Monthly Meetings

We meet at 2 pm on the fourth Tuesday of the month at the Congregational Church, Kilwardby St, Ashby.
There is normally a guest speaker or, in December, musical entertainment.
This is followed by tea, coffee and biscuits and a chance to meet and talk with other members.

Tea Rota and Reporting Groups

26th November - Dr Ann Featherstone – “Mrs Rose Buckner and how women coped after WW2”

Dr Featherstone is a retired university lecturer and teacher as well as a writer. Her talk was all about how women coped after the war and in particular about a Mrs Rose Buckner who wrote a book on home making in order to help women to cope at a time of shortages and rationing.

Dr Featherstone explained that she found a copy of this book in her father's bookcase when she was a child and became fascinated by it and by the drawings and sketches she found in it. There were pictures of a typical post war kitchen with no work tops, a gas fired geyser for hot water, a small table and an oil skin floor.

In the book Mrs Buckner wrote about the things that most of our mothers had to do every day such as cooking, cleaning, ironing and caring for a sick child or relative. Rose herself had 3 children, 2 daughters and one son and she was an older mother when she started her family having given up a good job in order to do so.

After the war she started writing a weekly column for the Sunday People newspaper which became so popular with the newspaper’s readers that she continued writing it for more than 10 years. The column and the book made women out to be the home makers and it taught them how to improve their domestic skills - how to make do and mend in a post war Britain where there was still rationing and shortages until well into the 1950's.

For example there was instruction on how best to do the weekly washing when soap was still very much rationed, how to turn old clothes or curtains into new garments and more importantly how to eek out the food ration by making Bakewell tarts from potatoes or making a sandwich filling from potatoes mixed with cold chopped sprouts and a small spoonful of marmalade.

Dr Featherstone's talk evoked many memories of our childhood in all of us and she delivered it with much humour and mirth. The talk was very well received by an audience which remained captivated for a good hour and which no doubt will be well remembered for months to come.