Jambusters (39 page)

10

A FINAL WORD

We ended the last chapter on a note of understanding of just how high the cost had been to women who had battled through the war years and now had to face an austere future. Up to now this book has celebrated the great industry, energy, enthusiasm and determination of the WI not only to survive the war but to do as much as they could for their fellow Britons in the process. In this chapter I want to look at the WI from a slightly different perspective and celebrate it at a more private level.

Seen from the twenty-first century it is hard not to conclude that members of the Women’s Institutes were thoroughly put upon during the Second World War. Actually, I think the picture is more complex and interesting than that. First, it is important to remember that WI members were not a separate species but were the mothers, wives, sisters, friends in the local village or community. They might also have been the village postmistress,
the district nurse, the schoolteacher. They might have been married to the local doctor or policeman. Some like Dr Gwen Bark were the local doctor. During the war they could have held several offices or played their part in more than one voluntary organisation. In other words, they were part of the fabric of the community and as such represented women of all types on the rural home front. There was also a very wide spread of wealth, from the poorest women married to farm labourers or, in Northumberland, to miners and industrial workers who lived in villages or, in Cornwall, to fishermen through to the wealthy, landed county gentry, many of whom were as committed to the cause and belief of the WI as their founders in 1915.

Although it would seem that the government asked the earth of them, that they expected them to work for no pay on every conceivable aspect of civilian war work from knitting comforts for the troops to growing surplus vegetables and fruit to feed the nation, from bottling jam to collecting rosehips and foxgloves, from making toys to collecting salvage, or from mending socks to advising on post-war housing, they were accorded a degree of respect from ministers that came as a result of hard-won esteem earned by their twenty-four years of pre-Second World War history. Though others poked gentle fun at the WI and spoke patronisingly of their contribution, assuming them to be relied upon merely to serve tea and refreshment at events, the government knew better than to talk down to Lady Denman and Miss Farrer. Lord Woolton, in his capacity of Minister of Food, was aware that he, through one contact, had access to the largest voluntary women’s organisation in the country and he did not abuse it, though I would argue that he made the most of it. Certainly he asked a lot of the WI but he was always careful to record his thanks, to explain why he was asking them to do so much and above all he made sure he was seen to be supporting
them by turning up at centres or supporting VIP visits. Mr Hudson, in the Ministry of Agriculture, was similarly careful to keep on the right side of the WI and his speech at the 1943 AGM showed a depth of knowledge not only of the countryside but also of the role played by the WI in rural life. Those who showed less understanding and tolerance, such as the civil servants in the Ministry of Supply who made Miss Farrer’s life so difficult in the middle years of the war, demonstrated an ignorance of the relevance of the WI which has in some instances continued to prevail. On a national level the Executive Committee had been desperate to keep spirits up and to emphasise the national importance of their work as praised by the likes of Lord Woolton. Thus an editorial in
Home & Country
published at the very beginning of the war set the tone:

Without doubt, we Women’s Institute members are a remarkable race. What with war, taxes, black-out, rationed cars, nonexistent buses, Stygian railway trains, packed houses, double-shift dinners, anxiety, loss of jobs, and that inexpressible dreariness that besets all war work – the feeling that you are darning a sock painfully with one hand and cutting off the foot with the other – she thought the members might be too busy to write. That doubt is over. There is nothing whatever Institutes are not doing in this war, from leading the Land Army, like their Chairman, down to sharing a saucepan with a lonely London mother, like Mrs Jones down the lane.
¹

After the war the NFWI decided to commemorate the contribution made by women by commissioning a huge piece of needlework which was described in the first stages of its planning as a modern Bayeux Tapestry. The embroidery celebrates the work of women in wartime and took over 400 embroiderers four
years to complete. It measures 15 feet 3 inches by 9 feet and represents contributions from every Federation. Eighteen medallions surround three large central panels showing women working on the land, in industry and in the services. The medallions depict all the different aspects of women’s contributions that have been covered in this book but they also included WVS and ARP work, reflecting the fact that many members were involved in multiple organisations during the war. It is at once an enormous but modest celebration of women’s contribution to the war. Its size is spectacular but it is not triumphal.

