Jambusters (27 page)

The Red Cross was a major beneficiary of WI efforts and fundraising. As early as November 1939 the Red Cross had been able to send supplies to hospitals and convalescent camps, thanks to the enthusiastic response to their first appeals. ‘In that month, the base store at Dieppe was ready for the reception of goods, and a first consignment was dispatched by the Stores Department. It
included over 30,000 hospital garments of all kinds, beds, bedding, ward accessories, surgical equipment, games and “comforts”.’
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However, it was to answer the need to put together prisoner-of-war packages in vast numbers after the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 that the greatest help was required. Although a trickle of men had been taken prisoner in 1939 and early 1940, it was following the Blitzkrieg of 10 May that the biggest single number of men was taken prisoner by the Germans: 50,000. The Red Cross had committed to sending each man a box of comforts once a week. It was a colossal undertaking and as the war progressed and more men were taken prisoner – some 200,000 in Europe alone – so the need for money, food and comforts for the Red Cross increased. According to historian Midge Gillies, ‘During the six years of the war it sent over twenty million food parcels to POWs. In the peak year of 1942 five and a half million were delivered.’
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Every penny for this vital work came from donations.

Mrs Milburn and several members of her institute used to go to a Red Cross workroom on a Tuesday to make whatever was most urgently needed at the time. In August 1941 she was asked to make lavender bags. ‘The lavender bags are to be sold in America and someone suggested putting the Victory V on one corner.’

During the war years the Red Cross grew into a mighty machine. The WI was only one of the many voluntary organisations that answered the wartime appeals. In the official record of the Red Cross and St John published in 1949, authors P. G. Cambray and G. G. Briggs gave some idea of the way it worked:

Functions of purchasing, reception, packing and distribution were carried out [by the British Red Cross’s Stores Department] for voluntary organisations. Among them were the London Committee of Allied Red Cross Societies; regimental associations and next-of-kin parcel centres concerned with the contents of such parcels for prisoners of war; and many more. The Stores Department was, in fact, the clearing house for supplies for societies in London engaged upon voluntary relief services for war sufferers, for no other body had the organisation and facilities which it possessed.
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At first there was no rationing on wool and institutes could order as much as they could pay for, either on the open market for general use or from the Ministry of Supply for specific war-related items such as comforts for soldiers, sailors and airmen. The only restriction on acquiring wool in the early days of the war was the WI’s own rule that wool intended to be used for knitting comforts could not be purchased using institute or county funds but had to be paid for by money raised from elsewhere. Over the next few years the WI became adept at raising money at whist drives and dances, as well as at other one-off events. There is no overall figure for money raised but individual institutes did keep records of money used for wool and the amounts were considerable. Barham with Kingston WI in East Kent collected £238 13s 4d in 1942 and £259 3s 6d the following year, which they used to buy wool for the Merchant Fleet. That is the equivalent of nearly £20,000 in 2012.

It might be assumed that all women in the 1930s could knit and that therefore knitting was simply an extension of what happened in the home. This was not the case. By the middle of the nineteenth century knitting by hand had been superseded by industrial knitting machines and the production of cheap garments in factories meant that knitting individual items for wear or sale was far less prevalent than in the eighteenth century. When the Women’s Institutes were founded during the First World War
many handicrafts and skills had been lost or were limited to the smaller and most rural of communities. As Inez Jenkins pointed out in her 1953 history of the WI:

the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century changed the British people in little more than twenty years from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation. It rang the knell of those crafts and skills of hand which, side by side with agriculture, had provided a livelihood for many and satisfied the personal and household needs of the community. It was quicker and cheaper to make by machine than by hand. So in most districts in England and Wales the old crafts disappeared and gradually were forgotten.
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One of the early aims of the Women’s Institute was to revive those handicrafts and to encourage the practice of traditional skills. The National Executive was keen to promote cottage industries, for profit, with a view to giving girls a reason to stay in their villages rather than moving to towns and cities. This hope that institutes would provide a place where knowledge and interest might be passed on was well-founded but there turned out to be little stomach for turning it into a commercial venture. By early 1919 it was clear that a more profitable policy in terms of furthering the WI’s own aims of educating women in the countryside was to encourage good craftsmanship and to meet home and local needs rather than aiming for industrial output that brought with it pressures and regulations that few felt eager to embrace. A loan from the Carnegie fund, who were supporters of the WI from the earliest days, was given to encourage the commercial exploitation of skilled crafts such as toy-, basket- and glove-making but by 1920 the grants were made solely for educational purposes. One great benefit of the
Carnegie grant was the provision for a collection of examples of fine craftwork.

The Craft Guild developed and during the twenties and thirties exhibitions of fine handicrafts were held at local, county and national levels. There was a focus on knitting, embroidery, sewing, basket-weaving, and slipper- and glove-making. It was popular and the standard of the work produced was very high. Edith Jones was a fine seamstress and entered competitions both locally and at county level with her sewing as well as her baking. On one occasion she was awarded third place for a calico patch she had made: ‘My men folk were pleased when I told them. They would have been grateful too if they had seem some of the samples there showing very little sewing intelligence. A “dem” (demo) on plain sewing would evidently be useful.’ However that night they had had a talk on poultry diseases, which was of equal interest to her.

