Jambusters (2 page)

All the other stories come from minute books, contemporary
records held by the National Federation in its archives at the Women’s Library in London, letters, diaries and anecdotes that have been passed on to me. The women in these stories are referred to, as they would have been during the war, by their title and surnames. Traditionally the married women would have used their husband’s Christian names to identify them if more than one member of the family belonged to an institute. So Mrs Peter Walker was the sister-in-law of Mrs Trevor Walker and the mother of Edith Walker, addressed of course as ‘Miss Walker’.

One other woman will feature: Clara Milburn of Balsall Common WI near Coventry. Her diaries were published in 1979, an edited version of the fifteen exercise books she had filled with daily observations about life during the war. Peter Donnelly, who edited the diaries, described how they began: ‘In the early uncertain days of 1940 Clara Milburn took time off from her loved (and sometimes loathed) garden and sat at her desk to begin a task she’d thought of starting for some time now. Opening a cheap soft-backed exercise book, she wrote “Burleigh in Wartime” on the first thin blue line, underscored it, and set to work on a project without any foreseeable end.’ Mrs Milburn wrote mostly of things that concerned her and other women: first and foremost the fate of her son, Alan, who was a prisoner-of-war in Germany, but also of her dismay at the ever-increasing price of what little was available in the shops, the terrible plight of the people of Coventry during the bombings there, and of her clothes, her garden and her institute.

The Women’s Institute covered England and Wales. Scotland had its own organisation called the Scottish Rural Women’s Institute, which was independent of the WI and although it functioned on broadly the same lines as its English and Welsh equivalent, it does not come under the umbrella organisation and therefore will not feature in this book. Not every village in
England and Wales had a WI during the war years. In fact only one in three had an institute but often they would cover more than one village, such as Edith Jones’s Smethcote Institute, near Shrewsbury, that also catered for Picklescote, Woolstaston, Leebotwood and Lower Wood. WIs were encouraged to involve those without institutes in communal activities such as fruit-canning and bottling or running market stalls so that the spread of its organisational reach was larger than that of any other organisation in the countryside. Its membership was ten times that of the Women’s Voluntary Service at the beginning of the war and twenty times the size of the Townswomen’s Guild. The WVS expanded to half the size of the WI during the war but with a proportionally smaller number of members in the country villages than in the towns. Many WI members belonged to other voluntary organisations, some sat on rural district or parish councils, others ran Guides or Brownies while others still were school governors or members of charity committees local to their areas. Some women worked full time, others were housewives or farmers’ wives whose domestic life was their work. The spread was enormous and the energy equalled it.

The Second World War was the backdrop to the lives of Britons for six years. For children who were five or six at the outbreak it shaped their childhoods; for young women it coloured their adolescence and the formative years of their adulthood; for middle-aged and older women it came as an all too grim reminder of the Great War that had ended just a generation earlier and cost the country nearly a million lives. As Peggy Sumner reminded me, the women who were members of her WI were the wives, sisters, fiancées and young widows from that war.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the population of the countryside almost doubled. Key workers, evacuated families, unaccompanied schoolchildren and military camps resulted
in unprecedented pressure on rural life. Food, housing, transport, schools, local services were all affected. As the country adapted to wartime conditions it was women who were at the forefront of helping with the adjustments needed. This was an era when wives were chattels and women made up a quarter of the workforce. Their lives in the countryside were not easy. When the war began over two thirds of rural housing had no access to electricity and main drains, a large number had only one tap or a pump in the kitchen to supply water. Some women even had to get their household water from a village well and privies were the norm. Washing was done in a copper, usually on Mondays, fires had to be laid daily in cold weather and some women still cooked on an open fire rather than a range or stove. Oral contraception was twenty years in the future and pain-relief for childbirth was unavailable except in hospitals. And yet this was the post-First World War generation of women who generally had less help in their homes than their grandmothers had.

