Jambusters (9 page)

At institute level the first concern was how and where to hold monthly meetings. In Oxfordshire, East and West Hendred’s minute books recorded a typical experience. On 19 September 1939 they met at 3 p.m. at the Parish Room to discuss the future plans of the WI. ‘It was decided to suspend all meetings at present as the women of the village were taking up other social work, and some had the care of evacuated children.’ At that meeting the president’s resignation was tendered and accepted with regret. Two months later they decided to resume and the monthly meeting was held, unusually for wartime, at 6.15 p.m. in the Parish Room. There was no mention of the
war but they dealt with the voting in of 1940’s committee and the lecture programme.

In January they were still meeting at 6.15 p.m. but it was causing problems for Miss Hope, their cookery demonstrator, as she could not get to the village owing to the blackout, lack of trains and buses and it was too far for her to cycle. Various members offered to have her to stay overnight and in February she ‘gave a demonstration of how to cook with economy during these hard times’.
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It was not until November 1940 that East and West Hendred decided to cave in and hold their monthly meetings in the afternoons rather than the evenings and the reason appeared to be so that they could invite evacuees. This however resulted in a drop in numbers as many members were unable to attend in the afternoons and there was, as they noted ruefully at the end of that year, a drop in membership overall. Juggling with the many demands placed on them both within the WI and outside was evidently difficult. One way to make life easier for themselves was to rely less on outside speakers and more on home-grown talent. Institutes were advised to see what their own membership could supply in terms of lectures and to make use of wartime visitors, such as evacuated mothers, local civil servants and even members of the military who might be posted nearby.

Alphington WI members in Devon were much more determined than those ladies in East and West Hendred. On 20 September they announced a ‘unanimous vote to keep going and form a working party to make garments for the Red Cross’. The following month was their 20th birthday, which they celebrated by knitting squares to be made up into blankets for evacuees. Their energy is apparent from their minute books: they invested in war savings certificates, they grew onions and outdoor tomatoes and made jam in the first few months of the
war but in February 1940 their hall was commandeered by the Devon Education Authority and meetings were suspended. Fortunately they found another room to use for meetings and in March began again with renewed energy and continued for the rest of the war. On the evening of the fall of France the speaker, Miss Veitch, ‘urged us not to give up the growing of flowers entirely during the war and to plan for the years ahead when we need not grow only carrots, onions and swedes’.

Herefordshire, being a large county with villages well spread out, was concerned primarily with the problem of getting speakers to monthly meetings. The Executive Committee recognised this was going to pose a major difficulty so they organised a lending library of popular lectures which could be borrowed from the county office and read out at meetings at a charge of 6d (£1.15 today), adding that the member selected as reader ‘should study the lecture beforehand’.

Interestingly, Herefordshire was the only county to suggest in this first communication that the war might last for several years, and as a result their chairman, the Hon. Mrs Dunne, took a rather more measured view of gardening, suggesting that preparation of the ground was at least as important as planting. She also foresaw the probability of organised fruit canning and preservation being required for 1940 and so suggested that members of individual institutes should register an interest and ensure they were members of the Produce Guild.

The Herefordshire County Agricultural Organiser was on hand to advise institutes or members about preparing derelict land or neglected corners of gardens for potato growing. He advised members to buy day-old chicks in February and March, since they could happily survive on scraps of food and provide eggs in the future. He pointed out that it is only of ‘comparatively late years that country people have become so dependent
on shops for their food, and that in these ways our Mothers could teach us much’. This was a theme that was often revived during the war, both in propaganda and in advice dispensed at a local level in pamphlets and newsletters.

Mrs Dunne signed off her letter to her eighty-five presidents: ‘We must remember that “The main purpose of WIs is to improve and develop conditions in rural life.” To do this we must not neglect the education and social side of our movement. The war threatens civilisation, and we must do our best through the stress and turmoil to preserve all that is good and beautiful and true.’

