17 minute read
Changing times
Country journeys
As part of their Diamond Day celebration, Eastern Region NWR members heard from speaker Sue Stennett about how her experiences as a young woman in the rural Lincolnshire of the sixties differed from those of her parents and grandparents.
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When Betty Jerman wrote of women “squeezed in like sardines in suburbia”, she obviously wasn’t thinking of those in the farming communities that I grew up with but, although not physically squeezed in, they too had to deal with the assumptions of others about how their lives should be conducted.
For far too long it was thought that women’s brains couldn’t cope with intellectual thoughts, both by men and by quite a few women. My great-great-great-great-grandmother, born in 1751, was somewhat unhappily married to an increasingly dour Quaker Minister, who banned music in the home and thought all art frivolous. This is part of a poem she wrote to a friend:
Alack the poor husband how woeful his case,
Who marries a woman of genius and taste!
Instead of a pudding you would make him a poem;
Forgetting perhaps the observance you owe him;
Be writing an elegy, an ode or a sonnet
When you ought to be making a cap or a bonnet.
Instead of attending affairs in your kitchen
And minding your business of darning and stitching,
Perhaps you’d be reading some book so bewitching.
So, you see, I wonder if women haven’t always found domesticity alone frustrating! And suspect that, although your amazing organisation was only formed 60 years ago, women have sought the friendship of others with whom to discuss and share experiences throughout time, as she clearly did. I was born in 1946, and was therefore 14 when NWR was founded. My brain then was just full of trying to get out of doing homework, spending time with my pony and being excited about the new music of the time. I’m sure my mother would have joined an organisation such as yours if she had had the time or the energy. Born in 1919, Mum was 18, and her sister Marjorie 12, when their mother died in 1937. Their father was an engineer in Ceylon who visited his family every five years. He had come home at my mother’s request when she realised how ill my grandmother was.
Were it not for an amazing PE teacher at her high school, I feel Mum might have had a very different life. She was very good at games of all sorts and it was the games mistress who took her for her interview at Bedford PE college.
Three years later, before starting to teach, she volunteered for war work in the summer holidays and was put on a farm near Lincoln, to help bring in the harvest. At the end of her employment the boss said to her, “Please come and see us tomorrow, we have something for you.” She cycled four miles out to South Carlton to be given a jar of jam for her six weeks work – would they have done that to a man? However, her reward was not just the jar of jam, she had also met her future husband. He was soon to join the army and any thought of marriage had to be put off for another four years.
In fact, his parents disapproved of Mum: she lived down the hill in Lincoln and was the daughter of an engineer, while Dad’s father was a well-respected doctor and they lived in Minster Yard with maids and a chauffeur. Yes, times have changed!
Mum taught at Howell’s School for Girls in Denbigh, North Wales. Her best friend was fellow teacher Rosie, a Cambridge geography graduate – although she had to wait until 1998 to receive her full degree. As a university graduate, she was paid £226 per annum, and Mum, with her college qualifications, £183. Out of this, both paid £70 a year for board and lodging. Rosie, who was to become my godmother, was the first teacher at the school to be allowed to stay on and teach after marriage, and Mum the second after her marriage in 1944. Both, however, had to leave once pregnant.
My dad had been brought up to inherit money but, by the time he was demobbed in 1946, the money was largely gone. He spent a year at agricultural college before becoming a farm
They don’t make ‘em like that anymore!
Congresbury group remember their home lives in the 60s, not always with affection!
There were some of who were still (just) of an age in single figures back in the 60s, but most were teenagers, and all remember the decade with a fond nostalgia tinged with a little groan about the chores.
There were several recurring themes during our online reminiscing, the main one being the weekly wash! Many remember the arrival of a twin tub, to the delight of their mothers, and one of us remembers still having a UDB in 1960 – a single tub washer stored Under the Draining Board. This monstrosity was dragged out every Monday to wash the clothes, which were then lifted into the sink with huge wooden tongs before being taken laboriously to the mangle, often outside the kitchen door, to be wrung out. Imagine that with all the heavy cotton sheets we had at the time. This always seemed to take an age so Monday supper was invariably cold meat, potatoes and pickles, or salad from the garden in summer. Immersion heaters not only gave us the hot water for laundry but also for baths. The cry of “who’s used all the hot water?” was common. Who else remembers handkerchiefs boiling in a pot on the stove?
Cold slabs with metal mesh covers were an attempt to keep our food fresh in the pantry or scullery and, as time went on, we remember the domestic fridge gradually coming into more homes. No one had a freezer at that time, so slightly off food was consumed anyway, as long as it wasn’t too bad! Waste not want not was the mantra!
Everyone remembered the freedom we had as children, when we could be out playing with friends with instructions from our mothers reminding us of our limits. These were often forgotten or ignored, as together we played chasing and hiding games in the woods for hours on end during school holidays. A good old-fashioned country life! As one member said “From the age of about six I was able to take a 20-minute walk to primary school on my own, past woods and down deserted country lanes. So different for our grandchildren, 60 years on”.
