Jambusters (26 page)

He told the women how he had visited a country village and admired the patriotic fervour of the womenfolk, eager to do their bit, and how the following day he had seen bombed-out families who had lost everything: ‘They want more jam; you women of the country districts can give it them from the surplus fruits in your gardens. I appeal for your help and I applaud all those who are unselfishly giving their work to increase our food supplies. Good luck to all of you who are helping in a grand piece of work.’
³²

The harvest was disappointing that year and there was a lot of poor fruit, which had to be discarded. The price of fruit in the shops and on the market stalls was higher than the previous year and the quality questionable. Mrs Milburn wrote: ‘Red currants are 2s 6d a lb, cherries 4s 6d, desert gooseberries 3s 6d (and Mr Malins said to a customer: “They’re not worth it! Wouldn’t pay
it!”).’
³³
But the WI members were far from downhearted. They gathered quantities of wild fruit, such as blackberries, rosehips, elderberries and whortleberries. In 1941 2,250,000 lb of fruit was preserved and 1,764 and a half tons of other preserves and chutneys had been canned or bottled, which was 100 tons more than the previous year when the harvest had been outstanding. Oxfordshire’s county minute book recorded: ‘The fact that Institute members had not been able to buy the jam they made was noted and discussed but the general feeling of the meeting was summed up in one member’s most passionately voiced remark: “We are
proud
that our members have not got anything for themselves out of this scheme.”’
³⁴

Coleshill Fruit Preservation Centre in Berkshire was particularly inventive in the disappointing fruit season of 1941. They made apple jelly, flavoured with cloves and lemons using windfalls, even maggoty ones. They then learned about apple pulp which could be made without sugar and thus be sold without having to breach the rationing regulations. They soon got into the swing of alternative preserves: ‘Mulberries came next and we made mulberry and apple jam – not much, because our retailer thought, rightly, that people would be scared of risking their small ration on an unfamiliar jam. Then the blackberries ripened, the apples continued, obligingly, to drop. When good windfalls became saleable we took the bruised and wasp eaten ones, with a little trouble we got plenty of sound fruit out of them, and we made pectin for blackberry jelly out of the peel and cores.’
³⁵

After their success with fruit they turned to vegetables, making green tomato chutney from green tomatoes touched with blight, so otherwise unusable. That went down so well that they then bought some enormous marrows to make marrow chutney for their local shop. ‘Our totals were small, this being a very small village but the variety of things we made and the fact that we tried
to run the centre as a public utility service, making what the village wanted as far as possible did mean that the Centre members enjoyed the job and that the community was quite enthusiastic by the end of the season.’
³⁶
Almost everybody in Coleshill had been involved in the fruit and vegetable scheme. Schoolchildren and teachers picked blackberries and other fruit; the local shopkeeper agreed to take all the produce and even the local supervisor was impressed by the community spirit.

Over the course of the next few years the food situation in Britain deteriorated. There was little risk that the country would starve but the variety of food available outside the ration was limited and grew increasingly so. Mrs Milburn went shopping in Leamington Spa in June 1941 and remarked that so many of the shops had notices saying no oranges or onions, sweets or chocolates, saccharine or cakes ‘but there is always bread and carrots’. Like many she stepped up her efforts in the kitchen garden, digging up more ground for planting and waging a constant war on the pests that plagued her vegetable beds. ‘I kill all the wireworms, calling them first Hitler, then Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Himmler. One by one they are destroyed, having eaten the life out of some living thing, and so they pay the penalty.’
³⁷

