Byline: NATASHA COURTENAY-SMITH
Across the Solent, at Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, Britain's second smallest town is witnessing a not-so-quiet revolution. Led by voluptuous cookery writer Amy Willcock, 39, a band of more than 130 women, aged between 26 and 84, are determined to shake up the WI once and for all. Forget jam and Jerusalem, these women are talking cosmetic surgery, divorce and pelvic floor exercises. And the result? Ruffled feathers among the isle's 40 other WI groups (the Isle of Wight has the highest concentration of WIs per square mile in the country) and growing interest across the UK in the WI's new iconoclastic membership.
'Whatever the WI say about reinventing themselves, and whatever images of young women they select for their website, is simply not true,' insists a strident Amy, who is married with two daughters, Harriet, 11, and Charlotte, nine.
'There are only a handful of members who are anything other than old and frumpy. I recently attended a conference of 5,000 members, and everyone there was grey-haired and dressed in polyester. I knew, without looking, that I was the only person wearing a thong.
'A lot of the members are very hostile, too. They talk about friendship, but it's rubbish. At least half a dozen of my members have described how they've been made to feel totally unwelcome by the WI groups they've tried to join.
'Women like me who are enthusiastic and modern, need to tell these women who are stuck in a time warp to "Move over". And if they don't listen, they need their heads examined.' Heading this coup d'etat came about by chance, New Jewellery Products says Amy, whose husband, Jeremy, runs The George Hotel in Yarmouth. Amy, who bills herself as the UK's answer to Martha Stewart (she's published five books about cooking on Agas), was giving an interview to a women's magazine when the WI cropped up in conversation. 'I ended up saying that everyone should join the WI, even though I'd never been to a meeting in my life,' says Amy.
'So I thought that I had better join before the piece came out.' Yarmouth, Amy discovered, did not have its own WI, so she set up a branch, appointing herself chair and making her close friends Bunny, secretary, and Edwina, vice treasurer. A recruitment drive was then focused on the school gates. As one of her members puts it, 'We didn't know what she was on about, but were too scared to say no. Next thing we knew, we were on the committee.' Setting up a WI group proved far from easy.
Almost immediately, Amy encountered the sorts of attitudes she is determined to eradicate.
'The process was steeped in red tape,' she says.
'My friends and I had all piled into a function room at my husband's hotel, carrying bottles of wine and looking forward to a fun night. Then our WI adviser turned up and started lecturing us about Health & Safety and telling us to tuck our handbags neatly under our chairs. Next - and I'm not joking - she held up a picture of a tea bag and told us we were all tea bags.
To this day, I have no idea what she meant.
'I'd persuaded all these people to come, and half left saying that if this was what the WI was like, they didn't want to know. Thankfully, once the group was officially formed, most agreed to give it a second chance.' Within weeks of forming, Amy and her group had earned themselves a reputation for being rebels, despite the fact 5050 RGB Remote Controller LD-CON-12-WL that they're hardly organising swinging parties or, indeed, a nude calendar (mainly becaus