Mrs Walshe from Danbury WI in Essex had written to complain that
in many little houses all over the country there is no sanitary appliance except a pail. The gardens of these houses, many of them very small, cannot grow food because the soil is polluted. There is also the question of the many rural schools which still have no sanitary appliances except pails. The Ministry of Health is very busy organising inoculation against diphtheria, but surely one essential method of fighting this and other dangerous diseases, such as scarlet fever, is to raise the standard of sanitation for all the people.6
As late as 1944, Home & Country published an article on how to manage an earth closet. It started with a cheerful assertion that if you have no drains in the house then there are no drains to go wrong. ‘But, and there is a very big but, an earth closet can be the most unpleasant thing in the world if it is not managed correctly.’7 Sybil Norcott’s family home outside Dunham Massey had an outside privy and she remembered a funny story when one of her mother’s friends, Aunt Rose, who had married a shipping director and lived in a smart house with modern sanitation, came to stay on the farm for a holiday.
Aunt Rose was used to a flush lavatory at home whereas here the lavatory was outside – a scrubbed wooden seat over a bucket in an outhouse not far from the kitchen. Martin, our Irish farmhand, was bringing the morning milk into the house to be sieved when Aunt Rose came in from the loo and said: ‘Hannah, you have no lock on the toilet door.’ Martin remarked: ‘Eh, missus, we’ve never had anyone pinch a bucket ‘a shit yet.’ Poor Mum!
Earlier that year the government had published a White Paper suggesting what might be done to bring water to nearly every house and farm ‘where practicable’. One of the problems was that there were over 1,000 water companies in Britain at the time and the government had to decide how to amalgamate the companies in order to provide water to remote households.
Sceptics too will find themselves wondering over those words ‘a piped water supply where practicable’. Practicable according to whom? There are WIs who before the war appealed in vain to the rural district councils for a piped water supply. They were told it was impracticable. Yet with the building of an aerodrome or an American camp a piped water supply was provided without difficulty. In Switzerland and in Sweden it is found practicable to supply even remote villages with water, electricity and telephones.8
This rankled many village householders and in their report the NFWI asked the question: ‘There appear to be ample supplies for Military camps. Water is practicable and reasonable for soldiers in wartime. Are we ratepayers and housewives going to insist that it is practicable and reasonable for civilian family life in time of peace?’9
The government had spent money on providing water supplies to rural villages during the 1930s and had succeeded in bringing water to 70 per cent of these areas. As the WI pointed out, however, these were the easiest 70 per cent to reach, the remaining 30 per cent being more inaccessible. In 1944 the government agreed to allocate grants for water and drainage. How far would the money stretch? the WI asked. ‘Many of the houses already served with water have no drainage. Even some of the agricultural cottages built this year have no water laid on, in some cases in spite of ample water being available.’10
Bedfordshire was one of the counties that had a good piped water supply with only one or two villages relying on a private scheme. Nearly all the houses had taps or standpipes, with the majority being served by the latter. Nevertheless five villages had to rely on wells and in three, Dean, Turvey and Milton Ernest, several villagers had to go more than 200 yards for a piped water supply. Counties further north, like Lancashire, were worse off. In Hoghton thirty-six households shared five wells, Great Dalby in Leicestershire was a village where eighty houses had to share three pumps, and Farley Hill in Berkshire had to pay water rates, yet 80 per cent of their householders had to carry water half a mile.
Answers to the sewerage question were even more shocking. In twenty-six English and Welsh counties half the houses surveyed had only earth, bucket or chemical closet and in Hampshire the figure rose to 77 per cent. In the worst case they could quote Bidford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, where twenty-one people living in three houses shared one bucket lavatory. The summary ended: ‘In Cerne Abbas (Dorset) sanitation is described as deplorable and not much improved since Tudor days.’11 What irritated the women carrying out the survey more almost than the insanitary conditions for the householders were those in the country schools where in twenty-one counties half of all schools had only earth or bucket lavatories. In Shropshire five schools were entirely without any form of water supply and ‘earth closets in village schools of all counties are quite usual and with the wartime difficulty of finding adequate school cleaners, school hygiene – if one can use that word in connection with earth closets – becomes a nauseous mockery.’12 At a school in Gloucestershire the pails were emptied into a drain which had not itself been emptied for forty years. Eighty yards below the drain was a pump supplying fourteen houses with water in times of drought. There was much to be done and the WI promised to lobby the government and follow closely the official survey into water supplies to ensure that the maximum pressure was put on local councils not to shirk responsibility for what they regarded as a scandalous situation. The battle over piped water and drains continued for another decade and it was only in the latter half of the 1950s that the majority of village homes had their own water supply. As the WI had pointed out in 1942, it did not seem very much to ask to be able to turn on a tap in the home and have running water.
