From WW1 to WI
To lighten the gloom of all my sad centenary blogging about battles come the celebrations this month marking 100 years of Women’s Institutes. No surprise to learn that the WI movement had its origins – in Britain at least – in the aim of encouraging women to become more involved in producing food during the First World War, as suggested by the above wartime poster. So those grim years of the 1914-18 conflict saw a remarkable growth of the movement. The end of 1916 saw 40 WIs across the UK; by December 1919 there were a total of 1,405 branches. Today, the WI nationally has over 212,000 members in just over 6,600 branches. It is the largest voluntary women’s organisation in the UK. I hadn’t realised that the WI actually started in Canada as early as 1897, so this seems the right place for a second wartime poster published by the Canada Food Board There’s a lot more that I hadn’t realised ab...