Jambusters (10 page)

Tiny though it was, Barrow had a post office, a shop and a pub. The shop was owed by Ada Hitchen, who was known by everyone as Ha’penny Ada as she put a halfpenny onto the price of everything she sold. The shop was an old-fashioned little store with big blue bags of sugar in the storeroom and jars of sweets on shelves for the children who would spend a long time trying to decide what to spend their 3d pocket money on. The pub was off limits. Caroline was told firmly by her mother that she and her brother were never to be seen in the pub, even when they were old enough to go into one. It was not proper, she said, to be seen going into your own village pub. ‘My mother wasn’t prudish about things, in saying this she simply
reflected the era. The Red Lion was a spit and sawdust type of pub.’ Although not far from Chester, Barrow had a butcher and a baker who came weekly in their vans. The baker, Mr Meakin, resorted to a bicycle during the war but he still made his rounds. Milk came from the farms in cans to individual households in the village so that even during the war they had plenty of milk and butter. ‘I remember that when we went to see my grandmother we always took her some butter because that was rationed and difficult to come by in the city.’ Coke and coal were delivered by horse and cart, although less frequently during the war than before it. The only warm rooms in the White House were the kitchen, which had a range, and the bathroom, which was heated by the hot water cylinder. During the winter the children used to dress in bed or make a dash for the bathroom.

When war broke out Ruth Toosey’s sister came to stay at the White House. She lived in Camberley and her husband thought she would be safer in Cheshire, so she spent several years living in Barrow. They worked the vegetable patch together and grew cabbages and leeks, as well as apples and raspberries. The raspberry canes were magnificent and yielded wonderful fruit in the summer. Mrs Toosey’s children and two boy cousins were quite convinced that if Hitler were to invade Britain he would certainly come to Barrow and steal their raspberries. So they dug Hitler traps to catch him. Caroline remembered: ‘They kept us busy for hours. First we dug holes in the ground and then we covered them with sticks, leaves and finally a layer of soil. Fortunately Hitler did not come to Barrow but unfortunately we succeeded in trapping our mothers, which was not the plan.’

Like so many other WI members, Mrs Toosey took on a number of extra voluntary duties. She joined the WVS and was a registered ambulance driver, with an ID card to prove it, despite the fact that the WVS and the WI represented military
and pacifist organisations respectively. She was not the only WI member to do this and in fact after the war there was a joint WI/WVS badge in recognition of those women who had worked in both organisations.

Although Barrow was rural, it was close enough to Liverpool to experience something of the horrors of the war and had its share of tragedy. The worst single event was on 29 November 1940 when the local sanatorium at Barrowmore Hall was hit during an air raid. Twenty patients and staff were killed and the hall was completely destroyed. ‘The force of the blast was so strong that our back door was blown off its hinges and when we came downstairs in the morning the washing mangle was on top of the electric stove.’ Caroline also remembered seeing a terrible glow in the sky over Liverpool as the city was bombed again and again during the summer and autumn of 1940. Liverpool, Bootle and the Wirral were the most heavily bombed areas outside of London, as the city was so important to the war effort. The government did not want the Germans to know how much damage they had inflicted on the docks so reports from the city were deliberately low-key. However, the destruction was dreadful and in all over 4,000 people were killed during the Blitz on Liverpool. Once Caroline went to stay with her grandmother and was taken on the train, which somehow was still running despite the devastation. The city was a horrific sight and she had nightmares for a long time afterwards.

Smethcote in Shropshire was far enough away from any major industrial city that the war had very little direct impact on the lives of its inhabitants. Nevertheless it rumbled along in the background for six years and shaped the work and focus of its WI.

