Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Was it the hope of peace that brought out new ideas for increasing efficiency on farms? The rear wheels of tractors were still fitted with spade-lugs for ploughing – even on brand-new models; but now someone had the notion of filling the hollows in the wheels with cement, to increase the weight and grip. In 1939 there had been 50,000 tractors in Britain. Now there were 150,000. Also announced – an amazing invention – was an all-weather tractor cab made of wood and canvas ‘with steel reinforcements’. At last, year-round protection for the driver! In Wiltshire a demonstration was held to determine the limit of a tractor’s power. Can a Fordson pull seven furrows on ploughland? was the question asked; and the answer was, ‘It can.’ Local demonstrations by War Ag committees drew gatherings of a hundred or more. Almost every week ingenious American machines were advertised in the farming press. A delegation of British experts returned from New York with news of ‘locker plants’ – freezing stations to which farmers could deliver produce.

  In spite of all this innovation, on upland farms oats were being cut with scythes, and horses were still used for farm work all over the country. At Evesham turnips were being washed by hand in the River Avon. Ploughing competitions flourished, with both tractors and horses taking part, and at the Percheron Horse Society’s stallion spring show, held at Histon in Cambridgeshire on 9 March 1945, Canewdon Unique, ‘a horse of much character, conformation and type’, was sold for 1000 guineas.

  With rationing still in force, there was such a sharp increase in the number of people creeping onto allotments to steal vegetables that the law was changed to make trespass an offence, liable to a fine not exceeding £50. When two boys claimed in court that they had raided an allotment in search of conkers, the magistrates refused to accept this as a reasonable excuse – but the case was dismissed under the Probation Act. ‘The general public must realise,’ the Country Gentleman’s Estate Magazine had thundered, ‘that allotments are in effect the absolute property of the allotment holders for the time being, and no unauthorised person has any right whatever to wander about them.’ Another annoyance was that of military personnel ‘blazing a trail’ through fields as they took a short cut to headquarters.

  With victory almost in sight, the Women’s Land Army began to melt away as more and more of its girls drifted off, discouraged by the knowledge that they would not get the post-war benefits or privileges promised to the other women’s services. In the last four months of 1944 their numbers fell from 68,000 to 63,000. Yet their efforts were still badly needed, as the Government was calling for at least 400 new recruits a week. When the national minimum farm wage for a man was raised by 5s to 70s a week, with one penny an hour more for overtime, no increase was given to the women on the land. This, said The Farmers’ Weekly, was an unexpected disappointment, ‘after six years in which their help has been praised about six times a week and twice on Sundays’.

  By the beginning of 1945 the Land Girls’ champion, Lady Denman, had become exasperated by the War Cabinet’s refusal to grant her recruits any financial reward; and in February an announcement that the Government would pay Resettlement Grants of £150 to Civil Defence and other auxiliary workers, but not to members of the Women’s Land Army, pushed her over the edge. Worn down by her exertions, and by poor health, she resigned from her position of Honorary Director, thereby provoking a surge of support from newspapers and from the Land Girls themselves. In due course this shamed the Government into making some concessions – for instance, that members of the Land Army would get state help in training for agricultural work – but many people felt that the rewards offered were inadequate. It was left to the Queen, in a valedictory message to Trudie, to point out that the organization would live on ‘in the shape of thousands who have settled down in the countryside as the wives of farmers and farm workers, or who are themselves continuing to work in agriculture … in field and forest, garden, orchard and dairy’.

  The Farmers’ Weekly thought that the war had done a lot to change young women’s outlook. An intelligent girl, said a leading article, ‘will want to feel she is doing a job worthy of her highest ability’, and not just be ‘a domestic in the pre-war sense of a general-maid-of-all-work-and-no-initiative’.

  Among the farmers’ most enthusiastic supporters was Churchill, who praised their achievement at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in London on 5 March 1945:

  The war has taught us that we have long neglected the treasure house of the British soil. Twice in a generation we have called upon the farming community, in spite of that neglect, to keep the wolf from our doors. They have not failed us. It would be madness, indeed, to cast away the increased food production which has been achieved in the war … Agriculture, therefore, assumes a place in the forefront of our post-war policy.

  Perhaps Churchill hoped that his support would win votes in the country – but he made no impression on one disgruntled farmer’s wife:

  Reading, movies, politics … The last I can soon dismiss … no interest at all. At one time I regarded anyone who was not a Conservative as being from another and inferior plane; but after seeing two major wars, all I can say is, if this is the best they can do, then let socialist, communist or any other animal do their worst. I care not. There are none of them worth voting for. It is of more moment to me when the swallows arrive than when any politician departs.

  Victory in Europe, proclaimed by Churchill on 8 May, left many country folk unmoved. John Alsop, who farmed at Morely Hill, near Newcastle, ploughed doggedly on through 1944 and 1945 with daily entries in his diary, and did not falter when the great news came through. ‘Cleaning up stackyard,’ he wrote on Monday, 7 May. ‘Top dressing behind stackyard. Threshing wheat from below the railway in afternoon. Rowed up stackyard fields.’ Then, as an afterthought (perhaps when he had heard a BBC news flash announcing victory at 7.45 p.m.), came ‘Armistice’. His entry for 8 May read: ‘War officially ends at 3 o’clock. Hubert and I took load for G. Moore to Limpetlaw. Heavy rain in afternoon.’

