Jambusters (40 page)

A letter from Margaret Funnell of Bideford in Devon shed a little personal light on a wartime WI. She was an evacuee from Guernsey living near the Bude WI hall in Cornwall. When meetings were held she and her friends would climb up the outside wall to peep inside. ‘One day a lady came out and invited three or four of us to watch a cookery demonstration. We were taken to chairs in the very front row and seemed to be given particular attention by the demonstrator. As she worked she stressed the importance of handling the mixture as little as possible and rolling out the pastry on
one
side only. Afterwards we were invited to taste her cookery – a treat in wartime!’ Margaret was about ten years old at the time but she told me that when making pastry she can still hear and see that lady giving her advice, which she continues to follow even now, seventy years on.

Janet Melvin was born in 1938 and her mother was a member of Woodmansterne WI in Surrey. She remembered that the WI meetings were held in the local village hall. Once she was taken to a big meeting dressed up in her Sunday best with white gloves and her Easter bonnet. All the women present were dressed in their best clothes too. ‘I was told by my mother that I was
not
allowed to move. A big imposing lady came to talk to us about WI jam-making.’ Janet does not know who the lady was but as we spoke we both wondered whether or not it might have been Lady Denman herself.

Although trips and visits during the war were difficult to arrange because of the lack of fuel, Mobberley members did manage to get to make a farm visit in Derbyshire. The weather was terrible and Mrs Wright, wearing her WI badge, offered to go and ask at the old farmhouse whether they had come to the right place. When the door opened and the old lady inside saw the badge she grabbed her arm and pulled her inside, giving her chapter and verse on her own experiences with the WI during the last war. The rest of the women joined her for home-made tea and a walk around the farm, concluding that ‘it was one outing we will all remember for it gave that old lady so much pleasure to have so many members around her’.
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Betty Houghton had joined her WI at Chiddingly in East Sussex at sixteen. She was not the only teenage member: ‘You have to understand that there was not much else on offer for women in the villages at the time. I would say that most people living in cottages had some association with the WI. It is important to emphasise that the WI’s role was and remains principally one of education. It taught women things, gave them skills, helped them to try something out that they might take further.’ Betty, who was musical, remembered the social side of the WI in wartime. She used to take her gramophone to WI meetings and play classical music to the women during the social half-hour. She joined the WI choir in Chiddingly, which had a good reputation, and she remembered a high point when Dr Malcolm Sargent, as he was then, came to adjudicate at a county-wide choir competition. ‘Music kept people’s spirits up, it kept people happy,’ she said. Her mother was a good musician and used to play the piano to accompany the Chiddingly WI choir. Mrs Dayrrell felt that it was her role as president to conduct the choir but it was not her forte and Betty’s mother used to conduct from the piano by moving her shoulders up and down to indicate when
people had to come in. ‘The WI was a great place to start something, to find out if you liked it and the great thing was that nobody would ever say “You are no good.” The attitude was “You have a go.”’

A letter from Alwyn Benbow in Shrewsbury shared a wonderful memory of her mother’s wartime activities:

Late evening my father would take the heavy metal cover off the large underground water tank in the yard. He would lean down with a bucket and scoop up the water. This was to fill the huge boiler in the kitchen. Then he would lay the fire for the next morning in the grate under the boiler. Several of my mother’s WI friends would arrive the following day and using the canner, probably on loan from WI house, would fill and seal cans of seasonal fruit or vegetables from the orchard. I remember the noise and bustle and laughter of friends together. I also remember my fear every time my father bent down to fill the buckets, and even when we played games, we never dared to step on the heavy metal cover over the deep, dark tank.

So what happened to the women whose personal stories have featured in this book?

Lady Denman resigned from her position of Director of the Woman’s Land Army in February 1945 in protest at the government’s refusal to award the land army the grants and benefits that had been accorded to women who had been in the forces and Civil Defence. She continued as Chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes until 1946 when she was succeeded by Lady Albemarle. In 1951 she was appointed GBE in recognition of her war work with the Women’s Land Army. She died on 2 June 1954 and her ashes were scattered at Balcombe Place. She had the pleasure of seeing the WI’s own education college in
Marcham in Oxfordshire named after her. Denman College continues to thrive.

