The Bluestocking Women’s Pub: definitely full of ludicrous halfwits who refuse to get a grip (with unionised gerbils)

[MyrtleLion]

Welcome to The Bluestocking: convivial by design, opinionated in the best way, generously stocked with excellent food and drink that complies with whatever it’s meant to comply with, and any calories, gluten or alcohol are entirely virtual.

Staffed by impeccably trained, unfailingly polite gerbils who run a tight bar with plenty of enthusiasm and good intentions. Quick with the drinks, but terrible spillers spellers and liable to turn an idle thought on existential existence into a full blown musical with Busby Berkeley routines. You have been warned.

All women welcome, just in case that isn't obvious. Men can go to The Staunch Ally round the corner.

Previous thread here: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5477133-the-bluestocking-your-local-womens-pub-warm-friendly-and-not-at-all-unusual-in-any-way

I grew up with this very outrageous, ridiculously clothed, smoking, drinking, outgoing woman who became the original mad dog lady.

only worked in Bletchley Park as a young woman!!! She didn’t say until it all started to come out in the news. I wish I’d talked more to her.

We had an ‘Aunty Edie’ - mad cat lady who lived at the end of the road - and I often wonder whether she had a strange and mysterious back story.

These incredible women have always walked amongst us, many dismissed because they were unconventional or gender non-conforming and usually unmarried. I wish I had taken time to get to know some of the ones I encountered growing up. Let them know they were seen.

Lurky we also watched A House Through Time and found it fascinating, although I was very aware that these were both posh houses. I mentioned to DH at the time that I'd like to see the same programme through the eye of the majority. My mum spent WW2 in either the Land Army or (after being invalided out) a munitions factory, but i guess that's not as exciting as being in the SOE!

But history is so often the history of men.

You could start with 'A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE' by Sarah Helm. I recommend it.

It was also favourably reviewed by Sir Paul Lever
Chairman of RUSI (Royal United Services Institute); Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (1994-1996), amongst others.

I aspire to being a mad cat lady.

@FuzzyPuffling It’s a shame that ‘gender studies’ wasn’t actually about reevaluating history and society through the non-male lens: seeking out and sharing the stories of real women, isn’t it? In stead it’s sought to erase them.

She was wonderful. Mad hair, permanent smile and always had a pocket full of sweeties. Was fiercely protected in our community, too. Woe be tied any lad who tried to take a pop at her.

I gave up history at school aged 14 because I wanted to know about women and working people, not kings and dynasties. And I told school so!

I went to a fairly forward-looking girls school in the 70s. It was very academic, science based (no typing or cookery for us!) and we were all expected to have fine careers. But history was still about men. Grrrr.

I once met a woman who'd worked at Bletchley Park, Mair Russell Jones, born Mair Eluned Thomas.

She and her son Gethin wrote a book, ' My Secret Life in Hut Six: One Woman's Experiences at Bletchley Park'.

Ooh, thank you. Going to look that one up now.

As an aside, following on from another thread - my prof was very interested in the idea of a book about the autistic woman’s experience of gender, explored through their memoirs/essays/short stories. She raised it with another academic who is very keen to support it and may be able to help get a publisher eventually. I now it would only be a small project/publication and not mainstream, but am quite excited about it. Going to meet up next month and pound out how to pitch that to get funding…

but just now, am off to Hobbycraft to see if they have any of my yarn in stock. DH appears to have put the left over balls from DD’s blanket at the very very back of the attic behind the Xmas decorations.

Carve Her Name With Pride about Violet Szabo.

Odette about Odette Churchill, never killed because her husband, Peter claimed they were related to Winston Churchill.

@MyrtleLion I remember the film with Viginia McKenna. Bet it bears no resemblance to the book!

There was a programme on the telly a few years ago - I don't remember whether it was about the Spitfire, or about women pilots in WWII.

They interviewed a very old woman in a nursing home - stereotype 'nice elderly lady' with a nice cardi and a nice blouse and a nice brooch and hair nicely 'done', sitting quietly in an armchair in a nice sitting room -
but oh how her face lit up when she described the manoeuvrability of the Spitfire, the power of the engine, how it responded to the slightest touch, how it felt to have ' joined the tumbling mirth/Of sun-split clouds'..

