Jambusters

by Julie Summers

  After the war the NFWI decided to commemorate the contribution made by women by commissioning a huge piece of needlework which was described in the first stages of its planning as a modern Bayeux Tapestry. The embroidery celebrates the work of women in wartime and took over 400 embroiderers four years to complete. It measures 15 feet 3 inches by 9 feet and represents contributions from every Federation. Eighteen medallions surround three large central panels showing women working on the land, in industry and in the services. The medallions depict all the different aspects of women’s contributions that have been covered in this book but they also included WVS and ARP work, reflecting the fact that many members were involved in multiple organisations during the war. It is at once an enormous but modest celebration of women’s contribution to the war. Its size is spectacular but it is not triumphal.

  That was the public image. But what of the private?

  The WI is made up of individual women. It is true that the National Executive was represented predominantly by well-connected women but Lady Denman was unapologetic about that. She used their contacts to the WI’s advantage but she recognised that it was the women in the villages who represented the lifeblood of the organisation.

  I would like to introduce one of them whose life was shaped and enriched by her forty-year association with the Women’s Institute. Her name was Alex Toosey and she was my maternal grandmother. There is no doubt in my mind that the WI offered a place of refuge as well as the opportunity for her to make a contribution to improving village life. It gave her somewhere she could be herself, particularly during the war. She could assist but also relax during what for her, like many others, were difficult years. Her husband left home on 31 August 1939 and but for one brief visit, did not set foot in their house again until November 1945. For three and a half years he was a prisoner of the Japanese and in all that time she received only a couple of letters and postcards. She was on her own with her three young children for the entire war.

  It is undoubtedly the case that Mrs T, as she was always known, felt very comfortable in the Women’s Institute. Amongst women she could be herself in a way that perhaps only her grandchildren ever saw. She could laugh about her woeful cooking abilities, which were a joke within Hooton institute, but she could also share her love of growing flowers without feeling self-conscious. Although she probably never pushed a wheelbarrow or wielded a hoe she was known for growing magnificent hyacinths and the fact that flower arranging was one of her passions was underlined by her gift of a vase to the institute on its 21st birthday.

  She represented the kind of woman who benefited from contact with the WI in a way that otherwise would have been missing in her life. She belonged to an era before women’s liberation from the slavery of the home. Husbands dominated and the social hierarchy of the village counted for a great deal. This was a time when country families had pews in church and women wore hats to go shopping. Women had less help in the house than their mothers and grandmothers had done and mod cons were still a dream for many. As we have seen, a fridge was a newfangled luxury and few owned one. Until then the larder, north-facing with slate shelves and a chilly feel even in summer, was the repository for fresh ingredients and cooked food alike. Spring cleaning was an annual event and undertaken with method and vigour. Carpets were dragged outdoors to be beaten, walls whitewashed, winter clothes put away and summer clothes and hats brought out of storage, often smelling of mothballs.

  My grandmother was a stickler for routine. On Thursdays, after the war, she would drive into Willaston, park her Morris Minor in front of the general store, regardless of the double yellow lines that were painted outside the shop in the mid-1960s, and buy 200 Kent cigarettes and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. She would then very carefully turn the car around and drive home.

  She wore her permed grey hair in a hairnet with white beads. Coloured beads on her hairnet meant it was a special day. She hated anyone touching her head and particularly disliked it when the wind blew her hair. She wore powder on her face and I have a strong memory of the smell of this powder compact, which used to appear regularly, sometimes even at traffic lights while she was driving. She would scrutinise her face and apply the powder with a thin, cream-coloured sponge that lived inside the compact.

  I learned not so very long ago that as president of the Hooton Women’s Institute she would check her make-up and apply powder during the reading of the last meeting’s minutes, which new secretaries initially found disconcerting. She adhered so rigidly to the formalities of WI rules for meetings that she once did not turn up to a meeting because the secretary, with whom she had agreed the date at the Executive Committee earlier that week, had failed to write her a letter inviting her to attend.

  Underneath this rather fierce exterior was a woman who was as devoted to the Women’s Institute movement as any member of the national council. She was actively involved from the day she joined Burton and Puddington WI in 1933 until 1972 when she retired from WI office at Hooton in her seventy-first year. One of her fellow members described her as someone who was great fun to be with. This surprised me and contrasts with many people’s recollections of my grandmother. They shared my grandfather’s opinion, which he expressed in his autobiography in 1970: ‘we are all very frightened of her but respect her deeply. She is known as Mrs T. or the Regimental Sergeant Major.’

  When the war broke out Mrs T was predictably defiant. Someone suggested that given the proximity of her village to Liverpool it would be safer for her to move or allow the children to be evacuated. She announced sternly that if Mr Hitler wished to kill her he would have to do so in her own bed. Throughout the Blitz on Liverpool she resolutely refused to sleep in a shelter and remained in her bedroom, though she did make the children sleep in the ‘Bogey Hole’ under the stairs, something my mother still recalls with horror. She also remembered that their uncle Stephen’s car was on blocks in the garage throughout the war and Mrs. T kept it stuffed with tins of food, probably obtained on the black market.

