Jambusters (35 page)

From the outbreak of the war Lady Denman and the National Executive had tried to reinforce the message that the war should not stop the WI from its campaigns for improving life in the countryside. Although the war interrupted normal proceedings of the administration in many ways, the WI tried as hard as it could to keep going with national committees and urged their
county colleagues to try to keep to their regular schedule of meetings as well. The annual general meeting was traditionally held in London but for the first four years of the war this was not possible. Restrictions on travel prevented many women from attending and the bombing meant that all but essential visits to the capital were to be avoided. Other national meetings could take place in cities outside London. In March 1941 Lady Denman announced at a Consultative Council meeting that the WI should begin preparing for a post-war world. Planning for reconstruction was not easy, she conceded, since so many WI officers at national and county level were committed to other jobs and the work had to get done with fewer meetings. But it was vital work and the meetings had to go on so that they could get stimulus and guidance from one another.

A great opportunity has been given us through the food production and preservation work. We should not forget the permanent results: (a) sounder diet, (b) the opportunity to get more County Council teachers. To carry out this work, the best possible machinery – WI and Council Meetings, Produce Guild rallies – are all as necessary as in peacetime; so is the election of good committees. Only through WI meetings can members realize the importance of their contribution to the national effort.
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This last point underlines once again the extraordinary reach of the WI, from the grass roots in rural villages to the National Executive Committees who had the ear of government. Now, in the middle of the war, Lady Denman urged institute presidents not to overlook their WI work while helping with other war work such as the Red Cross or WVS. ‘We are a permanent body and reforms such as an increase in the number of women police, the provision of milk for necessitous town evacuees and of school
meals for children are very much our concern, more so than that of the wartime organizations.’
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It was the permanence of the WI over the other organisations and the many bodies concerned with wartime food and rationing that gave planning for the future relevance. Issues that had been of concern to the movement in the lead-up to the war – rural housing, sewage and electricity provision, more women police, equal pay, school meals, analgesics for women giving birth at home – continued to occupy the WI throughout the 1940s. They lobbied ministries and badgered MPs as much as they had ever done.

In June 1942 Lady Denman broadcast a fifteen-minute speech on the BBC to her membership. It was a propaganda coup since many more listened in to the broadcast, including non-WI members, than could possibly have heard her speak at an AGM. She talked about how hard it was to run the WI in wartime when meetings were so difficult to organise, particularly national ones, and she likened herself to a captain of a ship unable to get messages to her crew about their destination:

The crew carries on, but it must do its best to guess what course to take. If I am considered as captain of the ship I must say that all the other members of the crew have done their utmost to find out the wishes of Institutes who should be directing our course; and we look forward to the day when you can again take charge. I do not want to press this simile too far but you Institute members not only direct the course of the ship of the National Federation, you also provide its motive power, its engines. Engines of about 300,000 woman-power sound pretty powerful to me.
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Never one to miss the opportunity to point out the value of the WI, she went on to say: ‘I hope that this figure will also impress
those who are planning for the future and that they will remember that our powerful woman-power machine should be used to the full for the improvement of country life . . .’

One issue that had been bothering the WI since the 1930s was the question of water and sewerage in villages. A questionnaire had been sent to institutes in 1942 and the response had been overwhelming. In 1939 some 30 per cent of villages had no running water and over half were not on main drains. Pumping and carrying water was a daily chore for thousands of households and made the task of washing and cleaning that much more difficult, especially in frosty or especially dry conditions. In 1944 the National Federation circulated the results of the questionnaire, which showed that in some villages 75 per cent of inhabitants had no piped water in their homes and nearly 100 per cent had no main drains. Herefordshire, which had a particularly bad water supply, commented: ‘No village in time of drought or frost has an adequate supply and quite 50 per cent have an inadequate supply at all times.’
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Bradfield took part in the survey and Mrs Ward made notes about who surveyed which parts of the village. The request had come from the county and she wrote: ‘The question of water and sanitation in rural areas was considered so urgent that it was decided to undertake the detailed survey asked for in the letter.’ Nine members volunteered to conduct the house-to-house survey with Mrs Ward taking responsibility for Mariner’s Road. Their survey revealed that most houses managed with ‘earth closets or primitive water closets that drained into malodorous cess pits or more scientific septic tanks’. It was not until the mid-1950s that the village would get main drains. Ann Tetlow remembered perennial problems with the septic tank at their house which constantly overflowed, leaving the garden and the farmer’s field beyond in a smelly, soggy condition. ‘The trouble
was that my father had a cold bath every morning, my mother bathed us every evening and she herself would have a bath before she went to bed so that the septic tank was overwhelmed and the garden was often a bit rank.’ When Ann moved into her own cottage in 1966 just down the road from her family home it had no mains water, no drains and a bucket loo. Electricity was also missing. All these were speedily rectified but it illustrates just how much work had to be done even in villages that were not so far from towns with good amenities.

Mrs Walshe from Danbury WI in Essex had written to complain that

in many little houses all over the country there is no sanitary appliance except a pail. The gardens of these houses, many of them very small, cannot grow food because the soil is polluted. There is also the question of the many rural schools which still have no sanitary appliances except pails. The Ministry of Health is very busy organising inoculation against diphtheria, but surely one essential method of fighting this and other dangerous diseases, such as scarlet fever, is to raise the standard of sanitation for all the people.
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As late as 1944,
Home & Country
published an article on how to manage an earth closet. It started with a cheerful assertion that if you have no drains in the house then there are no drains to go wrong. ‘But, and there is a very big but, an earth closet can be the most unpleasant thing in the world if it is not managed correctly.’
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Sybil Norcott’s family home outside Dunham Massey had an outside privy and she remembered a funny story when one of her mother’s friends, Aunt Rose, who had married a shipping director and lived in a smart house with modern sanitation, came to stay on the farm for a holiday.

