Jambusters (37 page)

Betty Houghton’s family lived in a bungalow in the Gun Hill end of Chiddingly village, which had its own well and tank, so with the use of a petrol-driven pump they were able to have water in the house. The heating was paraffin stoves and a coke boiler but they also had open fires that burned logs and coal. They had an Aga range from 1935 and two flush loos, so that their house was well equipped. At first, lighting was by paraffin lamps but by about 1935 they ran another Petter engine to charge up the accumulators. These methods of water production, heating and lighting were still in use in 1955 when Betty’s parents left Chiddingly. Although they had no electricity they had a telephone. Their number was 14, so they too were early adopters.

Ruth Toosey also had a telephone. Her number was Tarvin 23. The woman who ran the telephone exchange made a point of knowing a lot about what was going on in her area and on one occasion someone rang the exchange and asked to be put through to Tarvin 23 but was told: ‘You won’t get Mrs Toosey. She’s just gone into Chester on the bus, wearing a new hat.’

The demands of the institute members were not extravagant. Most women wanted three rooms downstairs with a separate hall or scullery for storing muddy boots, a perennial problem of the country housewife the report notes, but women in Durham and Gloucestershire said they would prefer just two rooms. A sign that so few women had fridges or expected to have one in the near future, since a large number of villages still had no electricity, was the insistence on a north-facing larder fitted with a cold slab.

‘There was no unanimous opinion about the aspect of kitchen or living room except a general demand that both should be light. It seems clear that new housing estates should be planned with a choice of aspects except for the back door. Everyone agrees that there is only one possible aspect for that –
away –
from one’s neighbour. Side-by-side or face-to-face back doors have no supporters.’
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The interesting point about the report is the intimate detail it provides of the inside of a country cottage in the 1940s and, judging by the relatively modest demands of the members who contributed to the survey, the quite primitive conditions which must have prevailed in many homes. It is striking, for example, that a majority of women wanted electric lighting but some expressly preferred gas. Coal was preferred for heating, while gas and electricity were equally popular for cooking. In Wales many households still cooked on open fires and a few women were sceptical about cookers, though these were in the minority. Ranges were popular as they served the purpose of providing hot water and a place to dry clothes in an emergency as well as giving off heat for the kitchen. Some women who focused on the minutiae even suggested that a small drying room could be built off the back of the kitchen with a gap in the wall to take advantage of the heat from the cooking range. What surprised the authors of the report was the fact that no one opted for oil as their first choice of solid fuel, either for heating or cooking. What surprised this current author is the revelation that members thought there should be heating provided in at least one of the bedrooms. Just one?

Edith Jones considered submitting a design for a house. Although only ten miles from Shrewsbury and just two miles off the A49, Smethcote was and remains today very quiet. The village had no electricity or piped water, nor was it on main drains. In fact houses still use septic tanks, though water and electricity did eventually come to Smethcote well after the war. Red House Farm was similar to other houses in the area, with an outside privy, oil lamps and a pump in the kitchen. Chris explained what the house had been like when her parents moved to the farm in 1947 after Edith and Jack retired:

The house had a phone – Leebotwood 69 – long before it had electricity. The only tap in the house was the pump in the brown sink in the kitchen and the loo was a good twenty yards from the house. You went out of the back door, up three steps and along a path, passed an old brick building which had hens in it and to the loo beyond the yew tree. Not a nice experience in the cold, wet or dark. And it was a two seater. One of the neighbours had a three seater as I recall. I was lucky not to have used it!

In the back of her 1944 diary Edith sketched out the floor plan of an ideal farmhouse with a list of notes that included central heating to one room downstairs, a water supply and a veranda under which she could hang her washing even on wet days. It is striking, looking at the sketch, how very similar the layout is to Red House Farm, where she had lived since 1914. The main difference was her requirement for a few more mod cons such as electricity and mains water. Though she had a pump in the kitchen that brought water from a well close to the back of the house, it was hard water and not ideal for her uses. On wash days she would heat water drawn from a wooden rainwater butt that she also used to water the garden. When there was a shortage of this soft water, she was obliged to use pumped water from the well. ‘I added Carbosil which answers very well,’ she wrote after one dry spell. ‘Because of the drying wind, the clothes were dry at midday. Washed Len’s smock not before it needed it!’ When she could not get the clothes dry outside she would hang them in the Dutch barn at the other end of the farmyard.