  In London things were more lively. Thousands of people surged into Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall, hoping to catch a glimpse of Churchill. Aircraft kept coming over, dropping coloured smoke flares. Bands played and impromptu processions of students marched about. When the royal family made repeated appearances on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, a vast crowd estimated at 60,000 greeted them ecstatically. In Trafalgar Square searchlights and floodlights turned night to day as 100,000 revellers, many dressed in red, white and blue, burnt effigies of Hitler on bonfires and let off thunderflashes and rockets. Nelson was floodlit in green, the lions in mauve. When the band of the Grenadier Guards struck up with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the whole crowd joined in. The biggest blaze of all flared up after midnight on Hampstead Heath, where a dummy village of wooden bungalows, built in 1941 as a decoy for Luftwaffe bombers, and containing many thousand tons of timber, burst into flames.

  Similar exultation exploded in towns and villages: blackout curtains were torn down, pub doors thrown open, trestle tables brought into the open for street parties; people strolled arm-in-arm, singing; they danced in the streets and fields; bonfires blazed, and the night sky was lit up by fireworks, which had been confiscated and kept in police stations ever since the outbreak of war.

  It took villages a few days to organize full-scale Peace and Victory Celebrations, like those held on the sports ground at Leverstock Green in Hertfordshire on 25 May. An elaborate printed programme announced: ‘We, Britain’s Old and Young, are celebrating today the Liberation of Mankind from Fascist Tyranny by the United People’s Victory in the World War, 1939–45’, and the festivities included a fancy-dress parade, races for ladies, gents, girls and boys, slow bicycling, a children’s tea party, an adults’ tea, a ‘Non-stop Variety Show, dancing to the Valetoes (crooner Miss Iris Evans)’ and a fireworks display.

  But it was Sunday, 13 May that evoked the greatest expression of relief. All over the country churches were crowded as the bells rang out, and in Lon
don thousands of people congregated for open-air services. Emotion ran high in Coventry, where 20,000 people assembled for a service in the Memorial Park, mourning not only the death of relations and friends, but also the destruction of their cathedral, of which the spire was almost the only part left standing.

  A leading article in The Farmers’ Weekly hit an unusually lyrical note:

  We have suffered, and worked, and waited a long time for our village bells to ring out their message of victory in the West. At last we hear the jubilant clamour from steeples that have celebrated many triumphs, but never one more hardly earned. Nor is the silence of ruined belfries less eloquent. Every shattered tower, every farm field in which bleak patches mark bomb craters, every torn roof and ravished woodland and scarred building is a muted string in our great symphony of relief and thankfulness.

  The Lady, a magazine not normally given to analysis of social trends, pointed out what a powerful influence war work such as civil defence had played in uniting rural communities, ‘where the Big House and the Vicarage have alike gone, and where nothing had arisen until the war came to bring the many newcomers into any communal effort’. But for all the privations and tensions of the conflict (the article continued),

  Mrs B would never have discovered that Lady A was not an idle slob, or Mrs C found how capable and well-meaning the haughty girl in the post office could be, or how well-read the draper, how good a botanist the butcher’s son, or how much feeling there was about the village school or the medical service.

  As she accompanied the pathologist Professor Keith Simpson on his rounds, Molly Lefebure searched for the key agent which contributed most to the defeat of Hitler. She decided it was the fact that the British enjoyed the war, and found it immensely satisfying:

  It gave them the chance to do all the daring things they have excelled at throughout their long history, and a lot of new, twentieth-century daring things into the bargain … For six glorious years they were able to be soldiers, sailors, airmen, guerrillas, frogmen, spies, bomb experts, nurses, rescue workers, ambulance drivers, explorers, plotters, schemers, saboteurs. As a race they have thrived on adventure, and this war brought them adventures galore. It gave them a feeling of great purpose, for it united them in a just cause, and as a people they love just causes. It gave them a chance to be great, and they have a marvellous capacity for greatness.

  Perhaps she was right; but the end of the war in Europe left country people exhausted rather than exultant, worn down by six years of all-out effort and sacrifice. They realized that they were infinitely better off than their counterparts on the Continent, whose lives and property had suffered far worse damage; but their hopes that things would improve quickly – for instance that rationing would cease – were soon dashed. Far from coming to a speedy end, food restrictions became even more stringent. Late in May 1945 the Government announced not just that the cheese ration was to be maintained, but that the weekly allocation of cooking fat was being reduced from two ounces to one, and bacon from four ounces to three. As for rice – there was no prospect of any more being released for civilian consumption. The worst blow of all fell a year later, in the summer of 1946, when bread, flour and oatmeal were rationed for the first time.

