Jambusters (6 page)

She was equally impressive when it came to putting her point
of view over to the government. She told the delegates at the 1938 AGM about her experience when the WI launched a campaign for free milk for children:

I do know that very many WIs
did
write to their MPs, for I was one of your representatives who met the Nutrition Group of Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. On that occasion more members came than we expected. One MP suggested that he would have been saved a lot of work if he had received one letter from the Country Federation rather than fifty from individual WIs. I suggested in reply that it was always possible for one letter to be overlooked, whereas fifty were bound to receive attention. Judging by the way this remark was greeted by a chorus of ‘Hear Hear’ and laughter, most of the Members of Parliament entirely agreed that there is strength in a united attack.
¹⁸

Another MP commented that she was worth ten men on a committee.

If Lady Denman brought administrative experience and expertise to the Women’s Institute movement, the woman elected to be vice-chairman in early 1918 brought academic excellence, outstanding communication skills and a kind personality. When Miss Hadow’s name was put forward Lady Denman said: ‘If she will accept, I will scrub her office floor for her!’ They were different in almost every way but they complemented each other well and they had a very warm relationship. Inez Jenkins, who was on the National Executive in the 1920s, wrote: ‘One can’t say too much or expatiate too long on the extraordinary fortune which put the movement in their hands. The very contrast in manner and style and dress, as one observes them side by side on the platform at the Annual Meeting, illustrates the widely divergent gifts and
qualities they bring to the movement, and the importance of both.’
¹⁹

Grace Hadow was an Oxford-educated college tutor, social worker and tireless campaigner for adult education, particularly for women. Like Lady Denman, she had a great flair for organisation. Born in 1875, a decade before Lady Denman, she was the youngest child and fourth daughter of a vicar from South Cerney, near Cirencester. She loved the countryside and understood and appreciated rural life. She knew how hard it could be for many of her father’s parishioners but she also understood that their lives could be improved through education. This knowledge, combined with her intelligence and curiosity, made her a valuable member of the WI executive and a good second in command to Lady Denman. She was educated in Stroud and Truro but spent a year in Trier in Germany, studying music and languages, before going up to Oxford in 1900 to read English at Somerville College. She overcame an early shyness by ‘simply pouring herself into college life and developed skills and interests which remained throughout her life, including her quick wit and charm as a speaker’.
²⁰
After gaining first-class honours she took up a teaching post in Pennsylvania, returning to Oxford in 1906 when she was appointed tutor of English at Lady Margaret Hall. It was during this time at the university that she edited with her brother, Sir William Henry Hadow,
The Oxford Treasury of English Literature
and
Chaucer and His Times
. Amongst her other writings was a translation of Berthold Litzmann’s biography of Clara Schumann, again in collaboration with her brother.

This academic work did not take her away from her interest in social problems. All her life she had a very strong sense of public duty. During the First World War, while carrying on with her writing and caring for her widowed mother, she worked with Belgian
refugees in Oxford. In 1917 she heard Mrs Watt lecture on Canadian institutes and immediately formed an institute in Cirencester. She actively engaged her local county council, urging them to put on lectures, and proposed setting up several more local institutes in her area. After the death of her mother later that year she resigned her lectureship at Lady Margaret Hall and went to run the department of extramural welfare for the Ministry of Munitions, where her job was to organise women’s work in the factories, crèches, housing and lodgings. Miss Hadow was described by an admirer as having not only intelligence and friendliness but fibre. He wrote: ‘I have heard that all her aeroplaning has been done in the open air alongside the pilot. It is told of Miss Hadow that when her services were later on accepted at the Ministry of Munitions, her chief said to somebody, “Well, she won’t cry!”’
²¹
She was also an intrepid mountaineer, becoming one of the first British women to climb to the summits of the Matterhorn, the Finsteraarhorn and the Fletschhorn, the latter by an unclimbed route. During the descent she developed pulmonary oedema and nearly died. By this time she was already in her late forties.