  Mrs T was not a confident cook and the children have memories of rabbit stew with little bones floating in grey gravy and stewed rhubarb with no sugar. She was, however, a good knitter and produced countless pairs of socks. In 1940 Burton and Puddington had a knitting party that resulted in 850 garments as well as 500 WVS armlets. The minute book records that by 1943 one member had handed in her hundredth pair of socks and that 1,001 had been knitted altogether. As well as knitting, garnishing camouflage nets and looking after the household, Mrs T worked at a WI canteen in Little Sutton making teas and meals for the American troops. Like hundreds of thousands of other women during the war she coped magnificently and like many others she found adjusting to the peace difficult. When my grandfather came back from the Far East she was deposed. She was expected to go back to being a housewife with domestic duties and social expectations and she found this hard to take. Burton and Puddington WI was an active institute during the war. Their membership dropped to twenty-five and they lost their hall to the military in 1939 so had to resort to twice-monthly working party meetings until March 1940 when they were able to get back into Gladstone Village Hall.

  The WI continued to be a source of escape, entertainment and enjoyment for her. In fact in 1951 she and a group of women decided the time had come to set up their own, new, institute in the village of Hooton, where she lived, and this became an absorbing interest for her. She never spoke about it though. It was her private world and we only know how much it meant to her because of the Hooton minute book that shows almost 100 per cent attendance at meetings, and by the comments from members who remember her in those meetings and at WI parties.

  When I came to write Jambusters I appealed to county federations and to institutes for information about their wartime activities. Several allowed me access to county and institute minute books and although they show snippets of life in wartime they are just records of events and decisions. Sometimes it is possible to read between the lines, such as on the occasion when A
udlem decided to substitute ‘Jerusalem’ with ‘God Save the King’ to open their meeting to mark military triumphs in North Africa. Other minute secretaries allowed for tantalising glimpses into their social half-hour activities: ‘Mrs Roberts put on a wonderful series of sketches about people in the village. They were anonymous but we were able to recognise everyone. It was one of the best evenings we have had this year.’ Unfortunately we shall never know who Mrs Roberts was taking off, nor why it was so funny. But perhaps that is right. The WI has been described by many women as a safe haven and they regard it as private and not something to be made public.

  In the Cheshire County Federation minutes for January and February 1941 the focus was on a forthcoming visit from Miss Cox. She was due to spend four days in Cheshire, visiting various institutes where she would inspect, advise, attend demonstrations and bring something of head office to Cheshire’s most rural villages. It was an event as eagerly anticipated as any. Yet in the minutes of the May meeting, the month after the event, there was no mention of Miss Cox’s visit, nor is there in any of the institute record books I read. Attention had been focused forward to the manufacture of syrup from beetroot and advice on drying moleskins. Only Home & Country offered any hints of how people had taken part in, celebrated or enjoyed activities, but these were compiled by institutes and sent to the editor, who picked and chose what she wanted. The intimate was hard to find. Linda Oliver, Surrey’s archivist, was hugely helpful in sending through brief memoirs and talks given by their members about the war years and that helped to get the ball rolling. Then the anecdotes began to come in.

  A letter from Margaret Funnell of Bideford in Devon shed a little personal light on a wartime WI. She was an evacuee from Guernsey living near the Bude WI hall in Cornwall. When meetings were held she and her friends would climb up the outside wall to peep inside. ‘One day a lady came out and invited three or four of us to watch a cookery demonstration. We were taken to chairs in the very front row and seemed to be given particular attention by the demonstrator. As she worked she stressed the importance of handling the mixture as little as possible and rolling out the pastry on one side only. Afterwards we were invited to taste her cookery – a treat in wartime!’ Margaret was about ten years old at the time but she told me that when making pastry she can still hear and see that lady giving her advice, which she continues to follow even now, seventy years on.

  Janet Melvin was born in 1938 and her mother was a member of Woodmansterne WI in Surrey. She remembered that the WI meetings were held in the local village hall. Once she was taken to a big meeting dressed up in her Sunday best with white gloves and her Easter bonnet. All the women present were dressed in their best clothes too. ‘I was told by my mother that I was not allowed to move. A big imposing lady came to talk to us about WI jam-making.’ Janet does not know who the lady was but as we spoke we both wondered whether or not it might have been Lady Denman herself.

  Although trips and visits during the war were difficult to arrange because of the lack of fuel, Mobberley members did manage to get to make a farm visit in Derbyshire. The weather was terrible and Mrs Wright, wearing her WI badge, offered to go and ask at the old farmhouse whether they had come to the right place. When the door opened and the old lady inside saw the badge she grabbed her arm and pulled her inside, giving her chapter and verse on her own experiences with the WI during the last war. The rest of the women joined her for home-made tea and a walk around the farm, concluding that ‘it was one outing we will all remember for it gave that old lady so much pleasure to have so many members around her’.2