The effect of the war on Edith Jones’s life was relatively minimal. She had plenty of food growing in the garden, the village
was not threatened by bombs and life was able to carry on more or less as normal, albeit with additional responsibilities such as evacuees, the family staying and paying guests, constant WI drives for knitting wool, fundraising for troops and collections for the local hospitals. Yet there is in her diary a rumbling sense of the menace of the war, which occasionally she comments on. ‘Bombs heard in distance’, she wrote in March 1941. ‘Planes overhead tonight’, she wrote three days later. Then ‘bombs fell at Chelmick [7 miles away] on Monday 7th. White washed the pantry.’

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THE PIPER’S CALL

The social needs of mother, teachers and children will make calls on the resourcefulness and ingenuity of every member.

Miss Farrer, 1939

The mass evacuation of people from the cities to the countryside is, after the Blitz, probably the single most famous event in the lives of the civilians living in Britain during the Second World War. Today the shorthand for evacuation is the image of a tearful child clutching a suitcase and wearing a luggage label waiting with crowds of others for a train at a station. Yet that is far from the whole story. In addition to women, children, the disabled, the elderly and other groups considered vulnerable by the government, went businesses, hospitals, government departments and private firms. James Roffey, an eight-year-old boy who was evacuated to Pulborough in West Sussex, remembered that the Max Factor cosmetic company moved one of their factories to West Sussex. ‘At Pulborough they took over a large house called Templemead to use as a packing factory. The young women who
worked there . . . found the village too quiet for their liking and soon began to drift back to London.’ Great Ormond Street Hospital was evacuated to Tadworth Court, their country branch in Surrey, and other temporary locations outside London; the National Gallery moved its collections to a quarry in North Wales; the Bank of England moved to Whitchurch near Overton in Hampshire and senior Post Office staff were relocated to Harrogate. Hundreds of military camps, anti-aircraft posts, airfields, depots and secret training units were set up throughout the country, often on the outskirts of small villages or hamlets, so that the population of some areas of the countryside almost doubled, putting pressure on everything from transport, policing and schools to local services, shops and the water and sanitation systems, where they existed. Rural Britain was in a state of almost permanent flux. The Post Office recorded over 38 million changes of address during the war. That is nearly one move per head of population.

Netherbury in Dorset was an example of how a small village was overrun with visitors during the early months. Their WI war record illustrates what happened:

The first to arrive in September 1939 was a Roman Catholic School from Acton, which was evacuated to Slape House: the sisters living in the house, the Priest being billeted at the Inn, and the children in various homes. In September too, came a Company of the Lancashire Regiment, to occupy the village hall, and the Women’s Institute ran a canteen in the old New Inn premises for the soldiers. These were followed by the Sussex Regiment. In February 1940 a further batch of mothers and children came from Southampton. On this occasion there was trouble, as the mothers sounded as though they would rather have stayed to be bombed in Southampton, than be buried alive in Netherbury. A vivid recollection is of one mother who refused to get out of the bus or to be parted from her cat which she had in a wooden box.
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By the middle of 1940 the village had almost twice the number of inhabitants as it had the previous year. The WI was affected by this mass movement of people on two levels: as an organisation and individually. Institutes played an important role in entertaining, catering for and helping out with any number of military camps and units, holding mending parties, dances and money-raising events for the forces. However, it was their work with the evacuees that affected the WI most deeply. In the first days and weeks they were wholly occupied with caring for children who ranged from the homesick five- or six-year-old to the truculent twelve- or thirteen-year-old. For some women this caring role lasted for the duration of the war and for many this developed on both sides into warm and loving relationships. However, at the outset everything was new and strange for both sides. Mrs Miles in Surrey was not sure about evacuation. She recorded her surprise at ‘the attitude [to the news of evacuation] of my charwoman which was pure joy. “I’m having 2 girls, poor kiddies. Could I rest when I have a spare room and I thought of them wanting a shelter?”’ Mrs Miles herself was more circumspect about the coming influx and was annoyed by the BBC’s announcements: ‘The evacuation notices are most inappropriately given out by BBC young men, who little know what despair enters the hearts of various women expecting the strangers and afraid to have them. Men just haven’t the foggiest.’
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At the beginning of September 1939 over 1.5 million mothers and babies, unaccompanied schoolchildren, disabled and elderly were evacuated from Britain’s major cities to the countryside. A further 2 million children were evacuated privately and over the
next six years the movement of people back and forth between the cities and the countryside was unceasing. Planning for the removal of non-essential residents in the event of a major aerial attack had been under consideration since the mid-1920s and detailed planning had been carried out over the latter half of the 1930s. During the Munich crisis in September 1938 the Home Office was swamped with enquiries about evacuation and the WVS, by then only in its earliest stages, was unable to cope. Miss Farrer suggested that the WI should lend the Home Office a typist and a typewriter, which was accepted ‘with deep gratitude’. Not only had the WI practical experience to offer at the national level but of course it had the unparalleled network of institutes throughout the country, which was of great value to the authorities.