@FuzzyPuffling I don't know whether you're up to clambering around small islands...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdexjz58e3zo

I have bought yarn!

Partly because I'm running out (I know! I'm a baby knitter, so my stash is limited) and partly because I'm knitting a baby cardigan and I'm playing yarn chicken and it isn't teal, like the hat, it's green. And the baby will be born in March and it will be warmer so it needs a DK hat as well as the Aran one. So I'll knit a green hat in DK and an Aran cardigan in teal.

And I need some neutral colours to stitch my blanket squares together (they look at me in their bag and glare because they're not yet a blanket).

And I promised @Boiledbeetle some suffragette socks in acrylic (I haven't forgotten!) and I feel more confident in knitting them in a 4 ply sock yarn rather than DK...

And I paid for it on the joint account! 😮

Nah, I'd rather stay in the Bluey and count puffins:
'One....'

Gosh that was exhausting - bargerbils, a glass of your finest Fleurie if you please!😄

@MarieDeGournay love the knitting story.
@FuzzyPuffling stunning cushion.

I interviewed several of my elderly/ ancient female relatives about their wartime experiences. Hair-raising stories and some incredible resilience, but it was the family's men who were involved in the fighting and got arrested and so on.

'The Past is Myself' by Christabel Bielenberg' is a cracker of a book. she was involved in the resistance in Nazi Germany. I think she was Irish, not British, which is why she wasn't interned.

In the 1930s women were taking to flying big time. Rich women by and large, but that was also true of the men.

https://bwpa.co.uk/celebrating-100-years-of-british-women-pilots/

Then during the Second World there was the Air Transport Auxiliary, whose purpose was to ferry new, repaired and damaged military aircraft between factories, assembly plants and maintenance depots and then on to active service squadrons and airfields, as well as transporting service personnel on urgent duty and performing some air ambulance work.

As well as women pilots, the ATA had disabled pilots, older pilots and people of 28 nationalities, including from neutral countries. And Women were paid the same as men of equal rank – the first time the British government had allowed equal pay for equal work for an organisation under its control. The women flying with the American equivalent, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), received as little as 65 per cent of their equivalent male colleagues.

I think I saw the same TV programme and I think it was about the ATA.

Amy Johnson was part of the ATA and was killed on one of her trips.

The women often had to fly aircraft too crippled by gunfire and midair combat to be used in the field. So they were flying difficult aircraft while the men flew new or repaired planes.

I've seen the mystery blanket club from the link.

Can I afford £99 to join? I know it comes with yarn and embellishments...

It's pays to have famous relations:

When Constance Countess Markievicz was taken prisoner by the British for her part as one of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion in Dublin, she avoided execution, unlike all the others.

It was jokingly suggested that she was spared because if they shot her, half of Debrett's would have to go into mourning - she was née Constance Georgine Gore-Booth, daughter of Sir Henry Gore-Booth.

The real reason was probably that the execution of Nurse Edith Cavell a few months earlier was regarded as such an outrage that the optics of shooting Constance Gore-Booth would have been bad, so she survived.

She become the first women MP to be elected to the House of Commons in 1918, and one of the first women ever to hold a cabinet position, 1919-1922, in the first independent Irish government.

I used to listen to a Radio 4 comedy called Hut 33, about Bletchley Park - I really enjoy radio comedy, and it was fascinating.

It's sold out. Phew! It was actually £295 including the yarn etc.

There were also the Russian Night Witches. https://wrightmuseum.org/the-soviet-night-witches/

I just read a novel called “The Rose Code” by Kate Quinn about three very different women, one clearly intended to be autistic, working at Bletchley Park in different areas of code breaking. Another was a debutante who spent much of the war being a girlfriend of Prince Philip before he entered a relationship with Princess Elizabeth, and the third was a working class girl from Shoreditch determined to claw her way up the social ladder. The story was totally gripping and based on a lot of real history (even the Prince Philip girlfriend bit). Highly recommended.