Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  In his survey the professor found that, in spite of all the ploughing, the number of small dairy herds had hardly declined, partly because farmers were working their land better and alternating leys (new-sown grass fields) with crops of corn – a system which improved the quality of the pasture. As cheese was rationed, dairy farmers tended to keep back some of their milk so that they could make cheese for themselves or to sell locally. The number of sheep – some twenty-seven million in 1938 – had been reduced, but was still substantial. Herds of beef cattle had been considerably cut down, mainly because of the shortage of feedstuff.

  For particular praise Gangulee singled out the Sandringham estate, where all suitable grassland in the park had been ploughed, and the golf course was growing oats and rye; six acres of lawn right up to the house were down to rye, and beds in the ornamental flower garden were full of beetroots and parsnips. Admirable though they were, such achievements were partly the result of benevolent man-management rather than agricultural acumen. The King took a strong interest in the welfare of his farm workers and arranged for a mobile canteen to ferry them out a midday meal. A van provided by the Ford Emergency Food Vans Trust distributed hot, two-course meals on four days of the week. Seventy-seven meals were cooked on each of the four days, and workers assembled at points nearest their jobs to await the arrival of the van. The cost to each of them was 6d a week.

  On another royal estate – the King’s farm at Windsor – the changes had been equally striking. Three Land Girls were employed; the horses which normally pulled gleaming carriages on ceremonial state occasions had been harnessed to mowers for cutting the hay, and 300 acres had been ploughed for corn – three times as much as in 1938. In the Great Park, which stretches away to the south-west in front of the castle, a mile-square block had been ploughed for the first time in centuries and planted with corn, constituting what the Commissioners of Crown Land claimed to be the biggest wheat field in Britain. The red deer herd, famous for the excellence of its stags, had been reduced from 1000 head to a breeding nucleus of under a hundred, and the animals had been fenced in, instead of being allowed to wander about the park freely.

  In general, Gangulee considered that ‘the remaking of rural Britain’ was having a strongly beneficial effect on the population as a whole, and that among urban people there was now ‘a keen interest’ in agricultural and rural life. He discerned a distinct improvement in the relationship between farmers and farm workers, and forecast that if the wartime expansion of agriculture became permanent, the workers’ status would certainly improve, and that the entire tempo of rural life would be altered, ‘from which the nation as a whole will derive benefit’.

  He was also a strong supporter of the Land Girls, whose training and experience (he thought) would help to ‘re-establish the dignity of agricultural labour and occupation. Some of these women will take up farming, and others will return to their pre-war professions with an intimate knowledge of rural life and environment.’ In short, war had ‘united the nation as never before’.

  In 1944 the area of land under cultivation increased by another 700,000 acres; but in the autumn disaster threatened when the number of volunteers needed to bring in the vital potato crop during November and December fell far short of what was needed. The President of the National Farmers’ Union, J. K. Knowles, sounded the alarm when fewer than a third of the 70,000 helpers he wanted had come forward; but the crisis was eased by the recruitment of children in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, who were granted extra leave from school.

  Already the NFU was lobbying the Government for the increased use of prisoners of war, of whom at least 100,000 had become available. After the surrender of Italy in September 1943, and its withdrawal from the war, thousands of Italian prisoners had already been repatriated; but since NFU officials reckoned that one German was worth a dozen Italians, their departure did not seriously weaken the labour force. Prisoners were allowed to work a maximum of forty-eight hours a week, all in daylight: for their labour farmers paid 1s per hour, of which the prisoners received 4d, the rest going to the provision of armed guards.

  Besides initiating far-reaching social change, the drive to increase food production had led to one astonishing discovery. On a bitterly cold day in January 1942 a contract farm worker, Gordon Butcher, was sent by his employer, the agricultural engineer Sydney Ford, to plough part of an enormous field called Thistley Green near the village of West Row, in Suffolk. Butcher was thirty-eight, a fairly simple fellow, with a wife and three children, sticking-out ears and a habit of talking aloud to himself. He had a tractor of his own, and worked for farmers round about. Ford was a good deal older – fiftyish, with a bald head and a foxy look. He did not own the patch which he sent Butcher to plough: that belonged to a man called Rolfe. But Ford worked for several farmers around the area, and had a bit of a reputation as a collector: people took him small finds like arrowheads which had been dug up in the fields.

