WI scrapbooks and community archives: women’s experiences of record-keeping in 1960s rural England

ABSTRACT

1965 marked the 50^th anniversary of the formation of the Women’s Institute (WI), which some members commemorated by making a scrapbook recording village life in England and Wales. As this competition shows, scrapbooks were just as appealing to community organizations such as the WI, as they were to individuals and families, yet it is the latter who have attracted the most scholarly interest. I reorientate this focus to argue that scrapbooks have historically functioned as community archives, inaugurating WI women into becoming their villages’ record-keepers, as they recorded what it meant to them to live in the English countryside in the 1960s. In their submissions, WI women reflected on the opportunities and challenges of creating an archive, allowing a rare insight into the experiences of grassroots record-keeping by an overlooked group of community archivists. By focusing on members of the WI, a largely conservative, countryside organization, this article diversifies both the sites of community archives, as well as the demographics of those who participated in community archival practices.

KEYWORDS:

• scrapbook
• community archives
• local history
• women’s archiving
• scrapbooking
• recordkeeping

1965 marked the 50^th anniversary of the formation of the Women’s Institute (WI). To commemorate this occasion, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) invited its members to make a scrapbook recording life in rural England and Wales for their anniversary year. WI members responded in their thousands, forming committees to co-ordinate who would collect, design, and make their branch’s competition entry. The competition was a highlight for June Field, the former president of Smarden Women’s Institute in East Kent, who recalled in 2009 how ‘we had a wonderful team of people. They all went round with their cameras and their notebooks and covered every aspect, every wedding, every funeral; everything that happened was put on in that one year.’¹ At the end of 1965 and in the opening months of 1966, WI members transformed their clippings, graphs, photographs, and an abundance of ephemeral material into their scrapbook entry, to meet, and often exceed the criteria outlined by the NFWI. Compilers also included valuable insights on their archiving experiences, from the initial collection of records, through to their presentation and conservation. This article lifts the covers of these often-elaborate scrapbooks to explore how WI members created and conserved their own community archives, which now reside in county record offices, county and branch WI or local history archives, and the homes of individual WI members and their descendants. I argue that these WI scrapbooks are a type of community archive, which illuminate the opportunities and challenges that archiving presented to a group of women who grappled with archival practices for the first time. Reading these competition entries uncovers how many countryside women experienced the process of archiving, providing the opportunity for researchers to expand the range of settings in which community archiving occurred.

I begin by demonstrating how scrapbooks have historically functioned as a community archive for a variety of community groups, drawing on archival material deposited in county record offices in Essex, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and East Sussex, personal collections, and shared online. I apply criteria developed by community archives scholars, namely 1) the performance of emotion, 2) archival self-reflexivity, and 3) presentation of competing narratives, to show how these scrapbooks function as community archives. The second part of this article explores how WI women reflected on their experiences of constructing their scrapbooks, offering one of the first historical accounts of what it meant to produce a community archive. Finally, I look at the arrangements which WI members made for the long-term preservation of these scrapbooks to explore how different WI branches reflected on the value of their archives and how they should be consulted.

Scrapbooks as community archives

Scrapbooks, defined as ‘physical books in which paper scraps and other items are saved’ are a type of archive where their makers arrange and classify a range of mixed media in between the covers of a book.² Archives literature largely understands scrapbooks as a personal, often private form of archiving, occurring beyond the remit of more traditional archival settings. Richard Cox defines scrapbooks as ‘purposeful compilations of the bits and pieces of documentary evidence that has survived, providing a glimpse into how someone interprets their life or the history of the family’, which are an enduring and ‘important part of the personal archive’.³ Historians and archivists have supported these assertions: most notably, Ellen Gruber Garvey has demonstrated the important role which scrapbooks played in the lives of African American activists, suffrage campaigners, and abolitionists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴ Rather than seeing the scrapbook as a component of a wider archive, Garvey describes a scrapbook as ‘a democratic form of archives’, available to anyone with access to scissors, glue, and a book, whether they made it from scratch, re-purposed an existing notebook or directory, or purchased their own volume.⁵ Easy to make, scrapbooks are ‘vernacular, decentralized archives’, valued by those which traditional archival settings have historically excluded.⁶

Scrapbooks are one of the ‘less conventional and hybrid models of record- and memory-keeping,’ created by communities who can be obscured in the historical record.⁷ The Co-operative Women’s Guild, the Royal Voluntary Association, and the Maccabi Association were just some of the many voluntary organizations who kept scrapbooks recording their society’s work, whether at a national or branch level over the course of the twentieth century.⁸ Singular local groups also kept scrapbooks, such as the Blisworth Drama Society in Northamptonshire, who discussed in a meeting in 1981 how they used scrapbooks to document their performances because it allowed them to combine a range of mixed media to record their work.⁹ This drama society joined a host of other community archives, who gathered a range of material into the pages of a scrapbook. The scrapbook was an appealing archival space precisely because community groups could personalize it to their specific record-keeping needs.