Most of Edith’s cooking was done on a black range, though she did have a brick oven in the wash-house, but she also liked to experiment with other methods. On one occasion she wrote: ‘I have some spare time so make a hay box for cookery. I have often thought of doing this but it never materialised till now. I wonder
if it will be a success.’ It was. The following day she was able to report: ‘I tried the hay box. It cooked the carrots nicely after 5 or 10 minutes on the fire, so it does act.’ The trick when using a hay box was to make sure that the pan was well heated on the fire prior to being put into the hay box so that the food inside would continue cooking, well insulated by the hay. It was the predecessor to the slow cooker and Edith gradually gained confidence using it, succeeding in cooking hams as well as vegetables.

What occupied the minds of the contributors to the questionnaire more than cooking, heating or aspect was the question of storage and the need for more cupboards. ‘Storage space is a special need of country families and too often it has been forgotten by the urban-minded architect. Some members ask for a perambulator porch, and many ask for a covered way to the coalshed. Some ask for a chute from coal-shed to kitchen. A few would like cellars and many would like a loft for storage.’
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Another reminder of the lack of modern conveniences is the request for an ‘outside copper for washing’. Mrs Watt’s dream in 1935 that with unlimited money she would give every rural housewife a washing machine was well ahead of its time. A few institutes came down in favour of having communal wash houses in their villages, but that was the exception, most women wanted to have such amenities privately available and to have some form of facility, as well as an airing cupboard, for drying clothes indoors on wet days. Pulleys hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen that could be lowered on a rope were common in many village houses and people alive today still remember the overwhelming smell of damp washing hanging around the house after wash day, traditionally a Monday.

There was no assumption, either, that public transport would be laid on for the village, in fact one WI suggested that having a communal bicycle might be desirable as a way of getting around.
Welsh members felt it was reasonable to be expected to walk or ride three to four miles to get to local schools, shops, chapel or church and the WI hall, whereas English members, both north and south, preferred a shorter distance of just half a mile, although most were prepared to walk up to twenty minutes to get to a bus stop to take them into town on market days.

The questionnaire asked for very specific details about the hard furnishings such as doorknobs, windowsills and stairs, all of which were answered by the women in the same way. They had to be easy to reach, clean and maintain. It is a reminder of just how much of a woman’s time in the 1940s was spent dusting and cleaning, mainly on account of the dirt and dust produced by open fires. The annual spring clean was a feature of life which has now all but disappeared. Most women requested washable wallpaper, picture rails, a bell and letter box on the front door. They wanted large windows that could be reached and cleaned from the inside and varnished paint on woodwork that could be wiped down with a damp cloth.

What is clear from the report produced by the WI is that women felt very strongly about how the home could and should be improved and there was no sense in their conclusions that what had been good enough for their mothers was good enough for them. They saw this as a real opportunity to make their voices heard and to push for significant improvements that would make their day-to-day lives easier and more efficient. An upshot of the housing survey was the determination felt by many institutes that no significant changes could be made without a strong representation of women’s views.

In 1943 two WI members were appointed to two government housing committees. The first was Mrs Methuen to the Rural Housing (Hobhouse) Committee and the second was Miss Haworth to the Design of Dwellings (Dudley) Committee. Their
greatest success, however, came just after the end of the war when Mrs Jew of Wilnecote WI in Warwickshire received a letter from Aneurin Bevan asking her to join the Central Housing Advisory Committee in 1946. Mrs Jew was just thirty-two years old and had a young family. After her appointment she gave an interview to her local newspaper spelling out her ideas for the perfect home, which was not the one she was currently living in. She wanted a kitchen with utility room for drying washing on wet days. She also wanted a kitchen diner – too much running about for housewives with food. But she realised that most of all the country needed houses and the key was to build them with space to accommodate fitments if possible. She pointed out anomalies, like building prefab houses without fireplaces in mining communities where miners got a coal allowance. Mrs Jew brought an intensely practical approach to considering housing questions.

