Jambusters (7 page)

The room was always laid out in the same way: low school chairs were set in a C shape around the president’s table. They were fortunate to have indoor loos at the school; many other institutes had to use outside privies, but they were the children’s toilets so were very low, which was not easy for older members. Mrs Hardy sat at the front of the hall with her secretary and treasurer. Peggy recalled her first impressions:

Everyone was wearing heavy coats, hats, gloves, good solid thick stockings and well-soled shoes or boots. The predominant colour was black or navy blue and these were top coats that had been bought to last a lifetime. People were still in mourning from the Great War which had ended twenty years earlier and some of the coats dated from that era. The room itself was always cold. You had to push the emergency bar on the inside of the school room door to get into our room, which brought with it an icy blast of cold air in the winter. There were heating pipes around the room but they could not compete with the draughts, so we all kept our coats, gloves and hats on throughout the meetings.

Mrs Hardy ran a tight ship. Members greeted their neighbour on arrival but there was no talking during the meeting except when someone raised a point or had a question, put through the chair, of course. ‘The only time we talked was when the tea came round and the cakes were handed out. If you were at the end of the row you had to hope that a nice-looking cake you had spotted would not have been taken by the time it got to you.’ Meantime, Mrs Hardy kept strictly to the timetable, and Mrs Hutchinson, who was on the tea committee and known to everyone as Mrs Hutch, used to hurry everyone to drink up quickly so that they could get on with the washing up. ‘We weren’t chatty, really, even during the social half-hour which was programmed by the committee. There were readings, plays and sometimes singing. The only chatting we did was during the brief tea-break. I didn’t find it intimidating. I just accepted it like you did when you went to church.’ And as with church, there was an unspoken hierarchy and plenty of hats.

A year after Peggy had joined the WI, on 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, who two days earlier had invaded Poland. With this began the most widespread and destructive war in history. By the end some 50 million people, military and civilians, had lost their lives and some of the worst
atrocities ever recorded had been perpetrated. When Peggy heard the declaration of war announced by Neville Chamberlain on the wireless she was not surprised. ‘We had all been expecting it,’ she said.

So had Mrs Miles and her fellow institute members in Shere near Guildford. In August 1939 Constance Miles, the daughter of Sir William Robertson Nicoll, founder of the
British Weekly
, decided to write a journal for her son as a record of her wartime experiences. She was married to Major Elyston Miles, who had retired, and they lived in a large house in Surrey. Mrs Miles was fifty-seven at this point and wrote that she felt ‘rather at a loss and useless in this one’ having worked through the First World War. The journal takes the form of a diary with long excerpts copied out from newspapers and books that she was reading, providing a rich backdrop to the war and great detail for her son. Unlike the diaries of Edith Jones, these journals were written with a view to being read by others, and in 1947 she lodged a set at the Imperial War Museum in the hope that they might be of interest in the future.

Her early entries give a sense of the panic felt by people at the outbreak of war. Her fear was one expressed by many: ‘doubtless the refugees and the air raids will be the worst home feature of this next war’ she wrote on 24 August 1939. She spent a week busily packing up clothes, precious china and other treasures into boxes and storing them. She worried about who would come to the house, and fretted over how much should be packed away. And in all this activity and concern there was the constant theme of the horrible news coming from Poland.

On the evening on 3 September she wrote: ‘The Prime Minister, in the most delightfully English voice, told us just after 11 that we were at war. It seems incredible! As I write, the sad day has gone by. The evening sun is glowing on the garden and
Edie’s border shows her African and French marigolds still beautifully fresh and golden. The King spoke on the radio. Curiously slow and sad and with much lack of vitality. Better far that the Queen had spoken.’

As the country was numbed by the fear of aerial bombardment and possible gas attacks on civilians, so the WI was briefly paralysed as it tried to decide what its role should be. Throughout the 1920s and 30s it had been actively promoting the League of Nations. An NFWI representative was appointed to the women’s committee of the union and within a few short years some 600 institutes, over 10 per cent of the total number, had become ‘study associates’ of the League of Nations. In 1929 the annual meeting had passed a resolution that the movement consider how best to further the cause of world peace and in 1934 they passed the following resolution:

We desire to affirm our faith in the League of Nations Union and to urge His Majesty’s Government to do their utmost to secure a real measure of world disarmament; and further, we authorise co-operation where advisory between the NFWI and other organisations with a view to every possible effort being made to attain this end. Further, we recommend that all Women’s Institutes should endeavour during the next year to introduce into their programme something that would interest their members in the activities and outlook of other nations.
¹

Their pacifist stand would cause the National Federation a great deal of worry in the early weeks of the war. How should the WI respond?

Miss Hadow, with her usual clear thinking, wrote in the WI’s monthly magazine,
Home & Country
:

It is for every individual to decide for herself how best she can serve her country in peace or war, but the fact that Institutes were called into existence in 1915 because such an organization was needed and that it was a government department which fostered their growth at such a time, should make all of us consider whether possibly this work in our own villages and our own county, work for which we have been specially trained may not be that for which we are best fitted and in which we can be of most use . . . Here is a great organization ready to be used, but it will cease to be an organization if all its most efficient members are drained away . . . No one would wish to restrain people from volunteering for National Service, but National Service may lie in simple things, and to help to keep up morale and to prevent life in an emergency from becoming wholly disorganized is in itself work of no mean value.
²

She was concerned about membership numbers declining and indeed she was right to do so. Membership fell by nearly 40,000 between 1939 and 1943 at the height of mobilisation. In the early months of the war younger women left the WI to sign up for the forces or were drafted into war work. Others felt that they had an obligation to take on a more active role and joined the Women’s Voluntary Service and this clashed with the WI’s principles. But there were a number, such as Ruth Toosey of Barrow near Chester, who felt that in a time of war there was no need for such sensitivities and continued to be members of their local WI as well as the WVS.