By 1943 some 800 fewer jam centres registered with the National Federation but the Ministry of Food was anxious that the WI should continue to run the Fruit Preservation Scheme. The main problem was the lack of volunteers. At the end of 1941 unmarried women between the ages of twenty and thirty were conscripted. The following year saw further recruitment and in 1943, when mobilisation reached its peak, nearly half of all women of working age were either in the forces, working in Civil Defence or in some other capacity that was directly linked to war work. This meant that most younger women had left the villages
and in some areas there was a marked shortage of workers. Nevertheless, an illustrated article on canning in
Home & Country
claimed that ‘even four years of ever-increasing restrictions and Government statutory rules and orders has failed to quench the enthusiasm of the great number of members who work at the Fruit Preservation Centres.’
³⁸
To their surprise and pleasure, the WI found that they received frequent high-profile visits. That year at least three centres hosted the Queen, who insisted on trying out the canning machine herself when she went to a centre near Reading. She stamped her initials on the lid of the can and it was handed back to her, with the label, and sent by her lady-in-waiting to Mrs Roosevelt, as a gift. Miss Craigen of the British War Relief Society visited Little Baddow in Essex and took a series of photographs which were then presented to the WI for their own use.
Home & Country
said: ‘She was most impressed with the work being done and asked a lot of questions as she wanted to send a very full account to America.’
³⁹

The visit that received the most coverage was that of Mrs McLean, president of the American Women’s Voluntary Service, who was in Britain ‘studying the wartime work of British women. She went to see a Dixie Hand Sealer being used at River Centre, near Dover, where they apparently jam and can imperturbably through air raids and bombardments.’
⁴⁰
The day before Mrs McLean’s visit there had been a raid and several bombs had fallen close to the centre. ‘Mrs McLean was so impressed with the day’s entry in the Day Record Book that the page was torn out and given to her as a memento of her visit to take back to America. Some 160lbs of jam were made, but the item that impressed her most was the secretary’s footnote: ‘All done while shelling was in progress – Heil Hitler!’
⁴¹

In 1945 an appreciation of East Kent’s bravery in producing jam when under fire from the V-rockets was published in
Home & Country
. It was written by a ministry inspector who was required to make regular visits to preservation centres to check the WI jam:

I feel I must write and tell you about the Preservation Centres in South-East England, who carried on so magnificently all through last season, under the most difficult conditions. Some mornings, after a bad night in London, I wondered whether I could face the hazards of the country, and then the thought of those centre members carrying on under gunfire, shelling, and ‘doodles’, braced me to another daily tour of the centres. One lot of jam which was passed, was referred to as a ‘doodle batch’, because the members had to take cover three times during the final boiling. Another centre worked constantly under shell fire. Where villages had had these horrible visitors at very close quarters, the answer I always received to an anxious enquiry was ‘We were glad that it was one less for London.’

I cannot express fully my appreciation and admiration of the centre members in the South-East, but I should like the rest to know what wonderful work they have done with a courage and sense of humour unequalled, and I am very proud to have worked with them.
⁴²

7

KNIT ONE PURL ONE

Institutes still knit, no doubt as a rest from onion planting

Home & Country
, May 1941

Along with jam-making, knitting is a strong image for the wartime Women’s Institute. The number of garments knitted for troops abroad, sailors, ARP wardens at home, evacuee children, hospital patients and for home use was enormous. No exact figure of the overall number of garments has ever been calculated, though in September 1944 the WI ran a three-month campaign to knit for Europe and the figure published in March 1945 for this one initiative alone was 152,044 garments with not all returns submitted. It is the only published figure but individual institutes made note of annual tallies in their minute books which indicate that the numbers must have been in the millions by the end of the war. In the first year of the war alone, Audlem in Cheshire knitted 770 garments for the troops, Totteridge on the outskirts of London 400, Essendon in Hertfordshire 450 and Broadway in Worcestershire a staggering 1,300, which they divided between
the Army and the WVS. Three years later in 1941 St Catherine’s Institute near Guildford produced 5,077 garments for Poles, Finns and prisoners of war while Grayshott in Hampshire knitted over 11,000 articles for the forces during the six years of the war. There were 5,585 institutes with 288,000 members. Not every member knitted but a rough calculation would put the number of garments at over 20 million. Many sewed while others were busy with food production and preservation but every record book refers to some members knitting during the war. It was a major industry and one the Army and Navy came to rely on.

