Jambusters (30 page)

As the war progressed so the pressure increased to save and salvage whatever could be reused. Some items were collected in vast quantities. Stamps were a favourite and Blackwell WI collected 300,000 stamps in 1943. Empty cotton reels were also in demand, though no one was ever told why they were needed. Janie Hampton described their use in her book
How the Girl Guides Won the War
: ‘Declassified files show that they were used by MI9, the secret War Office department set up to help prisoners of war escape. Tightly rolled silk maps of Europe, microfilm of contacts and German paper money were carefully inserted inside them, after which MI9 arranged for firms in the cotton industry to refill the reels with thread and to attach fresh paper labels to them.’
³⁴

Salvage became a byword for helping with the war effort and WIs listed in detail the quantities of paper, metal, milk-bottle tops and wool that were found, collected, scavenged, saved and put to good use, either by being reused by WI members or being sent to scrap and salvage schemes organised by the government. The WI was keen to make use of everything they could, so parties of women would collect wool from the hedgerows and tufts left on wire to spin into precious fibre for knitting. Some women experimented with other types of fur. An article on knitting with dog fur explained that as dog ‘wool’ had been spun in the last war there was good reason to believe it would work well once again.
They recommended collecting fur from dogs using wire brushes and spinning it in the usual way. The best dogs’ coats they had found were collies, sheepdogs, chows, keeshonds and Pekinese but the group had also experimented with golden retriever, spaniel and poodle, though these had been less easy to spin and thus they had had to mix the different kinds of hair. Raw sheep’s wool had become so scarce that towards the end of the war it was only possible to collect it from the wild. In the end the knitters concluded that articles knitted with dog wool did not turn out satisfactorily as the wool has little natural loft, unlike sheep’s wool. However, some women wanted to persevere, as articles knitted with dogs’ wool could be sold without coupons whereas anything made with sheep’s wool, even if gathered from the hedgerows, required coupons. The bureaucracy of the rationing and coupon system had extraordinary reach.

Joan Simpkins of Whitstable in Kent recounted a story told by her late mother-in-law, who belonged to Aldington WI in East Kent and whose neighbour was Mrs Elsie Hueffer, widow of the author Ford Madox Ford. ‘She was a somewhat eccentric lady, spun and wore her own garments, and was of course connected with the Pre-Raphaelites.’ Mrs Hueffer taught Mrs Simpkins senior to spin and after the outbreak of the war, once clothing became scarce, Mrs Simpkins saw an opportunity to pass on the skill and so allow other women to have wool. Her husband was a keen woodworker, so he set about making spindles and soon she was visiting institutes all over Kent and further afield. Mrs Simpkins junior wrote to me: ‘My husband and his brother were set to gather stray bits of wool left by sheep on hedges and fences. By the time I met the family it was all systems go and I was roped in to help make spindles.’

The lovely twist in this story came in the final paragraph of

Joan Simpkins’s letter: ‘On one memorable occasion the WI held
an exhibition at Barham (E. Kent) during the war which was visited by Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, and I have photographs of Mother speaking to them.’ This is of course the famous visit organised by Lord Woolton and Mrs Churchill in 1942 described in chapter 5. This letter brought that historical account to life.

The war in the Far East had had a further dramatic effect on supplies and thus rationing and salvage campaigns. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the Americans into the war. Three days later the British suffered a terrible loss when the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
were sunk off the coast of Malaya. Two months later, on 15 February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese in the biggest defeat in British military history. Within weeks the Japanese had taken over almost the entire Far East, creating a new empire which they called the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. With one blow they cut off all supplies from that area, including rubber, which now became scarce and had to be saved and salvaged. The WI was told to collect everything from car tyres to tap washers, every bit of rubber except proofed material such as rain coats. For the town-women this meant the banning of crêpe rubber soles for shoes and for the country wives a shortage of wellington boots. Elsie Bainbridge and her brother had special dispensation for wellingtons as they lived two miles from their school and had to walk down a cart track for half the distance. The track was often wet or frozen in the winter so that the boots for them were a vital necessity. ‘My mother used to knit lovely, thick socks for our wellingtons and that kept our feet dry in winter. In the summer we would wear clogs with wooden soles and leather uppers. These were much better than shoes and were waterproof against wet grass and shallow puddles and were very warm, provided you didn’t step into a deep puddle.’