That was the public image. But what of the private?

The WI is made up of individual women. It is true that the National Executive was represented predominantly by well-connected women but Lady Denman was unapologetic about that. She used their contacts to the WI’s advantage but she recognised that it was the women in the villages who represented the lifeblood of the organisation.

I would like to introduce one of them whose life was shaped and enriched by her forty-year association with the Women’s Institute. Her name was Alex Toosey and she was my maternal grandmother. There is no doubt in my mind that the WI offered a place of refuge as well as the opportunity for her to make a contribution to improving village life. It gave her somewhere she could be herself, particularly during the war. She could assist but also relax during what for her, like many others, were difficult years. Her husband left home on 31 August 1939 and but for one brief visit, did not set foot in their house again until November 1945. For three and a half years he was a prisoner of the Japanese and in all that time she received only a couple of letters and postcards. She was on her own with her three young children for the entire war.

It is undoubtedly the case that Mrs T, as she was always known,
felt very comfortable in the Women’s Institute. Amongst women she could be herself in a way that perhaps only her grandchildren ever saw. She could laugh about her woeful cooking abilities, which were a joke within Hooton institute, but she could also share her love of growing flowers without feeling self-conscious. Although she probably never pushed a wheelbarrow or wielded a hoe she was known for growing magnificent hyacinths and the fact that flower arranging was one of her passions was underlined by her gift of a vase to the institute on its 21st birthday.

She represented the kind of woman who benefited from contact with the WI in a way that otherwise would have been missing in her life. She belonged to an era before women’s liberation from the slavery of the home. Husbands dominated and the social hierarchy of the village counted for a great deal. This was a time when country families had pews in church and women wore hats to go shopping. Women had less help in the house than their mothers and grandmothers had done and mod cons were still a dream for many. As we have seen, a fridge was a newfangled luxury and few owned one. Until then the larder, north-facing with slate shelves and a chilly feel even in summer, was the repository for fresh ingredients and cooked food alike. Spring cleaning was an annual event and undertaken with method and vigour. Carpets were dragged outdoors to be beaten, walls whitewashed, winter clothes put away and summer clothes and hats brought out of storage, often smelling of mothballs.

My grandmother was a stickler for routine. On Thursdays, after the war, she would drive into Willaston, park her Morris Minor in front of the general store, regardless of the double yellow lines that were painted outside the shop in the mid-1960s, and buy 200 Kent cigarettes and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. She would then very carefully turn the car around and drive home.

She wore her permed grey hair in a hairnet with white beads.
Coloured beads on her hairnet meant it was a special day. She hated anyone touching her head and particularly disliked it when the wind blew her hair. She wore powder on her face and I have a strong memory of the smell of this powder compact, which used to appear regularly, sometimes even at traffic lights while she was driving. She would scrutinise her face and apply the powder with a thin, cream-coloured sponge that lived inside the compact.

I learned not so very long ago that as president of the Hooton Women’s Institute she would check her make-up and apply powder during the reading of the last meeting’s minutes, which new secretaries initially found disconcerting. She adhered so rigidly to the formalities of WI rules for meetings that she once did not turn up to a meeting because the secretary, with whom she had agreed the date at the Executive Committee earlier that week, had failed to write her a letter inviting her to attend.

Underneath this rather fierce exterior was a woman who was as devoted to the Women’s Institute movement as any member of the national council. She was actively involved from the day she joined Burton and Puddington WI in 1933 until 1972 when she retired from WI office at Hooton in her seventy-first year. One of her fellow members described her as someone who was great fun to be with. This surprised me and contrasts with many people’s recollections of my grandmother. They shared my grandfather’s opinion, which he expressed in his autobiography in 1970: ‘we are all very frightened of her but respect her deeply. She is known as Mrs T. or the Regimental Sergeant Major.’