  In a vicious north-east wind whistling over the Fens, Butcher worked away, up and down the field of barley stubble. Before the war his ploughshare would have been set at a depth of five or six inches; ploughing to eight inches ‘had never before been dreamt of’ in the stiff East Anglian clays. But now, because the next crop was to be sugar beet, to help ease the sugar shortage, Butcher had set his share at twelve inches.

  In the afternoon the steel tip suddenly hit something hard, getting such a jolt that it broke the wooden pin linking plough to tractor (the pin was a safety device). Butcher got down, and when he started scrabbling with his hands to discover what he had struck, he saw the rim of a huge metal plate about two feet in diameter, encrusted with green corrosion.

  For some reason he felt frightened. Instinct told him to get away from whatever it was he had found. He was also extremely cold. He turned his back and walked off to seek the help of Ford, who came out with a spade. A snowstorm swept over the two men as they dug away black earth, but they persevered, with growing excitement, until they had recovered thirty-four objects – plates, bowls, huge salvers … Ford saw at once that they had hit on something immensely valuable, but he told the ploughman that it was useless old stuff, and Butcher did not object when he took the whole lot home in a sack.

  Rather than declare the find, which he realized was a priceless hoard of silver, Ford kept it hidden for four years, and he seems to have spent much of the war cleaning it. Only at Easter 1946 was his secret laid bare. When Dr Hugh Fawcett, a well-known collector of antiquities, came to visit Ford, as he often had in the past, he noticed two spoons on the mantelpiece which he at once saw were Roman. Ford said they came from a find which he had reported to the police at Mildenhall, but that the coppers had promptly come along and ‘pinched the lot’.

  He then retracted this claim and showed Fawcett some of the plates, insisting they were pewter. Fawcett, seeing they were silver, had them turned over to the police, who started an investigation. Fawcett reported to Christopher Hawkes of the British Museum, who sent him back to Mildenhall, to make Ford declare the find. Ford refused. After an inquest held that summer, on 1 July 1946 the find was officially declared treasure trove. The highly decorated Roman silver, dating from the fourth century AD, included two enormous platters and several smaller dishes and bowls, as well as ladles and spoons. By the law of treasure trove, it should have been Butcher, the finder, who got a reward. But he did not know this, and Butcher and Ford were declared joint-finders, each receiving £1000 compensation. Had Butcher been ploughing at normal peacetime depth, one of the most magnificent hoards ever found in Britain might still be buried beneath the black earth of Suffolk.

  In the second half of 1944, as the Allied forces drove deep into Europe from north and south, life in rural Britain grew more settled. With air raids less and less of a threat, the future of farming after the war became the subject of animated debate. To what extent should wartime control and crop-planning be continued? How should land be distributed between agriculture, forestry, ind
ustry, housing and sport or amenity? The immediate nationalization of land – ‘Nationalism in our Time’ – had been one of the key elements in the Labour Party’s manifesto, but now the idea was dropped from the Five-Year Plan for Socialism. The Ministry of Agriculture proposed a scheme for training ex-servicemen and women who wanted to go on the land – but only those who were prepared to undertake a year’s ‘actual hard work’ on a farm would be accepted. As some wise guy pointed out, ‘The emotional appeal of life on the land is strongest with those who know least about it.’

  In a speech to the Farmers’ Club on 5 June 1944 the politician Sir John Barlow spoke up for the country, lamenting the fact that, with the growth of the industrial population in the nineteenth century, the physique of the nation had ‘materially diminished’, and that ‘with every yard of cloth exported from this country, a particle of health of the individual went with it’. Surely it would be better, he suggested, ‘even at some cost, to have a large and prosperous rural population than to adopt the negative policy of spending untold millions on social services in urban areas trying to regain what had been lost’.

