Jambusters (33 page)

The third of the three Rs was catered for by a trained teacher, Miss Wilson, who taught the children arithmetic. They remembered her as being very strict and had been told that she had been governess to an Indian prince or maharajah. The Vicar of Bucklebury taught scripture and Mademoiselle Bouvier came
from Reading on a bus to teach French. They even had a German teacher in Fräulein Oberländer, who had escaped from the Nazis by fleeing from Austria. ‘She was an excellent teacher, and, with the consent of our parents, taught us German counting rhymes and singing games which we still remember over 60 years on. I remember “Eins, zwei Polizei, drei, vier Offizier!” and so on.’

Ann kept her exercise books from school and her English book gives a flavour of the times. ‘Mrs Brown has been fined for buying some bananas at the Black Market.’ ‘Mr Jones is a bankrupt’ and ‘Mr Williams got a posthumous VC’. Slightly less easy to fathom is ‘Charles Dikons is a notorious highwayman’.

The WI featured as part of that wartime backdrop to Ann and Dorcas’s lives. They greatly enjoyed the children’s parties organised by the institute for the village children each summer at Horseleas. In June 1940 the WI was not sure the village party could take place. The war had taken a dangerous turn and the threat of invasion was real, so that the announcement of the date for 11 July suddenly seemed optimistic.

Bradfield was not a target for bombs but suffered, as many villages did, from planes opening their bomb bays over the countryside on the return flight. Ann recalled sitting under the stairs with John and her mother, who told them stories, while her father was out in his tin hat on air-raid duty. ‘Not once did she infect us with the fear that she must have felt at the thought of my father out there, unprotected, looking for bombs. His tin hat would not have offered him much protection if he had ever been close to an explosion, but thankfully he was not.’

In 1944 there was the children’s party, which was described by Mrs Ward in the record book: ‘After tea they enjoyed competitions and races in the garden organised by Mrs Sims and Mrs McCaskie. Mrs Dartford judged the competition for pencil
sketches and awarded 1st prize for the over 10s to Mary Bird, 1st for the under 10s to Dorcas and Marion Ward jointly. At six o’clock the children gave a hearty clap first to Mrs Sims for organising the games and then to Mrs Howlett for once again welcoming us all to Horseleas.’ In return the children would entertain the WI at their Christmas parties with singing and carols. Ann remembered: ‘Mrs Howlett was the tenant at the house so she made the garden available to us for those summer parties. They were wonderful, I remember, we had swing boats and roundabouts and ice cream – an unheard of treat.’ Dorcas added: ‘It was a wonderful time to be growing up.’

Children accepted the war as part of their lives, and not always a bad part of it. Caroline Dickinson was equally positive about her childhood in Cheshire. There was a great deal of freedom in Barrow and the addition of her two cousins to the family during the war years meant there was plenty going on and always someone to play with. Sadly the final legacy of the war for her was that she was left without her father. He died in Normandy on 15 July 1944.

For some the war was even exciting. An article that produced a critical response in ensuing issues of
Home & Country
described the thrill for one young woman:

We country and little-town people are getting the best of the fun in this war! A big town is rigid and impersonal. Air Raid Wardens and Local Authorities are ‘them’ in a town. In the country they are ‘us’. We seem sometimes to be living in a John Buchan story, set on an enormous stage, and each one of us with an acting part. It is a story of passwords and signals, emergency rations and prohibited areas – all the best thrills of romance! – and with our own men going out to guard us from dusk to dawn. Who would have believed that an official paper would have told you and me to ‘keep watch for anything suspicious’, what to do if an armed German invader were to drop from the sky?
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On her way to an institute meeting, the writer and a friend stopped to watch a dogfight in the sky above. They were enthralled by the acrobatics of the British fighters ‘like terriers’ on the tail of the German pilot. ‘When the wireless told the world of enemy aircraft shot down off the coast we felt we had done it ourselves!’
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She had stopped being afraid when the air-raid siren sounded and pointed out that even in the shelters they were able to carry on with their war effort since ‘we get through a lot of knitting underground’.