An article that appeared in the
Daily Mirror
reminds us of the attitude towards women in 1946:

Busy Wife Will Be Advisor On Labour Saving.

When the Ministry of Health asked Mrs Verena Jew to serve on a committee advising on domestic equipment they chose a woman with ideas. Plump Verena knows from experience all the snags of the average house. In the Warwickshire village of Wilnecote, Tamworth, she runs a 7 roomed rambling house single handed, copes with a four year old daughter and an eighteen month old son, rears pigs, poultry and runs a garden as well.

Just to put the record straight on ‘plump Verena’, she was far from the homely housewife implied in this particularly patronising piece.
The seventh of eleven children, she had come from a poor home. As a child she had lived in a house with paraffin lamps where all cooking was done over an open fire. Her family had not been able to afford to let her study at college so she had worked as a nanny but she was determined to continue with her education. She studied at evening school and by correspondence course to become a writer. She wrote children’s books before the war that were published by Pitman and used as school readers in the 1940s. During the war she trained as a nurse and was a busy member of her WI. She was invited to London in 1943 to speak at a London Housing Brains trust representing Warwickshire, which she did and loved. Being chosen by the WI for the Housing Committee came out of the blue but was a very welcome challenge. She said: ‘Country life can be made just as easy as town life. Electricity, power plugs and running water are essential in every house. Why should some of us go on living like our grandmothers?’

In 1943 the National Executive once again canvassed its membership for views. This time it dealt with education and once again there was an enormous response. Out of the total of 5,800 WIs 4,000 sent back answers to questions such as what the advantages might be of raising the school leaving age from fifteen to sixteen; if state boarding schools were available would you send your children to one for all or part of their school career? Should part-time education for children up to the age of eighteen be compulsory and which subjects should be offered? Should country teachers be paid the same as their town counterparts? Finally there was an open question about what other points women felt were important. Interestingly a majority of women favoured sending their children to boarding school for a part of their education in order to broaden their horizons and give them the opportunity to develop independence and learn to mix with other children from different walks of life. They also all favoured
raising the school leaving age to sixteen as they thought the extra year would offer the children more time to consider what they might do in the future and how vocational training could help them in their desire to continue to live in the countryside. The biggest concern they expressed was for the state of rural schools and time and again the answers to the question about raising the school leaving age was prefaced with the proviso that only on condition that the state of the schools was radically improved. In answer to the open question the majority of women argued for broader subject teaching so that children from an early age learned about the wider world. One institute summed it up: ‘The child should be taught to be a unit of the home, the home a unit of the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood a unit of the country and the country a unit of the world.’
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In March 1943 the WI held a conference in London at which the post-war relief of Europe was discussed. The overall message that came out of the conference was that the WI would be involved in doing more of the same for several years to come: that is to say there would be a continued need for food production and surpluses would be made available to the European countries that most needed them. This would lend new impetus and purpose to the Produce Guild. Members of the Guild of Learners would be asked to make increased use of their skills in teaching thrift crafts – knitting, sewing and making garments, toys and household furnishings for people abroad. There was also an emphasis on learning more about the international situation that would be so very different after the war, and a renewed challenge to the WI membership to make a contribution to the new world that would emerge from the dust and rubble of war-torn Europe. Miss Tennant, who was chairman of the International Subcommittee, summarised what the WI’s role would be: ‘It would have been easier and more exciting if we had been told – do this – or do that
and start now – instead we were told to go back to our Institutes to do what we were doing before, more intensively and more thoroughly, but ought we not to feel greatly encouraged and to realize that instead of one side of our work having been stimulated, it is the whole which has been given new significance.’
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