‘You had to turn the handle and it had to be in neutral to start with and this is what caused so many problems. It had to be absolutely neutral to start with and it had to be turned exactly twenty times . . . I fell into it quite easily [but] the other four kept on having trouble with it.’4
The risk associated with canning was that if it were not done properly faulty cans could explode dramatically. Mrs Toosey borrowed the local canning machine as it went around the village but did not like it. Caroline recalled: ‘My mother actually preferred bottling as she once had a can of tomatoes that was blown, which was dangerous. So she bottled fruit and vegetables and these were stored in the larder, along with some canned foods. Unfortunately the larder was very damp so that the labels fell off the cans. That made for interesting meals as on Sunday nights we would have eggs with tinned vegetables. Sometimes we got eggs with plums!’
After the success of the 1939 ‘boil up’ and a result of rationing, the Ministry of Food asked the WI ‘to extend its Co-operative Fruit Preservation Scheme organized under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture’. It allocated to the federation a further supply of sugar, which, members were told, ‘can be used for cooperative preserving of all local grown garden, orchard and hedgerow fruit supplied by members and non-members alike. Institutes that have not already signed up to the scheme are encouraged to do so through their county office so that they can benefit not only their own members but people in the wider community in their neighbourhood or village.’5 This was the call to arms. The editorial in Home & Country in July 1940 also dealt with the bureaucratic aspect of this work, which became for some institutes such a thorn in the flesh that they eventually backed out of the scheme: ‘A strict account of all fruit preserved must be kept for the information of the Ministry of Food, and the preserved produce can be sold through WI market stalls, WI monthly meeting stalls, or to retailers for re-sale in the normal course of trade.’6 This ruling was put in place prior to preserve rationing, which came into force the following spring and introduced greater restrictions on how jam could be sold. ‘With the help of sugar and without it, our members are going to be instrumental in saving for future use hundreds of tons of the fruits of the earth from our home gardens and orchards.’7
Sugar rationing was foreseen by the WI and in the same edition there were recipes for sugarless jam. The editor wrote: ‘Let no one think that fruit need be wasted if we are unable to get sufficient sugar to convert it into jam.’ One method was described as ‘the Old Method’ or sulphur preserving. ‘The fruit must be fully ripe and in good condition. Pick it over carefully and put it into the preserving pan. Let it cook gradually over a gentle heat until enough juice has been drawn from the fruit to prevent any danger of burning. Then boil for an hour. Never let it go off the boil, and let it boil well all over the entire surface.’
So far, so good. Now comes the rather more exciting chemistry experiment:
The jars (any shape or size will do) should be scrupulously clean and well warmed. Turn them upside down on a table. Put some sulphur in an iron spoon and set fire to it. Slip the spoon containing the burning sulphur under the mouth of each jar in turn until the glass is evenly smoked with fumes. Put the jar down quickly, mouth downwards, on the table to keep the sulphur fumes in. Now turn up a jar and fill it with the boiling fruit pulp; wave the sulphur spoon over the top of it, cover quickly with softened bladder or parchment paper. Brush over the top and sides of this covering with thin glue or paste to make it airtight. Seal each jar as it is filled, before filling the next. The pulp must be kept boiling all the time.8
This recipe was not one for the faint-hearted or those of a nervous disposition.
Another sugarless jam recipe, which was recommended for gooseberries, plums and damsons, was called Cottage Bottling. This involved cooking the fruit in large jars in the oven and then, when the fruit had shrunk down a bit, filling the jar to the brim with boiling water and covering it.
And the third method was drying. Fruit could be dried whole or, if large, cut into halves or quarters. Dried fruit became a luxury during the later years of the war but in the autumn of 1939 it was still being prepared. The WI also provided advice on drying vegetables, which would need to be steamed first and then dried. There was a great depth of knowledge in the combined membership of the Women’s Institute but no subject, except perhaps housing, elicited more comment than food preservation.