After the war she took up a post as secretary at Barnet House in Oxford, which at that time was developing as a centre for social and economic studies and social-work training. She liked the emphasis on self-government and social service and was able to pioneer the development of rural adult education, ‘fostering village industries, libraries, lectures, and classes on social and economic questions, music and drama’. So successful was this scheme that it became a prototype for rural communities on a national scale. She explained that it was not her aim to ‘take folk dancing and travelling cinemas to villages’ but ‘to get people to formulate their own demands and tackle problems’ and ‘to take their own place in local government or voluntary organisations, and future development can be left in their hands’.
²²
She believed
that the keystone of the WI arch was a combination of personal self-expression and social service. She played a leading part in negotiating with government departments but also helped and encouraged a broader outlook amongst the WI in the villages. She said: ‘Members must learn to realize their responsibility toward the community in which they live and, from an interest in their own village and their own county, come to see the connection between their affairs and those of the nation at large.’
²³

With these qualifications and interests, in combination with her outstanding abilities as a speaker – she was remembered after her death as one of the best women speakers in Britain – she was an ideal vice-chairman to Lady Denman. ‘Miss Hadow brought the great social force of education to the Women’s Institutes to complement Lady Denman’s great social force of organisation.’
²⁴
At an annual meeting in the 1920s Miss Hadow had to take the place of Lady Denman, who was unable to attend. Mrs Inez Jenkins, then the general secretary, had lost her voice. Miss Hadow had a sudden attack of nerves before the meeting and turned to Mrs Jenkins on the stage and said ‘If you see me getting into a muddle over procedure, you will shout, won’t you?’, Mrs Jenkins grabbed a pencil and wrote on a piece of paper: ‘I can’t, I’ve lost my voice.’ She remembered how Miss Hadow was about to get to her feet when she saw what Miss Jenkins had written, and took the pencil out of her hand and added two words ‘please hiss’.
²⁵

Miss Nancy Tennant, who succeeded Miss Hadow as vice-chairman in 1940, summed up the early pioneers of the National Executive:

Lady Denman had clear judgement and great precision . . . she was immensely respected. She was looked up to enormously and was very valuable . . . Miss Hadow was an academic. She looked like a bean pole, very tall and angular with pince-nez, but attractive and funny, and gay and sweet. Lady Denman and Mrs Watt worked in totally different ways, but they were both absolutely necessary, and I think that Miss Hadow was a sort of king pin in between, because she was more approachable than Lady Denman, by a long chalk, but had all the precision of an academic.
²⁶

As the WI continued to expand so decisions had to be taken about the nature of the way it should be governed and also how to manage the ever-growing number of individual institutes. Lady Denman favoured self-governance and eventual financial independence, which was achieved within a decade.

The middle tier of the WI was born in 1918 with the introduction of the Voluntary County Organisers. Mrs Watt was in charge of the first training school, held at Burgess Hill in Sussex, where twenty-three students spent three weeks. She explained that as well as choosing the ladies for their suitability to carry out this work she also felt ‘that the new organisers would require not only training and information but being put absolutely on the right lines. I felt they must learn from others as well as from me, that they must have practical demonstrations as well as lectures, that there must be ample time for discussions and questions and help, and that all of this should be given in an atmosphere impregnated with institute work and ideals.’

This set the trend for the Voluntary County Organisers (VCOs), who, Anne Stamper maintained, ‘have done more to sustain and mould the WI than anybody or anything else’.
²⁷
Mrs Watt emphasised the role of the WI, which was to stimulate interest in the agricultural industry and develop cooperative enterprises; to encourage home and local industry; to study home economics and to provide a centre for educational and social intercourse and for all local activities.