Miss Farrer was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1950 and continued as General Secretary to became the longest-serving to date, retiring in 1959 after thirty years in the post. She died in January 1977 at the age of eighty-one.

The German delegate at the 1939 annual general meeting, Gräfin Keyserlingk, had been on the national committee of the
Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine
from 1922, although the movement was banned by the Nazis in 1933. After her return to Germany she spent the war near Schweidnitz (now Świdnica in Poland) and was forced to flee before the Russians in 1945. Five years later she was elected an honorary member of the International Council of Women. She died in Baden-Baden in West Germany in February 1958 in her seventy-ninth year.

Mrs Milburn’s son Alan finally rang her from Leamington Spa station at midnight on 10 May. She dressed quickly and drove to pick him up: ‘At the station I saw the trellised metal gates closed at the entrance and in front of them were two figures, one in khaki in a beret and a figure in blue. The khaki beret wouldn’t be Alan, I thought, but it detached itself, came to the car and said: “Is it Ma?”, and so out I flung myself and . . . we had a good hug and a kiss and then soon were speeding home, talking hard.’ For the next few days she made tours of the village and neighbourhood, exulting in his safe return and people’s evident joy to see the family reunited: ‘I had a special message from Berkswell WI Committee expressing their delight at Alan’s return.’
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Two days later she wrote: ‘I walk about in a half-dream and the long bad years of war begin to fade a little as Alan’s voice is heard . . . and the house is once more a real home. The intense relief at the ending of the European war is felt everywhere. No longer do we live under the strain of it, though we shall have it at the back of
our mind, and its scars before our eyes, all our lives.’
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Mrs Milburn’s husband, Jack, died in 1955 and Alan was killed tragically in a car accident in 1959. Mrs Milburn died eighteen months later at the age of seventy-seven.

Peggy Sumner continued to share with her sister Marjorie the house in Hale where she and her parents had lived before the war. Once petrol rationing was lifted she was able to take her Morris 10 off the blocks it had been sitting on since rationing began. She remembered no major celebrations, just a gradual return of peacetime conditions, and of course she was free to attend WI meetings once again. She and her sister used to drive the Morris down to Cornwall on holiday and continued to do so until the car ‘died of a broken heart – a valve went – in 1960’. The biggest changes in the WI for Peggy were the outings arranged after the war. ‘We went to Reaseheath Agricultural College and Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. I went to Denman College in 1949. Then in 1951 we had a trip to London to visit the Festival of Britain and another one to a major craft exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.’ Peggy got drawn into more and more WI activities. She joined a WI choir, she went to dances and always tried to have a go when something new was suggested.

The great thing about the WI is that you are one of a few who are all trying things out. You get drawn into it and that makes you want to encourage others to join. There is nothing you can tell a non-member to make her join. She has to appreciate what it can be, what it can mean to her, what it can do for her. I have seen members scared to open their mouths when they first joined who have ended up as President or on the county committee. Nowadays the WI has the feeling of an extended family for me.

Mrs Ward remained involved in Bradfield WI, occasionally as president, and the family went on farming at Copyhold Farm until Mr and Mrs Ward retired in 1976. After leaving school her daughter Dorcas went to Girton College, Cambridge to study History. When she left university she became a housing manager in London and ended up doing policy work. During the 1960s she worked for three years in Hong Kong. ‘I missed the Beatles and the Swinging Sixties!’ she said. She retired to Frilsham, not far from Bradfield, and contributed to a book published as a tribute to a local woman called Felicity Palmer, who was described as a ‘farmer, natural historian and scholar’. In 2011 she published a history of Bradfield Village.

