Instructions

The Women's Institute Movement in Britain started in 1915, under the auspices of the Agricultural Organisations Society (AOS). The catalyst was the meeting, in February 1915, of AOS Secretary John Nugent Harris and Canadian, Madge Watt, who was to be given the role of setting up Women’s Institutes in Britain. The AOS was formed in 1901 to help farmers set up co-operatives, as a way of revitalising the failing farming industry. John Nugent Harris had tried to get the AOS to involve women who played an important, often unpaid, role in agriculture but had no training and no say in what was going on. Madge Watt had been closely involved with the Women's Institute in British Columbia assisting the Provincial Department of Agriculture to form Women’s Institutes. Now she had come to live in England she was keen to extend the WI Movement to Britain. The first WI was formed at Llanfairpwll, Anglesey in September 1915. John Nugent Harris and Madge Watt decided that Women’s Institutes were just what was needed to revitalise rural communities and to involve women in producing more food for the war-torn country. John Nugent Harris persuaded a somewhat reluctant AOS to appoint Madge Watt, at first for just 6 months, as an Organiser to try set up Women’s Institutes. Colonel Stapleton Cotton, a Vice Chairman of AOS and Chairman of the North Wales branch of AOS, invited Madge Watt to come and speak at a conference on June 15th at Bangor University College and he and his wife were so impressed by what Madge had to say that they invited her, the very next day, to meet women from their village, Llanfairpwll on Anglesey. At this meeting the women decided that they would like to start a WI. Mrs Stapleton Cotton became the first WI President, a post she held until her death in 1924. Encouraged by this enthusiastic response Madge Watt went on to form further Women’s Institutes, at first also in Wales at Cefn, and Trefnant, both in Denbigshire, in October 1915, and then in England at Singleton, Sussex (W) and Wallisdown Dorset in November 1915.