  Betty Houghton had joined her WI at Chiddingly in East Sussex at sixteen. She was not the only teenage member: ‘You have to understand that there was not much else on offer for women in the villages at the time. I would say that most people living in cottages had some association with the WI. It is important to emphasise that the WI’s role was and remains principally one of education. It taught women things, gave them skills, helped them to try something out that they might take further.’ Betty, who was musical, remembered the social side of the WI in wartime. She used to take her gramophone to WI meetings and play classical music to the women during the social half-hour. She joined the WI choir in Chiddingly, which had a good reputation, and she remembered a high point when Dr Malcolm Sargent, as he was then, came to adjudicate at a county-wide choir competition. ‘Music kept people’s spirits up, it kept people happy,’ she said. Her mother was a good musician and used to play the piano to accompany the Chiddingly WI choir. Mrs Dayrrell felt that it was her role as president to conduct the choir but it was not her forte and Betty’s mother used to conduct from the piano by moving her shoulders up and down to indicate when people had to come in. ‘The WI was a great place to start something, to find out if you liked it and the great thing was that nobody would ever say “You are no good.” The attitude was “You have a go.”’

  A letter from Alwyn Benbow in Shrewsbury shared a wonderful memory of her mother’s wartime activities:

  Late evening my father would take the heavy metal cover off the large underground water tank in the yard. He would lean down with a bucket and scoop up the water. This was to fill the huge boiler in the kitchen. Then he would lay the fire for the next morning in the grate under the boiler. Several of my mother’s WI friends would arrive the following day and using the canner, probably on loan from WI house, would fill and seal cans of seasonal fruit or vegetables from the orchard. I remember the noise and bustle and laughter of friends together. I also remember my fear every time my father bent down to fill the buckets, and even when we played games, we never dared to step on the heavy metal cover over the deep, dark tank.

  So what happened to the women whose personal stories have featured in this book?

  Lady Denman resigned from her position of Director of the Woman’s Land Army in February 1945 in protest at the government’s refusal to award the land army the grants and benefits that had been accorded to women who had been in the forces and Civil Defence. She continued as Chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes until 1946 when she was succeeded by Lady Albemarle. In 1951 she was appointed GBE in recognition of her war work with the Women’s Land Army. She died on 2 June 1954 and her ashes were scattered at Balcombe Place. She had the pleasure of seeing the WI’s own education college in Marcham in Oxfordshire named after her. Denman College continues to thrive.

  Miss Farrer was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1950 and continued as General Secretary to became the longest-serving to date, retiring in 1959 after thirty years in the post. She died in January 1977 at the age of eighty-one.

  The German delegate at the 1939 annual general meeting, Gräfin Keyserlingk, had been on the national committee of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine from 1922, although the movement was banned by the Nazis in 1933. After her return to Germany she spent the war near Schweidnitz (now Świdnica in Poland) and was forced to flee before the Russians in 1945. Five years later she was elected an honorary member of the International Council of Women. She died in Baden-Baden in West Germany in February 1958 in her seventy-ninth year.

  Mrs Milburn’s son Alan finally rang her from Leamington Spa station at midnight on 10 May. She dressed quickly and drove to pick him up: ‘At the station I saw the trellised metal gates closed at the entrance and in front of them were two figures, one in khaki in a beret and a figure in blue. The khaki beret wouldn’t be Alan, I thought, but it detached itself, came to the car and said: “Is it Ma?”, and so out I flung myself and . . . we had a good hug and a kiss and then soon were speeding home, talking hard.’ For the next few days she made tours of the village and neighbourhood, exulting in his safe return and people’s evident joy to see the family reunited: ‘I had a special message from Berkswell WI Committee expressing their delight at Alan’s return.’3 Two days later she wrote: ‘I walk about in a half-dream and the long bad years of war begin to fade a little as Alan’s voice is heard . . . and the house is
once more a real home. The intense relief at the ending of the European war is felt everywhere. No longer do we live under the strain of it, though we shall have it at the back of our mind, and its scars before our eyes, all our lives.’4 Mrs Milburn’s husband, Jack, died in 1955 and Alan was killed tragically in a car accident in 1959. Mrs Milburn died eighteen months later at the age of seventy-seven.

  Peggy Sumner continued to share with her sister Marjorie the house in Hale where she and her parents had lived before the war. Once petrol rationing was lifted she was able to take her Morris 10 off the blocks it had been sitting on since rationing began. She remembered no major celebrations, just a gradual return of peacetime conditions, and of course she was free to attend WI meetings once again. She and her sister used to drive the Morris down to Cornwall on holiday and continued to do so until the car ‘died of a broken heart – a valve went – in 1960’. The biggest changes in the WI for Peggy were the outings arranged after the war. ‘We went to Reaseheath Agricultural College and Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. I went to Denman College in 1949. Then in 1951 we had a trip to London to visit the Festival of Britain and another one to a major craft exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.’ Peggy got drawn into more and more WI activities. She joined a WI choir, she went to dances and always tried to have a go when something new was suggested.

  The great thing about the WI is that you are one of a few who are all trying things out. You get drawn into it and that makes you want to encourage others to join. There is nothing you can tell a non-member to make her join. She has to appreciate what it can be, what it can mean to her, what it can do for her. I have seen members scared to open their mouths when they first joined who have ended up as President or on the county committee. Nowadays the WI has the feeling of an extended family for me.