The Women’s Institute was another community group who turned to scrapbooks to archive their activities at a range of levels. The WI is a branch-based, voluntary organization, established in 1915 to bring together working- and middle-class rural women through the provision of a range of activities and events relating to domestic labour, handicrafts, agriculture, and food production.¹⁰ Campaigning on pertinent issues for countrywomen, the organization was largely conservative in not seeking to undermine a woman’s domestic role.¹¹ Rather than just using scrapbooks to record the activities of individual WI branches, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, several county federations launched their own county-wide village scrapbook competitions, inviting its members to research and write a history of their local village in the form of a scrapbook.¹² Such activities were a prime example of how historical actors have used scrapbooking, in the words of Ellen Gruber Garvey, as ‘a form of history writing from the ground up.’¹³ The scrapbook genre retained its appeal when the NFWI launched a competition to mark its Jubilee in 1965, which in turn incentivized many of its members to amass their own community archives, often for the first time.

Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd have traced how community archives grew on the back of the various social and political campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, which marked a turning point in the wider archival landscape.¹⁴ Such communities took record-keeping into their own hands, as they decided how to document their plethora of experiences.¹⁵ In 1965, WI women exercised a similar autonomy as they drew on the expertise of their own lived experience, alongside the ephemera which they valued in their lives, to create a record of their village community.¹⁶ This corpus of scrapbooks, like the genre more broadly, has suffered the same mischaracterization encountered in the early scholarship on community archives.¹⁷ Rosemary Shirley, one of only a few scholars to have worked closely with these scrapbooks, describes them ‘as part of a valuable heritage of informal, amateur and personal history recording by women.’¹⁸ By joining Richard Cox in referring to these scrapbooks as an ‘amateur’ form of record-keeping, Shirley privileges forms of institutional record-keeping in more traditional archival settings, rather than treating scrapbooks as a type of archive where their compilers were the experts on their respective communities.¹⁹

Most of the existing community archives scholarship has focused on the collection, preservation, and accessibility of archival material often in repositories established from scratch and with more left-leaning political motivations.²⁰ Fiona Cosson’s work is a useful exception in uncovering the important role of local history societies in generating, collecting, and presenting local archival material, which might not have otherwise been preserved.²¹ Overall, the scholarship often equates the community archive with either a single physical repository, or with material dispersed in the ‘attics, cupboards, church halls and hard drives’ of local history societies.²² By applying criteria developed by scholars of community archives to a different archival site — a scrapbook — I illuminate a previously overlooked type of community archiving, which democratized archival practices for thousands of communities. In fact, WI members were amassing their own community archives long before archival theorists had even explored such practices. Thinking more creatively about what constitutes a community archive to include an item like a scrapbook, allows for a greater appreciation of what community archiving looked like for different groups, who have so far been obscured in a literature which tends to focus on physical repositories, rather than more dispersed archival spaces. Though these scrapbooks centre on a single year, they share many of the qualities of physical repositories which had acquired material over several decades. Further, by focusing on the WI as a largely conservative organization, this article diversifies the sites of community archives, the demographics of those who participated in communal archival practices, as well as the model used to develop a community archive. Despite its temporal focus on 1965, the competition introduced a range of WI members to archival practices, which they reflected on candidly in their submissions.

Our Village Today Jubilee scrapbook competition

When launching the competition, the NFWI specifically drew attention to the long-term archival value of the endeavour. In June 1963, the NFWI’s General Education Sub-Committee wanted to launch an initiative in honour of the organization’s jubilee, to help stimulate ‘interest in the country’ through the ‘means of a competition at Institute level in the form of a Village Book (as opposed to a village history).’²³ The exact form of the book was undecided, but considering the diversity of media that the organizers wanted its members to capture (including drawings, writing, and photographs), it is no wonder that by November, the committee had settled on the scrapbook as the format for the entries.²⁴ Over the course of 1963 and 1964, various committees turned this competition idea into a reality, repeatedly differentiating the competition from earlier scrapbooking projects by emphasizing how ‘Our Village Today — Jubilee Scrap Book, 1965,’ should record the present, not the past. The repeated use of ‘Domesday book’ in discussions of the competition, suggests that the NFWI hoped to instil a sense of legacy-making in its members, by situating this activity against a prestigious lineage of record-keeping. In a letter sent to every WI President in England and Wales at the end of April 1964, Gabrielle Pike, Chairman of the WI, specifically emphasized the future archival value of these entries:

… the Women’s Institutes will be celebrating their Golden Jubilee in 1965, and we feel that this will be an appropriate occasion for as many as possible of the Institutes to make a permanent record of their village as it is in that year […] at least six members should contribute to the book, with drawings, plans, photographs, lettering, research, written descriptions, printed matter and other material; and do make the book as appealing to the eye as possible. […] what we want is not a history, but a picture of your village and its life in 1965, which you can hand down to future generations.²⁵

Pike acknowledged how this competition differed from earlier ones through its focus on recording the village today: ‘the place, the people, what they do, and the future.’²⁶ Members were to scrapbook on ‘geography (place), economics (work), and anthropology (folk)’ for their ‘permanent record’ which would act as a ‘picture of your village and life.’ Though she did not explicitly refer to the scrapbook as a community archive, her instructions to WIs were clear: amass an array of material on village life which would act as a permanent record. After the shortlisted entries for each county were judged, the NFWI declared the following winners of the competition: Outgate WI in Westmorland (for the North of England and the Isle of Man category); Toddington WI in Bedfordshire (for the South of England and Channel Islands); Radwinter WI in Essex (for the East of England); Llanilar WI in Cardiganshire (for the West of England and Wales); and Tregaron WI in Cardiganshire (for the Welsh category).²⁷

