Author: Rachel Wade, SWI Heritage Project Volunteer

‘Plan more than you can do, and then do it!’. For the 23rd birthday of the Longniddry Institute in 1940, its former president and SWRI founder, Catherine Blair, personally provided this message to its members. This note was tucked away within a unique copy of her book, Rural Journey, which was provided as a gift for the Institute’s birthday. Additionally enclosed was a handwritten message by Blair herself, declaring her hopes that the SWRI would continue to ‘develop the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity for which we are, as a nation, fighting today’.

This voice of Catherine Blair was uncovered during an exploration of the SWRI institute collections held in the John Gray Centre in Haddington. Along with this book, there was an abundance of syllabus cards spanning from 1918 to 2003 across the whole collection. There were newspaper cuttings of achievements, photobooks of significant events and members, rule books and handbooks, lists of office bearers and members, and the expected minute books and financial ledgers.

The Longniddry collection can be accessed using the John Gray’s user-friendly online catalogue. However, the collections held elsewhere face access challenges due to the issues around temporary storage, database issues, or incomplete cataloguing. Smaller local archives in Scotland have less resources to hold SWRI collections securely and permanently, and the process of making the materials accessible for the public (from boxlisting to creating databases) is tedious and time-consuming. It is important to underline this, because if this special copy of Rural Journey had not been deposited to the John Gray Centre by the Longniddry Institute, then Catherine Blair’s motivating words may not have been preserved.

My dissertation at the University of Glasgow has two branches: the project and the academic research. For the project, I created record-keeping guidance to advise local institutes on maintaining key records. Secondly, the academic research looks at how the SWRI’s Head Office (HO) corporate records reveal women’s interwar political engagement. This research begins by looking at the known activities of Catherine Blair across the interwar period, from her involvement in housing campaigns to her providing refuge to suffragettes under the Cat and Mouse Act. Then, on a deeper level, her personal correspondence found within the HO records reveals her open discontent with the Central Council Committee (CCC), based in Edinburgh. The HO records also hold the CCC meeting minutes, which reveal influential women like Chairman Mrs Anstrusther-Gray pointedly avoiding discussion of Catherine Blair’s complaints. The ensuing tension and conflict between Blair and the CCC created a history of the SWRI which is multifaceted: the HO records contain playscripts and cookery books, but also this rich political discourse about the democracy of the organisation and the education of citizenship for both rural and urban women.

Previously, historians had assumed the interwar period was ‘silent’ for women’s movements, shadowed by the preceding suffragettes and the subsequent post-war Women’s Liberation Movement. By unpacking Catherine Blair’s personal correspondence, her role within this supposedly non-political organisation clearly aimed to encourage rural and urban members to exercise their citizenship rights, and to integrate themselves in national social welfare campaigns and reforms. The SWRI promoted a firm link between work for both the home and country, motivating its members to exercise their citizenship to perform their ‘duty for the nation’ during the interwar period. This political understanding of the SWRI’s history derives from important archival records, from local institute to federation levels, which is a clear reason for ensuring collections are appropriately stored and preserved.

Overall, we know that the SWRI played a crucial role in the lives of individual women across rural and urban Scotland, creating interconnectivity and togetherness within local communities and enacting government welfare developments such as women’s healthcare, childcare, domestic violence awareness, and education. The HO records deepen this understanding, providing a more colourful picture of internal conflict in the struggle to integrate rural women in the organisation.

From the National Lottery Heritage Fund support that was granted in 2024, the SWI Heritage Project “Preserving the Past to Inspire the Future”, has been ensuring that key records are archived appropriately and maintained for public access. Members are able to contribute to such developments by joining the SWI Heritage Project as a volunteer, which may include box-listing or cataloguing, or recording oral histories. My research assesses only a fragment of what the total archives can reveal, which can be investigated by both academics and non-academics alike with continued efforts to improve the quality and accessibility of the SWIs records going forward.

About the author

I’m Rachel Wade, an undergraduate History student at the University of Glasgow, currently entering my final year of studies. I have a broad interest in both medieval and modern gender history, and I aim for a future career in archives and records management.

Since May 2025, I have been undertaking an Applied Dissertation with a placement at the Ballast Trust, working alongside Kiara King and Rachael Muir. To accompany my academic research into the interwar experience of SWRI members, notably Catherine Blair, I have been contributing to the SWI Heritage Project by creating a record-keeping guide for local institutes

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