Amongst all the other requests received by institutes there was one from their own National Executive. The WI ran a fundraising drive for ambulances during 1940 and raised sufficient funds to buy five: one for the War Office, one for the Royal Navy and three for the Royal Air Force. The fund also raised sufficient money to buy a mobile X-ray unit for the treatment of civilian casualties and three smaller, portable X-ray units, which would be most welcome, Dr Ulysses Williams assured the WI in his thank-you letter: ‘a most useful piece of apparatus that will solve many of our difficulties. In the case of air raids, when the lifts at the Royal Free are possibly not working, we shall find it very useful indeed.’
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It was one of the few campaigns instigated by the NFWI; most others were instigated by bodies such as the Red Cross, or the government itself, or begun locally by the village institutes.

A list of the activities undertaken by individual institutes gives some idea of the enormous breadth of support that one village could provide, from knitting string gloves for sailors or parcelling up toys for prisoners of war, to providing vegetables for the
local elderly or volunteering to cook school meals. Every year members of Mobberley WI made a donation towards a good cause in addition to all their other work on behalf of others. Over a five-year period from 1939 they gave £221 (£7,500 today) to charities. In 1942 they offered to raise money for the Christie Hospital in Manchester. When they told the hospital that they had raised £70 they received a request from the surgeons to allow them to use the money to purchase surgical instruments rather than putting the money into the general fund. ‘Later we were invited to the hospital and there saw these expensive things displayed with a large card on which was printed, “Presented by the members of Mobberley Women’s Institute.” The surgeons told us they had wanted these instruments for a long while but could not afford them.’
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Most counties had military bases or camps billeted in their area and these were not just British units. From 1940 there was a contingent of Canadian troops and two years later the first of the American soldiers arrived, reaching a total of 770,000 by 1943. At the beginning, when the camps were predominantly occupied by British forces, the institutes became involved in washing and mending clothes, organising parties and dances as entertainment. These were encouraged and were popular with both the men stationed in far-flung corners of the country and the women who were able to put on the events. These might range from a supper and dance for a few dozen men to a fully fledged party for 200. The WI was also involved with running military canteens, sometimes in cooperation with the WVS but often on their own initiative.

Thornton Hough WI on the Wirral had their own hall which had opened in 1931. It was used for catering for local troops and hospitals. They were only a small institute but were open on Sunday afternoons for soldiers based at Levers School and Raby
camps. ‘Members took it in turns to serve egg and chips or poached egg on toast to provide comfort for the troops.’ The WI also catered for the summer fete at Thornton Manor and members helped with catering when a convalescence hospital for the forces opened there later in the war. They also had a canteen for troops housed in huts at Clatterbridge Hospital. Grayshott WI opened a canteen in the Scout Hut in the village and served 670 meals a day. The canteens were a great boon for the soldiers but it was a lot of work for the women. Nella Last did a regular slot at her local canteen in Barrow-in-Furness, which she enjoyed, though not when the soldiers got too rowdy. As well as working in the canteen she served in a charity shop and also did a stint at the Red Cross Centre. It was exhausting work but when she wondered to herself why she did it she came to the conclusion that it was because she hoped someone, somewhere, would be serving her son, Cliff: ‘Every soldier I serve has my Cliff’s face – every merchant seaman has Frank Larkin’s,’ she told a woman who asked her why she was so determined to carry on. Coningsby and Tattershall WI in Lincolnshire ran a canteen for soldiers in the local Temperance Hall. Mrs McFeeters, who was the local doctor’s wife and president of the WI, helped to staff the canteen. She was asked to go in front of the hall committee one day as it had been reported that the soldiers had been heard to sing ‘Roll out the Barrel’. The canteen closed in May 1941, not because of the singing but because it was no longer possible to get supplies.