In 1960, aged 16, one member went to Germany to live with a family and attend school for a term. At home her parents had no telephone, and so had to wait three days for a postcard to let them know of her safe arrival. In fact, few had telephones, and all remembered exactly how long it took them to walk or run to the nearest telephone box. Few cars and limited transport options was the norm. Another remembers the long journey for a school trip to Switzerland when she was 13. She had been back at home for a week when her parents got
the postcard they had given her to post on arrival. Only five words were allowed, otherwise it was deemed a letter and the postage went up!
Our mothers coped with all the laundry, housework, shopping, cooking, ensuring children were immaculately turned out for school every day, often taking part-time jobs to help make ends meet. Usually, the men went to work and came home expecting dinner on the table. Some were more willing than others to help with chores, but that would be perhaps peeling potatoes and cleaning shoes. Sadly, not many women had much time to garden, so that was done mostly done by the men.
Individual circumstances will determine whether these were remembered as good or bad times, and few really thought at the time about how life was for their mothers, but we now think our mothers were amazing. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore! Hilary Hiscox, Congresbury NWR
foreman, then a farm manager, and finally taking on a tenanted farm of 200 acres at Hackthorn. Mum and I followed him around the county, living in very cold, old-fashioned cottages and farm houses. City girl Mum had to adapt to pumping water from the well, and lighting paraffin lamps and those black coal-fired ranges. As the years went on we got mains water and progressed from lamp-lighting to a windmill generator, and then to a big, smelly, noisy engine, which often refused to start! This was the only time I remember Dad swearing. Electricity finally arrived in the late 50s.
Mum and the other farmers’ wives of the time would never have been called a farmer. Yet they were responsible for PR, HR, administration, and the nutrition, health and hygiene needs of the workforce, with family members and often others drafted in to help. Cooking then was not just bunging a pizza in the oven: even on the very busiest of days it was cooking from scratch, as well as bottling, jamming and baking.
Dad was not a bad farmer, but he was a hopeless businessman and the farm foundered. My amazing Mum went back to teaching, as well as coping with three children, helping with farm duties – including the daily egg washing – and managing a five-bedroom farmhouse.
I can see her now after our high tea, sitting down with a cuppa and falling asleep for 10 minutes before getting up and working on until bedtime. She was a strong woman, and definitely kept the family afloat.
As a teenager in the sixties I loved every aspect of the farm and farming, but it never occurred to me that I would farm. At Lincoln Christ’s Hospital Girls’ High School we were given a decent academic education which, lamentably, I didn’t appreciate. At that school you were either a success and went to university, or you weren’t and went down the hill to the tech college to learn shorthand and typing – and become some man’s secretary.
Mum, after her experiences, was determined that her daughters just as much as her son should have training, a role, and a means of financial independence. I was lucky: I have several school friends who were not allowed to have a job – mostly, I have to admit, in the farming community. They had been sent to the sort of school that taught them the social
A what?
In 1981 I went to the NWR National Conference at Warwick University. The topic was ‘What Price Progress?’ While we were chatting over coffee before the conference began, one lady rather proudly announced that they were getting a computer. This was before home PCs or the internet. Everyone looked at her with amazement.
How things have changed. Most homes have a computer now, although not all. If I had written this in 1981, it would have been on a manual typewriter or even by hand! Daphne Williams, Shrewsbury NWR
graces, flower arranging, Cordon Bleu cookery and so on, and then had to come home, help mother, and make a financially suitable marriage. They are angry to this day.
So, after some family negotiations, in October 1964 I set off to swinging London to become a student nurse at The Royal Free Hospital in Gray’s Inn Road. My grandfather had wanted me to train at Lincoln County Hospital, where he was quite a bigwig – which is precisely why I didn’t want to go there!
London in the sixties! Yes, it seems that was where everyone wanted to be. But, although our skirts were shortened, music filled our leisure time, and we patrolled the Kings Road, Carnaby Street and Biba, it felt at the time as if we never really got the chance to be involved with the swinging sixties. We bought very little, because we had very little money – £11 a month after our board and lodging was paid for, and getting into debt was not an option. Hospital rules meant we had to be in by 10.30pm, although they didn’t notice if you were out all night. Several times we slept in deck chairs in St James’s park,
The former Royal Free Hospital in Gray’s Inn Road and the poor girls who had rooms with windows onto the fire escape suffered very interrupted sleep!
We had our transistor radios, ginger biscuits and each other, that much needed sisterhood after a bad day, the death of a patient one had grown fond of, or seemingly continual criticism from Sister. There was no counselling in those days and little praise. Many left before the end of training, and pregnancy meant you were out immediately. When I went to the family planning clinic before I was to be married in 1967, I needed a letter from the vicar confirming the date of my marriage before I could have contraception – the pill, surely the most massive gamechanger for women over the last 60 years.
