Lady Denman told them would win the war. It was not simply the tough-mindedness of the childless member, but the sheer amount of work that it must have taken to produce the jam and canned fruit that they did. Not only did they have to pick the fruit and wash, boil, can, bottle and label it but they had to collect firewood, as they did not have sufficient funds for coal. When East Kent did their calculations for the quantities made by each of their ninety institutes Hawkinge appeared third on their list. The five members had made 350 kilograms of jam and filled 350 kilograms of cans and a hundred bottles. It was an astonishing achievement.

As a young member of her WI, Betty Houghton was given a variety of jobs to do when it came to fruit preservation. The jam-making took place in the garage of a house called Pilgrims in Chiddingly in Sussex. Mrs A. T. Baker and Betty’s future mother-in-law, Mrs Houghton, were the cooks. There were many members of the Baker family in Chiddingly at the time, so that the ladies were known by their initials, Mrs A. T. and so on. Betty’s job was to weigh the fruit brought in by members and others who wanted to turn it into jam. She gave them 3/4lb of sugar for every pound of their fruit. It then went into production and once the jars were cool she would stick on the labels and
hand the finished jam back. This was in the early years before rationing meant that all jam had to be sent for commercial distribution. ‘It was very important to make sure the labels were stuck on straight before the jars were put onto the shelves and stored. This was not amateur production. It was carried out to a high standard and had to be just so.’ In 1943 Betty joined the Wrens and was sent to work at Bletchley Park. She lived in Woburn Abbey for the next two years and worked on the Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer, which was used by the British code-breakers to read encrypted German messages.

In 1985 Mrs Muller Rowland from Surrey was asked to talk about her memories of wartime institutes at an evening called ‘Forty Years On’. During the war she had worked as a canning machine operator. She recalled how some of the older members would be exhausted in the evening when they went home after a whole day working in a kitchen. Often they would have evacuee children to care for as well as their own households. It was a big extra responsibility for them, she said, ‘but they always found time to do our jam when necessary. The members who worked in those centres never had one pound of jam or one tin of fruit. It all went to the shops and was sold on the ration.’ She described the variety of facilities available to the institutes, some more satisfactory than others. ‘At Peaslake [Surrey] we had a very nice village hall but the sink was very small and the cans had to be cooled down at once so we took them to the little brook at the bottom of the village and cooled them there. I can still see batches of jam, beautifully labelled, covered with parchment covers, named and dated, and a tiny jar at the front for the Inspector [to examine]. I remember being asked what happened to the little pot and replied “Oh! That goes into the next batch.”’ Miss Tomkinson of the NFWI Agricultural Subcommittee
wrote: ‘We look back on our 1940 scheme with feelings rather like those of Alice in Wonderland when she was “opening out like the largest telescope that ever was”.’ They had made preparations for 200 preserving centres and at twenty-four hours’ notice the Ministry of Food asked them to expand five-fold. By the end of the season they had 2,650 centres. ‘Under our scheme, over one thousand tons of fruit has been preserved, most of which would otherwise have been wasted.’
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Although the committee agreed that there was room for improvement in some centres, by and large the standard had been high. Teething problems for the centres had included cans turning up late, orders not arriving at all and bottles broken in transit. In Oxfordshire the lack of bottles was solved by a couple of members driving a car and trailer to London, escorted by the WVS, to raid a rubbish dump in the capital. They returned unscathed with plenty of suitable containers and the preserving work continued.

One other difficulty a number of institutes came across was estimating the quantity of fruit that would come into the centres for preservation. It had an impact on the amount of sugar they would need to order and there was some debate about whether those running centres should refuse surplus fruit delivered without notice as making jam without sugar required different types of preparation. Mrs Milburn illustrated the problem from the other perspective: ‘A WI produce meeting took me to Mrs Ford’s at 10:45 am to hear about sugar for jam and the arrangements to be made about getting it for WI members. We have to calculate the amount of fruit we are going to have in our gardens!’

Institutes all around the country debated whether it was fair to ask women to volunteer to undertake hot, sticky work for long hours for no pay and no gain. Was it enough to know that they were contributing to the nation’s stockpiles of food? ‘Would that
be enough reward for the toil and sweat, the trouble of organisation, and the inevitable public criticism?’
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They would have to accept that they would not even get their own fruit back in their ration unless they were fortunate that a local shop bought jam from their centre. The majority of institutes who had been involved in the jam scheme agreed to carry on.

The women’s institutes received a huge boost when the United States donated six mobile canning vans to the jam effort in addition to the over 500 canning machines they and the Canadians also gave to the WI. The vans had been given, fully licensed, insured and equipped, by the American Federation of Business and Professional Women in acknowledgement of the role played by rural women. The great beauty of the mobile units was that they could be driven to orchards ‘so that the fruit could go straight from bough to can’.
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At first some members were suspicious of the canning vans, one claiming that she thought at first it was simply a very expensive toy. But she soon became an enthusiastic ‘van fan’ after seeing it in action. Miss McCall described a van:

Painted grey, mounted on a Ford V8 chassis (and surely ‘V’ was never more applicable!) they looked workmanlike and they were. Inside they were equipped with well arranged cupboards and shelves, a copper heated with Calor gas, and a zinc-lined sink. A trestle table which folded neatly away when the van was in motion held the hand-sealing machine. On the roof of the van stood the water tank . . . Canning, at all times, even in a well ventilated kitchen, is an unsuitable occupation for those who like fresh air and a low, even temperature. But if you like dripping heat, cramped space and perspiring companions, then the inside of a canning van is just the place for you.
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Despite the heat and discomfort the canning vans were well liked, as they were efficient and helped greatly in villages with no canning centre. Using a van institute members could produce fifty cans an hour or about 100lb of preserves a day.