Mrs Katharine Woods wrote a short history of Headington WI in 1974 to celebrate their 50th birthday and she was full of praise for the quality of their craftwork. She wrote: ‘to have raised the status of home crafts to a useful and worth-while occupation to be enjoyed both in the doing and in the use, is no mean achievement when we remember the miserable conditions in which many “home industries” have been carried on in the past.’ The main areas of expertise in Oxfordshire were glove-making and basket-making. Mrs Mannering from Evesham introduced WIs in the county to rush work, an ancient local craft that had all but died out. Rush work had been used predominantly to make horses’ nosebags and she found a retired, highly skilled basket worker to share his lifetime’s expertise with her WI. From this little beginning they began to develop the skill to make shopping bags and mats in the manner of osier basketry and floor mats in the East Anglian tradition using plaited rush sewn together with
string. This industry continued during the war and proceeds from sales were used to bolster institute funds. Another WI member from the county, Barbara Cullum, had grown up in Wheatley and knew just when the rushes were in season and thus pliable enough for weaving. ‘She is also an expert maker and a beautiful player on bamboo pipes – another ancient craft revived and developed and spread over many counties.’
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Glove-making was a highly skilled occupation. Leather from deer in Blenheim Palace park was made into gloves in the neighbouring little town of Woodstock. As late as the 1920s the leather dresser would cut out gloves and take them round to be sewn by hand in many local homes. The WI was keen on this fine work and continued to hand-stitch Woodstock gloves until the 1950s. ‘The stitching demands much care and skill, and the WIs, with careful instruction through the guild of learners, have helped to raise the status of the craft to a fine art.’
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A most exquisite pair of hand-made gloves was worn by the Duke of Wellington at the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. The gloves were made by Mrs Andow of Netley Marsh WI in Hampshire and show the very highest quality of workmanship. Hampshire was just as proud of its handicraft skills as Oxfordshire and listed sixteen, including embroidery, smocking, tatting, spinning, upholstery and jewellery. At Burton and Puddington in Cheshire, a talk by Miss Clayton of Willaston on glove-making resulted in a series of classes for members. Willaston still possesses a lovely pair of leather gloves made by Miss Clayton in 1942. The minute book records that she donated her four guineas fee from teaching the classes to her own WI’s handicraft section for the purchase of books.

It was not until 1941 that the government introduced rationing for clothes, dress material and shoes. Churchill had been against clothes rationing as he had been against food rationing. He told
the President of the Board of Trade, Oliver Lyttelton, that he did not wish to see the public in rags and tatters. Lyttelton replied that he believed the man on the street wanted rationing, which produced an outburst of rage in the prime minister: ‘Who are you to tell me what the public want? Why, I only picked you up out of some bucket shop in the City a few weeks ago!’ Nevertheless it was obvious to the government that by introducing such a scheme they could save on 200,000 tons of cotton and wool per year and several hundred thousand workers who would have been required to provide civilian clothing could be released for other forms of war-related work. The argument was compelling and clothes rationing was introduced on Sunday, 1 June 1941. ‘The great surprise of this Whit Sunday morning’s news is that clothes are to be rationed. It has been a well-kept secret, and the rationing has begun!’ wrote Mrs Milburn.
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Churchill was later to apologise to Lyttelton and admitted that he had been right to insist on it.

Lyttelton made a radio broadcast in which he appealed to people in a new and unusual way. He wished them to consider it patriotic to be badly dressed. ‘In war the term “battle stained” is an honourable one. We must learn as civilians to be seen in clothes that are not so smart . . . When you feel tired of your clothes remember that by making them do you are contributing some part of an aeroplane, a gun or a tank.’

Norman Longmate, in his book
How We Lived Then
, explained that clothes were put on coupons ‘not because supplies were scarce but because they were too plentiful. The chief aim of rationing was to save factory space, and by closing down small firms to release 450,000 workers for the munitions industry’.
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Wealthier women with large wardrobes were affected far less by the clothes rationing scheme than less-well-off women who had fewer clothes and often of a poorer quality, so that it had an
impact on them more quickly. There was more grumbling about clothes rationing than there had been about the food scheme and the government, aware that this would be the case, made a valiant attempt to mitigate the situation by commissioning top designers to design utility clothing. The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, led by Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies, created thirty-four smart Utility Clothing designs. The dresses were officially approved by the Board of Trade and a selection mass-produced to save labour; they were exempt from purchase tax. The designs followed the square-shouldered and short-skirted fashions of the war era whilst sticking to the regulations for minimal cloth usage. Buttons were limited to three and turn-back cuffs and trouser turn-ups were dispensed with. Skirts were still below the knee. In the event, utility clothing accounted for well over three quarters of all the clothes produced during the war, but not everyone liked it. Some people complained of poor quality and lack of durability, though others were still wearing dresses bought during the 1940s many years later.

Utility stockings came in for particular criticism. Silk stockings had ceased to be made, as the silk was needed for parachute production.
Home & Country
ran a series of advertisements and articles about how to mend stockings but they remained a sorely missed item until the end of the war, unless women were lucky enough to be made gifts of nylons by American GIs who apparently had limitless supplies of these glorious new stockings.

Clothing was rationed on a points system with coupons. The points could be used for buying wool, cotton and household textiles as well as individual items such as coats or dresses. No points were required for second-hand clothing or fur coats, but their prices were fixed and the supply of second-hand clothes was limited, though jumble sales run by WIs to raise money for wool and
other purposes did yield odd articles of clothing that could be reused or reworked. In the first year of clothes rationing each adult was allotted sixty-six coupons. To give an indication of what this would buy, five coupons could be used toward a blouse, five for a pair of boots, seven for a dress, and fourteen for a coat. These four items alone represent half a year’s clothing allowance for one person. Initially the allowance was designed to provide each adult with approximately one new outfit per year. However, this proved too extravagant and the number of coupons per person was reduced to forty-eight in 1942, to thirty-six in 1943 and finally, in 1945, to twenty-four, so that by the end of the war almost an entire year’s clothing allowance would be used up buying just one coat. And of course coupons did not guarantee availability, nor could they be used as payment. In 1942 an even more unpopular ration, for bath towels, was introduced, described by many women as ‘the last word’.