Home Fires

The basis for the PBS Masterpiece series starring Samantha Bond (Downton Abbey) and Francesca Annis (Cranford)
 
Away from the frontlines of World War II, in towns and villages across Great Britain, ordinary women were playing a vital role in their country’s war effort. As members of the Women’s Institute, an organization with a presence in a third of Britain’s villages, they ran canteens and knitted garments for troops, collected tons of rosehips and other herbs to replace medicines that couldn’t be imported, and advised the government on issues ranging from evacuee housing to children’s health to postwar reconstruction. But they are best known for making jam: from produce they grew on every available scrap of land, they produced twelve million pounds of jam and preserves to feed a hungry nation.
 
Home Fires, Julie Summers’s fascinating social history of the Women’s Institute during the war (when its members included the future Queen Elizabeth II along with her mother and grandmother), provides the remarkable and inspiring true story behind the upcoming PBS Masterpiece series that will be sure to delight fans of Call the Midwife and Foyle’s War. Through archival material and interviews with current and former Women’s Institute members, Home Fires gives us an intimate look at life on the home front during World War II.“Millions of words have been written about the military and social history of both world wars, but Summers carves out a little area of her own by examining the vital work performed by the Women’s Institute who, through its meticulous organizational skills and national network, found its finest hour in the face of conflict.” —Daily Mail (London)

“That image of defiant jam making sums up the way many see the wartime contribution of the Woman's Institute.” – The EconomistJulie Summers was born in Liverpool but grew up in Cheshire, where the Home Fires series was set and filmed. Her first book, Fearless on Everest, published in 2000, was a biography of her great uncle, Sandy Irvine, who died on Everest with Mallory in 1924. Her grandfather, Philip Toosey, was the man behind the Bridge on the River Kwai and her biography of him appeared in 2005. Fascinated by how people cope with extreme situations, she has turned her attention on the effect of the Second World war on non-combatants - the women and children. Recently she published Fashion on the Ration, a book that looks at what we wore during the Second World War. Her book Home Fires, the story of the WI in wartime, has inspired Masterpiece’s new Fall 2015 drama series HOME FIRES, featuring Samantha Bond, Francesca Annis and many others.

Praise for Home Fires

‘That image of defiant jam-making sums up the way many see the wartime contribution of the Women’s Institute. But Julie Summers . . . shows its much wider contribution.’

—The Economist

‘Millions of words have been written about the military and social history of both world wars, but Summers carves out a little area of her own by examining the vital work performed by the Women’s Institute who, through its meticulous organizational skills and national network, found its finest hour in the face of conflict.’

—Daily Mail (London)

‘I thought I was fairly well up on the WI contribution to the World War II effort until I read Julie Summers’s book! I was wrong – every chapter was a revelation – full of information, reminiscences, humor, and social history. It is also well written, well researched, and easy to read. Reading it not only gave me great pleasure but also made me proud to be a member of such a long lasting, valuable, and vital organization – an organization which is still working actively to “improve the quality of life of communities” both urban and rural.’

—Helen Carey OBE, former chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (1999‒2003)

‘Julie Summers recounts how thousands of women rallied around during the dark days of Hitler, baking cakes and knitting jumpers as if their lives depended on it.’

—Mail on Sunday

‘Superb . . . Overall, this book tells a wonderful story – highly recommended.’

—Who Do You Think You Are? magazine

‘Home Fires: Francesca Annis and Samantha Bond head the cast of this classy period piece about the friendships and hardships of a Women’s Institute group in Cheshire during World War II. The series is based on the bestselling factual book by Julie Summers about the role the WI played during the conflict.’