Up to the outbreak of war there was a strong sense that although vegetable production would improve (which it did) jam production would remain at the same standard – palatable, sometimes delicious but always looking home-made. It was a case of ‘We’ve always done it like that’. When the preservation centres started the government appointed inspectors. There were loud outcries.

It was bad enough to have to make jam according to Government recipes, but to be reproved for an unorthodox knot in the string seemed to many members the height of Government interference and absurdity. What did it matter if the cover was a little crooked? Yet at the end of the season when centre workers could gaze proudly at rows of shining jam pots with identical labels and neat string round closely cropped tops, they began to agree that there was something to be said for uniformity and method.
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Redlynch and District WI in Wiltshire was one of the institutes with the widest diversity of preserving undertaken. They made jams, jellies, fruit cheeses, fruit juices, chutneys and bottled fruits. Strict instructions were sent to remind them that the sugar obtained from the government could not be used to make home-made wines, cider or perry. All fruit had to be home-grown and not bought from shops or commercial growers. The range was impressive: ‘Gooseberries, red, white and blackcurrants, rhubarb, loganberries, blackberries, apples, plums, damsons, crab apples and quinces were all used at some point, either singly or
mixed, to make jams and chutneys.’ Initially they used the Scout hut but that was taken over by the Home Guard in 1943 and so they rented a room in the Temperance Hall for a shilling a week. The government supervisor was impressed with the jam in 1943 and also complimented the women on the layout of the room in the Scout hut. The next year the report on their jam read: ‘very good, beautifully covered and the pots very well filled’.
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Ministry inspectors travelled all over the country checking the preservation centres were working to the highest standards. Mrs Stevens was one inspector who worked in the Midlands. She reported on the good and the bad:

Sub-standard jam was in nearly all cases made by Centres which had not attended the County Council classes at the beginning of the summer, and had not kept to the standard recipes. About 1000lbs of sub-standard jam has been made out of a total of nearly 12 tons of jam and jelly. This does not include a very large quantity of very bad jam made by Little Compton and Chasleton who made about 1700 lbs, much of which contained wasps, and a quantity of which had not set and was going mouldy. Mrs Stevens had seen the jam and Miss Munro had also been to advise on it. A good deal had now been boiled up again, after the wasps had been removed, and a further report is awaited from the Centre secretary to say how much is now fit for sale.
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Even after the war some villages still complained of ‘centre jam’ as something of unnecessarily high standard conforming to government red-tape regulations. ‘One hopes that this is a dying resentment. For after the war amateur methods will not compete successfully with better finished and equally palatable commercial products. Fewer and fewer people think that
everything which comes out of a cottage kitchen is necessarily delicious or even wholesome.’
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How things have changed since the 1940s.

The German attacks on Britain and Northern Ireland continued relentlessly until May 1941. London was bombed on seventy-six consecutive nights during the Blitz and many other towns and cities were badly damaged. Plymouth was targeted on 18 March 1941 and the lives of its citizens shattered. The city’s infrastructure was badly damaged and, as Gerald Wasley put it, Plymouthians became ‘casualties of war without shedding a drop of blood. For them the consequence of the intensive aerial attack was that their set way of life was not merely inconvenienced, it was destroyed.’ The authorities encouraged families to leave the city, issuing free train tickets, but it was not easy to know where they would be welcomed. Bickleigh lay just seven miles from Plymouth and was one of the many villages that hosted destitute families. The WI had a hut which had been built in about 1920, donated by Lord and Lady Roborough of Maristow Estate. About 300 people a night sheltered in the hut and in farm buildings during what was known as ‘the evening trek out’. The WI organised a whist drive to raise money for the victims of the bombing and apparently managed to carry on with their regular meetings in the hut despite wartime dislocation. Bickleigh’s women were as busy and resourceful as any other WI, and contributed to the preservation scheme, although a note in their minute book read: ‘Decided not to use canning machine but to bottle fruit and make jam instead.’

As the 1941 season approached, the jam and canning centres were well organised but restrictions from the Ministry of Food were greater.
Home & Country
reported that ‘so far as the early fruits – strawberries, black currants, and raspberries are concerned, the Ministry of Food has issued an instruction that they
may be used only for jam. Later crops will be made into jam, canned where facilities for canning exist, and in some centres bottled.’
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Lord Woolton broadcast an appeal to countrywomen to help out in the great jam production in 1941. He knew that many people were disgruntled that he could not supply extra sugar for preserving that year but, as he explained, ‘As Minister of Food I have to be careful and to save sugar in order to see that there will be enough to keep up our rations even though the Germans may sink more of our sugar ships.’
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He urged women not to let the fruit go to waste but to pick and sell it to jam centres, rather than letting it rot on the trees and in the bushes: ‘Ladies, we are fighting for our existence: all of us are in this war and we must pull together, sharing our resources. Last year 2600 village centres worked under this scheme; already we have 4500 centres ready this year – ready with their workers, ready with their jam jars, and the covers for them; everything ready for your help in bringing in the fruit.’
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