This coming bank holiday weekend we will be celebrating the 80th anniversary of VE Day (although the actual anniversary is on 8 May). Fakenham is all revved up for it – the bunting is flying and many of the small shops, including ours, have themed window displays which is fun. While I was planning for it, the words ‘knit for victory’ kept running through my head until I was driven to do an internet search and see why. And indeed, it is because there was a WW2 poster with those words on it, an image of which was sent to me by a friend some time ago.
It turns out that knitting was in important part of the War Effort on the Home Front. The Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) was set up by Lady Reading, a close friend of the Queen and by the end of the War, one in 10 women belonged to it. The WVS set up Sewing Circles, which ran in factories, church halls and even Buckingham Palace. These Sewing Circles allowed women to contribute to the war effort in meaningful ways, and one of these was through knitting. Their slogan was “If you can knit, you can do your bit”. Sirdar, even then a big British wool company, produced wool dyed in the appropriate khakis and blues, and patterns were produced entitled ‘War Knitting’. These women produced millions of socks, balaclavas, pullovers, gloves and other comfort items for the troops. Apparently women would slip little notes into the socks for sailors to cheer them up. The WVS were also the official sock darners to the British Army and Navy, with more than three million items mended annually. It is amazing to think, really, how much darning that would have involved. I wonder what happens to socks with holes in them in the modern army? I have suspicion that they are thrown away.
I found a story in the BBC archives told by a woman who was in the WAAF. By 1941, clothing was rationed, and she discovered that jumpers were being issued to airmen, but not to the women. When she questioned this, she was told that the women could knit their own jumpers. However, no wool, needles or patterns were offered and rationing made it hard to to obtain wool. She persuaded the local priest to get hold of some wool for her, which she did, and she got her sister to knit her a jumper with it, although she also said she had to keep quiet about where she had sourced the wool, as the priest did not want women turning up at his bible classes just to get wool.
The effort was not limited to the Sewing Circles either. Girls at school were taught to knit and were supplied by the Government with thick wool to be turned into garments for the armed forces. One person from Portsmouth remembers that the sweaters had to be knitted in plain stocking stitch up to a roll collar with no armhole shaping, making it difficult to fit in the sleeves which were also basic with no top shaping. She recalls that in the end they knitted the sweaters Guernsey style, with a very simple yoke from the level of the armhole, making them easier to assemble and, in her opinion, better looking.
When the Blitz began in 1940, the WVS turned their attention to providing clothing for the Home Front as well. They produced blankets for first-aid posts and baby clothes and handed out wool via the shelter marshals so that people sheltering underground from the bombs could put their time to good use. Once clothes rationing was introduced, the members of the WVS turned adult clothes into items for children, transforming felt hats into slippers and blankets into dresses and coats. Make Do and Mend in action.
Of course the UK was not the only country to have this kind of movement. In my travels around the internet I found lots of interesting information about the drive to knit for the armed forces in the US. My favourite, however, was this Life Magazine cover – I love the woman’s look of extreme concentration on the task in hand! Very realistic.
It is all more than 80 years ago now, and I cannot imagine that it would be possible to mobilise something like the WVS now, and probably it would not be necessary. Still, women are knitting for their men at the front even now. One of my customers, a Ukrainian refugee, sends socks, knitted in West Yorkshire Spinners wool, to her boyfriend in Ukraine. Not, I assume, because he needs them, but because they provide comfort both for the person receiving them and the person knitting them.