Elsie Bainbridge’s mother was resourceful when it came to making best use of what she had to hand. When sugar was in short supply she used golden syrup to make her jam, as she had used it in biscuit baking. ‘Mother’s jam was lovely and sweet and using the syrup was a good way of making sure that she did not waste the fruit we picked in the garden and from the hedgerows.’
In addition to encouraging members to experiment with different kinds of fruit preserving, Home & Country also carried advertisements for preserving equipment which the NFWI had obtained at special prices for institutes. A small number of hand-sealing machines could be bought from the National Federation for £5 12s 6d (£195 today). The tins were also available for sale. Sybil Norcott’s father bought her a canning machine that she soon learned to operate efficiently. She would offer her services to the WI but also to other groups locally and that way she earned a little extra money and helped many village women to preserve for the winter. Mrs Cowley of Botley in Oxford had a childhood memory of accompanying her mother to the WI hall where she opened up as caretaker. There, in the hall, she would see rows and stacks of shiny cans ready to be used by WI members who came in to undertake this work. She also recalled the noise of the canning machine. It was a proper cottage industry and was taken seriously by both the WI and the government, however not to the extent that the Ministry of Supply would grant them additional petrol rations for distributing the jam.
The WI has remarkable records and in no area are these fuller than in the records of the preserves made in the centres formed at the request of Lord Woolton. All over the country women had taken the minister’s message to heart: ‘This war may well be decided by the last week’s supply of food. It is up to all of us now to see that our people have that last week’s supply.’9 By 13 July some 375 tons of sugar had been allocated to the preserving centres, and ‘tons of fruit that would otherwise have gone to waste have been turned into health-giving food for the coming winter’.10
The Ministry of Agriculture could hardly have hoped for a better response from the Women’s Institutes. Not only did they make jam from all surplus fruit but they also ordered thousands of extra fruit trees and bushes. Blackcurrant bushes were the favourite in many counties as they were easy to grow and produced good yields quite quickly. Apple and pear trees took longer to establish and the harvests would not be large for the first few years. As one member pointed out: ‘The government is expecting us to stock the nation’s larder but it takes time to get a decent orchard established.’11 Mrs Milburn was impressed by the quantities available at her local farm stall after the bumper crop in 1940. In August she wrote: ‘When supper was over I finished WI notices and took them out to the village, picking up six pounds of greengages at the amazing price of 2d per pound. Plums, damsons and greengages are all so very plentiful this year.’ Edith Jones had equally high yields and a particularly good crop of apples she stored not only in the granary but also in the box room, which she had tidied during her spring cleaning.
At Copyhold Farm in Bradfield the Wards grew fruit, including apples, pears, plums, cobnuts and blackcurrants. They also had a small dairy herd and a few pigs. Their aim had always been to make themselves as self-reliant as possible, so that they grew their own barley and oats for the cattle. There were days during the war when Mr Ward would get up at 5.30 a.m. to milk the cows and do a full day’s work, and then spend half the night on Home Guard duties. ‘My memory of my father in wartime was that he was always exhausted,’ said Dorcas Ward. Mrs Ward kept hens and sold the eggs; she trapped wild rabbits which she sold for their m
eat. The fruit was grown for commercial sale and was taken every week to Reid’s in Newbury, where the key thing was to remember to get the wooden crates back from Mr Reid for the next week’s delivery. Mrs Ward also grew fruit and vegetables for the family and took great pride in being self-sufficient. ‘I remember the great calamity one Christmas when my mother had to buy Brussels sprouts because for some reason our own had not grown that year. It was the shame of her war.’ Jam-making was part of Mrs Ward’s annual work and she would record on the inside of the cupboard door how many pots she had made in a year. Dorcas recalled the climax being 119lbs. Her mother was always busy, and no more so than at harvest time when she would help with haymaking and organise the farmworkers’ wives who volunteered to help her in harvesting the field of blackcurrants. There was about an acre of the bushes and in good years the bushes would be sagging with fruit. Picking the blackcurrants was back-aching work so the women sat on milking stools which they moved along as they picked. In the evenings her mother would sit mending clothes, while listening to the nine o’clock news.