—TV Times

PENGUIN BOOKS

HOME FIRES

Julie Summers was born in Liverpool but grew up in Cheshire, where the Home Fires series was set and filmed. Her first book, Fearless on Everest, published in 2000, was a biography of her great uncle, Sandy Irvine, who died on Everest with Mallory in 1924. Her grandfather, Philip Toosey, was the man behind the Bridge on the River Kwai, and her biography of him appeared in 2005. Fascinated by how people cope with extreme situations, she has turned her attention on the effect of the Second World War on noncombatants – the women and children. Recently she published Fashion on the Ration, a book that looks at what we wore during the Second World War. Her book Home Fires, the story of the Women’s Institute in wartime, has inspired Masterpiece’s new fall 2015 drama series of the same name, featuring Samantha Bond, Francesca Annis, and many others.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

First published as Jambusters in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013

Published with a new preface by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

Published in Penguin Books 2015

Copyright © 2013, 2015 by Julie Summers

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN 978-1-101-99196-1

Cover photo © ITV Studios Ltd. A coproduction of ITV Studios and Masterpiece.

In affectionate memory of Ga and to all the unnamed WI members who made the countryside tick during six long years of war

Preface

Foreword

1 Let the Sunshine Stream In

2 The Gathering Storm

3 The Piper’s Call

4 Coupon Culture

5 Digging for Victory

6 Boil and Bubble, Toil and Trouble

7 Knit One Purl One

8 Gaiety, Song and Dance

9 Building for the Future

10 A Final Word

Notes

Bibliography

Photograph Credits

Photographs

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE

The story of the journey from book to TV series has been for me an intensely personal one. It has been exciting, at times a little alarming but without doubt one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. Taking a non-fiction book and turning it into a drama series is a creative process like no other that I have been involved in. However, let me start at the beginning.

When my then editor at Simon & Schuster, Mike Jones, asked me in November 2009 whether I thought the Women’s Institute had done anything interesting in the Second World War I agreed to go and find out. Given that I have written a whole book on the subject, you will not be surprised to know that the answer to his question was emphatically yes. The most surprising thing I discovered about the WI in my first weeks of research was that it was a pacifist organisation. That was not a fashionable thing to be in the late 1930s, but it proved in some ways to be the making of them during the Second World War. They could not be swallowed up into war work so they had to define their own rules and stick to them. As we shall see, this is exactly what they did, devoting themselves to the humanitarian side of the war effort. It never occurred to me, or to Mike I suspect, that we were about to embark on a project that would eventually inspire a major drama series.

Home Fires took a long time to research and write. It was by no means an easy book as there was almost an embarrassment of material and yet very little in the way of ‘voice’, so I had to dig deep to find the heart of the wartime WI and the members who had kept the countryside ticking. Minutes and record books charted their activities and listed the immense quantities of herbs collected, fruit preserved and pies baked. It was only when I met women who had been wartime members, or whose mothers had been active in the WI during those years, that the personal stories added real life experience to those extraordinary achievements. Those are the stories that you will read in Home Fires.

Eventually I handed the manuscript to Mike in March 2012 and spent the summer dealing with editing questions and selecting images. This is a creative process because every image in the picture section has to earn its place and the all important captions have to justify their inclusion. In September 2012, about six months before the book was released in the UK, I signed up to go on an Arvon script-writing course. I felt I needed to try something new after writing ten books, to try a completely different discipline, which might present an interesting challenge. Spending a week at Totleigh Barton in Devon with an enthusiastic and diverse group was a wonderful experience, but within hours of starting the course I realised that this was not for me. I do not watch enough television and especially not the kind of series that my fellow students wanted to write. However, I was determined to get as much out of the course as possible so I threw myself into it with my customary enthusiasm. One of the tutors was Simon Block. When we met for a tutorial on the last day of the Arvon course he asked me what I did as a day job. I told him I was a writer and he laughed. ‘I thought you were!’ he said. We both agreed that I should not give up the day job and I should continue to pursue my passion for storytelling.

That morning Mike Jones had sent me the final design for the hardback jacket. The mobile phone reception at Totleigh Barton being somewhat patchy, I had had to walk to the top of a hill to receive the email. I was thrilled with the jacket and I showed Simon the image on my phone. This started a conversation about women on the home front during the Second World War, one of enduring interest to me ever since I wrote Stranger in the House in 2008, which looked at the effect of returning men on the women of Britain after 1945. It was a little researched or understood subject, but one which had an enormous impact on the way society coped in the post-war years. Home Fires gave me another perspective on women in the countryside and the research for it produced some wonderful stories. As I was preparing to leave Totleigh Barton the following day, Simon took me aside and said: ‘Julie, I think Home Fires has the potential to be enormous.’ Actually, he was even more extravagant than that. I doubt that either of us had the slightest inkling that we were about to embark upon what I can only describe as an incredible journey.