In 1943 the WI decided to hold its AGM in London. As usual it was organised over a period of two days in June and despite ‘stygian travel’, as Lady Denman put it, almost everyone managed to arrive at the Royal Albert Hall on time, though the guest of honour was gracious enough to delay the start of her speech by a minute in order for delegates who had been held up on trains and buses to get to their seats. The National Executive had tried to keep the identity of their special guest a secret and there was tremendous excitement and anticipation as the Queen stood up and addressed the 8,000 women in the hall:
Through the institutes the energies of thousands of countrywomen have been organised in directions essential to victory. The care of evacuated children, the preservation of thousands of tons of fruit, the collection of salvage – these are only some of the jobs tackled by village women through their respective institutes. As Joint President with Queen Mary of our own Institute at Sandringham – where I am glad to think that we have three generations of our family as members – I know how deeply concerned our members are in these problems.13
The next speaker was the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Robert Hudson MP, who elicited a huge roar of approval when he began:
I could not help wondering, when I came into this great hall this morning, what the Nazis would think of a gathering like this. That is, if you can imagine them allowing women to have the audacity to organise and run a national movement of this sort. Your gathering is a tribute to the living force of democracy. In the fourth year of a world struggle, it is a very great achievement to have gathered together so representative an audience from all corners of England. I should like to congratulate you, Lady Denman, and your Federation on its wisdom and initiative in reviving the full democratic working of its machinery.14
Lady Denman used her speech at this AGM to encourage the members to start planning for the peace to come. She told them how proud she was that their water and sewerage survey had met with almost universal praise and she reminded her audience ‘that there had hardly been a government department which had not asked, through this organisation, for the help and cooperation of country women. Both have been given freely by the Institutes all over the country.’
Another topic that concerned the WI from the mid-1940s was the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services. Presented to Parliament in November 1942 by its author, Sir William Beveridge, it recommended principles
that he believed necessary to abolish poverty from Britain. The Beveridge Report, as it soon became known, was radical, suggesting as it did that the war provided the opportunity for a fundamental change. He said: ‘Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.’ The report was well received by the public, and the WIs were as vocal in their praise as other groups. They particularly liked the emphasis on ‘social expenditure to the care of childhood and to the safeguarding of maternity’. They had long been arguing the case for an allowance for families with children under fifteen, claiming that it would help towards ‘preventing widespread malnutrition, encourage the birth rate, and remove children from the consequences of those modern world diseases – slumps, industrial disputes and so on – which they should not have to bear’.15
The WI welcomed the Beveridge Report as a real advance on current thinking: ‘Evolutionary not revolutionary. The logical outcome of the national insurance we already know. Everyone is talking about it and yet there is hardly anyone who disagrees with its general principles.’16 Lectures, discussions and debates on the report were held in institutes throughout the country from the time of its publication in December 1942.
An article in Home & Country in January 1943 addressed specific issues relating to family life in the report: ‘In order to understand some of the recommendations of the Report, we have to consider a very important fact which underlies them. This is the fact that in England today we have a great many old people and far too few children. It is a matter of common sense that many hands make light work, that if there is no one to speed the plough there can be no harvest.’17
The birth rate in Britain had been on a downwards curve since the 1920s and by 1942, when the statistics for the previous year were made public, it was a gloomy picture. The rate had declined by some 40,000 live births per year since 1938 and the 1941 figure of 579,091 was an all-time low. In fact the turning point had been reached and the birth rate began to rise from 1942 onwards, so that in 1944 nearly 200,000 more babies were born than in 1941. It marked the beginning of the so-called ‘baby boom’ that would last for the best part of fifteen years. But this was all in the future and the WI was concerned about how the country would function with an ageing population and no new blood to boost the working population in years to come.
In 1943 an article appeared in International Women’s News entitled ‘Mothers and Homes: Need for Outside Interests’. The author, Gwen M. Bark, argued that it was wrong to expect women to be forced to spend their entire lives in their homes and to devote themselves solely to the running of the house and the care of husband and children. She herself worked as a volunteer with the cadet corps of her local Girl Guides and she asked herself why so many of the young girls in her group showed evident interest in and fondness for babies yet Britain was suffering from a decline in the birth rate. The conclusion she came to was that motherhood was not particularly appealing, especially in the countryside, where it could appear to be one long lifetime of drudgery. She argued in the article for women not only to develop outside interests but to become involved in local affairs so that they could have a say on water, electricity, sewerage, education and so on. And, of course, being a member of her local WI, she recommended joining at as early an age as possible so as to have some say in things that would affect not only the women but their children in the future.