Following the Munich crisis, when an emergency evacuation of a small number of children had been carried out prematurely, Miss Farrer commissioned a short report from one of the officials involved. Mr Draper was very critical of the existing plans and made several suggestions which Miss Farrer condensed in a letter to Sir John Anderson, the minister responsible for air raid precautions and evacuation, in November 1938. The letter contained many of Mr Draper’s recommendations, the first being to suggest that every local authority should appoint an advisory committee representing voluntary organisations so that each society could be allocated particular duties, thus avoiding duplication or glaring gaps. He had been annoyed by the county council clerks’ complete dismissal of the WVS: ‘In one county which I visited, the Clerk refused to meet the representative of the Women’s Voluntary Service or the Secretary of the County Federation of Women’s Institutes or to give any information whatsoever about his proposed billeting arrangements.’ The government knew that they would have to rely on the goodwill of country families, and in particular housewives, to make evacuation work and this
criticism must have stung because the WVS was responsible for helping with transport and billeting in the countryside and the WI took a great deal of responsibility for the women and children when they arrived.

What bothered the WI in particular was the fact that an evacuation on the scale planned by the government would put pressure on all forms of local service. Miss Farrer suggested in her letter that ‘in a modern war the staff requirements for an evacuation service (doctors, nurses, teachers, local government officials, etc) are as essential as for military purposes.’
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She suggested that ‘it should be impressed upon country people that evacuation work will be an essential part of national service and that those wishing to do war work should not all leave for the towns’.
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This was not done until the propaganda drive in 1940 when the Ministry of Health produced a series of posters proclaiming that looking after evacuees was a national service and as such should be seen as part of the war effort.

Miss Farrer felt sure that ‘the majority of Women’s Institute members would willingly take mothers and children into their homes and do their best to look after them’. In an era when the caring role of women was taken for granted the government assumed that their motherly instincts would overcome difficulties. However, women were concerned with the practical matters that evacuation would throw up and which the government, in their view, failed to address. There were questions about the provision of after-school activities for evacuee children, crèches for two- to five-year-olds and the need for specialised carers and foster mothers for that group. ‘Country families, if they have refugees billeted on them, will be fully occupied in carrying out the extra domestic duties that this entails. They will have no spare time to superintend the children.’

In January 1939 the Minister for Health approached the
National Federation of Women’s Institutes and asked them for their cooperation in carrying out a major survey of 16 million homes in the countryside in preparation for evacuation. Such a monumental piece of work could never have been undertaken without the help of voluntary bodies and in the event 100,000 volunteers, including a very large number of WI members, completed the survey in record time. The purpose of the survey was to establish a comprehensive picture of the housing situation in reception areas and to pin down the number of households who would be prepared to take in children and mothers. When the survey was submitted Miss Farrer and her colleagues were frustrated by the government’s recommendation for billeting one child for every spare room, pointing out that larger houses not only had more rooms but also bigger rooms, which would be able to accommodate more people. This would put the onus on wealthier households to take responsibility.