By the middle of the war many things were restricted, unavail
able or severely rationed. After the success of the clothing coupon scheme (from the government’s point of view) the Ministry of Supply put out a fierce directive about what could or could not be done with paper. No paper should be destroyed unless it was to prevent spreading infectious diseases. All waste paper had to be disposed of to a collector or buyer.

Norton and Lenchwick WI in Worcestershire held a competition for waste paper and took delivery of 800lb of paper and cardboard while Little Aston in Staffordshire collected 2 tons in the same month. All these collections brought the institutes small amounts of money. Some was ploughed back into coffers to buy wool for knitting but much of the profits made from collections and sales were given away to hospitals, canteens, the Red Cross and other local good causes.

It is hard to imagine that some members did not feel a little downhearted when they received yet another request for voluntary assistance during the long years of the war. There is seldom a complaint to be found anywhere in the records and there is even perhaps a sense that grumbling would somehow undermine all their patriotic good work. The range as well as the quantity of hand-made articles that they made and distributed is simply astonishing and it is hard to imagine that they had time to squeeze all the activities into daylight hours. Yet they did. And they even found time to entertain one another. And the troops.

8

GAIETY, SONG AND DANCE

Mrs Brown agreed to enquire into the possibilities of getting a band and also an extension of leave to carry on after 10pm for a dance to be held some moon-light night in November.

Bradfield WI minutes, 1939

Mrs Blewitt of Boxted Hall in Essex wrote 195 letters and telegrams to her daughter, Maria, who was a Section Officer with the WAAF in England, Scotland and the Middle East and Italy during the war. She wrote 490 letters, telegrams and cards to her son, Major James Blewitt, during his war service in North Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Maria bundled up all her mother’s letters and returned them to Boxted for safekeeping. Mrs Blewitt commented that, being filled with ‘such very parochial matters’, the correspondence would probably ‘share the fate of most old letters of going into the paper-basket, considerably dusty and yellowed some years hence without further reading’. Fortunately this immensely rich treasure trove was deposited with the Department of Documents at the Imperial
War Museum in London and has been preserved for posterity. Far from being filled with parochial matters, it offers a wide-ranging and fascinating view of life in the 1940s from one woman’s perspective. Much of the correspondence deals with family matters but Mrs Blewitt, like Mrs Milburn, was a brilliant observer of everyday life and as Cicely McCall wrote in 1943, ‘The real stuff of a nation’s history is just ordinary life.’ Mrs Blewitt had an eye for the quirky or amusing angle on any story or snippet. As a prominent and wealthy member of her village she was involved in her WI, often hosting the annual garden party at the hall. In June 1941 she wrote to Maria telling her about the plans: ‘It is the summer’s meeting where I have to provide games etc. We are being very topical and having a gas mask race – a stirrup pump competition, dropping bombs on Berchtesgarten – and as a variant to placing the donkey’s tail or the pig’s eye we are having putting Hitler’s moustache on his face blindfolded.’
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Garden parties, winter dances, whist drives and games offered the WI some relaxation and laughter after all the hard work. That had been the intention from the outset.