The title for this book,
Jambusters
, was the inspired suggestion of my brother, Tim. He deserves credit for a very clever pun, though I suspect he did not know at the time he suggested it just how apposite it would be. During the war the WIs bust logjams, circumvented bureaucracy and improvised in many different ways. They wrote a major report on evacuation, were involved in advising eleven ministries, including the Treasury, and as a result influenced government thinking about children’s health and education, housing and post-war reconstruction. They ran canteens for troops, baked pies for farm workers, and collected hundreds of tons of rosehips and herbs for the pharmaceutical industry. By their joint effort, members contributed millions of knitted garments to keep troops and refugees in Europe warm. They made 12,000,000 lb. (5,445,000 kilograms) of jam and preserves, helped to set up over 1,000 pig clubs and made more than
2,000 fur-lined garments for Russia. And in amongst all this major activity they sang, put on plays and organised parties to entertain their villages and keep their spirits up. The Second World War was the WI’s finest hour.

In her speech to the annual general meeting of the Women’s Institute held in the Albert Hall in 1943, Queen Elizabeth thanked the women for their enormous contribution to the war effort. As joint president of Sandringham WI with her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, where her daughter, Princess Elizabeth, became a member in 1943, and as a regular visitor to other institutes, she had first-hand experience of the WI’s work. She said:

When we have won through to peace, a great page in the history of Britain’s war effort should be devoted to the countrywomen in this dear land of ours, who, left to carry on in the villages, tackled their job quietly and with wonderful efficiency: and institutes up and down the country have given a grand demonstration of how women can work together cheerfully and lovingly for the good of all. I am so glad to have this opportunity of paying my tribute to the NFWI and to all my fellow-members.

It will take a whole book, not just one page as suggested by Queen Elizabeth, to pay tribute to and celebrate their extraordinary achievements on the Home Front during six long years of war.

Jambusters
opens with a brief history of the WI and introduces a small number of the key players who ran the organisation at national level. Then we follow the course of the war, seen through the eyes of women who have all been involved in or associated with the WI in one way or another at institute level. We will look at some of the large variety of activities women
undertook at the behest of the government and its national body, such as jam-making, food production and knitting. The book ends with a brief summary of the post-war lives of those women whose personal stories have featured.

All the stories in this book have been checked as far as possible for accuracy, and if there are any errors in the narrative, I take responsibility for them. No names have been changed but a small number of stories have been told anonymously so as not to cause offence to relatives who might still be alive. To every woman who has helped to bring this book to life I offer my warmest thanks.

The village of Milton in Cambridgeshire had a wartime motto which I think sums up the contribution made by the WI: ‘Say little, serve all, pass on. This is the true greatness – to serve unnoticed and work unseen.’ Women did not trumpet their achievements and many of them were unquantifiable anyway since the aim was to keep going, and make life a little easier for others.

Julie Summers

Oxford

1

LET THE SUNSHINE STREAM IN

A friend said, ‘Come along with me.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ But she kept bothering me and my husband said, ‘For goodness sake go with her and stop her worrying.’ So I went with her and that was the best day’s work I ever did.

A WI member, 1919

Not every woman in the countryside joined her WI, but for those who did it probably presented the only opportunity for them to socialise outside the home and to learn about life beyond their immediate environs. Edith Jones was one such woman. She described her village in the early part of the twentieth century:

Life in the truly rural areas could be rather humdrum before the motor transport came into its own. Some of us lived 10–12 miles from the market town and 3–5 miles from the nearest railway station depending on where our houses were situated. We were in a scattered area, mostly farmers and connected with farm work and the women had a full time job in the home for there was no electricity nor piped water or any other modern convenience and everything was ‘made at home’. We seemed to have little time or cause to visit our next village unless it was for a fresh sitting of eggs in the spring or a jar or two of honey in the autumn ready for winter colds. The menfolk generally managed the cattle auctions, touching each other for a lift in the farmers’ gigs but if the farmer’s wife went too they knew they’d have to be sober to touch a ride back.

