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 thou
ght 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.’
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.
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