During the Second World War the men went off to fight and women were needed to take their places and work in the factories. This much is common knowledge but fewer readers will be aware that women were also drafted in as volunteers to work narrow boats on the canals, taking industrial materials and coal around the country. The stories of some of these women are explored in the entertaining show, Idle Women of the Wartime Waterways, and I was lucky enough to catch it at the warmly welcoming Shipton-on-Cherwell Village Hall on Saturday evening.
The programme is split into two very different halves. The first is an amusing and thoughtful monologue devised and performed by Kate Saffin. She largely speaks as Isobel, one of the Idle Women, although she voices several characters too, either from Isobel’s family or as interesting people met on the canals. Isobel was a “posh” girl from North Oxford who initially had no clue as to how to steer boats or use the locks, but she had the common touch and was helpful to Bess, a boater’s daughter who was illiterate and yet desperately wanted to read about Clark Gable in the movie magazines. Kate’s monologue is based on first hand accounts and is a splendid piece of oral history.
The second half is an equally enjoyable performance, by poet and actor Heather Wastie of her own poems and songs. These too are found pieces, all based on collected accounts and interviews. There is a lot of acute observation and much humour, which drew knowing nods and laughter from the boaters in the audience, particularly the anecdote about having to use the bucket in the engine room only to find later black circles imprinted on one’s bottom. Towards the end Heather takes up her accordion and has the audience singing the choruses to a couple of songs, including a particularly splendid one about a list of defects in two narrow boats presented in a report to the Ministry of War Transport.
And were the women idle? No this seems to have been a joke, made up long after the war by the daughter of an author writing about these hard-working girls. She saw that they all wore blue badges with the letters on them and asked if it stood for Idle Women, and it stuck. Prosaically, it just denotes Inland Waterways.
The Idle Women tour continues this week in Oxfordshire: full details on the website www.alarumtheatre.co.uk