  By the autumn of 1944 the absence of gamekeepers and foresters had had a marked effect on wilder areas of land. For five years there had been no preservation of game; farmers had cut no bracken for bedding, and no thinning had been done in the coverts. In Montgomeryshire Captain Bennett Evans was alarmed by the increase in numbers of foxes, whose depredations were undermining the farmers’ efforts – in response to Government appeals – to increase their output of sheep. ‘It may even become necessary in North Wales,’ he wrote, ‘soon to decide whether it is going to be foxes or trees.’

  In Scotland and the north of England many grouse moors lay derelict, blasted by bombs and shells, lacerated by tank tracks and raked by small-arms fire. The fire which was deliberately lit on Midhope Moor, to decoy enemy bombers away from Sheffield, took such a hold that it burnt down to the bedrock, which remains bare to this day, as do some of the targets, which were hammered by 75mm solid-shot rounds from Sherman tanks. The hard tracks made on the lower part of the moor are also visible, and in most years an army bomb-disposal unit is called out to deal with the live munitions still being found, including mortar bombs, American pineapple grenades and small-arms ammunition.

  In his diary for August, George Muller noted how the balance of nature had changed:

  The fellside, long a sanctuary for feathered and ground vermin, has gone wilder even than during the last war. Magpies, jays, carrion crows, rooks and buzzards have taken complete possession of this foothill, with its peeps through the trees of the far-off mountain ranges. Foxes abound – the huntsman says there are enough here to keep a pack going the whole of a season; badgers from a nearby colony have set up new quarters among the gorse and broom; stoat and weasel overrun the ground. The ground vermin are seldom seen – the bracken conceals their movements – but there is much evidence of the ill they do … Small birds are nearly all gone. Sparrowhawk and kestrel drive away whinchat, thrush, blackbird and robin.

  Early in 1945, on the human front, things were looking up all round. As hopes of peace increased, the property market began to move: prices were low, but numerous white elephants came up for sale, along with many more modest dwellings. In January 1945 a ‘replica Tudor house’ in Essex with five bedrooms and ninety acres was going at £7500. Among its advertised attractions was ‘Telephone’.

  Even with old houses available, there was a pressing need for new homes in the country. A survey carried out by the British Federation of Women’s Institutes produced a damning indictment of water and sewage systems in the countryside. Research workers reported ‘horrors undreamt of by the more fortunate village residents’, and revealed that out of 3500 villages, a thousand had no piped water: even in places on the mains, the supply often went not to homes but to standpipes, which were liable to freeze in winter. In less favoured hamlets people still had to rely on wells or springs, many of which were contaminated, or even on water carts. More than half the houses surveyed had earth, bucket or chemical closets: in east Suffolk alone twenty-two villages had over a hundred earth closets apiece.

  In December 1944 the Government announced that 50,000 ‘permanent houses’ would be built in rural areas and let at 7s 6d or 8s a week ‘in the first two years after Germany has been beaten’. Altogether the Ministry of Health had plans for 800,000 new homes in the countryside, with rural projects given higher priority than urban. At the same time an expert pointed out that growing crops of bungalows instead of crops of wheat had taken up much good land, and had ‘prejudiced other farming land by the creation of ubiquitous ribbons of bungaloid growth’.

  Some new homes had already been built, but in September 1944 they had received a scathing review in The Farmers’ Weekly, when, ‘after several months of closest secrecy, during which nobody has been allowed near the buildings’, the Government’s thirteen ‘new type houses’ were put on view at Northolt, in Middlesex, but turned out to be ‘singularly uninteresting’. Built of brick, with three bedrooms and a bathroom but no central heating, they had a grim appearance and several major failings, among them the fact that there was no access to the coal store from outside, so that sacks of fuel had to be carried indoors and unloaded.

  In contrast with that disappointment, a farm show held in Birmingham turned out to be an immense success. Staged by the National Farmers’ Union in a blitz-cleared space in the city centre, it was supposed to last for a week, but proved so popular that its run was extended to a fortnight: 10,000 people crowded in every day, fascinated by the demonstration of how Warwickshire farms grew all the potatoes for the city’s 1,000,000 inhabitants, as well as producing their milk and the flour for their bread and biscuits.