The October edition of
Home & Country
was almost entirely devoted to the outbreak of hostilities. The editor, Miss Margaret Jackson, asked for forbearance as the issue was late and cut down in size owing to ‘difficulties’, a word which became the
byword for the war in many institute record books. ‘We had hoped, every one of us, that war would be averted. But it is with us, and we must each do what we can to maintain that spirit of sanity, friendliness, and corporate activity which has been the distinguishing mark of Women’s Institutes since their foundation, now twenty-four years ago, in an earlier time of stress and common danger.’

Members of the WI in Mobberley, Cheshire, were as anxious as anyone else. Gertrude Wright, in her short history of the institute,
The First Thirty Years
, wrote: ‘I remember well the Committee Meeting in September [1939] – the sense of fear, the fear of the unknown future – but it was decided that if possible the monthly meetings be held as usual and that the officers carry out the work if it was impossible to hold a Committee Meeting.’ By the end of October they could record with satisfaction that they had helped evacuee mothers and children, issuing an open invitation to the women to join their meetings; they had sent a large parcel of clothing to the City League of Help and knitted 144 garments for the forces. They had also decided to reform their choir and to keep up ‘the same loyal spirit as thousands of other Institute members in all parts of the British Empire’. The following year their hall was requisitioned by the government so they had to hold their meetings in a large upstairs room at the Bull’s Head.

After the initial days of fear and anxiety, evacuation, relocation, mobilisation and confusion, Britain settled down to wait and see what would happen. While the government had been advised and indeed believed that Hitler’s Luftwaffe would drop an enormous tonnage of bombs on cities and other targets within hours of the declaration of war, quite the opposite happened. There followed almost nine months of what became known as the Phoney War. The first deployment of troops to the
continent was completed by mid-October, at which point the British Expeditionary Force comprised 158,000 men. Six months later it had doubled in size to 316,000. The biggest worry for the first batch of men was not fighting Germans but fighting the cold and boredom. The winter of 1939/40 was the coldest in forty-five years. Ruth Toosey’s brother-in-law, Major Philip Toosey, had been sent to Lille with his medium artillery regiment. He wrote later: ‘The winter was bitterly cold. The men lived in barns and I kept them busy by digging pits for the guns and building command posts on what was an extension of the Maginot Line. It was a pretty painful experience; before this we had always had permanent cook houses at camp and I well remember the many cooking problems and getting used to the atmosphere of living in the field.’ That Christmas his men received parcels sent not only from families but also from the Red Cross. These contained comforts such as gloves, socks, woollen helmets and scarves, which were very welcome. The WI had been busy knitting.

Mass Observation, that brilliant window on everyday life, presented the most valuable of vignettes in its myriad reports, diaries, questionnaires and observations during the early years of the war. Set up in 1937 by three young men, anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet and journalist Charles Madge, and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, its aim was to document and record everyday life in Britain through the eyes of ordinary people. They recruited some 500 people, who were untrained, to keep diaries and volunteers to work on questionnaires. The initial impetus was to record the public’s reaction to the abdication of Edward VIII but in August 1939 they asked the public to send them a day-to-day account of their lives in the form of a diary. They had in place observers who would continue to record their lives during this turbulent time. The value of these observations
for historians is inestimable but even at the time Mass Observation’s research through questionnaires influenced government thinking. Famously, it was publicly critical of the Ministry of Information’s posters, including ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, forcing a change of attitude and the production of more appropriate posters.

Muriel Green, who wrote a diary for Mass Observation from August 1939, was the daughter of a garage and village shop owner in Norfolk. By Christmas she had become resigned to living in wartime, though nothing much had happened. Then on 27 December she and her sister heard an aeroplane overhead: ‘we both said at once, “I’m sure that’s a Nasty.” But we both stood and watched, making no attempt to take any precautions. About 5 mins later we heard more aeroplanes and Jenny rushed out and said she saw 3 Spitfires chasing over after the 1st plane.’ Muriel was eating her lunch, the dog was barking and jumping around and Mrs Green said she was going to go outside and see what was going on: ‘She said we might as well be killed while we were as excited as anytime.’

Other women were less excited by the prospect of war. Mrs Street from Gravesend in Kent wrote: ‘I hate the blackout. It makes me feel uneasy. Everything is so dark and I can’t do anything for fretting for what might happen in the night.’ Stella Schofield, a full-time member of Mass Observation’s staff in 1939, wrote a report in January 1940 based on interviews she had carried out with women’s organisations in late 1939, in particular looking at the effect of the war on their membership. Her conclusions point to a two-fold reaction: the first that the impact of this war as against the last war was that women were affected from the outset. Women were fatalistic about the inevitability of war, even though by and large they opposed it.

Inside their organisations women are more consciously critical, more questioningly aware of the war processes. They find themselves once more precipitated into world war by a man-monopolised society. It would be idle to speculate whether or not the present situation could have been avoided had women held executive government positions – there are, of course, women who believe this – but it is very much to the point to realise that, however unorganised the mass of women may be today, they were far less organised in the last war.
³

The second observation she made was that women accepted there would be change and that they would have to deal with it. Men had gone or were liable to go away to fight or defend; children had been evacuated or had arrived as evacuees; life had been disrupted from the day war was declared by blackout and air-raid warnings. Meeting huts and buildings had been taken over and the rhythm of life thoroughly interrupted and disrupted for almost every woman.