I returned to Oxford and carried on with life as normal, finishing the proofs of the book and considering what I might write next. Four weeks later I received an email from Simon telling me about a conversation he had had with a friend who worked as a television producer at ITV Studios. She would like to meet me, he wrote, and I was sure to like her because she had worked on Foyle’s War. This was recommendation enough. I met Catherine Oldfield, then a development producer at ITV Studios, in Covent Garden. My diary for that day, 22 October, records ‘lunch at le Deuxieme. Evening lecture at Eastbourne Congress theatre. Many miles covered.’ Quite the understatement as it turned out. At that lunch I agreed to send Catherine a draft of Home Fires and she in turn asked me to scribble down any ideas I might have about the type of setting that could work for a drama series. Well, I had been on a script-writing course, hadn’t I? The following week she wrote to tell me that the book had made her cry and that she would like me to meet Francis Hopkinson, Creative Director of Drama at ITV Studios, to discuss buying the ‘option’ for it. To my delight, Simon Block was signed up as the series creator and writer. Simon is a key player in so many ways and since we first met he has become an inspiration and a friend. He, Catherine and I spent a day at my home in Oxford before Christmas turning ideas over and over. It stands out in my mind as the most wonderful, creative and exhausting day I have ever spent. By the end of it Simon had begun to draw three characters, two sisters and a young man, who would be the first creations in his drama. It was so exciting to watch him conceive completely fictional characters, pulling them out of the air, as it were. They seemed to me to be ghostly shadows that would eventually become solid human forms inhabited by actors. My contribution to those discussions, as it has been ever since, was as a historical consultant. Not just facts but tone, mood and detail about the WI as well as some history of Cheshire, which is the county of my birth and in which the drama was to be set. I felt the county offered so much scope. With Liverpool and Manchester as its (then) two major cities, the Battle of the Atlantic, the war’s longest running battle, and the huge number of camps – army, air force, German and Italian prisoner of war and Polish Resettlement – plus the Wirral, and the neighbouring counties of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Shropshire and North Wales, there would be no shortage of material or incidents to draw upon.

Over the ensuing months Simon produced an outline and then a first script. Reading that was a very special and precious moment. Finally a version of that script was submitted to the ITV commissioners and I received a telephone call from Catherine one afternoon telling me that ‘we’ had the green light to make a show of six episodes. That day, 18 March 2014, I wrote in my diary ‘HOME FIRES ARE GO!’. As with everything to do with this series, that was an understatement. What had appeared to move at glacial pace now accelerated to a hundred miles an hour. Within a month I found myself sitting in a script development meeting at The London Television Centre talking about the National Register of 1939, the beginning of rationing in 1940 and the running of a secret ballot WI style. Over three days we bounced ideas around while Catherine tried to keep everything in order, writing notes all over the walls. By the end of the third morning we had rough outlines for episodes two to six.

I have been so very fortunate that Simon and Catherine have allowed me to be involved in the scripts, not in the writing of course, but in the historical detail and in the tone. It is difficult to capture the mood in the country in the first weeks and months of the war, and most especially in the early summer of 1940 when the most likely outcome was an invasion of Britain. We know the way the war ended, but at that stage it was far from clear. I felt that each episode had to match the prevailing mood of the time and this is certainly something that Simon has woven into the scripts.

