Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Weeding in summer was regarded as not too bad a job, as several girls usually worked together and could chat as they hoed – unless the farmer deliberately set them to start at opposite ends of the field to stop them gossiping. In winter, though, the combination of cold and wet made the task exhausting. Betty Olsen, who came from Leeds but was sent to North Creake, in Norfolk, remembered how ‘Gus, our foreman, used to wrap sacks round our legs and bodies, tied with string. When you got to the end of a row, you just lay on the ground, with pebbles and stones sticking into your back, waiting for the other girls to catch up.’ Another demoralizing task was potato-picking, which might last for three miserable months in autumn and winter. A tractor would go along the rows with a spinner, throwing out the spuds, and the girls had to collect them by hand and toss them into buckets, working furiously to clear the row before the tractor came along again and sprayed them with earth.

  To work on the land in a bevy of girls was one thing: to strike out on your own demanded even higher resolution – and no one can have been bolder than Rachel Knappett, who bicycled up to Bath Farm, in south-west Lancashire, on April Fool’s Day 1940, to be confronted by ‘a rather formidable array of men: the boss, the two horsemen, Bill and Billy; Tommy, Billy’s younger brother, pig man, pony man and hen man; Joe the tractor driver and Barney the Irishman’. As she wrote later, ‘a land girl at Bath Farm was a thing unknown’, and the men were ‘rendered almost speechless’ by their attempt to stop swearing in her presence. In particular they struggled to curtail their habitual and constant use of ‘bugger’. Once they realized that it did not offend her, they relaxed, and instead of addressing her ‘in a stiff and formal manner’, they called her ‘Owd yeller ’ead’, ‘Owd Knappoo’, ‘The bloody wench’, ‘Sparrer’, ‘the Poot’ (pullet), ‘Gaupie’, ‘Blondie’, or ‘Oo’ (she).

  Rachel won their hearts, and they won hers, so much so that she laboured on the farm for five years, doing every conceivable job, and came to love its setting, south of Preston, in ‘the great plain stretching westwards to the sea’, with the ‘faint, blue shapes of the Cumberland mountains shadowy and magical in the distance’. In a beautifully written book, A Pullet on the Midden, crackling with jokes, she recounted her experiences, and concluded that ‘End, in the language of a farm, is another word for beginning. Work without end. Amen.’

  Land Girls exhibited no mean stoicism. By late autumn 1940 there were 200 of them working in Kent, and at the end of November six were ploughing in a particularly dangerous coastal area. Their tractor engines were so noisy that they were oblivious of their surroundings, and only when shrapnel started falling around them, or even on them, clattering on metal surfaces, did they realize that a dogfight was in progress overhead. Far from asking for a transfer to somewhere safer, they simply applied for steel helmets – which they got.

  Volunteers could never tell what job they might be called upon to do. A girl on a Shropshire farm milked eighty cows in the afternoons, but she was also put to drive a milk van with faulty brakes. Early one morning, in the blackout, she and her companion ‘got in the middle of a tank convoy – don’t ask me how’. She remembered her friend ‘holding her hands in prayer and saying to Himself and her husband (who was in the Army in the Middle East), “Don’t let the tank stop suddenly on this hill, cos the guns are right on a level with my ear ’ole.”’

  Jean Redman joined the WLA at sixteen and first worked in a market garden at Colnbrook in Berkshire, living among gypsies, who invited her into their spotless and highly decorated caravans. Then she was put in sole charge of a poultry farm at Datchet. In summer the task was easy, as the 3000 chickens spent the day in an orchard, and she could gorge on fruit; less pleasant was learning to kill, pluck and draw the birds – and her first attempt was disastrous:

  It took many tries to break the neck by screwing and pulling. When that didn’t work, I tried a blow on the head, and was getting more and more desperate. Eventually I thought I had killed it, and put it down on the ground, but it got up and ran drunkenly around … I was horrified, because I knew the neck was broken … I discovered later that although the bird was dead, the nerves made it react in this way.