The competition brief set the parameters of what their members should collect, functioning in many ways as an overarching collecting policy for individual branches. This top-down direction distinguishes this community archival practice from the more well-documented organic, and often spontaneous composition of community archives dedicated to recording an organization’s activities. Eager to win a coveted place on a course at the WI’s educational institution Denman College, WI members wanted to meet the competition brief and went to great lengths to populate the pages of their scrapbooks with information on the categories which the NFWI prescribed. Yet as I will show, WI members responded creatively to what was a broad brief, exerting high levels of autonomy over the material they selected to archive on their village, just like other community archivists before and after them.²⁸ With over 2,500 entries worked on by over 15,000 women, it is unsurprising that each branch offered their own interpretation of the brief.²⁹ The hybridity of the scrapbook genre encouraged WI members to cross formats as they amassed material of importance to their respective villages: some pages appear to resemble a census, while at other times, they function more as a social survey. Their volumes could simultaneously emulate all these different initiatives, whilst at the same time still retain their intention to preserve various records on their villages for posterity. Even considering this diversity in response, the competition entries reflected the intention of their makers to create an archive centred on their village communities.

WI members used a range of strategies to collect and present quantitative data which they expected to interest future researchers. In Pembury in the Isle of Wight, members devised their own questionnaire, whose 79 responses they presented as a series of typescript numbers, sorted into categories such as ‘houses’, ‘equipment’, ‘running our homes’, ‘shopping’, ‘house maintenance’, ‘health’, ‘religion’, and ‘holidays’.³⁰ This page carried an assortment of information on the quotidian life of the village, from levels of consumer durable and car ownership, to the extent of domestic support, to how often villagers baked bread or cakes at home, or whether they paid for decorators or were DIY experts themselves.³¹ In Ashton in Northamptonshire, the compilers generated a list of all 354 families living in the village, amassing information on a villager’s marital status, age, children, educational provision, and occupation — meeting the expectations of the Doomsday-style records the NFWI encouraged them to produce.³² While Pembury and Ashton scrapbookers presented their statistics in a table, other WIs were more imaginative. Bishopstone and Hinton Parva WI in Wiltshire created a hand-drawn infographic, providing an occupational breakdown of villagers and levels of pet ownership.³³ In Collingtree in Northamptonshire, WI members created a series of graphs to categorize villagers’ occupations, distilling the results by those families of business executives or directors who lived on the newer housing estates, compared to farm, factory, or building labourers who lived in older parts of the village.³⁴ Though directed by the brief, members set their own criteria of what they deemed important for their community archive, supplementing demographic data (which the 1961 census had already captured), with more specific information on topics as wide ranging as consumption habits and educational provision. The range of data collected by WI branches is emblematic of their subjective responses to the competition brief, as they collated information specific to their village communities.

The genre of the scrapbook was well-suited to absorb an array of qualitative data and narratives, which as Caswell has argued, is a key component of a community archive.³⁵ WI branches responded with great creativity in recording qualitative information on their communities, ranging from elaborate collages to diary entries penned by fellow villagers. The polyvocality of the scrapbook genre meant that WI members did not have to offer an overarching narrative for their villages but could instead take a more segmented approach when presenting and collecting information. Returning to Pembury on the Isle of Wight, the WI appeared to have invited individual families to contribute their own specific pages to their competition entry. One housewife recalled the struggles of getting her children to school in the morning: ‘Eventually I bully, badger, plead, threaten and whack the four biggest children through the process of dressing, washing and cleaning teeth. With a relief, I gulp down my sixth cup of tea, with a couple of tranquilisers’.³⁶ The inclusion of such a visceral account of rural motherhood is at odds with the positive tone of the remainder of the volume, demonstrating how the multi-authored scrapbook enabled different women to offer a variety of narratives, and counter narratives, on motherhood and rural life. Other pages in Pembury’s volume were dedicated to recording the valuable work of the mother and baby clinic, as well as where local women worked on a part-time or seasonal basis.³⁷ In several scrapbooks, WI members immortalized their experience of purchasing new consumer durables and fabrics, such as in Eversholt in Northamptonshire where they shared their delight at purchasing nylon clothes which did not require ironing.³⁸ WI scrapbookers afforded the minute details and struggles of quotidian rural life a key place in their archive, securing their experiences from historical obscurity.³⁹ WI members joined other community archivists in centring their own experiences and polyvocal narratives as a form of consciousness raising.⁴⁰

WI members’ performance of emotion speaks to how the scrapbook worked as a repository of emotion for their respective communities.⁴¹ The medium of the scrapbook allowed members to respond creatively to the competition brief, when asked to reflect on the changes in transport and housing, as well as what ‘we expect … fear … [and] hope for’.⁴² The NFWI’s Jubilee took place during a time of much change in rural English life: the economies of many villages re-orientated from agriculture and towards the emerging service industries, leading especially younger villagers to search for work outside of the confines of the village. Improvements in transport meant that many middle-class families re-located to the country, while still finding employment in nearby towns or cities, leading to concerns in places such as Whitchurch where members disliked how ‘our villages and picturesque little towns may become no more than dormitories […] vanished without trace in a welter of urban development’.⁴³ The landscape of many villages was also changing as new council housing, inaugurated as part of post-war building efforts, led to the erection of new properties in rural villages, accompanied by new communities settling in a village. As rural life underwent significant change, WI members used scissors, scraps, and glue to register their emotional responses to what they witnessed.