Where halls were requisitioned it was necessary to find somewhere else to meet. Washington Station WI in Northumberland had their meeting place in the Glebe Welfare Hall commandeered for military purposes, so they moved first to Biddick Chapel, then to the Wesleyan School Room and later to the Youth Club. The inconvenience of constant moves meant that nothing could be stored in the meeting hall, so that china, books and other equipment had to be packed up and carted to the next hall by hand. There was a sigh of relief in February 1946 when they could return to the Glebe Welfare Hall. Barthomley Women’s Institute in Cheshire lost the use of the hall as a meeting place but Mrs Brandon stepped in with an offer for the committee to use the kitchen in her house, the Cottage. This invitation was extended to the whole membership and in October 1939 they held their first meeting at 2 p.m., at which they appointed a tea-treasurer who would be responsible for looking after the 2lb of tea and a tin of biscuits which they agreed should form a basis for their ‘larder cupboard’. By November things had picked up and they held their annual general meeting at the Cottage at which they resolved to arrange their 1940 programme month by month but, more importantly,
to forgo their usual Christmas party and instead give a party for the local children and the evacuee children, of which there were a large number in the village.

Arnside Institute in Cumbria agreed a satisfactory deal with the local ARP. Formed in 1919, they were one of the oldest institutes in the county. In 1928 they had purchased land in the village and erected their own hall as a meeting place. The hall was initially commandeered at the outbreak of the war and the minute book records that the WI Badminton Club and WI Library (both held in the hall) had ceased to function ‘due to the taking over of our Hall by the Westmorland County Council for A.R.P., Red Cross and other National Work, but we do appreciate their kindness in allowing us to use a small part of the Hall for our monthly meetings’. The hall was divided lengthways down the middle, the left-hand side being used for WI meetings while the right-hand side was used for all other activities. The ‘partition’ was made up of camouflage nets, waiting to be garnished, suspended from large hooks that were still screwed into the beams in 2011.

Some institutes, such as Bradfield in Berkshire, simply got on with business as usual, whilst acknowledging the war was going to make life more difficult for them and add to their workload. They made two concessions to the war. First, they gave over their September meetings to blackberry picking and secondly, from 1941 they had ten-minute sessions at each meeting set aside for ‘kitchen front questions’. This was a popular slot, especially when increasing restrictions limited what was obtainable on their ration cards and points.

They met in Miss Connop’s room, which was a corrugated construction donated by the daughter of a local landowner at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ann Tetlow, daughter of an active WI member, Mrs Sims, explained:

It was a shack, really, with a tortoise stove and a corrugated tin roof and walls lined with pitch pine inside. The loo was an earth closet with no light. If you wanted to use the loo in the dark you had to go across the road and borrow a torch from Mr Trotman. There was another hall in the village called Johnson’s hall, which had a wonderfully sprung floor which people loved to dance on. That was a superior building, not least because it had an indoor ladies, though the men still had to go outside to use their facilities.

In the first few weeks of the war the WI raised money for blackout material to cover the windows of the Connop room but in 1940 it was requisitioned by the Home Guard so that the WI had to find somewhere else to hold their meetings. And they had to leave their blackout material behind, which must have been an irritation since they had paid for it out of their own funds.

At the first meeting after the outbreak of hostilities, Bradfield’s secretary, Miriam Ward, was preoccupied taking minutes on the election of a new president. On 21 September Mrs Hyde Baker, the outgoing president, proposed a new member, Mrs Howlett. By the end of the meeting an election had taken place and the new member had been voted in as the new president, in what must represent one of the fastest routes to power. The following month Mrs Ward noted that the election was neither in order nor valid since it had not been a general meeting, so Mrs Howlett was demoted to acting president until their November general meeting. However, after this official glitch, she remained in office for twenty years.

