Happy Birthday, dear WI!

It’s been a busy week for everyone involved in the centenary of the Women’s Institute. I wasn’t fortunate enough to get through the ballot for the Garden Party on Tuesday 2^nd June, and I couldn’t apply for the Albert Hall AGM as I was working with the U3A that day. But that doesn’t mean I’ve missed out on the excitement. My name must be lurking somewhere on a dusty list at the BBC and ITV: when there’s something going on with the WI, who’re you gonna call? I’m honoured that this week, at least, it’s been me.

Local BBC and independent radio stations have been eager to pick up the centenary story. It might have been nice had they covered it on their drive-time shows (with a nice cup of tea and a suitable cake) but hey, I don’t mind being bright and breezy on air at – what was it this morning, for BBC London? Six-thirty am, I seem to remember.

On Tuesday, the day of the Garden Party, I was summoned at two hours’ notice to Buckingham Palace to do a piece for the News at Ten. I’ve been peripherally involved with the media for ages now, but I still can’t quite get used to the last-minute, split-second nature of it all. I leapt on the train, my lunch half-munched, and found my way to ITV’s satellite-dish van in Green Park; meanwhile the newsroom had decided that it was too blustery to film outside (although right on cue, the sun came out as though someone had flicked a switch at 3 pm, when the Party was due to begin).

We eventually found an alternative venue for the interview – the gorgeous new library at LSE – and proceeded to film ten minutes or so of chat about the history of the WI, which was broadcast (cut, understandably, to a few seconds) that evening.

More radios the next day, and the next – I love it! Writing is such a solitary, physically passive sort of occupation. I grab any chance to get out and enthuse in public. And it feels such a privilege to be able to enthuse about the Women’s Institute, for which – as anyone who’s read A Force to be Reckoned With will know – I have unbounded admiration.

The television interview was different, but I have to say that most radio presenters tend to ask the same questions, and I thought it might be useful for those of you who are WI members involved with the local Press to know what those questions are. You’ve probably been asked them already, actually.

1. Why Jam and Jerusalem?
2. Still Jam and Jerusalem?
3. Anything else apart from Jam and Jerusalem?
4. Did the WI do anything before the Calendar Girls came along?
5. Why are all WI members old?
6. Why aren’t men allowed?

That just about sums it up, I think. I really hope this week will have finally changed the public’s mind about our radical, courageous, fun-loving and passionate organisation.

That would be the best 100th birthday-present of all.

‘Jerusalem’ and the Women’s Institute.

I gave a talk on A Force to be Reckoned With yesterday, and some interesting topics came up in the discussion session afterwards, while we were all munching cake. One question asked there (and at most places I visit, to be honest) was about the history of singing ‘Jerusalem’ by the Women’s Institute. How did it come about?

‘Jerusalem’ was composed by Hubert Parry in 1916 as an anthem ‘to brace the spirit of the nation’ in the depths of the First World War. When Millicent Fawcett heard it, she asked Parry if the women’s suffrage movement might appropriate it. ‘Jerusalem’ was more modern than the slightly dreary ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ and less strident than Ethel Smythe’s terrifying ‘March of the Women.’ Parry agreed, and ‘Jerusalem’ was first sung by massed women at the Royal Albert Hall at a suffrage rally in 1918.

Grace Hadow was one of the founders of the Women’s Institute; she was also a suffragist and a keen musician. After holding a nationwide competition for a WI anthem in the early 1920s, the results of which made her weep with despair, she hit upon the idea of transferring ‘Jerusalem’ from the suffrage movement to that other great women’s movement, the Women’s Institute. Both organisations were about empowering women; their members were bracing (as Parry had hoped) and inspirational. So it is that from 1924, ‘Jerusalem’ and the WI have been inextricably linked.

That’s not all the WI inherited from the women’s suffrage movement. Historically they share the same signature colours of green, white and violet, and both were inspired by suffragettes – like Grace Hadow and Edith Rigby – who fought for women’s freedom of expression with conviction and lasting success.

The original social network?

I have a treat in store tomorrow: a trip to Carlisle, to speak to the Cumbria Cumberland Federation of Women’s Institutes at their Spring Meeting. I love these occasions: the perfect cocktail of hard work and celebration with a generous dollop of frivolity and always, an excellent cup of tea. I’m going to be speaking about ‘A Force to be Reckoned With’, and stirring up a bit of solidarity with the pioneers of the WI Movement, which was founded  to give women in isolated communities the confidence to speak up about things that mattered to them, to support each other, and so to change the world. I guess you could say it was the original social network.

So social networks are nothing new – the WI was founded in Canada in 1897, and in the UK in 1915 – but as our world grows more and more ‘virtual’ (and I’m a fine one to speak, with my tweets and my blogs…) I think the value of real, one-to-one, face-to-face contact  grows even more precious. That’s what the WI has always been about.

‘It’ll never work without a man to run it,’ said some clever gentleman in 1915. You try telling that to the hundreds of women I’ll be meeting tomorrow!