The 1965 scrapbook entries offer a temporal window into the emotions which WI members recorded as part of their marking of key turning points in communal village life. Infrastructural changes often provoked the most comment and creative responses from scrapbookers. During 1965, many villages saw the introduction of a water mains system for their village, which caused much disruption to village life such as in West Chiltington, where compilers described how they were ‘suffering’ during the replacement, while in Eversholt the change caused ‘considerable inconvenience and poor road conditions’.⁴⁴ In Wilstead, members dedicated an entire page to ‘The Sewer’, noting the village’s ‘stoicism and many grumbles’ while the drains were laid, using photographs and line drawings to provide a visual narrative besides their written one.⁴⁵ Juxtaposed next to hand drawn illustrations of village services provided in Pembury, compilers noted under the title ‘what we lack’: a men’s hairdresser, a shoe repairer, a bakery, and a coffee shop, next to a small newspaper clipping criticizing the costs of bus tickets for older residents.⁴⁶ On a similar theme in Sturminster’s submission, scrapbook compilers lamented how many areas of the village lacked a pavement, sometimes because of a road’s dual public and private ownership, which was a source of frustration for many.⁴⁷ WI women employed a range of archiving strategies to capture their feelings over the changes they had witnessed in their villages in 1965.

The breadth and depth of information collected by individual WIs reflected the competing voices and visions exhibited by individual WI members, the WI branch as a whole, and the national organization. The General Education Committee intended to use the information from the scrapbooks strategically in their county and national campaigning work, hence their invitation for members to scrapbook on their fears.⁴⁸ Though this might have been one of the wider aims of the competition as a whole, individual branches had other agendas. They used their entries to testify to the strength of community spirit and activity, despite the change in the composition and economies of their villages. The tone of some of the scrapbooks suggests that WI women wished to present themselves as forward-looking and willing to adapt to new technologies and the offerings of mass culture, pushing back against long-standing tropes of rural backwardness. The influence of these different factors varied based on the location of the WI, their proximity to larger towns and cities, the extent of their post-war transformation, and the intentions of individual members. Furthermore, the scrapbooks privilege those women who had some investment in the community, either through the WI, or their pre-existing networks. As a result, the scrapbooks are not comprehensive in their documentation of village life and its residents, reflecting the local response to the brief set by the NFWI. Members in Wilstead, Bedfordshire lamented how difficult it was to persuade other villagers to contribute to their scrapbooks, perhaps implying that their position as a WI member hindered some villagers from getting involved.⁴⁹ Further, few Black, Asian or Ethnic Minority Groups appear in the scrapbooks, likely because most WI members were white, and the influx of new migrants arriving in 1960s Britain largely settled in towns and cities.⁵⁰ The competition entries privilege white women’s narratives, with only a few mentions of more diverse groups: in a scrapbook made by Bodiam WI in East Sussex, a Black man is photographed sewing up the sacks of hops, as part of a section dedicated to hop gardens, while Ashton WI recorded how one villager had fostered a mixed-race baby.⁵¹ These community scrapbooks, like other community archives, were shaped by the demographic make-up of compilers, who focused on certain communities, perspectives, and topics.⁵² They also reflected the competing tensions between the overarching aims of a competition set by a national organization, and its interpretation by individual WI branches and members, who wished to create meaningful records on their village communities.

Experiences of community archiving

Like other community archivists, who tend to be more self-reflexive on archiving compared with those in more traditional settings, many WI members incorporated candid reflections on the compilation process into the books themselves.⁵³ The gleeful title of a page in a West Sussex scrapbook made by West Chiltington WI declares, ‘We Made This Book’, offering names, ages, and occupations for each of the compilers, as well their roles in both the WI and in the scrapbook-making process.⁵⁴ Phyllis Porter, the Chairman of the dedicated ‘Scrap-book Committee’ informed readers that she made and bound the book, while other members took photographs, interviewed fellow villages, penned sections on village history, and weaved the material for the front cover. One of the winners, Radwinter WI in Essex, included a photograph of the Old Vicarage where they met for their scrapbook meetings, grounding their archival experiences in the homes of one of its members.⁵⁵ Unusually, they also included a small, signed photograph of each woman who had provided the content for each page, ensuring that readers did not overlook the contributions of individual members, especially when one member (with particularly neat handwriting) had transcribed the entire volume. In Pembury, WI members added nine head profile silhouettes to a page with information on the age of the compilers, how long they had lived in the village, their families, and a brief snippet about their interests.⁵⁶ Other women exhibited a more self-effacing, defensive tone in their volumes. Eight Ash Green WI in Essex referred to their large scrapbook as a ‘little document’; Joan Hawkes, President of Eversholt WI implored readers ‘to be excused any deficiencies that may exist’, while Renold WI in Bedfordshire shared their ‘humble apologies’ for any notable omissions in their attempt to ‘render a faithful account of life in Renhold’.⁵⁷ Members were keen to create an accurate record, taking seriously their responsibilities as recently-inaugurated community archivists. Other scrapbookers were less apologetic and more transparent about their curatorial choices, such as in Boxted in Essex where compilers added:

Our facts are as accurate as we can make them. Our pictures are cut from printed matter found about our houses in common with others all over England. We have included references to broadcasting, press and other influences not peculiar to this village, but they form a big part of our daily life. Without them our year as mirrored in this book would be thin, incomplete and duller than we are in fact.⁵⁸

Though adapting a confident tone, the compilers still felt compelled to justify their editorial decisions over their sourcing of photographs, perhaps indicative of a perceived snobbery towards using mass print culture in a local record of their village. By including these comments, compilers were keen to explain their archival decisions.⁵⁹

WI members’ openness in illuminating the scrapbooking process suffused the commentary on the competition in the pages of the WI’s journal, Home and Country. Reporters emphasized the intricacies of the compilation process after members had come together for an exhibition of some of the best scrapbooks at the Ceylon Tea Centre, in London in May 1966. WI members were most interested in discussing the ‘“inside” work’ at the heart of the record-keeping process, or what McKinney has recently conceptualized as ‘information activism’, the ‘range of materials and processes constituting the collective, often unspectacular labour that sustains social movements’.⁶⁰ WI scrapbookers were eager to share their experiences forming scrapbooking committees, enlisting the help of family and community members — and of 3 a.m. bedtimes before submission.⁶¹ Compilers expected future readers to be as interested in the creative process as the finished product, sharing the emotional dimensions of creating their community archives. As Jane Hamlett reminds us in the context of mothers’ archival practices, creating a family archive through album-making was a form of ‘emotional work’, which reveals just as much about their representation as mothers, as it does their families.⁶² Moving from the home to the community, the comments which WI members inserted into their community scrapbooks reveals the value they placed on the emotional performances of their archival labour. According to the President of Whitchurch’s WI, the scrapbook ‘has been a source of pleasure to all who are working on it’, sentiments echoed by Norton-in-Hales WI President Gladys Sandbrook who wrote how she ‘enjoyed compiling it and hope it will give endless pleasure in years ahead’.⁶³ It is not surprising that WI women registered their enjoyment at amassing their collective archives, wishing to perform the role of model community members in a bid to please the judges.

However, other comments testify to the difficulties which WI members faced when creating their community archives. One contributor to Shorwell’s scrapbook recounted in a poem how when she was invited to write for the scrapbook, ‘to me it was not a very easy task’, presumably because she was unfamiliar with sharing her views in this way in this format.⁶⁴ Members of Dyke WI in Lincolnshire were daunted by the prospect of finding enough material with the absence of a village church, parish council, and with only 84 houses in their village.⁶⁵ While some WI members were reticent about their abilities, other WI branches were outright resentful at the time they spent working on their competition entries. Gladys Gambriel, Wilstead WI’s President, was explicit in her indictment of the initiative: ‘This has not been a labour of love. We find none of us enjoys making scrapbooks’.⁶⁶ In a letter inserted towards the back of her institute’s submission, Gambriel substantiated her strong pronouncement in more detail:

We have spent countless hours hunting for material, chasing up reluctant contributors, sticking awkward shapes with uncooperative dried out [unclear], trimming small items of newsprint and promptly losing them. We don’t consider it an interesting occupation to fill long winter evenings. […] Do you sit down with a lapful of cuttings and a pot of paste?⁶⁷

Gambriel is unusual in the aggrieved tone she adopts, lamenting how scrapbook-making was another unnecessary, fastidious burden for a WI member. Members of Boxted WI took the emotional register of their discontent to a new level, as they used one of their opening collages to compare the production of their scrapbook to a painful labour, by inserting a newspaper photograph of a crying baby, with the caption: ‘BIRTH of this SCRAPBOOK. NOBODY LOVED IT.’⁶⁸ The use of capitals and the visceral metaphor of childbirth emphasizes how bitter they felt about spending their leisure time amassing their archive. Continuing the baby metaphor, compilers noted the book was ‘grudgingly adopted [and] soon clothed with sugar paper, colours to give continuity … Ten members got a scheme off the ground … . (Later: fallouts and stand-ins made it 12).’⁶⁹ It is striking that Wilstead and Boxted WI went to such lengths to submit and preserve their volumes, despite their negative experiences as first-time community archivists. WI members felt that record-keeping could be a challenging, and at times a contentious experience, which they subsequently reflected on in prominent positions in their scrapbooks.⁷⁰

WI women used their scrapbooks to voice their immediate discontent about their participation in this record-keeping project, lamenting its time-consuming nature and their inability to get certain villagers onboard. Often these quotidian record-keeping practices go unrecorded, masked behind the celebratory language of creating a new community archive, or only rise to the surface several years later. However, these community scrapbooks see WI members revelling in the subjectivity of the genre to include uncharacteristically open comments on archival processes, which are rarely gained from other sources. These comments not only reveal how WI members physically created their community archive, but what they thought about it, as they joined hundreds of other community archivists at a similar time.