When the war broke out Mrs T was predictably defiant. Someone suggested that given the proximity of her village to Liverpool it would be safer for her to move or allow the children to be evacuated. She announced sternly that if Mr Hitler wished to kill her he would have to do so in her own bed. Throughout
the Blitz on Liverpool she resolutely refused to sleep in a shelter and remained in her bedroom, though she did make the children sleep in the ‘Bogey Hole’ under the stairs, something my mother still recalls with horror. She also remembered that their uncle Stephen’s car was on blocks in the garage throughout the war and Mrs. T kept it stuffed with tins of food, probably obtained on the black market.

Mrs T was not a confident cook and the children have memories of rabbit stew with little bones floating in grey gravy and stewed rhubarb with no sugar. She was, however, a good knitter and produced countless pairs of socks. In 1940 Burton and Puddington had a knitting party that resulted in 850 garments as well as 500 WVS armlets. The minute book records that by 1943 one member had handed in her hundredth pair of socks and that 1,001 had been knitted altogether. As well as knitting, garnishing camouflage nets and looking after the household, Mrs T worked at a WI canteen in Little Sutton making teas and meals for the American troops. Like hundreds of thousands of other women during the war she coped magnificently and like many others she found adjusting to the peace difficult. When my grandfather came back from the Far East she was deposed. She was expected to go back to being a housewife with domestic duties and social expectations and she found this hard to take. Burton and Puddington WI was an active institute during the war. Their membership dropped to twenty-five and they lost their hall to the military in 1939 so had to resort to twice-monthly working party meetings until March 1940 when they were able to get back into Gladstone Village Hall.

The WI continued to be a source of escape, entertainment and enjoyment for her. In fact in 1951 she and a group of women decided the time had come to set up their own, new, institute in the village of Hooton, where she lived, and this became an
absorbing interest for her. She never spoke about it though. It was her private world and we only know how much it meant to her because of the Hooton minute book that shows almost 100 per cent attendance at meetings, and by the comments from members who remember her in those meetings and at WI parties.

When I came to write
Jambusters
I appealed to county federations and to institutes for information about their wartime activities. Several allowed me access to county and institute minute books and although they show snippets of life in wartime they are just records of events and decisions. Sometimes it is possible to read between the lines, such as on the occasion when Audlem decided to substitute ‘Jerusalem’ with ‘God Save the King’ to open their meeting to mark military triumphs in North Africa. Other minute secretaries allowed for tantalising glimpses into their social half-hour activities: ‘Mrs Roberts put on a wonderful series of sketches about people in the village. They were anonymous but we were able to recognise everyone. It was one of the best evenings we have had this year.’ Unfortunately we shall never know who Mrs Roberts was taking off, nor why it was so funny. But perhaps that is right. The WI has been described by many women as a safe haven and they regard it as private and not something to be made public.

In the Cheshire County Federation minutes for January and February 1941 the focus was on a forthcoming visit from Miss Cox. She was due to spend four days in Cheshire, visiting various institutes where she would inspect, advise, attend demonstrations and bring something of head office to Cheshire’s most rural villages. It was an event as eagerly anticipated as any. Yet in the minutes of the May meeting, the month after the event, there was no mention of Miss Cox’s visit, nor is there in any of the institute record books I read. Attention had been focused forward to the manufacture of syrup from beetroot and advice on drying
moleskins. Only
Home & Country
offered any hints of how people had taken part in, celebrated or enjoyed activities, but these were compiled by institutes and sent to the editor, who picked and chose what she wanted. The intimate was hard to find. Linda Oliver, Surrey’s archivist, was hugely helpful in sending through brief memoirs and talks given by their members about the war years and that helped to get the ball rolling. Then the anecdotes began to come in.