Jambusters

by Julie Summers

  One restricted foodstuff was lard. Sybil’s mother stored lard in the pantry and had to be careful that nobody discovered how much she was storing, so it was kept in jars on the top shelf and labelled ‘apples’ or ‘pears’. That was code for reminding her which jar was to be used first. Winter apples kept longer than pears so that was the jar to be used last. It was a little industry that sustained not only their household but also others, including their neighbours, in the community. Sometimes they even had visiting children from a city school who would delight in seeing all the different animals on the farm. Sybil remembered one little girl saying to her: ‘Now I know what chicks look like. They have two legs and I always draw them with four.’

  As the first winter of the war drew to a close and the warm weather returned, bringing with it new growth, Hitler launched the Blitzkrieg. ‘The most eventful day of the war! This morning Holland and Belgium were invaded by Germany and very soon afterwards they both appeal to the Allies for help,’ wrote Mrs Milburn on 10 May 1940. Her entry concluded: ‘Mr Chamberlain has resigned the Premiership and Mr Churchill has taken his place.’

  The speed and ferocity of the Blitzkrieg shocked the nation. Regular news bulletins, eagerly listened to by individuals and groups crowded round wirelesses, gave out sombre announcements of horrors and atrocities being perpetrated not only on the armed forces but on women and children. Mrs Milburn was as distressed as anyone: ‘There is so much one could write. Each day there is so much news that one is appalled at all the happenings and the terrible loss of life, given out so calmly on the wireless. Thousands of Germans in troop-ships, armoured trains, aeroplanes. Over a hundred enemy aeroplanes brought down by the Dutch in one day! And much nearer 200, counting their losses elsewhere. All this for a few madmen out for world-domination!’ A fortnight later she wrote: ‘Oh the horror and bitterness of war!’

  As the German war-machine crashed its way westwards so the minds of everyone became focused on the threat of what would happen next. With British, French and Belgian troops cut off by the German Army there was no option but to order an evacuation. Churchill called the events in France ‘a colossal military disaster’. With the capitulation of Belgium on 28 May the British Expeditionary Force, including Mrs Milburn’s son, Alan, was in ever-greater danger. The evacuation – in total over 338,000 British and French soldiers – continued until 3 June. Men were picked up from the beaches in the now famous ‘little boats’ and brought to larger vessels lying at a distance from the shore. Some 580 boats took part in the evacuation and the miracle of the little ships is one of the most evocative stories of bravery from the early years of the Second World War. For mothers and wives waiting to hear news of their men the days, weeks and months following the evacuation of Dunkirk were agonising. On 1 June Mrs Milburn heard that two young men from their district had been killed. ‘These are the first of the men we really know and my heart aches for the Winsers; Philip was so cheery and such a good fellow.’

  Alan Milburn had been captured at Dunkirk and his mother still had no news. On 1 July she wrote: ‘Always one is thinking of him, wondering whether he still lives and if so, whether he is well, where he is, what he does all day, what discomforts he is suffering. If . . . if . . . And so the days go by.’ On the same day, the Germans landed on the Channel Islands following several days of raids and in August the Battle of Britain began.

  Mrs Milburn wrote in her diary on 6 July:

  Twink and I took our little walk in the peaceful fields . . . No one to be seen there – just trees and hedges and the great blue arch of heaven. In the evening the village is quiet, with scarcely a soul to be seen walking about. But it is not a happy tranquility. It is unnatural and eerie, and tense at times. Behind it lies the unhappiness and anxiety of war and the not knowing what will happen to our dear, dear land in the next few months.

  Two weeks later, in a bid to keep going, Mrs Milburn had been to her institute where a produce exhibition was being held, to see how the judges were getting on. She found them ‘in the thick of things, tasting and judging the merits of jams, jellies, chutneys, salad cream and bottled fruit. Mrs Ford was sipping each bottle of wine and looking flushed by the time she had got to the eleventh!’