Scrapbook afterlives

As early as 1966, the General Education Committee of the WI recognized that it ‘was bound to be a slow process’ to arrange for individual branches to give their entries to county record offices, especially when they were still being exhibited and distributed amongst villagers.⁷¹ Traces of information archived in the scrapbooks themselves reveal the different journeys they traversed after they were judged for the competition. A loose sheet of paper inserted inside the front of Eversholt’s volume recorded how over 26 residents of the Northamptonshire village had viewed the scrapbook in their homes.⁷² The editors of West Chiltington’s scrapbook charged its readers 1 shilling per week to fund the repairs made to the flyleaves as a result of heavy handling by earlier readers.⁷³ In other counties, such as in Kent and Somerset, several WIs had arranged to exhibit their scrapbooks in local civic spaces, such as the Sister Art Gallery in Canterbury and the Holburne of Menstrie Museum in Bath — further displaying their importance as community archives in being displayed in these institutions.⁷⁴ After these exhibitions closed, WI branches began to consider the final destinations for their community archives. The General Education Committee advised county archivists to invite individual WI branches to deposit their scrapbooks, like at Bedfordshire Record Office which by 1983 had already received 24 competition scrapbook entries.⁷⁵ Some WI branches decided to give their entries to local libraries, rather than an archive. In 1967, Norfolk County Library encouraged WI branches to deposit their scrapbook with them, on the basis that they would conserve them, and provide easy access for WI members — emblematic of the porous boundaries and arrangements between different types of archives.⁷⁶ Though a community archive for their village, some WI members felt their scrapbooks would be best preserved and subsequently accessed by the researchers in the county record office or library.

Other WI branches kept their scrapbooks in their respective villages, preferring for their branch or village local history society to retain ownership. In Worcestershire, Harvington WI stored their entry for many years in suitcases in the village hall, while Pembury’s entry was also ‘buried in a box and locked in a cupboard in the Parish Hall.’⁷⁷ Some entries remained with individual WI women, stored under the beds of the original compilers, which later family members inherited, and made arrangements to digitize.⁷⁸ The decision over who owned the scrapbook was sometimes so significant that the local press publicized the final outcome: in March 1968, a headline in the Grantham Journal pronounced that the ‘Kirkby Underwood Scrapbook is “in custody”’ of the local WI.⁷⁹ Radwinter WI took seriously their custodial responsibility for their winning creation, arranging for it to be insured in 1969, putting a price on their community archive.⁸⁰ Radwinter WI also reproduced several copies of their book for readers to consult rather than the original volume.⁸¹ Stansted WI in Essex was unusual in arranging for their scrapbook to be microfilmed, presumably to avoid the impacts of unnecessary handling.⁸² Some branches incorporated handling advice into their volumes, advising readers how best to minimize the damage to the binding.⁸³ Others invested time and energy into creating bespoke forms of protection, such as Wilstead’s impressive felt-lined, wooden case, which still protects the scrapbook deposited in Bedfordshire Record Office to this day.⁸⁴ These arrangements demonstrate how WI women were not only responsible for the acquisition of material, but also for their archive’s long-term conservation.

Advice on binding, strategies to reduce handling, as well as bespoke forms of protection echo conversations which archivists and conservators had, and continue to have, today. Knowledge on preservation and access was not confined to the purview of professionals but was articulated and debated by WI members whose responsibilities as community archivists extended beyond the competition itself. In some cases, WI branches worked in partnership with local archives and libraries, while on other occasions, they retained ownership of their community archives, valuing its proximity to the village over the detrimental impact of leaving their scrapbooks in a cold village hall, or under a bed. These decisions reveal the competing priorities of individual WI branches, who thought about the accessibility, conservation, or ownership of their community archives when deciding on the final destination for their community archives.

Conclusion

The 1965 scrapbook competition encouraged women to archive both the mundane and exceptional experiences of rural life, incorporating ephemeral material sourced from their rural worlds into their community archives. By subjecting these scrapbooks to analysis, I have uncovered how different rural communities generated their own community archives in the form of a scrapbook. Like all archives, these scrapbooks are shaped by the context of their production: the competition brief; the backdrop of the WI at the national, county, and branch level; and the position of individual scrapbookers in their respective communities. Scrapbook community archives were influenced by what their compilers deemed important enough to record and what was possible for them to source from their existing relationships with other villagers. The genre of the scrapbook allowed their makers to record what was valuable to them, and they did so by drawing on a range of mixed media, often to centre their specific experiences of village life, which remain neglected in other archival sources. The competition reveals the multiple stakeholders invested in the creation of these community archives, in a competition stimulated by a national voluntary association, but whose entries were dispersed all over England and Wales, owned by different bodies and whose final destination varied based on different, competing priorities. By focusing on this competition, this article has shown how scrapbooks were not just used to archive personal, familial records, but important community records too.

