Home life carried on as D-Day attack launched

AT the beginning of June eighty-one years ago, the newspapers were headlining the invasion of Europe, and foretelling the final destruction of Nazi Germany.

- JACK SWEET Yeovil historian

Naturally on 6 June 1944, and the subsequent days, all eyes and thoughts were on the strip of coast across the English Channel, but life was still going on more or less as it had always done at home on the Home Front, as it was often called during the war years. For example on 6 June - D-Day - the Somerset Federation of Women’s Institutes held a local government conference and looked forward to women taking a more active role on local councils. One speaker stated that if they wanted better housing, sanitary conditions, education, water supplies, recreation centres, playgrounds and such like in the countryside, women should brave the prejudice against them and stand for election. She pointed out that men had been designing homes since ‘the year one’ and in 1944 were still perpetuating stupidities, ‘even putting hot water pipes in larders'; women’s common sense was badly needed!