How a spirit of inclusivity got our Women’s Institute branch over the line

In the early 20th century, women from Christine Edwards’s village in Cornwall had plan to achieve the numbers to form a WI branch. Photograph: Purple Marbles/Alamy

I was intrigued by your report (Women’s Institute will ‘continue to celebrate’ transgender women amid inclusivity row, 18 April). In 1918, in this remote Cornish village, a group of women including several of my great-aunts wished to apply to form a branch of the Women’s Institute. They needed one more name to meet the requirements for membership. Ever enterprising, one of the women encouraged her unsuspecting husband to add his signature to the form, to make up numbers. I know not for how long (or indeed whether) he remained a member, but the branch still flourishes over a century later.
Christine Edwards
Veryan, Cornwall

• Never mind Nicholas Hoult’s new film (‘I’m building a patchwork quilt’: Nicholas Hoult on fame, fatherhood and playing Dracula’s wingman, 14 April). What I want to know is where he got his pleated trousers from. I’ve searched the length and breadth of Britain over the last three years and drawn a complete blank.
Peter Geall
Coventry