At one point during the script development meeting Simon said, ‘I have a question for you to which I don’t think you will know the answer. What day did it start snowing in 1940?’ To his surprise and my slight embarrassment, I did know. A big WI agricultural meeting, scheduled to take place on 31 January in London, had to be cancelled as it had started snowing heavily four days earlier and transport was impossible. Trains were marooned, villages all over the country cut off and two days before the meeting there were snowdrifts ten to twelve feet deep in places. My family all know that I am, like my father, fascinated by the weather and I love the shipping forecast, so it is not really a surprise that I had paid attention to such a dramatic weather event. Since then I have been consulted on any number of questions to do with the WI, the war or the home front. One day my phone buzzed while I was having lunch with my mother and aunt. Sophie Bicknell, the show’s script editor, wanted to know what the price of a pot of jam would have been in 1939. It was an urgent request because the art department was dressing the set for a scene to be shot that afternoon. Fortunately Mum, Jane and I managed to work it out (about 1s 3d) and I could ring Sophie back minutes later.

By August it was time for the first read-through. To hear the words of the scripts spoken by actors for the first time was powerful and emotional. Simon’s scripts came alive in a whole new way for me and I began to hear the voices of the women he had created and given life and character to. Three weeks later I drove up to Cheshire for my first set visit. Nothing could have prepared me for the thrill of seeing the black and white world that I have known for the last fifteen years through pictures, words, diaries and books come alive.

The team were filming the opening sequence to the series. So, no spoiler alert. Steph Farrow and her son, Little Stan, were driving a herd of shorthorn cattle into a Cheshire farmyard. Simple as that. But for me it was an emotional explosion. There were smells, so familiar from my childhood but now linked to Simon’s drama. There was noise, colour, movement, heat and energy. It was overwhelming and I had tears in my eyes when I saw Steph, played by Claire Calbraith, encouraging the cows into the yard. ‘Slow as you like, Stan,’ she says to her son. Slow as you like indeed. I didn’t want it to stop. And because this is television there were several takes, so it did not stop. Everything about the set was perfect as far as I was concerned. The vegetables planted in the middle of the farmyard, the hen coop, the old car in front of the stables, and lovely reddy-brown and white cows munching grass along the hedgerows and mooing as if indignant at having to do the same thing more than once.

A week later I was on set again, this time dressed in a 1930s two-piece blue tweed suit and wearing a grey wig crowned with a brown hat, matching brown shoes and a lovely big brown handbag. This was my Hitchcock cameo day. One very precious moment for me was sitting in the green room listening to Francesca Annis and Samantha Bond rehearsing their dialogue. Those ghostly shadows from 2012 had blossomed into living, breathing characters. And here they were, in front of me, passionate and vital.

Since that magical day the production has moved on. I have visited the village and seen the butcher’s shop dressed up as a wartime greengrocers and the chip shop disguised as a petrol station with a sign in the window saying ‘Business as usual. Excuse our appearance . . . we are currently part of ITV Home Fires’. I have seen a completely fictitious but wholly convincing war memorial with the names of men carved in the font created by MacDonald Gill for headstone inscriptions after the First World War. The old Cheshire signposts to Great Paxford almost caught me out and I briefly wondered if there really was such a place in the county. Fiction and reality were beginning to meld in my mind. Now the filming is finished, the production team has dispersed, the directors have had their say and the series is ready to air. To think that the corner of Cheshire where I spent much of my childhood will become known to a television audience in the United States is especially thrilling. During the war there were American camps in Cheshire, both army and air force. From June 1942 the RAF airfield of Burtonwood near Warrington became USAAF Station 590, the largest airfield in Europe, with some 18,000 personnel. As readers will discover from this volume, the wartime First Lady, Mrs Roosevelt, was a great supporter of British women on the home front during the Second World War. She made a visit to Britain in 1942 and found time to go to Barham in Kent, near the south coast, where she met Mrs Churchill and Lady Denman, and inspected a village Women’s Institute. As a result of this visit she organized for material help to be sent directly to the WI for their preservation scheme.