  Mrs Sims and Mrs Ward in Berkshire were as busy as Mrs Milburn ensuring that life in their institute carried on alongside all the other responsibilities that fell on their shoulders. Theirs was a smaller village than Balsall Common. By the middle of the twentieth century Bradfield had a population of around a thousand and was divided into two parts: Southend and the old village round Bradfield College, a public school that had been founded by Dorcas Ward’s grandfather. To give some idea of the character of the village in wartime, Ann and Dorcas listed all the different businesses, farms and shops that ran in Bradfield. There were seventeen farms, four milk-rounds, three post-offices, a garage, a village school and sixteen shops. There was also a clock and watch repairer, a radio repairer, a cobbler, a blacksmith, two garages, two dressmakers and a hairdresser. Bradfield also had its own policeman and a district nurse.

  Life in Bradfield became ever busier for the womenfolk. First, many of the men were called up, so that women had to take over roles hitherto done by their husbands, sons or other men, and secondly, the amount of paperwork escalated. Ration books, savings books, identity cards, clothing coupons all had to be processed and dealt with by the shopkeepers. Ann remembers her own mother doing seemingly endless paperwork as she juggled a large number of voluntary jobs during the war and for years afterwards. In addition to serving on the WI committee for forty years at various times as president, secretary and treasurer, Mrs Sims also ran the National Savings Scheme in the village.

  In January 1940 R. M. Kindersley, president of the National Savings Committee, appealed directly to the WI for help in raising the profile of the National Savings campaign. He told them it was essential ‘that for the duration of the war a large part of the purchasing power of individuals should as far as possible be transferred to the State though the purchase of Government Securities’. He invited the NFWI to help by cooperating with organising the campaign alongside the National Savings local committees; by displaying posters and distributing leaflets and by setting up in each WI a branch of the National Savings Scheme. This was something that the WI agreed they were able to do and actively supported the Treasury in its aim to raise substantial sums of money for the war effort. By December 1940 the war was costing £10 million (£426 million today) a day and the government needed to borrow over half the amount from the public. The scheme had started in 1916 to help pay for the First World War and the legacy had been a strong organisation of local and regional committees. When the government launched the new campaign it was able to tap into that network. ‘Running a Savings Group appealed to many people unable to take a more active part in the war, and group secretaries included people in their seventies and at least one blind woman, but most were housewives, often those same “willing horses” who were the backbone of every form of service, from ARP to collecting salvage.’8 Ann particularly remembered Mrs Adams who, in addition to her WI work, sold savings stamps every week. She would come over to the house to do the ‘sistifficates’ as she called them. Once the money was counted and the fifteen-shilling certificates had been made out she would regale Mrs Sims with all the village gossip she had gathered as she rode around the village on her bicycle.

  Raising money is a running theme in war diaries and institute record books. Although the WI was not supposed to raise funds directly for war work, this was often ignored at an institute level. Some institutes regarded requests as a challenge and succeeded, over the years, in raising impressive sums of money, mainly through the purchase of savings stamps but often for a specific cause, such as the Spitfire Fund or Wings for Victory week. Stotfold in Bedfordshire had topped the WI ‘Savings Ladder’ in 1943 with a sum of £8,190 (£283,000 today) raised in just two years and of that total £3,446 (£119,000) was raised for Warship Week in 1942. As the village ha
d a population of less than 5,000 this was remarkable.

  Over the course of her life Mrs Sims served as a trustee for the Almshouses, was a parish councillor, a school manager, sat on the Parochial Church Council, ran the Brownies and Girl Guides, where she was respectively Brown Owl and Captain, she organised Christian Aid week for twelve years and took part in Meals on Wheels. This in addition to bringing up a family, managing a house on a wartime budget and with rations as well as helping to keep village spirits up during the six years of war.