  The show perhaps disguised the fact that prospects for that year’s vital potato harvest were dismal. At the beginning of September the Ministry of Agriculture had put out a special call for volunteers, but few had come forward, and an official in Newcastle reckoned that ‘people seem to think that the war is over, and that they needn’t bother’. Such hopes were fostered by a report that the Royal Show – suspended since 1939 – would be held next year if the war ended in the autumn.

  Country people grounded by scarcity of petrol were scenting the chances of greater mobility. As no new cars were being built, high prices were offered to owners of vehicles long laid up. ‘Old cars will never fetch a better price than at present,’ said one advertisement; if an old banger was too decrepit to take the road, farmers were advised to cannibalize it: use the wheels for carts, the chassis for the basis of a trailer, the body for a hen house. Motor manufacturers had begun to drop tempting hints about better times ahead. The Ford company promised that ‘those Saturday afternoons at Brooklands [racing circuit] are not far off’. Bentley assured customers that ‘The manufacture of Bentley cars will be resumed immediately conditions permit’, and advertisements by the Park Ward company, showing a sleek Rolls-Royce, declared:

  One by one the pleasures of those pre-war years will return. Among them, at perhaps no long distance date, will be the unsurpassed grace and dignity of Park Ward coachwork.

  For the time being, the daily grind continued. January 1945 brought blizzards and the worst frosts for years. Many country roads were blocked by snow, and one night at Dalwhinnie in the Scottish Highlands the temperature fell to minus four Fahrenheit – thirty-six degrees below freezing. In Ross-shire marooned cattle were saved by air drops of hay, but hundreds of sheep perished in snowdrifts, and others fell victim to foxes driven down from the moors by the cold. In the Cheviots the barking of a collie led rescuers to four US airmen whose Flying Fortress had crashed in the hills. On the Solway salmon choked by snow and ice were sold by fishmongers for 4s 9d a pound. It became impossible to move threshing machinery from one farm to another, and potato and root crops could not be lifted from the ice-bound soil, even by Russian prisoners of war, liberated from their former existence as slaves in Germany, who were working on
the land in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

  In spite of many difficulties, the farming community was buoyed up by the record of its performance. In 1939 Britain had had thirteen million acres of arable land and 18.75 million of permanent grass. By 1944 the figures had been reversed, to 19.25 million of arable and 11.75 of grass. The average yield of wheat had gone up from eighteen to twenty hundredweight per acre, even though some of the corn had been grown on poor land. Yields of barley had also increased, from sixteen to eighteen hundredweight. The area down to potatoes had more than doubled, and the flax crop had expanded by a factor of seven. ‘The battle of the land will go down as one of the great victories of the war,’ declared W. McN. Snadden, MP for Kinross and West Perthshire. As The Farmers’ Weekly remarked,

  The face of Britain has been changed almost beyond recognition during the past six years … but it has been essential to her very survival. By comparison, the small blemishes inflicted by enemy action or necessitated by military operations are insignificant. The additional ploughing of nearly seven million acres, all the dredging, ditching, draining and bush-clearing, if continued and properly cared-for, should leave the farm lands of Britain in radiant health when the scars of war are effaced and forgotten.

  Scars there were aplenty. Thousands of farm buildings were derelict. Concrete pillboxes, gun and searchlight emplacements and Nissen huts stood abandoned in fields or gardens, and no compensation was offered to owners of the land to meet the heavy cost of their removal. Hundreds of fields were pitted with bomb craters. ‘The strange thing about them is that there is never nearly enough subsoil surrounding them to refill them,’ wrote one farmer. ‘Some must have been blown in small lumps over a wide area, while the blast must have compressed the subsoil in all directions and so left a hole bigger than can be accounted for by the amount blown out.’ Someone suggested that big craters should be left empty and surrounded by trees, to make attractive dells. Robert Hudson, the Minister of Agriculture, estimated that £5 million worth of new farm buildings would be needed after the war, and warned that the structures would not all ‘be thatched and picturesque, and it would not be possible to prohibit the use of concrete and modern materials’.