Mrs Sims remained as active as ever, taking on a variety of voluntary jobs and sitting on committees, including the WI, right up to when she died in 1996 at the age of ninety-two. Her daughter Ann studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama as a student in her twenties, having spent a few years working as a farm pupil and a secretary. She joined Bradfield WI in 1966 and held most offices on the committee over the years. She remained an active member until her death in May 2013. She said of the WI: ‘it has been part of my life since I was a child. If you scratch my skin you’ll see I’m WI through and through.’

Ruth Toosey lived at the White House almost until the end of her life. Her husband, a major in the army, was killed in Normandy in 1944. She became one of nearly 250,000 war widows who were left to bring up their families on their own after the Second World War. The WI provided continuity and a shared understanding in those circumstances. I remember her as a great character with a deep laugh and a wonderful twinkle in her eye. Her daughter, Caroline, had four sons and now lives in Nantwich in Cheshire.

Gwen Bark gave birth to a baby daughter, Mary, in 1946, at
which point she resigned from the committee of Tarporley WI in Cheshire though she continued to be a member for another twenty years. She joined her husband as a partner in the GP practice once the children were all at school. She always wore a tweed suit when working, Mary remembered, and was much loved and respected. She died in 1968 at the age of fifty-five.

After the war Sybil Norcott married Les, a tenant farmer like her father. Her wedding present from her parents were two ingilt pigs and not long afterwards they had twenty-four piglets. Sybil took her exams in butchery via a grant given by the WI. The qualification for butchery was examined in Dolgellau and before she could teach she had to pass the test for pig curing. As petrol was still rationed she had to take her wares in a suitcase on the train. ‘It was incredibly heavy. I lugged this great big suitcase across the platform and when people asked me what I had in there I told them books. But in fact I had a ham, picnic ham, cut from the shoulder, a side of bacon all cured with saltpetre and honey, and fresh sausages.’ She passed her examination and returned to Cheshire with a lighter suitcase. She became ever more active within the WI, benefiting from any number of courses on offer, including public speaking. ‘Les was marvellous. He never begrudged me going to the WI. On the contrary he encouraged it. He had his own interests. He was a great bowler and used to coach the young farmers’ cricket team.’ In 1976 Sybil became a TV star, featuring as a guest cook on Yorkshire Television’s
Farmhouse Kitchen
. Could she have done all this without the WI? Unlikely. The WI had the structure to nurture her talent and the outlet for her to exploit that talent and put it to good use. From a wild country girl who liked nothing better than to dig her patch with her special spade and watch the barn owl rearing her owlets, she blossomed into an expert on the WI’s national stage. She said, in summing up her seventy years in the
WI (and counting): ‘If I had not been in the WI I would not have demonstrated for the NFWI at Earls Court. I would not have met the Queen three times and done a demonstration for her. I would never have done all this without the WI.’

Edith Jones continued to be a member of Smethcote WI. She and Jack retired to Church Stretton in 1947 and she remained an active member of the community. Her great-niece Chris recalled that she

always made a bit of time to improve herself. She encouraged me to read and my brother and I were both great readers, probably as a result of her enthusiasm. She was always game to have a go at anything. The WI was an abiding interest and even when her husband was slipping away in 1958 she made sure that her cakes were delivered to the WI meeting before going into hospital to see him. As she got older and was less active my mother would go down to her cottage to help in the garden and would invariably find Edith sitting on the porch, chatting to passersby. When she had a hip operation she had to come and stay with us at the farm to recuperate. One morning my mother heard a terrible crash at the bottom of the stairs and rushed to the hall to see Edith coming downstairs on her bottom having thrown her crutches down first. She had no intention of asking anyone to help her. She was a great character.

Edith died on 23 December 1980, just a few weeks short of her 97th birthday.

‘The WI was a big part of Edith’s life. When she left Smethcote and my parents took over the farm, my mother joined in her place and I too have been a member of Smethcote WI, so that there has been a family member in the Institute continually since it was formed in 1931,’ Chris said.