  She was not the only busy lady. Mrs Elsie Young, who lived until she was ninety-eight, was a stalwart of Bradfield village. She joined the WI the same year as Mrs Sims and helped out with the National Savings Scheme. When her husband was called up she took over his work at Bradfield College, which meant that she cleaned two classrooms before breakfast, washed up for 240 after breakfast, the same after lunch, collected the post from the various letter boxes and put the post on the bus for Reading. Then her daughter, Pam, came home from school and after their meal they returned to the college to wash up after supper. At this meal ten boys helped, so Mrs Young enjoyed the evening wash-up.

  After the fall of France at the end of June the fear of a Nazi invasion grew. Mrs Ward wrote the minutes for their June committee meeting. There had been an announcement that the children’s party would be held at Horseleas, Mrs Howlett’s house, on 11 July. This suddenly seemed optimistic: ‘I think when this announcement was made each of us wondered in our hearts whether by that date any children’s party would be possible or whether our lovely countryside would be suffering as that of France is suffering today.’ The reaction of parents was once again to evacuate their children, first from the vulnerable coastal towns and then overseas. Tens of thousands of children were sent on private and government schemes to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. These children faced a new and unseen horror as they made their journeys by ship: German submarines lying in wait that caused immense losses amongst merchant shipping bringing food and supplies to Britain.

  Although food from the continent to the UK was disrupted during the autumn of 1939, it was not until the fall of Holland and Belgium and the capitulation of France that food exports from the continent ceased completely. Apart from bacon, eggs and butter, the single most sorely missed item in the kitchens of Britain was the common onion. Until 1940 the majority of Britain’s supply of onions had been shipped from the warm fields of France and Spain, where crops produced large yields. The end of onion imports led to a great surge in the desire to grow onions. It was successful only in certain counties where the growing conditions were favourable and there was, for the rest of the war, a shortage of onions. This had a big impact on the taste of food and Elsie Bainbridge remembered how dull their food was when her mother was unable to purchase or grow onions. So valuable did they become that they were offered as prizes at WI raffles and there is a record of one being given to Lady Albemarle as a present. Mass Observation diarist Maggie Joy Blunt wrote on 18 March 1941: ‘Lady A was given an onion yesterday for her birthday. Her cook flavoured bread sauce with it and then used it for something else.’9

  The Ministry of Food tried to encourage the commercial cultivation of onions and by 1941 the first crop was eagerly awaited. Unfortunately, the bad weather in August meant that the growth was poor and, worst of all, the onions were unfit for storage so that much of the crop rotted and people were bitterly disappointed. Marginally more successful was 1942 but there were never sufficient onions grown commercially and it was down to the allotment holders and private gardeners to grow their own where they could.

  No sooner had the WI heard of the great onion blockade, or that is how they came to see it, than they organised onion seeds and sets to be distributed via the National Federation. Some areas, such as Dorset and Oxfordshire, are better for growing onions than others; Oxfordshire WIs harvested 13 tons in 1942. As researcher Stephen Rockcliffe explained: ‘The onions we grow today are largely the result of hybridisation, and known as short-day onions. This refers to the amount of daylight they require to grow. As any gardener will tell you, onions grow really slowly. The varieties available pre-war would not grow successfully in the UK – too cold, too wet, too dark in the early months of the year.’ And that was indeed the problem. Countless references in diaries and letters attest to the frustrations felt by the gardener and allotment holder over growing onions. It was not only the weather that affected their development, but pests and diseases such as onion blight. Mrs Milburn complained in her diary, in July 1941: ‘We have worked so hard in the garden and a lot of it is in vain, it seems. I am particularly vexed with the onions, which have onion fly badly, and my own seedlings are dying off one by one.’10 The following year she gave up completely, miserable that her beautiful bed of onions had been attacked by the onion fly grub. ‘It was no use to leave them to be eaten off one by one, Hitler fashion, and I shall not grow them again. They were a back-aching job to plant out, and I have spent many hours on their culture – all for nothing.’11

