Seats sold out for a two-hour keep-fit performance by the Stoke Newington’s Women’s Institute.

The display in the Stoke Newington Assembly Hall was in aid of the Mayor’s Charities Fund.

The Gazette reported – rather misgynistically – how: “A young looking woman in a short gym slip handed her wedding ring and wrist watch to her teenage daughter, and said: ‘Hold these until I have finished.’ She then trotted out with scores of other women, most of them mums and some of them grandmothers, to give an energetic programme of keep fit and dancing.”

Many of those in the audience were children of the students who had “come to see mum do her stuff”.

According to the Gazette, the “mums did their stuff brilliantly”, and impressed the mayor who was watching. Students had all made their own costumes out of silks and sequins that “would have made Liberace envious”.