Scenes at the Museum

Along with five other members of BFWI I attended an event at the Royal Albert Hall last weekend. It was chaired by Lynne Stubbings, the National WI Chair and featured talks about the history and the future of the WI movement. Ann Stamper, the WI Archivist, went through the early years before the WI was big enough to need the Albert Hall for its Annual General Meeting but had already organised itself into many of the good practice still used today. Then Charlotte from the Shoreditch Sisters WI talked of the physical problems of setting up WIs in London and ran through her WI’s successful campaigning activities. Charlotte would definitely have made a good suffragette if she had been born many years earlier than she was. Lynne concluded by giving the figures for membership at present and gave us some details of future events.
Then two of us scampered across Hyde Park to take a very crowded underground train to the Barbican where the Museum of London was hosting an afternoon of speakers whose subject was the Suffragettes. There is an exhibition in the Museum at the moment. First up was Diane Atkinson whom we had heard speaking at Denman College but this didn’t matter as she altered the angle of her talk slightly and she is easy to listen to. Next Julie Purves talked about the personalities of the women drawn into the suffrage movement. Elizabeth Crawford followed to give an interesting exhibition of the artistic talent among the women shown in their posters, cartoons and general publicity material. She pointed out that they were ahead of their time in their use of advertising leaflets and merchandise. Caitlin Davies concluded the session by giving us an illustrated talk about the history of Holloway Prison and its part in the treatment of the imprisoned suffragettes. Caitlin has written a book called “Bad Girls” which I should imagine would be useful reading in support of the WI campaign for Care not Custody.
The novel which the local WI Reading Group has been reading this month was “Behind the scenes at the Museum” by Kate Atkinson which has nothing to do with real museums as she is likening our lives on display to others as museum pieces but we keep the background history which led up to our present day character shut away in the drawers and cupboards of our personal memory. We all enjoyed reading Kate’s novel as she is a favourite author with our group. It was good to have something which made us laugh although it was a sad story telling of early deaths in childhood, disfunctional marriages and poor childcare. Doesn’t sound funny, does it? A case of if you don’t laugh you might cry.
 
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