When you read this book you will not meet Steph Farrow, Frances Barden, Joyce Cameron or Alison Scotlock. You will meet real women: Edith Jones, Ruth Toosey, Sybil Norcott and many others. Their stories are the life-force in Home Fires, for they were the ordinary country women who lived and survived extraordinary times. For them the Second World War was fought off screen but was present in their lives all the time. It was the backdrop to their every day and for many it altered their lives completely. Some found strengths they did not know they had, others like Edith, already resourceful, simply blossomed as she took on more and more responsibility. For others still, the war took away family members. The common thread for all those women in Home Fires is the Women’s Institute. During the war it gave shape to tasks and focused energies. It had a purpose, as it had always had, which was to improve the lives of women in the countryside. It offered women such as the real-life Sybil Norcott or the fictitious Steph Farrow the opportunity to try something new, to explore their potential, to change their own perception of themselves and develop interests outside their farms. And, of course, it offered comfort, safety, friendship and humour for all the members who needed it. They are the WI members who are the DNA of the series.

All this has moved seamlessly to the screen. Simon Block has taken those real-life women as his inspiration and drawn on some of their characteristics to create the characters who people Home Fires. I would like to think that if Ruth Toosey were to meet Frances Barden or Sybil Norcott were to walk into Brindsley’s butcher’s shop to buy some lamb chops, they would both feel at home and in familiar surroundings. That, I think, is the magic touch that Simon has brought to Home Fires.

FOREWORD

In June 1939 the Women’s Institute held its annual general meeting in London. The weather was glorious. Many of the delegates who came to London from all over the country had never been to the capital before. Cicely McCall, who was responsible for the WI’s national education programme, observed the scene with fascination. She met one excited seventeen-year-old from Cumberland who had slept with her train ticket under her pillow for a month before the meeting, so thrilled was she to have been asked to represent her institute. Dressed in their best suits and dresses, wearing hats, gloves and sensible shoes, more than 8,000 women, many fanning themselves in the heat, crowded into the magnificent Empress Hall in Earls Court. The seating was arranged in alphabetical order by county beginning with Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire and so on. Stewards dressed in cream overalls with broad green and red ribbons over one shoulder showed people to their seats. There was a buzz of conversation and an air of eager anticipation.

The national committee members walked up onto the stage. Everybody stood up. Miss Nancy Tennant from Headington raised her right hand to conduct. The organist played the opening bars of ‘Jerusalem’ and 8,000 women lifted the roof with the well-known anthem. The great theatre reverberated to Parry’s beautiful tune and the voices rose and rose. As the music faded, the delegates took their seats.

Lady Denman, dressed formally and wearing a green hat, stood up and welcomed her delegates. She then asked Miss Hadow to greet their honoured guests from the Associated Countrywomen of the World, who had gathered in London for a mass rally. Twenty-three countries were each represented in the Empress Hall by a woman delegate, many in national dress. Miss Hadow stood up. Tall, thin, every bit the vision of a blue-stocking academic, she addressed the meeting: ‘Lady Denman and Fellow Countrywomen, we are met here today in our great parliament to welcome our sisters from other lands. In the first place, we are country women; we live on the land and serve the land. And in the last resort, it is not by armed force, or even by industrial prosperity, but it is by the land itself that men live.’

There was loud applause and appreciative murmuring from the delegates. She went on:

In the second place, we are women, we belong to the constructive sex, whose whole instinct is to reserve and to foster life, to build homes in every land. In the hands of women, of wives and mothers, and I will even dare to say of sisters, daughters and spinster aunts, the health and happiness of mankind very largely is laid. Those two things, the unity of the land, the unity of our common womanhood, speak a universal language. It is in that tongue that in the name of 328,000 English and Welsh women I do indeed say to our guests from other countries – You are Welcome!

The applause swelled. As she sat down the foreign delegates stepped up onto the stage one by one. Some neither spoke nor understood English but all of them understood the applause and the smiles that greeted each fresh announcement. America, Sweden, India . . . One by one by they came forward, made their bow, and sometimes said a few words. Latvia, Norway . . . Germany. Miss McCall was in the hall and watched as the German delegate walked onto the stage.

She was a tall woman. Her shoulders were flung back, her face set as she stepped on to the platform. There was a second’s tense silence, as though suddenly eight thousand pairs of lungs had contracted, and their hearts too. Then came deafening applause. It rang round the hall tumultuously. It fell, then grew again increasing in volume as though each perspiring delegate on that very hot June morning could not enough say: ‘Welcome! We are all country women here today. We are non-party, non-sectarian. We wish for peace, goodwill and cooperation among nations. You have had the courage to come here in spite of rumours of wars. We bid you welcome!’

