|
Much of it was funny, some was sad and moving and the musical interludes were a delight. The highlight of the morning must be when her husband joined her to perform a humorous take on ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’.
Royal County of Berkshire Show – 19/20 September 2009
A crowd of visitors enjoyed very pleasant weekend weather and all that the WI Tent had to offer.
There were lots of hats on display made from recycled materials which showed a great deal of ingenuity and skill. They were judged by Pippa Greenwood of ‘Gardener’s World’. The winner was a delicate creation in green and white made from coat hangers, Waitrose bags and bits of bottles, while the runner-up was a mob cap made from fruit nets.
Veolia had compost bins and a wormery on show, together with much advice about more conventional recycling and help for the environment. They contributed bags of compost which the Science and Technology committee put to good use as hordes of children planted lettuce seeds.
As part of the ‘Seed to Table’ feature the stages of bread making were shown and one small boy spent ages with the pestle and mortar trying to produce flour.
The campaign displays on the plight of the honey bee and the overuse of plastics also attracted visitors.
CELEBRATING OUR 90th BIRTHDAY
16 April 2009
At our Spring Council Meeting we celebrated in style with an historical commentary illustrated by 9 decades of fashion. This was followed by a selection of songs from the last 90 years performed by Lori Tingay.
Later, in June, we held an afternoon tea with a show of today's fashions, at which our celebration cake was cut and enjoyed by all.
Our 90 years from 1919 to 2009
The first WI in the world was formed in Canada in1897, but it was not until the First World War began that it was realised in England that such a movement would meet the need that was then strongly felt for producing more food as well as its better preservation. The movement was launched in 1915 under the auspices of the Board of Agriculture and helped with a Government Grant. It was taken up everywhere with enthusiasm and in 1917 the first Annual General Meeting was held in London at which the National Federation was formed and Lady Denman elected President. The first WI in Great Britain was opened in Wales in 1916 and in Berkshire the 5th WI was formed in Hurst the same year. Sadly Hurst is no longer with us and our oldest continuing Berkshire WI is Burghfield founded in 1917.
By 1919 Berkshire had 20 WIs and the County Federation was formed. In February 1921 eight Groups were formed comprising 55 institutes.
The 1920s
Lectures at institutes veered towards the practical – glove making, millinery, gardening, dyeing and cleaning, soap making and recovering umbrellas, leavened with the occasional literary subject or a travel talk, sometimes illustrated with lantern slides.
We had no paid County Secretary in the early days – one hard working member of the Executive, Mrs. May, is recorded as being both Hon. Secretary and Hon. Treasurer for the County. After one year of this she resigned the Secretaryship and as the replacement Secretary lived at some distance from Reading her appointment necessitated raising funds to provide her with a telephone. There was no County Office as such; the Executive met in a room in the old Shire Hall and used the Abbey Hall for Council Meetings.
1926 was the year of the General Strike and the first day of this coincided with the WI County Exhibition at Reading Town Hall which included Singing and Drama Competitions and an exhibition of handicrafts and produce. At that time Berkshire extended north to the Gloucestershire border at Lechlade, but despite there being no public transport that day only one WI in the whole county failed to get their entries to the Exhibition.
Also in 1926 an Historical Pageant depicting some of the chief events in the History of England took place in Windsor Home Park.
By 1929 the Federation had grown from 20 institutes to 94.
The 1930s
The early part of the 1930s was affected by the Great Depression which started with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and rapidly spread world wide. There was high unemployment, poverty, low profits and plunging farm income which particularly affected families in the countryside, most of whom relied on farming and its allied trades for their livelihood.
Life in the Berkshire Federation that year was marked by the opening of the Newbury WI Market Stall, which many of us will remember with affection. So successful was it that in the following year a Market Stall was opened in Reading and then one in Wallingford.
In 1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic; sadly she disappeared in 1937 while on a flight.This year also saw a great step forward in the running of our Federation. With over 100 Institutes we could now afford to rent an office in Watlington House and employ a salaried County Secretary.
1936 was the year in which we were ruled by three monarchs. George V died in January and was succeeded by Edward VIII who abdicated in December of that year and was succeeded by his brother, George VI.
In the world of entertainment “Talkies” had come to the cinema and films could now be made in colour. This was the era of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and the horror films – Dracula, Frankenstein and King Kong. Radio or “the wireless” became the dominant mass media.
The 1930s also saw the rise of the Nazi party under Adolf Hitler, and by the end of the decade the country was preparing for war. The WIs were involved in the arrangements for receiving children and mothers with babies from the cities to be billeted with country families in order to escape bombing and where possible whole schools were moved together with their teachers.