Wartime jam-making was an additional burden for busy housewives. The preservation centres were set up in villages or close to where supplies of fruit were found and the conditions that the women worked in were seldom ideal. The list from 1940 included halls, domestic science kitchens, huts, WI markets, police stations, cafes, packing sheds, garages and private kitchens of all kinds. Mrs Denys Blewitt lived at Boxted Hall near Colchester in Essex. A wealthy lady and an active member of her WI as well as of the Women’s National Citizen Association and the Conservative Party, she was very generous offering the hall when it was needed. From 1939 onwards for the rest of the war she made the kitchens in the servants’ quarters at the hall available for jam-making. There WI members made more than four tons of jam on seven stoves. Boxted Hall’s kitchens were well equipped and there was running water to hand, which was a boon. Where water was not laid on it was carried by relays of willing helpers to the ‘kitchens’ and the fruit very often had to be picked by the women doing the jam-making. ‘At one centre half the members cycled five miles before breakfast to pick the fruit, other members prepared and served them breakfast and the rest preserved the fruit in the afternoon.’12 Miss Cox, who checked all the forms that came in from the preserving centres, found one that had a note apologising for her form being late but ‘my house was bombed and it was so difficult to find things afterwards’.
Lord Woolton visited preservation centres several times each season. His continued support and interest in their work was essential and the visits did much to sustain morale. In December 1940 he wrote to Lady Denman congratulating her on the success of the preservation scheme. ‘This was work of national importance demanding administrative ability of a high order at the Headquarters of your organization and local initiative and cooperation which are a fine example of democratic action at its best.’13
But the National Federation also sounded a note of caution about the preservation scheme. They wanted to ensure fair shares for everyone and equality was never far from their minds: ‘The Institutes have readily grasped both the importance of this piece of work, and the principle of share-and-share alike on which its products should be distributed. It is important that no one, member or non-member, should buy more than her fair share of these sugar-content foods simply because she is better off or has been able to supply more fruit than her neighbours.’14 This concern fed down to the counties and several had a discussion about fairness at county level. In 1940 members were allowed to buy back their jam at wholesale prices and the executive committees were exercised by the question of how much jam it should allow its members to purchase. Was it fair, they asked, to permit people to buy back as much jam as they had supplied fruit for? This would discriminate against those who had produced less fruit and also those who would not be able to afford to buy large quantities. They also asked the question: ‘What safeguards are there that members getting jam cheap can’t sell it expensively?’ The National Federation recommended that everyone should be allowed the same quantity so that no one was treated unfairly. The following year rationing was introduced and there were no special privileges for anyone. That was easier for WI members but the public was unhappy. An article entitled ‘Making Jam at Home’ appeared in The Times in March 1941 explaining how the Minister had asked the WI to take on the task of preserving all surplus crops.
Already there is some feeling against ‘the plan for giving all available sugar for jam making to the Women’s Institutes and allowing none for private persons.’ Mrs Dulcibella Dalby of Castle Donington, Derby, writes that angry feeling will be aroused in people who are not members of the Women’s Institutes and there will be a sense of injustice at a small body of the community having the handling and control of all sugar for jam and bottling.15
The criticism was understandable but the WI had to undertake to keep the strictest checks on the amounts of sugar used and if any were lost it caused a tremendous headache for the Jam Committee, as was the case when Boxted WI could not account for 80lb in 1942. Mrs Blewitt was in charge of trying to find out what had happened as the local police had been unable to trace the missing sugar. On 9 February 1943 she wrote to her daughter: ‘I spent the afternoon with Nina yesterday. We were supposed to finish the Jam accounts, which should have been in by the New Year. I found a proper jam morasse, and as she had not got the Pass Book, or looked at it all the year, we did not get very far. If we have to do it again I shall have to take on the account keeping, it is not conceivable to be so stupid at them as Nina!’
