FOR more than half a century, the lives of a group of isolated women became intimately connected through the act of writing letters for a secret magazine.

Those letters come to life anew in Foursight Theatre’s devised stage adaptation of Jenna Bailey’s book Can Any Mother Help Me?, on tour at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from tonight (March 3).

The letters were an inspiring research resource for the Canadian-born Jenna when she was studying for her Masters degree in life history and oral history at the University of Sussex. “I was just looking for a topic for my thesis, when Dorothy Sheridan, the head of the Mass Observation Archive, mentioned the Cooperative Correspondence Club,” she says.

The club was set up in 1935 by desperate housewives as a virtual community, long before the Internet. A young mother in a small Irish village had been abandoned by her husband with four children and very little money, and feeling lonely and devoid of near neighbours, she wrote to The Nursery World magazine under a pen name with a heartfelt plea: “Can any mother help me?”

“It was a magazine for mothers and it had a bit of everything: correspondence, buying and selling cots, advice on curing colds,” says Jenna.

“So the young mother’s plea struck a chord and was the catalyst for the Cooperative Correspondence Club (CCC), which ran from 1935 to 1990 and from 1940 had the same editor for 50 years.”

In all, 24 young women were recruited for the CCC, creating a support network in which each member wrote fortnightly on any topic as diverse as wartime politics and housework, racism and sexism, hidden desires and the female orgasm, marriage and childbirth, socialism and inequality.

“The Irish mother couldn’t afford the postage to write to them all, so instead the letters were sent to the editor and they would then be sent round to each CCC member in turn on the 1st and 15th of each month. Comments were added and the letters were sent on to the next in line,” says Jenna.

The remnants of the CCC letters were donated to Sussex University by CCC member Rose Harker in 1998 for the Mass Observation Archive, for whom she had written in the 1950s. “It was a Leftist Socialist organisation started by Cambridge dropouts in 1937 who wanted to observe the masses from the bottom up rather than the top down,” says Jenna. “They encouraged people to write about life around them, so there was a bit of controversy about eavesdropping, as their staff would go to the pub and literally write down everything!”

Once Jenna had used the letters for her thesis, she set about compiling the book for publication in 2007, having spent eight months acquiring permission from the assorted copyright holders. “The Nursery World magazine was secret and not meant for publication, so the letters were very random but I tried to construct a life cycle, following them from marriage to babies to diverse affairs and old age and the loss of members,” she says. “By the end you see the group coming to the end and the sadness of that.”

The book came to the attention of Foursight Theatre, a Wolverhampton company with a reputation for revisiting history through the eyes of women, whether unknown, famous or infamous, most notably in Thatcher The Musical, a show that visited Leeds in 2006.

“I met them, I liked their approach and I let them get on with it,” says Jenna, who has been travelling up from Brighton once a week to attend rehearsals with director Sarah Thom and her all-female cast in the Midlands. “I love what they’ve done with the letters, as the CCC women were great storytellers and they’ve stuck to that. You really get a sense of the women and who they were and what they were going through, their range of experiences and their intimacy.”

Jenna may be Canadian but she is “primarily interested in British history”, specifically in the lives of British women in the 20th Century.

“It was a fascinating time with the changes they went through: the way their lives changed in that time was exceptional and I’m drawn to what this group of women saw, as the secret voice of their generation,” says Jenna, whose next book will be a study of legendary Leeds band leader Ivy Benson and her All Girls Band.

“Again it’s that same generation of women [from the Thirties onwards] and a great story of women that carved a different path for themselves from other women of that generation. If people have stories of Ivy, please contact me.”

To do so, write to Jenna at jenna.bailey@gmail.com.


Foursight Theatre presents Can Any Mother Help Me?, The Story Of The Cooperative Correspondence Club, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, March 3 to 7, at 7.45pm nightly plus 2pm on Thursday and 2.30pm on Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700.