  For parties working in the fields, lunch was a couple of sandwiches – usually fish paste or cheese – and maybe a bottle of cold tea (to buy a flask they had to go through the cumbersome process of obtaining an agricultural voucher). Mabel Thomas, who was posted from Barrow-in-Furness, on the edge of the Lake District, to Letterston in Pembrokeshire (‘a very long way from home’), came to loathe the beetroot sandwiches given out by the housekeeper in her hostel.

  A posse in Dorset acquired a big black kettle for making tea; they would go to a nearby cottage and ask for water, but the kettle was so heavy that it took two of them to carry it when full. ‘Then,’ remembered Irene Johnson, a twenty-one-year-old from Leeds, ‘we built a bonfire out of branches and made gipsy tea. We would boil the kettle, put in the tea leaves, put the kettle back on the fire. The leaves settled on the bottom, and the tea poured clear. I’ve never had tea like it since.’

  One summer night in her hostel Irene was woken by a strange whistling. The sound remained a mystery until the post boy told her it was the song of a nightingale, which came to a particular copse at that time of year. A recording of a nightingale was broadcast over the radio when programmes closed down at midnight; but, having heard the bird live, Irene knew it was nothing like the real thing.

  Out in the country, of course, no lavatories were available, so when girls had to answer a call of nature, it meant crouching in a hedge or ditch or behind a tractor and hoping no men put in a sudden appearance. Grace Wallace had a particularly unsettling experience: during haymaking she once inadvertently squatted over a rabbit burrow, from which the startled occupant suddenly erupted at high speed. She too bolted, and in her fright she staggered down the field with her trousers round her ankles.

  In the evening the girls would be ferried back to base and given a meal; working in the open air, they developed raging appetites, but also lost weight. Their only entertainment was the local cinema, an occasional dance in the village hall, or a visit to the pub, where, because they were so poor, one half-pint had to last out the evening. The WLA had a stock of bicycles which the girls could use. Sometimes they rode them into town for dances, and returned late at night without lights, risking collisions and a fine from some lurking policeman. More often, they had to ride to work: once, at threshing time near Colchester, Emily Braidwood pedalled sixteen miles in each direction.

  They worked for fifty hours a week in summer, 7.30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and forty-eight in winter, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an hour off for lunch, for a wage of £2 2s a week, with half a day off every week and sometimes a long weekend. At harvest time, when dew lay heavy on the corn until midday, they might not get started until lunchtime, and did not finish work until nine or ten at night. Because machinery was so short, they were usually issued with basic equipment – hoes, spades, scythes, billhooks – and when it came to ploughing, most of them drove horses rather than tractors. But they soon proved that they could do almost anything that men could accomplish.

  Their cheerful outlook was epitomized by Iris Newbold, a shop assistant from Hull, who particularly enjoyed scything thistles on a farm at Malton, in Yorkshire. There the girls worked three or four in a row, making their way across the pastures; Iris developed a ‘powerful swing and a good rhythm’, but her neighbours had to jump about ‘to avoid losing a foot’ because she was left-handed and swung in the direction opposite to everyone else. ‘I was ridiculed as a cack-handed townie and sent to the back’, but ‘I loved standing at the edge of the field with the long, curved blade in the air as I sharpened it with the flint stone and a bit of spit’. In the evenings she danced at the Malton Rooms to ‘wonderful music from the Coldstream Guards, as they played their delightful Military Two-Steps and rousing Quicksteps’.

  Living conditions varied enormously. Some girls were billeted in comforta
ble farmsteads, and were well fed by farmers’ wives. But seventeen-year-old Edna Dallas, who had dreamed of living in ‘a lovely old farmhouse’, found herself along with forty other girls in a prefabricated building in the middle of a field (one of hundreds hastily built to accommodate the new workforce). The inmates slept in cubicles with double bunks, and as there were only three bathrooms, ‘we often ended up four to a bath. There was no privacy, and modesty soon vanished.’ The whole colony of girls was employed by the local War Ag committee, and when farmers asked for so many of them for hoeing or ditching, lorries took them out to their places of work. Another hostel for forty girls, in Worcestershire, was nothing but a converted fowl house, and the inmates each had to pay the owner, Captain J. E. Bomford, £1 a week for food and shelter.

