UK NEWS

HOW THE WI FOUGHT NAZIS ON THE HOME FRONT

National Treasure: The WI book

Saturday March 8,2008

By Cyril Dixon

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JAM-making, knitting and vegetable-growing...they were the everyday tasks that helped win the most terrible of wars.

Now a captivating account of how rural Women’s Institutes put their favourite pastimes to good use in the fight against Hitler has surfaced.

And the scrapbook detailing Dorset WI’s activities during the Second World War has been given National Treasure status by the British Library.

Rebecca Donnan, principal conservator of the Dorset archives, where the scrapbook is kept, said: “Everything seems so joyful in it – despite the fact that it was a time of great adversity.” The record was compiled from material submitted by each village WI branch in Dorset at the end of the war in 1945.

The leatherbound scrapbook contains poems, letters, and paintings. Entries catalogue how the women knitted socks and sweaters for soldiers and sailors and opened their homes to evacuees.

Members grew fruit and vegetables and preserved everything they could not keep. All but a few entries mention jam.

Ms Donnan said: “The WI’s effort with regard to producing jam for the war effort was phenomenal.” One cartoon drawn by a Verwood WI member shows women spending a “pleasant afternoon de-lousing the socks” of evacuees by hanging them above a smokey fire.

Bettie Wrixon, 85, of Toller Fratrum, who is still a WI member, recalls helping her mother knit for the troops. “We all tried to do what we could,” she said.