There was a hiatus in September 1940 when a memo was sent out from a government department saying that no more string gloves were required for minesweepers. Mrs Hazelwood in the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute wrote to Miss Farrer to say that she had spoken to a commander who said that was quite wrong and begged for 640 pairs by the end of the month. ‘It seems clear from the enclosure I send you that there are two types of sweeping and that for one of them, in which the danger of jagged wires does not arise, the string gloves are
urgently needed
. It is of course essential that they should be correctly made & properly sewn but I do hope that something can be done to clear up this disastrous mistake which will disappoint countless men at sea.’
¹

There are innumerable references in WI minutes to emergency requests for a dozen pairs of socks here, eight helmets there, or gloves for a Civil Defence team who were posted on a chilly hillside in November. And the WIs responded, as they always did, enthusiastically. Miss Farrer had discouraged knitting and sewing activities at monthly meetings so separate knitting groups or knitting parties were set up, some in conjunction with other voluntary organisations. Edith Jones wrote that her institute had set up a working party with the WVS. They sewed, knitted and collected salvage for the troops and for their local
hospital. Just one example of how quickly the WI could react was when the Council for Maternity and Child Welfare sent the national head office an SOS for fifty nightgowns for expectant mothers. It was received on a Monday evening in January 1940. The following morning Buckinghamshire County Federation received the request, since the hospital had been evacuated to their county. At lunchtime the county secretary had been able to confirm to the London office that six institutes had volunteered to make six nightgowns and two would make seven. The patterns were received on Wednesday lunchtime and the nightgowns were delivered by the end of the week. Sewing was almost as popular as knitting and one of the groups who really benefited from the WI sewing parties were the land girls who often came to institutes with hopelessly ill-fitting clothes which they had no idea how to alter. Sambrook WI near Telford in Shropshire decided to spice up their sewing party in February 1942 by making their members do it blindfold.

Audlem WI in Cheshire met for their first wartime meeting on 14 October 1939 at two o’clock. The September meeting had been cancelled owing to the outbreak of hostilities and lighting restrictions so the committee had decided to move their meetings from evenings on the first Thursday of the month to afternoons on the second Saturday. ‘At the conclusion of business, scissors, needles and a sewing machine were busy and by 4pm 23 thrift garments were ready for distribution to children evacuated from the town to our village.’ Twenty-three garments in two hours and while a meeting had been taking place. That is impressive. It is good to record that in their November meeting they heard from the mother of an evacuee child who wished to record her gratitude to Audlem institute’s women for the ‘kindness shown to the children by the sewing done on their behalf’. In the five and a half years between autumn 1939 and spring 1945
the institute secretaries filled four sets of record books and only once did the three-letter word ‘war’ appear in any of those writings. They discussed how meetings would proceed in the future and the quantity of sugar they should order from the National Federation for their jam-making.

Materials for knitting and sewing parties could not be purchased from institute funds. Miss Farrer suggested that ‘it is advisable that any money-raising effort for this purpose should be undertaken by the village as a whole, and not by the Women’s Institute’. However, once money was raised then institutes could apply to purchase cheap materials and patterns from the Personal Service League, who had put out an urgent appeal for pyjamas, helpless-case jackets and shirts for Service and Civilian Hospitals, socks and pullovers (sleeveless or with sleeves) for the Services. ‘The socks need not be of the regulation uniform colour, but the pullovers must be.’
²
This might seem cautious in the detail concerning fundraising but it was an important point for the Women’s Institute, that they be seen to be neutral and not supporting the war effort with their funds, although their women-power was at the country’s disposal. Some institutes ignored the directive from headquarters. Alphington WI in Devon reported in October 1941 that they had £200 6s 0d on war savings deposit. Members unanimously agreed to donate £100 towards a machine gun, £50 towards a Bren gun, £40 to parachutes, £6 17s for clothing for one soldier and £3 towards two stretchers. Ten months later they raised £500 in their ‘tank drive’.