Edith married John Cecil (Jack) Jones on 10 July 1914, less than a month before the outbreak of the First World War. They moved to Red House Farm in Smethcote as tenant farmers, with milking-cows, sheep and poultry on some sixty acres. It was not a large farm, even in those days, and they had little money. They milked morning and evening with the help of Jack Middleton, who lived in nearby Picklescote. Jack was an ex-soldier of the Great War. He never married but lived with his elderly mother and earned his living by catching rabbits and working for Mr Jones, earning five shillings for eight hours’ work, Edith noted. The cows came into the milking shippon opposite the house to be milked but that building had no water so the cows had to be driven down to the pond at the end of the farmyard to drink after milking. In addition to the cattle and sheep there were Edith’s chickens, of which she was extremely fond. She sold eggs at the farm gate as well as taking them into Shrewsbury market on Saturdays. When there were tasks on the farm, such as caring for sick animals, Edith invariably helped out. She wrote about drenching and hand-feeding a calf that was poorly. For three days she looked after it but, she wrote, ‘at a quarter to one on Saturday morning the calf died. The men buried it. It had tried hard to rally.’ Although she was clearly touched by the calf’s death Edith was unsentimental about animals. Farming was a way of life and there would always be deaths as well as births in the countryside.

Jack Jones was a quiet man committed to his farm and the community. A rural district councillor who also served as a churchwarden, he was a regular pall-bearer at funerals. He went to market weekly to buy or sell stock and he enjoyed the quiet life of the country with its seasonal rhythms. His wife was different. Edith was extraordinarily industrious and gifted at turning her hand to mending and making almost anything. She was also an avid reader, and despite her busy life as a farmer’s wife would try to set aside an amount of time each afternoon to reading or studying. She loved the wireless and used to note programmes that she had listened to in her diaries. In March 1938 she wrote: ‘Sowed antirrhinums and sweet peas in boxes. Listened to the Parliamentary discussion on the unrest in Central Europe.’ Six months later Chamberlain returned from Munich: ‘The European Peace Pact was signed! May it be a lasting pact and for our good. War has threatened and been hanging over us and the relief when peace was declared was immense.’ That year, on Armistice Day, she remained hopeful: ‘Nice morning. I gather and clear up wood under yew trees. Chop some then Len comes and finishes them. There is now a good supply in the shed and it looks tidy. We keep the two minutes silence and feel thankful for peace in the country.’

Her great-niece, Chris Downes, remembered how Edith always wanted to know more about the world she lived in.

She had a passionate belief in the value of education and she read widely on any number of topics. I remember when she was in hospital in her eighties having had a hip replacement. We visited her and she was astonished that other women in her ward were just sitting in their beds. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, Christine, they just sit there and do nothing. They’re not even interested in reading or playing Scrabble.’ As a young woman she had studied butter-making at Radbrook College in Shrewsbury. She was very skilled and achieved top marks for her butter-making.

The Joneses were childless but in 1926 they were asked to look after Edith’s nephew, Leonard Manley. The Manley family had moved from Shropshire to Staffordshire, to a farm near the river. Leonard suffered from rheumatic fever and his parents were told that if he remained in the house by the river he would die. Leonard believed he was going to spend the summer with Aunt Edith and Uncle Jack at Smethcote but in fact he stayed with them for the rest of his childhood and became for them the son they never had. He remained close to his parents and siblings and there were regular family visits but his home was Red House Farm. When he was old enough he went to Rodbaston Agricultural College in Staffordshire and did a one-year course just before the outbreak of the war. The relationship between Leonard and his aunt was close, so that when Chris was born she called Edith ‘Gran Jones’. ‘I told my friends at school that I had three grandmothers, my mother’s mother, my father’s mother and Edith. The teachers said that was not possible but it was true. I regarded all three women as my grandmothers and I saw a great deal of Gran Jones. She and Jack retired down the road to Church Stretton in 1947 when Leonard married my mother, Gwladys Hughes.’