  While onions thwarted many gardeners, other vegetables were easier to grow and were used successfully to supplement the monotonous wartime diet. The Ministry of Food encouraged cultivation of potatoes, carrots and tomatoes and the National Federation distributed tomato seeds and bags of seed potatoes in great numbers each year, as well as thousands of packets of Suttons’ seeds that they obtained at special rates ahead of the planting season. Record books and county agricultural subcommittee notes list all the different varieties of seed that were available through the National Federation. In 1940 Suttons provided 10,000 collections of vegetable seeds, the price to members being 2s 6d (£5.74 today), which contained peas, broad beans, beetroot, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, leeks, lettuce, spinach or parsnip (members had to choose one or the other), onions and turnips. The quantities were sufficient to sow in a large vegetable garden or allotment, giving about eight rows of 25 feet and 200 plants of broccoli, Brussels, spinach, cabbage, etc. Were everything to grow from the seeds, this would have been enough to feed a family and supply a surplus, which could be sold at a local WI market. The government set high targets for WIs. In February 1940 East and West Hendred’s minutes secretary wrote: ‘The meeting was informed that the Government wishes each Institute to contribute by sale 2 cwt onions and 3 cwt tomatoes above what members need for themselves.’ They decided to join with Harwell and work as a fruit-preserving centre so that they could get a sugar allowance. ‘Major Borwick has kindly offered to take market produce to the WI stall at Didcot therefore members should sow a surplus of vegetables.’

  Edith Jones was a regular visitor to the Saturday market in Shrewsbury. She sold surplus produce that was not needed by the household or her neighbours and at times made a small profit. She grew peas, beans, broad beans and soft fruit in the summer. She planted cabbages, winter beans and onions and had an orchard outside the kitchen from which she harvested apples and pears. ‘It is late for planting cabbage but rabbits have been troublesome. Autumn sowing of beans is a new venture,’ she wrote in November. What they did not eat fresh or sell at the market she bottled, jammed, canned or pickled. Everything that she grew in the kitchen garden and orchard was used and from her diary it is clear that she was enormously industrious. Chris Downes remembered her larder with its stacked shelves: ‘there were salted kidney beans in jars, jams, cooked and uncooked meat, bottles of plums, damsons and pears. That was the only way that fruit and vegetables could be preserved and used throughout the rest of the year.’ With no electricity at the farm until the late 1950s there was no cold storage. Edith also kept hens. She was very interested in her poultry and made frequent mention of them in her diaries. In November 1939 she was delighted with a new trapdoor that Mr Tomkins had made in the fowl house ‘easier cleaning. 1/1.’, she wrote, presumably referring to the cost of the door.

  As we have seen, the government made the decision to issue the same rations for every adult, deeming it iniquitous to differen
tiate between types of work carried out by members of the population. They believed it would make rationing more acceptable to the British public and generally it worked. However it was acknowledged that certain types of manual work meant that people needed more food in order to be able to work efficiently. For men and women working in factories in the towns and cities this could be provided by the use of canteens where food could be purchased over and above rations. There was a dramatic increase in the numbers of canteens for miners and factory workers from 1,500 in 1939 to 18,486 in 1944.12 In addition there were the British restaurants which had been started during the Blitz and served up to 600,000 subsidised meals a day to urban workers in over 2,000 restaurants by 1943.

  This did not help the farm labourers and other workers in the countryside. These people usually took their midday meal with them from home, using their weekly cheese or bacon ration. In 1942, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, enlisted the help of the WVS, who developed the Rural District Pie Scheme, through which they took meat pies to the workers in outlying villages and farms on certain days of the week. As the Denbighshire County Secretary explained to the president of Trefnant WI, it was designed to provide ‘country workers with meals outside their rations, thus bringing them into line with industrial workers who have access to work canteens etc. Moreover the Ministry of Food realises that the provision of carried meals for men and women working long hours in the fields has become a very real difficulty for the house wife, and hope that the pie scheme will help to overcome this.’13 The WVS was active in small towns but not in remote rural villages so that the WI’s help was needed to make the scheme work as the government had intended.