But the overriding message to the students was to promote the technical knowledge of agriculture and to give the housewife the information and confidence to work in partnership with her husband. ‘The farmer will say that the science of farming is not a woman’s job, but it is exactly what she ought to know about. So we want the farmer’s wife to attend the Women’s Institute; we want her to get into the habit of seeing books and papers on the science of farming, and to link up her own home interests with her husband’s business interests.’
²⁸

This was ambitious and exciting. It was potentially liberating and certainly different from anything most of the countrywomen who came to those first institutes had ever experienced. One member from a village WI told one of Mrs Watt’s students: ‘I am only a girl in service, but I cannot tell you what help Wivelsfield WI is to me. I learn so much there, and when I am married and have a house of my own I can put it all into practice.’
²⁹

Mrs Watt returned to Canada in 1919, well pleased with her work in England and Wales. Before she left she had the satisfaction of starting a WI at Sandringham of which Queen Mary became president. In a report on the institutes and their achievements she wrote: ‘A great movement has been set going. The results are out of all proportion to the energy expended. I feel quite uplifted. Rural womanhood, touched by the magic wand of opportunity, has blossomed as we knew it would. It has all been womanly, kindly and homely.’
³⁰
There is no doubt that her energy and zeal helped to form the firm roots of the Women’s Institutes and set them on the course that they were to follow. On Mrs Watt’s departure Mrs Nugent Harris took over the running of the VCO schools and by the end of 1919 VCOs had become a permanent feature, with 89 operating in 26 counties with responsibilities for 1,405 institutes.

Over the next twenty years the WI grew in stature and confidence. It learned how best to lobby ministers and furthered its aim to educate the membership and set up guilds to teach and confer qualifications. Above all, the WI learned how to make democracy work. Lady Denman spoke on the twentieth anniversary of her appointment as chairman of the NFWI in 1937: ‘To my mind the greatest of all achievements of the Institutes is that we really have learnt to govern ourselves. We do not believe in dictators; we believe that each member should be responsible for her institute and should have a share in the work.’

By 1939 the Women’s Institute was as well organised and prepared as it could be to take on anything that was asked of it. And they knew that they would be asked in the event of a war.

2

THE GATHERING STORM

England obliged to declare war on Germany. Hitler dashes our hopes to the ground. We must hope, strive and pray for a speedy victory as we feel we have right on our side, not lust for power.

Edith Jones

September 1939

Peggy Sumner joined Dunham Massey Women’s Institute in 1938 with her older sister, Marjorie, and their mother. The family came from Hale and Peggy was the family’s driver. Her car was one of perhaps six used to get to the meetings in those pre-war days. Dunham Massey had been founded in 1919 by the Countess of Stamford, who called a meeting of the members of the War Working Party which, according to Marjorie Sumner’s brief history of the institute, ‘had been disbanded the previous autumn leaving a heartfelt gap in village life’. The countess was elected the first president and Dunham Massey became the first institute to be formed in Cheshire. The WI undertook all the regular lectures, activities and business but they were also
involved in the local library scheme. ‘Books were presented by members and Miss C. Perkins was the first Librarian. After a time it had to be closed – some of the books being thought unsuitable for young girls. Most undesirable.’ After censorship it continued but following several complaints, the librarian was given permission to burn any she herself thought unsuitable. In 1936 all books were sent to the local hospital.

By the time Peggy joined the WI, Mrs Hardy, who presided over the institute for twenty-six years, was president and the membership had to be capped at 120, which was a comparatively large institute with a varied social strata. Dunham Massey did not have its own hall so they used to meet in the school room, which is now the village hall, converted in the 1960s. The school had been erected in 1759 ‘for the benefit of the township of Dunham Massey according to the will of Thomas Walton Gent’ and the handsome red-brick building still has the fine black and red details over the tall windows. ‘We paid our entrance fee of 2d to the treasurer, Mrs Hughes, which was for a piece of cake and a cup of tea. Biscuits were not acceptable in those days. In fact even during the war we tried very hard to keep making home-made cakes for our meetings.’