Aunt Rose was used to a flush lavatory at home whereas here the lavatory was outside – a scrubbed wooden seat over a bucket in an outhouse not far from the kitchen. Martin, our Irish farmhand, was bringing the morning milk into the house to be sieved when Aunt Rose came in from the loo and said: ‘Hannah, you have no lock on the toilet door.’ Martin remarked: ‘Eh, missus, we’ve never had anyone pinch a bucket ‘a shit yet.’ Poor Mum!

Earlier that year the government had published a White Paper suggesting what might be done to bring water to nearly every house and farm ‘where practicable’. One of the problems was that there were over 1,000 water companies in Britain at the time and the government had to decide how to amalgamate the companies in order to provide water to remote households.

Sceptics too will find themselves wondering over those words ‘a piped water supply where practicable’. Practicable according to whom? There are WIs who before the war appealed in vain to the rural district councils for a piped water supply. They were told it was impracticable. Yet with the building of an aerodrome or an American camp a piped water supply was provided without difficulty. In Switzerland and in Sweden it is found practicable to supply even remote villages with water, electricity and telephones.
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This rankled many village householders and in their report the NFWI asked the question: ‘There appear to be ample supplies for Military camps. Water is practicable and reasonable for soldiers in wartime. Are we ratepayers and housewives going to insist that it is practicable and reasonable for civilian family life in time of peace?’
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The government had spent money on providing water supplies to rural villages during the 1930s and had succeeded in bringing water to 70 per cent of these areas. As the WI pointed out, however, these were the easiest 70 per cent to reach, the remaining 30 per cent being more inaccessible. In 1944 the government agreed to allocate grants for water and drainage. How far would the money stretch? the WI asked. ‘Many of the houses already served with water have no drainage. Even some of the agricultural cottages built this year have no water laid on, in some cases in spite of ample water being available.’
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Bedfordshire was one of the counties that had a good piped water supply with only one or two villages relying on a private scheme. Nearly all the houses had taps or standpipes, with the majority being served by the latter. Nevertheless five villages had to rely on wells and in three, Dean, Turvey and Milton Ernest, several villagers had to go more than 200 yards for a piped water supply. Counties further north, like Lancashire, were worse off. In Hoghton thirty-six households shared five wells, Great Dalby in Leicestershire was a village where eighty houses had to share three pumps, and Farley Hill in Berkshire had to pay water rates, yet 80 per cent of their householders had to carry water half a mile.

Answers to the sewerage question were even more shocking. In twenty-six English and Welsh counties half the houses surveyed had only earth, bucket or chemical closet and in Hampshire the figure rose to 77 per cent. In the worst case they could quote Bidford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, where twenty-one people living in three houses shared one bucket lavatory. The summary ended: ‘In Cerne Abbas (Dorset) sanitation is described as deplorable and not much improved since Tudor days.’
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What irritated the women carrying out the survey more almost than the insanitary conditions for the householders were those in the country schools where in twenty-one counties half of all schools had
only earth or bucket lavatories. In Shropshire five schools were entirely without any form of water supply and ‘earth closets in village schools of all counties are quite usual and with the wartime difficulty of finding adequate school cleaners, school hygiene – if one can use that word in connection with earth closets – becomes a nauseous mockery.’
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At a school in Gloucestershire the pails were emptied into a drain which had not itself been emptied for forty years. Eighty yards below the drain was a pump supplying fourteen houses with water in times of drought. There was much to be done and the WI promised to lobby the government and follow closely the official survey into water supplies to ensure that the maximum pressure was put on local councils not to shirk responsibility for what they regarded as a scandalous situation. The battle over piped water and drains continued for another decade and it was only in the latter half of the 1950s that the majority of village homes had their own water supply. As the WI had pointed out in 1942, it did not seem very much to ask to be able to turn on a tap in the home and have running water.

In 1943 the WI decided to hold its AGM in London. As usual it was organised over a period of two days in June and despite ‘stygian travel’, as Lady Denman put it, almost everyone managed to arrive at the Royal Albert Hall on time, though the guest of honour was gracious enough to delay the start of her speech by a minute in order for delegates who had been held up on trains and buses to get to their seats. The National Executive had tried to keep the identity of their special guest a secret and there was tremendous excitement and anticipation as the Queen stood up and addressed the 8,000 women in the hall:

Through the institutes the energies of thousands of countrywomen have been organised in directions essential to victory. The care of evacuated children, the preservation of thousands of tons of fruit, the collection of salvage – these are only some of the jobs tackled by village women through their respective institutes. As Joint President with Queen Mary of our own Institute at Sandringham – where I am glad to think that we have three generations of our family as members – I know how deeply concerned our members are in these problems.
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The next speaker was the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Robert Hudson MP, who elicited a huge roar of approval when he began:

I could not help wondering, when I came into this great hall this morning, what the Nazis would think of a gathering like this. That is, if you can imagine them allowing women to have the audacity to organise and run a national movement of this sort. Your gathering is a tribute to the living force of democracy. In the fourth year of a world struggle, it is a very great achievement to have gathered together so representative an audience from all corners of England. I should like to congratulate you, Lady Denman, and your Federation on its wisdom and initiative in reviving the full democratic working of its machinery.
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