Rural Journey

Catherine Blair describes how the infant Scottish Women's Rural Institutes helped in the war effort

One snowy night Miss Chart and Mrs Morley Fletcher came to give us our first lesson in embroidery, bringing with them embroidered mats done by Frenchwomen behind the guns at Verdun, work which, the women said, 'helped them to keep their sanity.'

Those of us who had menfolk at the front could well understand this: for we were finding out that our work for the Institute and for the social life of the villages was helping us through many anxious moments. Sometimes our meetings were begun with silent prayer. We sent parcels to the soldiers, collected money for the Minesweepers Fund and did what we could for the Red Cross.

I overheard someone ask a member what she had done at the Institute meeting, and she replied, 'I sat an grat wi another woman in the corner.' To weep with those that weep - is this not the truest sympathy?

But our sympathy bore fruit in action; we collected money to provide two beds in the Scottish Women's Hospitals in Serbia and France; and the French soldiers wrote that they got well quickly because of the cheerful names on the beds -'Mac' Merry,' which they translated as'Be Happy!'

Macmerry, I may mention here, was during the war the home of our co-operative trading effort. The members took shares at 2s 6d each, and this supplied us with the capital to start with. We made and sold the jams and bottled fruits - jam being a necessity in a village where the miners had to take 'pieces' with them to the pits.

We got sugar from the Food Control Committee and made marmalade - eking out the precious oranges with carrots and turnips! We got blueberries from the Lammermoors; crab apples, brambles and elderberries locally; apples and rhubarb from gardens nearby - the miners' houses having small gardens. But 'Rhubarb is like advice - a gran thing for giein awa!'

We made the jam and bottled the gooseberries in the cookery room of the school, and sold it to members at each meeting. When our trading society was wound up at the end of the war we came out - thanks to our able Treasurer Mrs Mackenzie - with our share capital and ten pence to the good!

From the beginning we had christened our Scottish Institutes 'Rural' Institutes to get away from the idea of the Institute as a building. But very soon the word 'Institute' was dropped, and all over the country they were affectionately known as 'Rurals.'