  Hard toil and basic living quarters were not the only hazards. Renée Dorras joined the WLA at the start of the war and was sent to a farm near Ross-on-Wye, but became emotionally involved with a man who had separated from his wife. As the woman was seeking reasons for a divorce, Renée felt she must leave the farm; yet she had no choice about another appointment: ‘I had to go to the Board and tell them I wanted to move, and go wherever I was sent.’ After a spell in a munitions factory, she joined the army and became an ambulance driver – a job which proved alarming at night, when headlights were banned: ‘You could only tell something was coming past when you felt the vibrations.’

  Betty Merritt, sent to work in Sussex, specialized in tractors, and became not only a skilled driver but also a proficient mechanic, able to do her own maintenance – reset the spark plugs, clean out the carburettor, grease the nipples and change the engine oil. On winter mornings her Fordson was often so frozen that it ‘took a lot of muscle to get it going’; because there was no anti-freeze, she would have drained the radiator the night before, so first she had to fill it with water. If she could not rouse the engine after a struggle with the crank handle, she would sometimes ‘flop over it and cry’. The occasional loan of a Ferguson, which had a self-starter, was a rare treat.

  One of her fellow labourers was not a Land Girl at all, but a small black man. When she met him, he was shifting piles of manure, but she was struck by how smart he looked in his blue and orange short-sleeved shirts and khaki shorts, and by the fact that he spoke English so well. Apparently he was a university lecturer, and had been forced to stay in England when war broke out. Only much later did she discover that in 1946 he returned to his native Kenya, leaving behind an English wife and son; that in 1953 he was given a seven-year prison sentence for his alleged involvement with Mau Mau terrorists, and that in 1964 he became President of his country. His name was Jomo Kenyatta.

  Sometimes girls formed themselves into mobile squads for specialized activities. One was the outstanding four-girl vermin team who rode about North Wales on bicycles dealing death and destruction to pests of all kinds. In little over a year, from February 1941 to April 1942, they accounted for 7869 rats, 1668 foxes, 1901 moles and 35,545 rabbits. Their task was made easier by the fact that they were allowed to use Cymag gas and a variety of poisons: even so, it was no mean achievement.

  In a Christmas message to the Women’s Land Army, the Queen thanked and saluted the girls, telling them, ‘By your skill and devotion you have released great battalions of men who now fight for the land which formerly they tilled.’ Echoing that royal accolade, an agricultural expert on tour reported: ‘To observe them in their green pullovers, open-neck shirts and corduroy breeches, cheerfully grappling with difficult farm work, and making light of the hardships involved in it, is to reassure one’s faith in the invulnerability of Britain.’

  Other people fancied them for different reasons. ‘Then there are the Land Girls, an unfamiliar sight in the orchards and among the cows,’ wrote Vita Sackville-West in the early days of the war:

  Picturesque in their brown dungarees, tossing their short curls back and laughing. I came across two of them picking plums; very young they were, and standing under the tree loaded with the blood-red drops, their arms lifted, the half-filled baskets on the ground beside them, they could scarcely have looked prettier in their lives than on that sunlit morning.

  Harvest was always a time of intense activity, but one girl – Daphne Cross – lamented the arrival of a Lend-Lease combine in 1942. Until then she and a farmhand, Fred Banks, had worked with ‘our dear old binder’, and in the evenings soldiers had helped them stook up the sheaves. ‘The general feeling of fun and banter between us was all so different from the solitary work of the combine, which gradually took over and required only two people.’ Another volunteer, Jean Bradley, gave herself a nasty fright when, trying to load a sheaf onto a wagon, she gave a violent upward thrust with a pitchfork and speared the hand of the man on top. She never forgot how she ‘learned a whole new vocabulary in the few minutes before he was carted off to hospital’.

  Later in the war disillusion began to set in. Many members of the Land Army resented the fact that they were never awarded the privileges enjoyed by other women’s services. They were not granted travel warrants. They were denied cheap railway fares, as they were not working in munitions, and were not classed as war workers. They were not allowed to use NAAFI canteens. As one remarked, ‘We had discipline, rules and punishments, just the same as the ATS, the WAAF and the Wrens – but no one seemed to know what we were.’