On 3rd September 1939 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced to the country that Britain was now at war with Germany.
The 1940s
The outbreak of war brought sweeping changes to life in the countryside. Thousands of children were evacuated from London with their teachers, as were mothers and babies, and also staffs of large offices were moved to the country.
Women, whose husbands were in the forces, also rented houses in the country and moved there with their children. Young single women joined the Forces, the Women’s Land Army or were drafted into Munitions Factories. WI members throughout the county not only gave the help asked for by the Government but undertook a great deal of further service of all kinds, both as Institute activities and in co-operation with wartime organisations. We had blackout and rationing, points and clothing coupons.
In the early days of the War it seemed that normal monthly meetings would be impossible in many villages as halls had been commandeered or filled with evacuees, but in nearly every Berkshire village it was found possible to get accommodation of some sort for the regular voluntary organisations, and throughout the County members reported good attendances at meetings and increased membership.
Talks on Food Preservation, Growing Vegetables and Make Do and Mend were popular. Canning and Jamming Centres were set up throughout the County. Herb Collections were organised and members collected nettle leaves and hawthorn berries to be dried for medicinal purposes; also rosehips, conkers and acorns. Elderflowers and foxglove leaves were collected for drying. Many institutes held blackberrying picnics in September in place of the normal monthly meeting. Mr. Sutton of Suttons Seeds, Reading, donated thousands of collections of vegetable seeds to WIs to be sold at a discount.
Institutes held dances and whist drives in aid of (among others) Great Ormond Street Hospital, St. Dunstan’s, the Red Cross and the Royal Berkshire Hospital for whom they also collected and donated root vegetables. Institutes also made up parcels for invalid prisoners of war and started National Savings Groups and Produce Associations in their villages.
Lots of institutes had their own Entertainments Committee which put on programmes of music and drama at their own meetings, and many of the evacuated mothers were the leading lights and were greatly missed when they eventually went back to London.
In 1944 the WI were asked to conduct a detailed survey of water and sanitation in rural areas. At this time the majority of houses in the country had no piped water or drainage which must have been quite a culture shock for the evacuees from London.
1945 and the end of the war, but rationing still continued and there was an acute housing shortage with so many properties having been bombed and the Government had no funds to pay for reconstruction. Do you remember the prefabs which were put up as a temporary measure which were supposed to last for 10 years, but some of which are still occupied today? It took a while for factories to convert from making tanks, aircrafts and munitions to becoming car and tooling plants. Jobs in Civvy Street for the 4,300,000 men and women who had left the Armed Forces were in very short supply.
The country suffered recession even worse than the one we are suffering now, and to compound the misery the winter of 1946/47 was one of the worst of the century.
WIs received generous food parcels from institutes in Australia, New Zealand and Canada which were most welcome, and we in turn, from our own meagre resources, sent food parcels to the starving Germans and Austrians; a perfect illustration of “Love thine enemy”.
On the positive side, Denman College opened in 1948 and at that time, of course, it was in Berkshire.
Having dressed in utility clothes throughout most of the decade, in 1947 Dior brought us the New Look – glamour at last!
The 1950s
In 1950 the Berkshire Federation was still firmly linked to its agricultural and rural roots. For many years we had had an Agricultural and Rural Domestic Economy sub-committee, and in this year they organised four conferences on Small Livestock in Newbury, Reading, Faringdon and Abingdon. They welcomed many distinguished speakers on the care of poultry, pigs and rabbits, and films were shown on these subjects.
Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a cantata, The Four Seasons, especially for the WI and three county festivals took place in Abingdon, Wokingham and Reading. From this three choirs were chosen to sing at area festivals and one of these, Basildon, gained a place in the special choir at the Albert Hall.
1951 was the Festival of Britain and, as the Berkshire Federation’s contribution, it was decided to restore the garden at the County headquarters, Watlington House, to its former beauty. Many institutes provided volunteers for this work and also for its ongoing maintenance.
On February 6th 1952 our beloved monarch, George VI died from cancer and Princess Elizabeth succeeded to the throne. In May Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay became the first people to reach the top of Mount Everest as part of a British expedition.
This year saw the official visit to Holland for 25 Berkshire members, many of whom had never been abroad before. This was a most successful visit and many members subsequently received their Dutch hostesses in their Berkshire homes. This marked the start of many subsequent overseas Federation holidays now organised by the Travel Committee.