A WI meeting consists of three distinct parts. First there is the formal business, which is led by the president and written up by the institute secretary in the Record Book. Then there is a talk or demonstration, most often given by an outside speaker. It can be educational or entertaining and is sometimes both. The talk is followed, after a short refreshment break, by the social half-hour. Almost the first instruction given by Lady Denman at the outbreak of the war was ‘to keep the social side of the WI alive however hard this may be and even if our usual generous tea has become only a cup of tea and a biscuit! To laugh together will send us home heartened and cheered for our daily work.’
²
The WI is serious about its educational work and is equally serious about entertainment. WI choirs and drama productions often
reach a very high level and during the war, as we shall see, some important musicians were involved in rehearsing and conducting choirs. The social half-hour was designed to allow people the freedom to let their hair down a little. At no time was this more important than through the war when demand on their time, expertise and goodwill was so enormous. As we have seen, the government expected women who were not directly employed in war work to give up an extraordinary amount of time to ‘do their bit’ and to do it for free, with no personal gain other than the satisfaction that they were contributing to this or that campaign.

At first some institutes faltered, overwhelmed by all the other work that had been heaped onto their plates by billeting officers, WVS duties, food production committees and extended family responsibilities. A sympathetic editorial in
Home & Country
acknowledged these extra commitments and tried to make light of them:

Of course, we know the difficulties are enormous. Life in reception areas is not all blackberrying, nor even wholly knitted squares. One government department tells us to double our activities for the doubled rural population, another seizes our halls. County Federations beg us to meet before dark: school shifts fill up the rooms till 5:30pm. Above all, there is the black-out, the universal pall that falls on England’s gaiety and activity every night at sunset. Ah, what a peace party the National Federation will hold some day, with one gigantic jumble sale of a hundred miles of black, ill-dyed and malodorous sheeting.
³

Membership of the WI dropped from a pre-war high of 331,600 in 1939 to a low of 288,000 in 1943, the year that mobilisation
peaked. The majority of women who departed were under thirty, unmarried, and could join the forces or do war work. It marked a big shift in the demographics in the countryside. As the Queen acknowledged in her speech to the Annual General Meeting that year: ‘Today our villages are sadly empty. The young men are away fighting for the land they love so well. The girls too are away at their war work, and the great responsibility of carrying on rests with the older women. How gallantly they are doing this, shouldering every sort of job with such a grand and cheerful spirit and planning and praying for the day when their dear ones come home again.’
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She was right. The average age of a Women’s Institute had gone up after the beginning of the war and the women left behind were usually older members who had been with their institutes from the beginning and valued the social half-hour. It had always been part of the WI meetings and it was popular. Sometimes it comprised a dramatic production, at other times a beetle or whist drive, often a sing-song and sometimes a more rumbustious game of musical chairs. As the war dragged on so the desire to keep cheerful grew, and far from becoming demoralised it seems that women became more resilient.

The third edition of
Games for Playing at Women’s Institute Meetings
, printed at the University Press in Oxford in 1941, ran to thirty-two pages and included eight sections covering acting, miming and speaking; guessing; moving about games; musical games; outdoor games and sports; sitting games; team games and writing games. The games had been gathered from a variety of books written for the Girl Guides Association and the Central Council for Recreative Physical Training. Miss Mary Hirst Simpson, who wrote the introduction to the booklet, emphasised that playing games in the right spirit ‘can be a true piece of communal work, one which is not only worthwhile, but
which may even be a duty of the Institute member’. She was a champion of the social half-hour and took it seriously, berating institutes that neglected what she saw as the all-important part of the meeting that allowed women to relax in each other’s company.

Miss Hirst Simpson was almost a WI institution in her own right. Born to a wealthy family in Northamptonshire in 1871, she never attended school but was educated at home by a governess and later, as she had trouble with her eyes, by her mother, who read to her in a darkened room. When she recovered she was allowed to explore the lovely landscape around her home. Her real gift was her intimate knowledge of the countryside. She understood rat-catchers and hedgers and ditchers, farmers and farmhands just as much as she did the local doctor, the parson and the lawyer. She always felt that there were gaps in her knowledge so she continued to do correspondence courses throughout her life to catch up. She was exactly the kind of woman for whom the WI offered so much.