Mrs Ward was unusual as a minute-taker in that she allowed herself interjections and opinions, which throw a light onto
village life in a way that other institute record books do not. Ann Tetlow offered additional colour by talking about her childhood memories of the village during the war. Unlike Mrs Ward, Ann’s mother, Mrs Sims, had not been born in Berkshire. Her father’s job had taken him all over the country and Bradfield was her first settled home. Her husband was from London and wrote novels. They chose Bradfield when they got married in 1934 because it was convenient for bus and rail services. As their family grew, Mr Sims got a job teaching at Cheam School, a prep school, in Headley in order to support his family, and used his writing skills in providing plays for the boys to perform. These were subsequently published. Meanwhile, his wife threw herself into village life. After Ann was born Mrs Sims would push the pram around the village and meet Mrs Ward, also with a pram, hers containing a baby girl named Dorcas. Ann and Dorcas grew up to become lifelong friends and their lives have woven in and out of each other’s family narratives over the course of seven decades. Both girls have vivid memories of the ladies who made up the core of the Bradfield WI. In that delicious way that childhood memories are defined, many of their recollections of individual women are of characteristics such as shape, size or unusual use of words. The picture that emerges is one of a diverse group of women, some quiet, some outspoken, but all passionately involved in village life and energetic in their WI.

Dorcas’s grandmother had been the founding president of Bradfield’s institute in February 1920 and her mother had been the secretary, so that their association with the Women’s Institute stretched back nearly twenty years before the Second World War. Dorcas remembered the committee meetings that used to take place at Copyhold Farm prior to the main WI monthly meeting.

It was always in our sitting room which was a small room and quite a squash with twelve chairs, including my father’s large armchair. And his desk was in the room too. It used to be shut as firmly as possible for the meeting so that there was enough space for everyone to squeeze in. My mother always wrote using an inkwell. She never took to using a fountain pen though later she liked to use biros. But my memory is of the inkwell standing on the little pie-crust-edged occasional table between my mother and Mrs Howlett.

There was an open log fire and a large, brown wood and Bakelite radio on a shelf behind Mrs Ward. ‘My sister and I used to go to these meetings because the sitting room was the only warm room in the house. Mrs Howlett used to sit next to my mother. She did not know much about the business of the WI so my mother would guide her on those matters,’ Dorcas explained. Mrs Ward was the secretary minute-taker throughout the war years and Dorcas said that despite her positive comments and observations she did sometimes get frustrated with the women on the committee, especially those who would sit through meeting after meeting without saying a word.

Ruth Toosey, in the village of Barrow, Cheshire, was also the secretary of her WI during the war. Her daughter, Caroline Dickinson, remembered that meetings took place in the evenings throughout the war as the farmers’ wives would have found it impossible to get to afternoon meetings. Mrs Toosey would spend the following evening writing up the minutes. Caroline has a strong memory of her mother ‘sitting at her desk, fountain pen in one hand, cigarette in the other, huffing and puffing over the minutes. Sometimes she would tell us stories about what had gone on at meetings and often these were very funny. One evening she came back giggling about an almost
stand-up fight between two ladies over washing woollen items. She said it had been like a Punch and Judy show.’

For Caroline and her brother, John, living at the White House in the village, the war dominated their childhoods. Life in Barrow was similar to that of many other rural villages at the time. It lay some five miles from Chester, at the head of the Wirral. Liverpool was a little over twenty miles away and both of Caroline’s grandmothers lived there so she grew up with memories of both peaceful Barrow and the bombed-out city.

The centre of the village had focused around the millhouse, which stopped working as a mill just before the war, but Caroline could remember the delicious smells that came from it. The majority of the villagers worked on the farms around Barrow but there were a number of larger houses owned by families with business interests elsewhere. These women were leading lights in the WI. Mrs Norman’s family owned the department store Owen Owens in Liverpool and Mrs Synge, who was president, and Mrs Gamon, who was also on the committee, lived in two of the other large houses in the centre of the village.