1953 - the Queen’s Coronation, the first time such an event had been broadcast on television. Millions of viewers round the world were able to view the pageantry on their television screens, many of which had been bought for the purpose, and those without televisions of their own flocked to their neighbours’ houses to watch.
1956 was the year of the Suez Crisis when petrol rationing was brought back for a short period. The Russians won the first phase of the race to the stars with the launch of man-made satellite Sputnik 1 which orbited the earth in 95 minutes.
1958 was the year when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was formed and the first of the Aldermaston Marches was held.
The 1960s
The Daily Telegraph reported that in 1960 Britain had recovered from the post-war austerity and entered a new era of optimism, cultural expression and social revolution. It was in this year that the Beatles were formed, the BBC Television Centre opened in London and Penguin was found not guilty of obscenity for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
This was the era of the Mini designed by Alec Issigonis in 1959 which superseded the Bubble Car.
Gabrielle Pike, a Berkshire member, was elected Chairman of NFWI and in 1965 the Golden Jubilee celebration of the movement was celebrated in Berkshire at Easthampstead Park.
In 1966 the position of President of the Berkshire Federation was abolished in order to save money (prior to that we had both a President and a Chairman), and the County thought seriously about moving to house of our own, as we were fast outgrowing the cramped office space which we rented in the lovely 17th century Watlington House. Ever since 1940 funds had been put aside to buy a house of our own, and it was hoped to move to a house in Eldon Road but Reading Council wouldn’t grant change of use and in any case institutes across the County were fairly evenly divided for and against the scheme. It would be another 20 years before the Berkshire Federation had its own premises.
In 1969, the year which saw the demise of the half pint bottle of milk, Berkshire Federation celebrated its own Golden Jubilee with a Craft Exhibition and, most notably, the production of The Brilliant and the Dark. This was an operatic sequence for women’s voices commissioned by NFWI from the young composer Malcolm Williamson with a libretto by Ursula Vaughan Williams and was first performed in the Albert Hall in June of that year with WI choirs and performers from all over the country taking part, including our own Cookham WI Choir.
In October Berkshire Federation put on our own production of this work in Reading Town Hall.
The 1970s
The 1970s were a decade of change both nationally and in the Berkshire Federation.
In 1972 Britain adopted decimal currency. Pounds shillings and pence became just pounds and pence. Each pound was worth 100 pennies under the new system, rather than 240 pennies of yesteryear. Guineas, for many years the staple amount in which professional fees were rendered, became obsolete.
At the end of 1973 our long serving County Secretary, Margaret Latham, retired after 22 years service. When she died in 1979 grateful institutes and individual members contributed to a fund in her memory and in appreciation of the wonderful help and service which was given so freely to all Berkshire members. This became the Margaret Latham Bursary which pays for a course a Denman College for a member each year.
1974 saw the introduction of boundary changes and on 1st April 1974 the beautiful area of North Berkshire was absorbed into the New Oxfordshire becoming “The Vale of the White Horse District”. Public demonstrations against this move and a petition to the Queen were of no avail and so this historic creature is now outside our county boundary.
This change also resulted in 49 of the Berkshire WIs moving into the Oxfordshire Federation. With the loss of almost a third of our membership the Executive Committee had to face the cold reality of running Berkshire on very limited funds against a background of mounting inflation. To add to our woes we lost our County Treasurer as her institute was transferred into Oxfordshire.
1976 was the summer of the heatwave when we faced the driest hottest summer for more than 250 years. Reservoirs dried up across the country and stand pipes were set up for people to queue for limited water supplies.
In the l970s, because so many WIs now met in the evenings, Spring and Autumn Council Meetings were held in the evening for the first time and were very well attended.
The 1980s
1980 was the year Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. It was also the year that John Lennon was assassinated. Here at home the NFWI held a drama festival – Scene 80 – and in the Berkshire round the winner was Sonning Glebe WI doing Jabberwocky. I wonder if anyone here today remembers seeing it. It was eventually performed at the Royal Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.
The summer of 1981 saw the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer and more than 700 million people around the world watched the ceremony on television. Back in Berkshire the NFWI’s Promotions bus spent 3 days in Newbury which led to the founding of Falkland WI, and an Autumn Craft Fair was so popular that there was a long queue waiting for entry.
1982 brought the Falklands War, and in December of that year women surrounded Greenham Common military base to protest about the installation of nuclear weapons. They set up camps by the two main gates and remained there until 2000.
In 1984 Torvill and Dean won a Gold Medal at the Winter Olympics.