WI members were self-reflexive about their archiving processes and did not shy away from injecting their emotions into their community creations. While some makers conveyed a great sense of pride at their collaborative efforts, others did not hold back from registering their anger and resentment at spending their free time as community archivists. Members’ inclusion of comments on compilation, unprompted by the NFWI’s brief, indicated the value they ascribed to these feelings, leaving readers under no illusion as to the archival labour they had at times reluctantly invested into their volumes. The pages of some of these scrapbooks became pages of protest, not only in relation to scrapbook making, but also to the changes that members had witnessed as the countryside changed after the war. As a result, these scrapbooks reveal as much about the village communities they sought to record, as they do about the historic lived experience of community archiving in the 1960s. Not only had scrapbookers become researchers and record-keepers, but they also dipped their toes into being conservators, as they made decisions over the long-term preservation of their volumes, either through specific instructions to readers, conservation strategies, or deposit arrangements.

This article has adopted a more expansive approach to the study of community archiving by offering an important case-study which diversifies both the sites and demographics of community archival practices. It has demonstrated the role of voluntary organizations in stimulating these community archival practices for more conservative leaning organizations, compared to the more left-leaning activist groups who have attracted the bulk of the current community archives scholarship. This article has suggested a new model for community archival practices, which takes account of the overarching direction given by the NFWI in the form of the competition brief, and its interpretation by different WI branches, who made sense of it in light of the specific needs and interests of their respective communities. By focusing on rural women and their village communities, this article uncovers community record-keeping practices which have at best been under-represented, and at the worst, entirely absent in our existing histories of record-keeping and community archiving. The widespread survival of these scrapbooks should encourage a broader view of community archiving practices beyond that of institutions to look at hybrid, devolved sites which democratized access to record-keeping practices. Scrapbooking inaugurated a new group of record-keepers, who incentivized by the WI’s competition, became the self-appointed custodians for their villages. The criteria which scholars have used to define community archives also apply to these scrapbooks: the inclusion of a range of mixed-media, the injection of emotions, self-reflexivity on archival practice, the presentation of competing narratives, and their divergent after-lives. Scholars have increasingly rehabilitated the role of community archives, departing from reductive assessments of these practices as unprofessional or amateur. By positioning scrapbooks as community archives, I have shown how they too should not be categorized as an amateur form or archiving, but as a credible and important community archive which thousands of countryside women created in mid-1960s England.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Sophie Bridges, Lucy Delap, Tiia Sahrakorpi, and the two peer reviewers for their comments on the earlier drafts of this article. I also extend my sincere thanks to the Wolfson Foundation, the Cambridge History Faculty, and the Royal Historical Society who funded this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Cambridge Faculty of History [NA]; Royal Historical Society [NA]; The Wolfson Foundation [Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities].

Notes on contributors

Cherish Watton

Cherish Watton is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, specializing in the history of material culture, archiving, life writing, and collecting in modern Britain. Her PhD research explores a history of scrapbooking in Britain during the twentieth century. She also works part-time as an Archives Assistant at Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. Cherish founded and runs a national online archive on the work of the Women’s Land Army and Women’s Timber Corps: www.womenslandarmy.co.uk.

Notes

1. “Transcript of Interview with June Field on 23.2.09.”

2. Good, “From Scrapbook to Facebook”, 558.

3. Cox, Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling, 140.

4. Garvey, Writing with Scissors.

5. Ibid., 227.

6. Ibid., 209–210.

7. Gilliland, “Archival and Recordkeeping Traditions in the Multiverse”, 56.

8. For a flavour of some of these scrapbooks, see Scrapbook of Willie Cooperman, ACC13547/1; Violet Audrey Jarvis, Diary and Scrap book of the Cottingham, Yorkshire, East Riding, WVS Darby and Joan Club, WRVS20110054; Hornchurch (Park Lane) Co-operative Women’s Guild scrapbook, WCG/8/49/1.

9. Minutes of the Blisworth Drama Society, 9 March 1981; Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse”.

10. Beaumont, “What Do Women Want?”, 148; Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism.

11. Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism, 33.

12. For example, see “Villace [sic] History”, Yarmouth Independent, 9 April 1938, 10.

13. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 209.

14. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?”; Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community”. For a flavour of this scholarship, see Corbman, “A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives”; Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History”; Caswell et al., “To be Able to Imagine Otherwise.”

15. For definitions of community archives, see Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives,” 153; Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?” 74–75; Caswell et al.,”To be Able to Imagine Otherwise”, 10–11.

16. Langhamer, ”Who the Hell are Ordinary People?”

17. For a summary of this older view, and its more recent rebuttal, see Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community,” 115.

18. Shirley, Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture, 91. See also Shirley, “Pylons and Frozen Peas.”

19. Cox, Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling, 165.

20. Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives”; Bastian and Alexander, Community Archives; Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History”; Caswell, ”Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse”; Bastian and Flinn, Community Archives, Community Spaces.

21. Cosson, “The Small Politics of Everyday Life”.

22. Ibid., 46.

23. Minutes of the General Education Sub-Committee, 19 June 1963, 5FWI/E/1/1/1, 1.

24. Minutes of the General Education Sub-Committee, 15 November 1963, 5FWI/E/1/1/1, 1.

25. Gabrielle Pike to WI Presidents, Our Village Today Jubilee Scrap Book, 1965, 24 April 1964, 5FWI/E/1/1/123, 1.

26. Ibid., 2.

27. National Federation of Women’s Institutes Jubilee Scrapbook Competition, Golden Jubilee 1965 [and] Scrapbook Competition, 5FWI/E/1/1/123, 1.

28. Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centred Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse,” 311.

29. Home and Country reported that they received over 2,500 entries to the competition. Assuming that every Institute followed the instructions that a minimum of 6 women had to work on an institute’s entry, at least 15,000 women would have been involved in some element of the competition. For more, see “Scrapbooks of the Countryside,” Home and Country, July 1966, 261.

30. Pembury WI, “WI Scrapbook of 1965”.

31. Ibid.

32. Ashton WI, Scrapbook of Ashton,1965.

33. “Womens [sic] Institute,” https://bishopstoneandhintonparva.org/womens-institutue/.

34. Collingtree WI, Scrapbook “Collingtree 1965”, ZB0445/2.

35. Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse,” 313.

36. Shorwell WI, “1965 Scrapbook,” 83.

37. Pembury WI, “WI Scrapbook of 1965”.

38. Eversholt WI, “Women’s Institute 1965 Eversholt”.

39. Shirley, Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture, chap. 4.

40. Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse”, 18.

41. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 241, 250. For a case-study on the emotional dimensions of scrapbooking, see Watton, “Suffrage Scrapbooks and Emotional Histories of Women’s Activism.”

42. Letter from Gabrielle Pike to WI Presidents, Our Village Today Jubilee Scrap Book 1965, 24 April 1964, 5FWI/B/2/1/123, 2.

43. Whitchurch and Ganarew Local History Society WI, “The Women’s Institute Scrap Book 1965.” For more on these developments, see Newby, Green and Pleasant Land?; Burchardt, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll; Burchardt, “Historicizing Counterurbanization.”

44. West Chiltington WI, W.I. scrapbook for West Chiltington, MP 968.

45. Wilstead WI, Scrapbook, X939/58/5/1.

46. Pembury WI, “WI Scrapbook of 1965”, 24.

47. Sturminster-Marshall WI, “Our Village Today”, 48.

48. Minutes of the General Education Sub-Committee, 12 March 1964, 5FWI/E/1/1/1, 3.

49. Ibid.

50. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain, 4, 73, 117; Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, 21.

51. “Bodiam Jubilee Scrap Book 1915–1965 Pages 55 to 57”; Ashton WI, Scrapbook of Ashton, 1965.

52. Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives”, 165.

53. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 20.

54. West Chiltington WI, W.I. scrapbook for West Chiltington, MP 968.

55. Radwinter WI, Radwinter Scrapbook 1965.

56. Pembury WI, “WI Scrapbook of 1965”.

57. Eight Ash Green [Copford] Women’s Institute scrapbook, T/Z 29/15; Eversholt WI, “Women’s Institute 1965 Eversholt”; Renhold WI, The Commonplace Book of Renhold, X351/32.

58. Boxted WI, Jubilee scrapbook, D/Z457.

59. Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse”, 16.

60. McKinney, Information Activism, 2, 13.

61. “Scrapbooks of the Countryside”, 261.

62. Hamlett, “Mothering in the Archives”.

63. “Norton-in-Hales Scrapbook 1965”.

64. Shorwell WI, “1965 Scrapbook,” 39.

65. “Dyke WI”.

66. Wilstead WI, Scrapbook, X939/58/5/1.

67. Ibid.

68. Boxted WI, Jubilee scrapbook, D/Z457.

69. Ibid.

70. For details on the number of Women’s Institutes in 1966, see Annual Reports of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, 5FWI/A/2/2/09, 4.

71. Minutes of the General Education Sub-Committee, 13 October 1966, 5FWI/E/1/1/1, 3.

72. Eversholt WI, “Women’s Institute 1965 Eversholt”.

73. West Chiltington WI, W.I. scrapbook for West Chiltington, MP 968.

74. “A Village Record”, Herne Bay Press, 1 July 1966, 5; “Scrapbooks at the Holburne,” Somerset Standard, 9 June 1967, 21.

75. Patricia Bell to Mary Cowley, 27 April 1983, Correspondence re WI scrapbook competition for the Baker trophy, X939/2/9/3/22.

76. “Where to Store W.I. Scrapbooks”, Lynn Advertiser, 7 February 1967, 9; Andrew Lau cited in Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse,” 312.

77. “Women’s Institute Scrapbook 1965 A Year in Harvington”.

78. For example, see “Chedworth WI Scrapbook of 1965”.

79. “Kirkby Underwood Scrapbook is ‘in custody,’” Grantham Journal, 22 March 1968, 2.

80. Letter from Phoenix Assurance Company Limited to Mrs M. Buckman, 22 May 1969.

81. Author’s interview with Radwinter WI member, 26 November 2021.

82. “Scrapbook to be Micro-filmed”, Herts and Essex Observer, 22 March 1968, 6.

83. West Chiltington WI, W.I. scrapbook for West Chiltington, MP 968.

84. Wilstead WI, Scrapbook, X939/58/5/1.