  Praise for their efforts came, strangely enough, in an advertisement by the British Omnibus Company: ‘They’ve upset a lot of old notions, have the Women’s Land Army, as many farmers will admit. There would have been more tightening of belts in Britain if they hadn’t.’

  Every Land Girl, when she left, received a certificate of thanks from the Queen; but almost more highly valued was the strong sense of comradeship which members of the force had established among themselves. ‘Everyone was away from home, but we were working with a common purpose,’ said one; and another, who had spent countless days perched with three colleagues on a tractor-towed potato planter, remembered simply, ‘We sang the hours away.’

  No Land Girl looked back on the war with greater warmth than Mary Schofield:

  I loved working with the horses far more than I ever should with a tractor … I am glad that I had the chance to ride on a swaying, horse-drawn load of hay … glad to know that I could feel at home there; that the ways of the city are only a thin veneer, and that underneath I belong to the country – to the land of green fields and brown earth, of smokeless skies and wide horizons.

  I have learned to love the land, as well as the people. Now I look at them with eyes which see much more than they once did, because I understand what I see. I have a deeper respect for the people and the problems they have to face … However long I live, I shall always thrill at the sight of a line of stooks up the stubble, or new lines of corn up a dark brown field, or at the touch of the soft muzzle of a horse. In spite of the work, it was a wonderful life, and I would not have missed it for anything.

  In their search for extra labour, the War Ags pressed everyone they could find into gangs – alien refugees, unemployed farm workers, prisoners of war and conscientious objectors, known to all as Conchies. These motley crews were housed in fleets of caravans, and the Conchies worked on the land in ever-increasing numbers.

  Anyone who objected to taking part in the war effort had to give his or her reasons before a tribunal chaired by a lawyer, usually a judge. The panel had the authority to grant full exemption from military service, or from any kind of war work, or to dismiss the application. Of the 60,000 men who applied for Conscientious Objector status, 3000 were given unconditional exemption and 18,000 were dismissed, but as the war progressed the proportion of men unwilling to serve in the armed forces fell from sixteen per thousand in March 1940 to six in a thousand after the evacuation from Dunkirk.

  Neville Chamberlain, who had served on a tribunal during the First World War, was sympathetic to objectors, but most of them found life uncomfortable. Their children were cold-shouldered at s
chool. Landlords declined to repair their houses after bomb damage. Neighbours would not speak to them, except to make disagreeable remarks, calling them cowardly, selfish, irresponsible, pro-Nazi and a danger to society: ‘If everyone was like you, Hitler’d be here.’

  One of the most cheerful Conchies was the writer Edward Blishen, whose father had returned from the First World War wounded, shell-shocked and unable to talk about his experiences. Teddy declined to fight, but took a positive view of life, and left a lively account of his fellow objectors’ antics in his autobiographical book A Cackhanded War.

  Sent to a flat, wet, cold farm on the Essex coast, he found the hedges overgrown, the ditches filled in and the fields full of bramble bushes. On arrival he was put straight to work. His mentor Bert – ‘the fattest foreman in the world … a great quantity of waistcoats, a small cloth cap above an immense face’ – handed him a blunt sickle, known as a bagging hook, and left him with the sole instruction: ‘Keep low on they bushes, won’t ’ee.’

  The landlady who accommodated Blishen’s gang had ‘come under sharp fire from some quarters in the village’ for taking them in, and she got her own back on the Conchies by giving them little lunch packets containing ‘two sandwiches of a vague sort of meat savaged by her home-made mustard pickle … covered by a mist of green corruption’. All too often there was ‘a sad burying at mid-day’; but sometimes, having learned to make fires from tiny twigs and then bigger branches, they cooked their sandwiches round a brazier.

  In Blishen’s memory, their work was ‘all thorns and icy water’. They cut hedges and dug ditches to drain the fields for ploughing, spurred on by occasional visits from the War Ag’s labour officer, whose attitude was ‘one of perpetual rage’. In spite of this aggravating superintendent, Blishen came to love the ditching, getting pleasure from carving out spadefuls of clay and relishing the moment when, with the last block removed, water began to flow along a new channel. If ever he and his mates were seen standing idle, Bert would mutter, ‘T’nt a bloody circus.’