In the 1980s fashion was influenced by the western economic boom. Youth culture stopped hogging the scene as the teenage market lost impetus. The dominant market was getting older and was also financially secure. Big shoulders and power suits were in; the popularity of TV dramas like Dynasty and Dallas influenced fashion. Corporate business suit dressing, Margaret Thatcher in tailored evening suits, Yuppies and the copying of styles worn by Diana Princess of Wales, all contributed to 1980s fashion.
1989 was a red letter year for the Berkshire Federation. At long last we moved out of the cramped rented accommodation at Watlington House into our own WI House at Mortimer.
The 1990s
1990 was the year when Germany was reunited. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall was taken down. The checkpoints closed and people were allowed to move from East to West for the first time since the Wall was built in 1961.
1991 was the year of the Gulf War when Britain sent more than 40,000 troops to support the UN international coalition gathering in Saudi Arabia. The American led coalition moved swiftly to force the Iraqis out of Kuwait in an air offensive called Desert Storm. During a six week attack the Iraqis were pushed back and Kuwait City was liberated.
It was also the year when Robert Maxwell, chairman of the Mirror Group, died in the Canary Islands. He allegedly fell off his yacht. Following his death it became apparent that his company’s pension funds had been misappropriated.
After Croatia and Slovenia became separate states in 1992, the United Nations sent a peace keeping force when Bosnia Herzegovina claimed independence leading to a bloody civil war. Once again British forces were involved in a foreign war.
The National Lottery was launched in 1994 and in 1995 Barings Bank fell when rogue trader Nick Leeson ran up huge losses.
1997 saw the building of the Millenium Dome and devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Queen opened the Scottish Parliament in July 1999.
During all these stirring events WI life went on as usual. In 1990 we had 109 WIs in Berkshire but by the end of the decade this had fallen to 89. Members were involved not only in WI events but in supporting their communities as well. Our County Chairman in 1993 was one of those volunteers who worked tirelessly providing refreshment for the firemen and those who assisted in bringing the dreadful fire at Windsor Castle under control.
So, what were we wearing in the 1990’s? After the conspicuous consuming years of the 1980s less became more in the 1990s. The silhouette became neater as shoulder pads finally died and jewellery became non existent or chic in its fineness and barely there quality. Occasion wear became less formal while still being fashionable. Simple lines and long gowns returned but with slits and low cut neck lines.
When business rules for dressing relaxed many people lost interest in fashion as necessary and important to their lives. Dressing down in every aspect of life became an acceptable norm and ‘smart casual’ became a dress code. Trousers were in and jeans were everywhere. Women of the nineties learnt how to build capsule wardrobes - one reason why the nineties were so black. After some of the garish hues of the 1980s, black and more black was dominant for some ten years. Women discovered real easy dressing - black goes well with black and other neutrals. Some equally dull, but neutral browns and greys did become the so called new black for a brief season or so.
Individuals felt noticeably conspicuous in bright colours amid a sea of black. Blend in understatement became the way to dress. Only strong individuals had the courage to wear hues that suited their skin colouring rather than draining it.
The 00s
2000 – the new Millenium which we celebrated with fireworks and parties. Do you remember how worried we were about the Millenium Bug which we were told would cripple computer systems, and how relieved everyone was when it didn’t? And the fiasco of the Millenium Dome which opened on 1st January but had made heavy losses by July?
February 2001 saw an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease at a farm in Northumberland and this spread rapidly. All cloven footed animals were at risk of contamination and culls were made all across the country to try and eradicate the infection. Many perfectly healthy animals were killed if they were feared to have been in contact with contaminated herds or flocks, and the suffering to farmers, as well as to their animals, was horrendous.
On September 11th terrorists hijacked planes in America and used them as flying bombs. The world watched as the World Trade Centre was hit by two planes and collapsed to the ground killing thousands of people.
On a more positive note this year saw our County Secretary, Valerie Hudson, start work at WI House, and how lucky we are to have her.
2002 saw the death of the Queen Mother, but also the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. The Queen Mother was a member of Sandringham WI, and the Queen still is, although she can normally only attend one meeting a year. 2007 saw the introduction of WI Life.
I should like to finish by quoting the words of our former County Chairman, Judy Palmer, in her 2005 Year Book letter:
“Over the years the needs and aspirations of members have changed enormously. The lifestyle of the twenties and thirties is far removed from the way we live and run our lives today but the aims and objects of our organisation remain the same….How lucky we are to belong to an organisation that really does something for everyone.”
|