  Country people were shocked when Churchill was defeated in the General Election of 5 July 1945, and the Labour Party won a landslide victory under its leader Clement Attlee (who reminded George Orwell ‘of nothing so much as a recently dead fish, before it has had time to stiffen’). A key element in the Left’s campaign had been the Beveridge Report of 1942, which had urged the creation of the National Health Service and the Welfare State; and Churchill made the mistake of suggesting that its recommendations were so dangerous that some form of Gestapo would be needed to control developments set in motion by them. Exaggeration suddenly helped land the great war hero in the wilderness.

  It seemed that the change of government would make little immediate difference to farming. Public ownership of all land remained the Left’s ultimate aim; but at Labour’s Blackpool conference in May a spokesman had announced that the party, if it came to power, would not nationalize the land, at least during the next five years. In the election campaign the agricultural policies of all the main parties had been much alike, and, as someone remarked, ‘The country still needs food, whatever political party may organise its resources.’

  In the summer of 1945 there was a severe shortage of men to work on the land. Requests by leaders of the agricultural community that farm workers should be given priority release from the services went unheeded, and when the Government appealed for 200,000 volunteers, only 50,000 came forward. The War Office announced that 90,000 German prisoners were available, but there were arguments about how long they should be made to labour, and whether or not they should be paid the same as natives, who got 1s per hour. With the harvest approaching, it was agreed that prisoners could be worked for as long as a farmer needed them, provided they were released in time to return to their compounds before dark. Germans were certainly not shirkers: on the bank of the River Trent in Nottinghamshire a gang 635-strong cleared 144 acres of flax in three days, pulling the crop by hand. Some of them, besides being strong, were skilled distillers, and eased their homesickness by concocting a gin-like spirit from potatoes.

  The presence of prisoners in the harvest field certainly made life more interesting for the boys and girls from holiday camps:

  Although some boys considered working with prisoners to be infra dig, Marjorie Rolfe and Eileen Terry from Birmingham got on well with both German and Italian captives, the Italians in particular refusing to believe that the girls had chosen to work on the land and had not been coerced. Again, Manchester girls working in the Ormskirk area found the Italians ‘very glamorous, with their dark eyes and incomprehensible accents,’ and very few thought of them as being ‘the enemy’.

  As the author remarked, in those days ‘hard physical labour on the farm or elsewhere was something to be taken in one’s stride and enjoyed’.

  On VJ Day – 15 August – the Japanese surrender was greeted by the announcement of a two-day holiday. But because the news came through at midnight, many farmhands went out to work without hearing it, and they were offered overtime rates to carry on. But when one farmer took beer out to the harvest field and told his men they could stop for the day, they had no qualms about accepting his offer. ‘Well, Bill,’ he said to one of them, ‘is it too early for beer?’ ‘Nearly, sir,’ came the answer – whereupon twenty men drank ten gallons in three-quarters of an hour, and before ten o’clock were singing merrily.

  Two weeks later there came an unpleasant shock, when the new President of the United States, Harry Truman, abruptly announced the termination of Lend-Lease, the programme of aid which had helped sustain Britain over the past four years. In 1944 alone America had sent Britain (besides a huge quantity of munitions) £40 million worth of meat, £44 million of butter, cheese, eggs and dried milk, and £5 million of grain. With these supplies cut off, further belt-tightening was in prospect.

  Gradually the countryside was returning to normal. Weather forecasts were resuscitated for the first time since 1939, the great majority of them, unfortunately, wrong. Wartime airfields, some of which had taken up 500 acres, were abandoned by the dozen, allowing the land to revert to agriculture. To bring disused bases back into production, crawler tractors began ripping out the wire mesh and coarse string matting which had given strength to grass runways. New grass was sown at the rate of 200 lb to the acre; huts were demolished, ditches cut to reconnect disrupted drainage systems, and old boundary lines between farms re-established. Once all that was done, silence enveloped the land. For ten years after the war the concrete runways at Bardney were lined with every kind of surplus military vehicles, most of which were eventually sold at auction. ‘The quietness of a forsaken airfield was quite eerie,’ one man remembered. ‘Silent roads where once military vehicles abounded were equally strange.’

  Stranger still were
the paranormal manifestations which seemed to haunt the abandoned fields, especially in Lincolnshire. At some stations people heard the noise of wartime engines – generally Merlins – both on the runways and overhead. At RAF Bardney people walking towards the old control tower felt the presence of an oppressive character, and at RAF Digby lights appeared in the tower long after power had been disconnected. On several airfields phantom airmen in full flying kit were seen walking, riding bicycles or trying to hitch lifts, and at the entrance to RAF Hemswell visitors several times saw two men who disappeared when approached. In the hangars at RAF Coningsby some invisible force was reported to have touched people and pushed them around. Inside the deserted officers’ mess at RAF Manby unexplained footsteps were heard in the corridors; doors opened and closed by themselves, and voices emanated from the old kitchen. In 1962 at Lindholme, as two men walked past a hangar on the deserted airfield, they were suddenly surrounded by sounds of activity – hangar doors screeching open, aircraft engines starting up, and the patter of many feet running past them.