Gwen Bark had trained as a doctor in Liverpool before marrying in 1938. Her husband had been called up but was invalided out of the Army in 1940 during the evacuation from Dunkirk. Their house in Wallasey had been destroyed by a bomb so they moved to Tarporley, in the middle of the Cheshire farming community. Her husband joined a spinster, Dr Clifton, in practice and during the war Dr Gwen, as she was always known, ran baby clinics. She also lectured on child welfare and contributed to the WI’s war effort by knitting, sewing, growing vegetables and keeping goats, pigs and geese. She played the piano and loved music as well as walking, all of which passions she passed on to her children. At the time she wrote the article, she had two young children and went on to have two more. She was very keen on encouraging better conditions for children and working mothers. In 1944 she proposed ‘that this institute should notify their MP of their opinion that the proposed allowances for children, under the Beveridge Report Scheme should not be paid to the father as suggested, but to the mother’, giving the reason that the father was more likely to spend it on other things.
Another report from 1942 that pleased the WI was the Scott Report on Land Utilisation in Rural Areas. The NFWI had been represented by Lady Denman, who was appointed to the committee in October 1941, and evidence had been given by Mrs Vernon and Mrs Neville-Smith of the Executive Committee, Miss Farrer in her capacity of General Secretary and Miss Walker, the NFWI Agricultural Secretary at the time. The committee had as its brief the question of post-war planning, housing, water supply, electricity, rural industries and seasonal employment for women. They were so pleased with the report that they felt the Scott Committee deserved a vote of thanks from WIs ‘for keeping so steadily in mind the vision of Jerusalem’.18 The National Executive urged local institutes to take a lively interest in the Scott Report and to attend or even organise meetings and discussions about it in their village. Norfolk led the way in this by combining forces with the Parish Councils Advisory Committee, inviting speakers to come and explain points in the report so that they could make recommendations to their local MPs prior to the report being discussed in the House of Commons. It told women that they had a once in a lifetime opportunity to preserve true local government in England and although this would be a weighty responsibility it was one that they should welcome for the post-war era.
In June 1942, following a national House and Planning Conference on 28 May, the WI sent a housing questionnaire to county federations for distribution. They also announced a county competition, observing that ‘Institutes seem to be taking to house planning like ducks to water,’ adding that ‘since the majority of members are housewives that is only to be expected’. The Ministry of Health had set up a Design of Dwellings Subcommittee to which the WI was asked to submit evidence. Houses mattered far more to rural working women than to their menfolk, since the home was run by the housewife for her husband and her children. This was the point emphasised in the opening paragraph summing up why the National Executive felt the response to the survey had been so positive. The editor of the questionnaire challenged the membership: ‘In order to get really reliable ideas as to what most people want there must be as many answers sent in as possible. So cast your net wide, Counties, and see that the Committee has a huge catch to deal with.’19
Some WI surveys were accompanied by lectures or leaflets from experts giving advice to institutes on the topic in hand but on this occasion the National Federation was anxious to find out members’ views on what kind of house they would like to live in. They asked for plans for a house, including fitments, its sanitary arrangements, outhouses and garden, and finally any other points of special importance. The subcommittee responsible at national level was particularly taken with the replies to the last point in the questionnaire, which had clearly captured the interest of members who were given the chance to vent long-pent-up feelings. The authors concluded that the combination of evacuation and films had meant that the country housewife ‘had developed a healthy desire for an improved standard of housing’. Many said they had never enjoyed anything so much as answering the questionnaire and ‘it showed the sound common sense of the average cottage housewife. It showed, too, how much she has suffered from the daily irritation of badly designed interior fittings . . . Nearly every member wants electric light and there is hardly one paper out of the hundreds returned that does not plead for built-in cupboards in every room, upstairs and down.’20
What makes both fascinating and sobering reading seventy years on is the fact that
so much of what today is taken for granted, even in remote rural homes, was considered something to be desired but not expected: Aga stoves (or their equivalent) and fridges for example. ‘A small number asked for some form of central heating and an Ideal boiler to burn rubbish.’21 It is worth remembering that few rural villages had rubbish collection more than once a month at the time.
A picture of a typical rural cottage was painted by Kitty Blanche, whose aunt, Delyth Jones, lived near the Welsh village of Corwen in a farm cottage. It stood at the bottom of a lane, about half a mile from the main farmhouse up on the hill. At one stage the cottage had been tied to the farm but now her aunt rented it from the farmer.
Jambusters Page 27
