Domestic Life | The Wychwoods Local History Society

… from the Wychwoods “That’s How It Was” Publication

Impressions of wartime in the Wychwoods are not so much dominated by the privations, restrictions and destruction of the time, as by the enormous contrast with life at the end of the twentieth century. Being able to afford to take advantage of the domestic electricity supply that had come to the Wychwoods in the early 1930s has been probably the most dramatic agent of change. Few during the war had a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, an electric cooker. Of course, there was no television; even radio was not yet universal.

Do you remember any special radio programmes that you listened to during World War Two?
‘Never listened in.’

You never listened in, you didn’t have a radio?
‘No. We never had any at home either’. Rose Burson

Rose Burson was a young married woman in 1939. Mary Barnes was a 12 year old evacuee. ‘I don’t remember having a radio, actually, but I suppose there was a wireless‘.

Betty Scott, wife of the doctor, also could not remember listening to the radio. On the other hand, the radio was important to others.

Betty Brown was 12 when war was declared. ‘We always listened to the Vera Lynn programme on Sunday nights. They played requests for the Forces and they played the National Anthems of countries in the war. Also ITMA‘.

And Vi Smith, who was 29 when war was declared, said, ‘We had a radio which I used to have on quite a bit because it kept you in touch with what was going on and I remember Winston Churchill on the radio’.

‘At first it was head phones. And then you had bigger radios. It was nearly the start of the war before we had a radio. And it was as big a treat as the television today‘. Jim Hall.

Colin Pearce described a weekly routine. ‘There was Rawlins’ shop who sold bicycles. Charged your batteries up for your radio during the war. Always remember that we used to take it down every week. He had accumulators. Picked the old one up and took a new one down and paid your sixpence‘.

A telephone, too was not yet general, although Mrs Scott was already tied to the house in order to answer it. The telephones in the Wychwoods were operated manually by Vi Smith’s mother at 9 High Street, Shipton and ‘manned’ 24 hours a day, particularly for air raid warnings. At Crows Castle, where Daphne Edginton moved in 1940 on her marriage, there was no telephone for some years after the war was over.

For many cooking was mainly still done on a solid fuel range or oil stove.

What did you cook on?’
I cooked on a horrid black range with one oven each side actually but never heated properly. It was supposed to heat the water as well but the bathroom was a mile away, not above it so to get a bath was quite a tricky business. We had to take some extra hot water up, buckets or something to get enough hot water to get in‘. Daphne Edgington

Shipton had its own gas works in Gas Lane and some houses had a supply. Mrs Scott had a gas cooker towards the end of the war, and remembered the difficulty of cooking even a tiny joint of meat on Sunday because the gas pressure was so low.

Valerie Davies described the amenities of her home.
‘The bathroom was downstairs with the copper in the room. I suppose we only had a bath once a week, and that was it’.
And the loo was in the bathroom, was it?’
No, you went out the back door on the other side of the house and that was outside’.
Did you have running water?
‘Yes, cold’.
And electricity?’
‘Yes and electricity’
What was the cooking done on?
‘The original was an old black range, and we had that, then at some point Dad must have been doing up a house and the people gave him what we called a Triplex. It was a grate one side and it was enamelled and it looked better, and we had that with an oven. The everlasting memory is the Valor stove that would flicker a patch on the ceiling with the porridge bubbling in the morning’.

Travelling was much curtailed by wartime but our interviewees still made trips to Oxford, mostly by train, or to Chipping Norton. Bicycles were the everyday means of transport and Peggy Coombes remembered cycling for miles.

As for entertainment, as Joan Hall said ‘No, there was nothing on but you didn’t notice because you had always been used to nothing on‘.

Dances were organised in the British Legion hall in Milton (close to the site of the present village hall) and in Shipton. There were film shows for children and also for the troops to which the locals went in the Red Triangle hut and Shipton Court. By 1945 Shipton cinema was open in Upper High Street, and it was not unusual for some to cycle every week to see a film at one of the two cinemas in Chipping Norton. Much of the local entertainment was home made with fundraising in mind.

Peggy Coombes summed up the problem. ‘We were working pretty hard and pretty late most of the time‘.

“That’s How It Was” Menu

These pages are reproduced from the Society’s publication “That’s How It Was”, featuring women in the Wychwoods during World War Two. The texts and images were published in the year 2000, and deserve a place in our expanding online archive. Please bear in mind as you read our texts in these pages, that we reproduce them as published in the year of publication.

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