Hyde Heath WI in Buckinghamshire had a welcome surprise on 2 August 1940 when the Queen, who had requested to see a canning centre in operation, arrived to inspect their preservation centre. The canning shed at The Wick was cramped and hot but, as one observer pointed out, the Queen kept her cool. She asked lots of questions of Mrs van Kerkhoven, who gave the demonstration, and was very interested in learning how the fruit was being gathered from local gardens and orchards. Her lady-in-waiting wrote to Lady Denman after the visit to say how much she had enjoyed herself and ‘how greatly Her Majesty appreciated all the most valuable work they were doing’.16 At the end of her visit the members presented the Queen with ‘a gift of jellies, jams, bottled and canned fruit’.
Even where institutes had dwindling numbers of members, for example owing to compulsory evacuation from the coastal areas in 1940, women who remained tried to keep jam-making going. In Old Felixstowe there were only a handful of members remaining in the coastal town, yet a fruit-picking party visited the deserted gardens and sold the crops for their owners or for the WI. They said: ‘It is hard to carry on but in our quietness and confidence will be our strength.’17
Above all, jam-making caught the WI’s imagination. ‘No common pen can do justice to it’, one woman wrote of the great jam drive. ‘In Northamptonshire, one canning day, a WI copper was worked so hard it set the chimney on fire.’18 At another institute members complained of developing corns on their fingers through peeling pound after pound of pears and ‘Earls Barton centre has nearly reached the 2000th jam pot . . . while Marbury in Cheshire made 1187 lbs of jam and filled 1132 cans of fruit.’ The scale of the industry was quite breathtaking and so was the enthusiasm and appetite for news of their work: ‘Wootton Bridge canning report shows 722 cans, 624 lbs jam and 228 bottles, plus a perfectly fresh jar of tomatoes bottled by a member 22 years ago. No wonder they sang the National Anthem!’
The year 1940 was a particularly good one for fruit, especially plums, and the quantities of jam and fruit pickled, canned and preserved were impressive. In perspective, that would have been sufficient to supply 2 million adults with a year’s ration of jam based on 1/4lb of jam every two months. The National Federation felt proud that its members had responded so enthusiastically to the Ministry of Agriculture’s call for increased production.
Germany launched its Luftschlacht um Grossbritannien, translated literally as ‘Air battle for Great Britain’,
in July 1940, first targeting British shipping centres and coastal convoys. Winston Churchill announced to the House of Commons ‘. . . the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’ It was the first campaign to be fought entirely by air forces and it represented one of the most significant battles in the war. Germany failed in its objective of destroying Britain’s air defences. There is no doubt that the success of the Royal Air Force in preventing the Luftwaffe from gaining air superiority ended the threat of an invasion.
In August Mrs Milburn wrote of the Battle of Britain in her diary: ‘We hear on the news of airmen’s experiences during these exciting flights, usually told very calmly, quickly and tersely. Tonight we hear that in fighting round our south-east and south coasts, as well as over Berkshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire, the Germans have lost 57 planes and our losses are 9 here and 14 on the continent.’ The next day, 14 August, she wrote: ‘Yesterday’s “bag” of Nazi planes was 78 to 13 of ours. And everybody was tired today because we have all been up the best part of the night.’ Dugouts, air-raid shelters, Morrison shelters all became an everyday, or rather every night, reality for millions of civilians up and down the country for the next few months as the Germans launched attacks on industrial targets and cities, with often devastating effect. There are thousands of accounts of people hunkering in shelters, some cold and damp, others like Mrs Milburn’s bunk hole which was eventually rendered quite comfortable. In London thousands slept in the Underground stations; in Manchester Patricia Kelly hid in an underground canal while the world exploded around her. She had gone home from the safety of Cressbrook to spend Christmas with her parents.
In London during one raid alone on 19 December 1940 almost 3,000 people died. The cost of the Battle of Britain in civilian lives was high. Between July and December of that year over 23,000 people were killed and 32,000 wounded. Yet for some it was exciting. Schoolchildren would regularly flock to sites where enemy aircraft had crashed to pick up souvenirs. Elsie Bainbridge in Cumbria had a close encounter. In January 1940 a British plane crashed in a field next to her house in a severe snowstorm. Elsie was in bed with whooping cough and her mother in bed with flu.
Jambusters Page 18