I had expected to love this book bearing in mind that it is billed as being the book that the 'Home Fires' series is based upon, and I have been enjoying that programme. I didn't expect the melodrama that the TV series tends to veer into, more and more judging by the latest run, but neither was I expecting the very dry recounting of facts here.

I did learn a lot about what country women did towards the war effort, with food production, food preservation, salvage collecting, knitting for the troops, entertainments to raise money for good causes, wild plant gathering for essential medicine production e.g. foxgloves to make digitalis and rosehips for vitamin C production, wool gathering from the hedgerows, Make do and Mend, toy/clothing and other items made for refugees in Europe, supplying all sorts to the Red Cross for POWs, and lots more besides. All with no pay and no transport allowances and everything rationed, the jam makers, for example, not even being able to get back the jam they had made with their own fruit, as it all went into central stores and what you bought and used your coupons for (the coupons didn't pay for anything, they just allowed you to get it if it was available) would be jam someone had made in another village most likely. And this against a background of very basic amenities, with a lot of villages not having mains drains, a lot lacking electricity and some even not having a water supply in the house, as these utilities didn't reach a lot of country areas in the UK until the late 1950s.

However what I missed here was that, although there were extracts from diaries or letters of individual women, they were few in number and I just didn't get the sense of women as individuals, to the extent that when they reappeared in the narrative under another topic - the book is topic based, starting with a history of the WI and then going on to each of the things they helped organise e.g. food production, clothing production etc etc - I couldn't get a sense of who was who. For that reason I have to say this was only an OK 2 star read because it didn't bring the subject alive. And that's a shame because it is a very important subject which hasn't been looked at much in the huge supply of books about civilian life in WWII, which tend to concentrate on what went on in the towns/cities. ( )

While I enjoyed reading all of Summers' books, Jambusters: The Story of the Women's Institute in the Second World War was my favorite of the lot. This volume was specifically about the role that the Women's Institute (WI) performed on both the national and county levels. These women played hosts to evacuees, took over the role of primary household manager, assumed the responsibility for the nation's food production, and so much more. Not only was the WI important during the war for the nation but even more so for women who made up its membership. The main goal of the WI was to provide a space for women to socialize (there's real value in this) and educate themselves on everything from how to preserve food and stretch out their meager rations to animal husbandry. (Many local chapters kept farm animals which they then sold to raise funds for war work.) I knew that they were a social group but I had no idea just how large of a role that they played. This just reinforced how amazing women truly are. 10/10 ( )

Informative, if a little pedestrian, overview of the tasks the women in the Institute undertook during the war years to keep the country clothed, fed & enthused. And more fascinating - their surveys, revealing the lack of running water, connected loos & other deprivations of huge swathes of country-folk.

Brought home the sacrifices & awkwardnesses of many in the countryside who had to share their homes with urban mothers & children with very different life experiences & attitudes. ( )

A very good and inspiriting look at what The Women's Institutes were able to achieve to keep Great Britain going during WWII. What these women were able to do every single day for years both during and after the war is purely mind-boggling to someone from a later, much more leisurely, era.

I'd never heard of The Women's Institute before reading this book, but everything they stand for and strive to achieve makes them very much a community I'd like to be a part of if I lived in a rural part of the UK (in order to have a local institute, a town/village had to be beneath a certain population ceiling), but the amount of hard work they put in (or did during the war) is admittedly, daunting.

The book was generally well-written, although telling this story requires a lot of names and a lot places and it was a constant challenge trying to keep it all straight as names were introduced and then reappeared in later chapters. There were also enough copy-editing errors to be noticed, which is somehow especially disappointing in non-fiction; I shouldn't hold it to a higher standard, but I do.

Jambusters has whet my appetite for more narrative history of the home front during WWII and I'll be on the lookout for interesting ones. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, the TV series Home Fires is apparently based on it, although it is an entirely fact based book. The characters in the series do not appear at all in any recognizable form.
The book takes you through the history of the WI (Woman's institute) with the main content focusing on WWII.
The WI was very heavily called upon to do their bit for King and country, helping with the war effort in some very surprising ways! The women went above and beyond the call of duty many many times taking on tasks that would have exhausted them many times over.
A great comradeship between vastly differing woman of all walks of society sprang up and still continues to this day. The women were awe inspiring and I am not sure the likes will be seen again. ( )