Countess Margarete Keyserlingk was overwhelmed. The look of strain on her face disappeared and pleasure and amazement replaced it. She spoke in German: ‘It is with great pleasure and thanks to you all and to my delegation that I am able to be here today to bring you greetings from my country, in the hope that this meeting will lead us all to a greater understanding of one another.’ As she stepped off the platform she hesitated and almost stumbled. We shall never know what message she took back to Germany because within three months Poland had been invaded and Britain had declared war on her country.

*

When I set out to write a history of the Women’s Institute in wartime I had in mind an historical overview with anecdotes from village institutes about jam-making, vegetable-growing, salvage-collecting, knitting and other activities we associate with the Second World War. As I have gone along I have realised that this is not what lies at the heart of this book. There are many top-down biographies of the Women’s Institute but what I was interested in was the bottom-up story, the ordinary countrywomen who were at the heart of the village institutes. What has grown out of my research is a picture of the remarkable role played by ordinary women in rural Britain during the war. Unpaid, unsung, to a large extent uncomplaining, these women quietly and often with humour, made the countryside tick. The role of the WI was crucial in two ways: on the one hand, the government relied on its links with the National Federation of Women’s Institutes to make direct requests of countrywomen to look after evacuees, collect everything from National Savings to bones for the munitions industry and to care for the nation’s larder; on the other hand, the WI at institute level offered women a safety valve. At their monthly meetings, after they had completed their business and agreed on the many requests for their help towards the war effort, they could let their hair down. And they did. Singing, dancing, sketches and readings, beetle drives, musical bumps, and ‘identify the ankle’ competitions all helped to lighten the mood and send them on their way to take up the tasks set for them.

This book is a tribute to these women. Some were grand county ladies, others were farm labourers’ wives and daughters. The majority were somewhere in between. In the institute there was no differentiation between their backgrounds. Though it would be foolish to suggest that all social boundaries were broken, they were, however, porous. The story of how they all buckled to and helped out is of more interest to me than who was the president or secretary on any given committee. The WI bound them together. Sybil Norcott, a WI member for nearly seventy years, summed it up: ‘The WI is in my heart. It is in all our hearts. It is a way of life.’

I have been fortunate enough to interview a number of women who joined the WI during the war, albeit as very young members, or whose mothers, aunts or other family members were involved. Their personal perspectives give the historical material its colour and they are the only ladies in the book who are referred to by their Christian names. Peggy Sumner joined her WI before the war and is still a member. Her county, Cheshire, honoured its nonagenarian members in 2011 with a service in Chester Cathedral. Sybil Norcott, also a Cheshire member, was a child during the war but her mother belonged to her local institute and Sybil used to go to meetings as her mother was afraid to walk through the woods to the hall on her own.

Ann Tetlow and Dorcas Ward have known each other since they were a few months old. Dorcas’s mother and grandmother were founder members of Bradfield WI in Berkshire. Her mother was secretary throughout the war and her minute books are amongst the most colourful and descriptive I have read. Ann’s mother was also a very active member of the institute and used to allow Ann and her brother to attend the social half-hour of their afternoon meetings.

Caroline Dickinson’s mother, Ruth Toosey, was my great aunt. She was on the committee of her WI in Barrow for several years during the war and she also held an ambulance licence with the Women’s Voluntary Service, as well as being responsible for the girls of the Women’s Land Army in her village. Dr Gwen Bark was a doctor who ran baby clinics in Tarporley, while bringing up her own young family and being an active member of her WI. She was outspoken on matters to do with child health, milk and the Beveridge Report but was also keen to encourage young mothers to find something of interest beyond the home in order to keep them mentally alert.

And Edith Jones, the wife of a farmer from Smethcote in Shropshire, whose great niece, Chris Downes, has given me access to Edith’s wartime diaries. These offer a view of the war as well as the activities of her village and her farm-life during those years. In 1938 she wrote on the first page of her diary: