Dear Ladies,
Were you watching “Home Fires” based on Julie Summers book “Jambusters” on Sunday, 3rd May? Did you record the whole series of six programmes to be screened over the next five weeks and did you enjoy ITV’s presentation?
It was good wasn’t it? Until I had started reading “Jambusters” I had not realised just how much jam had been produced or how it’s production had been controlled by government regulations and regular government inspections. The jam was made from the wonderful harvest of 1939, and following years, which might otherwise have been wasted, falling on the ground and rotting; that the enormous amount of WI jam added flavour and nutrition, in the form of sugar, to the restricted war-time diet and a real contribution to the food supply available. Fruit was turned into chutney as well as jam and preserves and members bottled, canned and preserved throughout the season, enabling fruit to be kept and stored for the dark days ahead.
Did you know that the American Federation of Business and Professional Women gave six canning vans to the WI containing all necessary equipment for the production of fruit. Ref: Jambusters by Julie Summers – photo section between P. 164 – 165
And of course, all of this fruit gathering, boiling. potting-up, canning and preserving was just another chore WI members had to contend with, alongside their own chores, family commitments and other war-time activities – like knitting and…
Have you read “A Force to be Reckoned With – a History of the Women’s Institute” by Jane Robinson? Until I’d started reading this book, I had little real knowledge about the WI’s beginnings, which took place in Canada in 1897, at Stoney Creek, when Mrs. Adelaide Hoodless addressed a Ladies Night meeting and talked about the need for girls and women to be taught domestic science.
Did you also know that in England around this time, there were Women’s Institutes already meeting of a very different nature to their Canadian prototype? One set up by Mrs. Nora Wynford Phillips in London, a “suffragist and keen campaigner for equal opportunities for professional women in their workplace.”
Another WI group in 1913, concerned with adult education and “run by the London County Council and linked to a working men’s institute for education.” There were about thirty such groups in deprived areas as Hackney ,Brixton, Battersea, Deptford and Borough with classes in domestic and health subjects.
That in the London home of Lady Cowdray early in 1915, a show was organised, which included live farm animals wandering about, to showcase “what women have done and can do in agriculture”. Her daughter was Lady Gertrude Denman – who became the WI’s National Chairman during the early days of WWI.
Then I was fascinated to read online that Mrs. Alice Liddell who as a child inspired the creation of the book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, became the first President of Emery Down Women’s Institute close-by her home in the New Forest where, as Mrs.Reginald Hargreaves, she was known as a noted society hostess and mother of three sons.
Margaret Halstead
Ref: all information discovered in “Jambusters” by Julie Summers and “A Force to be Reckoned With” by Jane Robinson and from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for the Adderbury & District WI’s website