The appreciation felt by soldiers for the efforts made by the WIs is evident from the many references to letters of warm thanks for entertainment, refreshments, hot baths, clothes repairs and sock-darning. It was not a given that all WIs would be prepared to undertake mending work. Mrs McFeeters asked her membership to vote on the issue of whether they should undertake darning for the RAF. The result was 10:1 in favour but by
1942 they had to give up their knitting party as there was no coupon-free wool available. Some WIs, such as Warton in Lancashire, received so many such letters that reading them became a permanent feature of their meetings. Private Fred Evans wrote to Mrs Walker: ‘Thank you so much for mending my shirt. I couldn’t see the tear anymore and it was comfortable again. You did a grand job. Give my love to Missy and say I’ll see her again soon.’ Gloucestershire institutes made such an impact on a regiment stationed temporarily in the county that the week after the soldiers left a cheque for £5 was received by the county ‘for WI funds’. At another party an aircraft engineer won a teapot full of chocolates as a prize. ‘He returned it to be sold and a colleague won it, kept the teapot for a lady friend and returned the chocolates.’
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It was not just men that the WIs entertained. There were women’s units stationed around the country too. Radley decided to invite girls from the WAAF to a party in August 1942: ‘It was decided to entertain the guests from 7.30–10.0 with progressive games followed by dancing and community singing. It was agreed to buy bread and cakes from WI funds, the members to provide tea, milk, jam, butter, margarine and tomatoes. Prizes were promised by Mrs. Wrinch (jam), Mrs. Talboys (toilet soap), Mrs. Paton (toilet soap), Mrs. Hellard (cake), Miss Greening (book) and Mrs. Drysdale (fruit). Cigarettes (to be handed round) to be provided by members not giving prizes.’

Lady Denman had particularly mentioned her Women’s Land Army girls when she asked her institutes for help at the beginning of the war. Many of these young women, she told them, would come from the cities and have no experience of the countryside. In 1940 she published an appeal to farmers’ wives to help her out by considering how best to approach the thorny issue of persuading farmers and gardeners of the potential value of employing
members of the Women’s Land Army, for which she was responsible. ‘The Women’s Institutes and the Women’s Land Army are each helping in the campaign for more food production. Women’s Institute members can do much by their influence and encouragement to enable the Land Army to take its full share in this task. The prejudice against a woman attempting to do a man’s work dies hard.’
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The main problem was that most girls who joined the Land Army had never worked in the countryside. Many had been barmaids, waitresses, hairdressers or millworkers before joining up. They came in great numbers from London and the industrial cities in the north and found the outdoor life in the isolated countryside a big change. Initially almost all the girls lived in lodgings or billets close to or on the farms where they worked. These could be cottages with the families of other workers, or in the farmhouse with the farmer’s family. Farmers and their wives often looked down on them if they came from the poorer areas of cities. There are many records of kindnesses extended to the Women’s Land Army, from offers of hot baths when none were available in their billets, to invitations to WI meetings and events, high tea or lunch on Sundays with individual members and invitations to dances if troops were stationed close by.

Ruth Toosey had responsibility for the welfare of the land girls in her village, of which there were about fifteen. They used to come to the White House where the Tooseys lived for a weekly get-together after tea and Mrs Toosey would listen to their stories and hear their complaints or worries. One unfortunate land girl got pregnant during the war, so her advice was clearly needed, if not always listened to. Mrs Milburn referred to the nine land girls who regularly visited Burleigh for baths and tea as ‘my’ girls. She wrote to them regularly after they were moved on to another farm as they were part of a mobile unit that went
where work was required. The WLA reached its maximum strength in July 1943 with 87,000 workers. As the food shortages increased and the amount of available male labour for farmers decreased so they began to see the value of the land girls. One wrote:

They drove a tractor, harrowed up twitch, which they carted and burned, had a whole week’s threshing, one on the corn stacks and the other on the straw stacks, taking a man’s place in each case, and keeping pace with the men. They fed and cleaned out pigs and learnt to milk daily, they picked potatoes and took on four acres of beet, of which they made an excellent job . . . I found them cheerful and willing, with never a grumble in rain or storm, always sensibly clad and happy. Girls like this cannot but help to win the war.
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