However, that training taught me a resilience, the ability to prioritise and a very practical approach to coping with life that I am grateful for, and which helped with my new role as a farmer’s wife, although I had difficulties with my motherin-law, who was horrified that I continued to work as a staff nurse. Of course, that stopped when I became pregnant. Child care was extremely limited and the prevailing culture – and my mother-in-law – would not have tolerated my working. I did, however, become more involved with the farm and especially the pedigree suckler herd of cattle that we had. I became pretty good at calving cows and the after care of mother and baby, and had some good years. Eventually I became quite good friends with mother-in-law too: she softened, and I think I became a bit less threatened and a bit more understanding. And she taught me all I know about gardening!
Things have changed since then, and the world of agriculture has many more women involved in all aspects of farming and the associated industries. Many are running the family farm, or at least taking an equal part in the decision making, although they may still recognise the situation in which someone arrives on the farm and asks them for ‘The Boss’.
So let’s carry on improving the lot for ourselves, our fellow women and men, and here’s to NWR, carrying on being involved in that improvement, as Maureen Nicol wrote in that first letter to the Guardian ‘supporting housebound and working wives with liberal interests with a desire to remain individuals’. Well done Maureen, and thank you!
The house I grew up in
Glastonbury Tor
I spent my childhood in a Somerset village called Street, which is where Clarks shoes were made and which is two miles from Glastonbury.
In 1960 I lived with my parents and brother and sister in a newly built semi-detached house on the edge of the village. The house was at the bottom of a cul-de-sac at the end of a row of private houses built behind a council estate. We lived on the edge of open fields with views across the Somerset Levels to Glastonbury Tor.
The house was a standard three bedroom semi with a bathroom, and a shed in the garden. The bathroom had a sink and a toilet, but no shower. We had no car and no telephone. Cooking was by electricity: there was no gas. We had coal fires to heat the downstairs front and back rooms, but no other heating – the first thing my father did when we moved in was to build a coal bunker! The bedrooms had lino on the floors, and the front and back downstairs rooms had lino too, with a square of carpet in the middle of each room. How I longed for fitted carpets!
Apart from a sweet shop at the top of the estate, the main shops in the village were at least a fifteen minute walk away, but we were well served by mobile shops: a butcher and a
fishmonger called weekly and a van from the Co-op came every Friday – this van was big enough to walk into so that we could browse the shelves of (mostly tinned) goods.
In the smallish garden my father grew flowers and vegetables. He also planted fruit trees.
We walked to our secondary school and usually came home for lunch. From the centre of the village we could get buses to Bristol, Wells, Taunton and Bridgwater – if we could afford the fares. There was also a local train station near Glastonbury from which we used to go on a tortuous journey involving two changes and much waiting around to visit my grandmother in Southampton.
We had moved into that house two years previously. Before that we lived in a rented terraced house on the High Street within walking distance of the shops. This was an old house with no bathroom and an outside toilet. There was no running hot water. The kitchen had a stone flagged floor. There was a range in the breakfast room and open fires in the front room and dining room – only lit on Sundays – where we burned turf. The bath was in the kitchen and at one end there was a gasfired copper geyser which heated the water. The geyser was only fired up once a week: at other times we had a bath in a tin bath in front of the range. My mother cooked on a gas cooker and there was an electric light in the centre of the ceiling of each room, but upstairs there were no power sockets: we had little oil lamps as night lights.
This house had a very long garden where we loved to play and where my father grew fruit and vegetables.
While we lived here, we went to junior school in Glastonbury: my father would take us to the bus stop in the morning and put us on the bus, then we would walk the short distance to school. After school we would catch another bus to Street and my mother would meet us.
My parents took out a mortgage with the council to pay for the house. My mother was determined that we should not spend our lives in rented accommodation, although I know my parents found the mortgage repayments very onerous.
In 2020 I live with my partner in a large Edwardian semidetached house in a south west suburb of Sheffield. The house has four bedrooms, a study and two bathrooms – which include two showers! We have gas-fired central heating and fitted carpets. There is a garage which could accommodate two small cars. We have a fairly big garden, but we don’t grow vegetables. Around the corner there is a pub and a Tesco Express with a garage. Over the road there is an Indian restaurant, and other restaurants and takeaways are within walking distance. We have a car, but the bus stop is very close and we can easily get to other parts of Sheffield and to the train station by bus, using our bus passes. We own the house – we have both paid off the mortgages we had on other properties.
Life is very different for me now from what it was in 1960. I live in a city with easy access to everything I need, including many different forms of entertainment. I would not like to go back to living in the country. My life as a child in Street was very restricted and I was often bored. It was difficult to maintain contact with my friends during the school holidays.
A strange legacy of living in the two houses of my childhood is that I much prefer to live in older properties. My mother hated the rented house on the High Street because of its stone floors and lack of facilities. She loved the new modern semi with its bathroom and running hot water. My sister and I hated the new house and loved the old one because it had more character. Now when we get together, a lot of our conversation consists of reminiscences about the ‘old house’. Eilis Coffey, Sheffield/Fulwood NWR
