They Fought in the Fields: The Women's Land Army: The Story of a Forgotten Victory

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1

Pioneers

‘Dr Johnson, when asked his opinion of women preachers, replied that a woman preaching was like a dog walking on its hind legs: It is not well done, but you are surprized to find it done at all.’

Graphic, witty and scornful, the image is Johnson at his misogynistic best. Nearly 200 years later, in 1939, it was with similar scorn that the British farming community greeted the prospect of a Women’s Land Army. Their conviction that it couldn’t be done is perhaps surprising since only twenty years earlier it had been done–and well done at that.

Most people associate the land girls and their famous uniform of green jerseys and fawn breeches with the Second World War. But mould-breaking though these women were, they had an earlier, even more pioneering precedent. The first Women’s Land Army had been set up with tremendous haste in 1917 when, after three years of a harrowing war, starvation loomed. That year Britain was described by its Agriculture Minister as a ‘beleaguered city’. Wholesale destruction of food-carrying ships by the ruthlessly efficient German Navy, the run-down state of British farming and the unquenchable demand for men by the Services had reduced the country’s reserve of food to just three weeks. Despite the prevailing view that the land was no place for any decent girl, 43,000 women patriotically applied to join the new force, though half were rejected as unsuited to the toughness of the work. A survey of 12,637 Land Army members in 1918 showed women at work in all fields of agricultural life; there were 5,734 milkers, 293 tractor drivers, 3,971 field workers, 635 carters, 260 plough-men, 84 thatchers and 21 shepherds. What is more, their efforts had proved highly satisfactory and won praise from both farmers and politicians. Memories are short, however, and by the time Britain’s farmers learnt about plans for a new Land Army on the eve of the Second World War they had conveniently forgotten the unsuspected skills displayed by its older sister.

In most other European countries women have traditionally worked alongside their menfolk, herding animals, digging and planting in the fields, harvesting and haymaking. In Britain, however, farming had always been very much a male preserve in which the woman’s role was limited to specific light farmyard tasks like feeding the pigs and calves, collecting eggs and tending the kitchen garden. Things are best done the way they always have been done has ever been the farmer’s creed. Not that, as the war clouds gathered over Europe in 1938, British farmers had anything to be complacent about. British agriculture at the end of the Thirties was in a sorry state. The country was importing seventy per cent of its food, in stark contrast to the German Reich which by then was producing four-fifths of the food it consumed. It seems incredible that successive British governments did nothing to remedy this dependency, which made it acutely vulnerable, especially in the face of Hitler’s drive to reduce imports in Germany and the precedent of the First World War.

The situation in Britain was largely the result of a decision taken at the end of the nineteenth century that the route to prosperity lay through exporting sophisticated manufactured goods in return for raw materials and food imported cheaply from North America and the colonies. Things had reached crisis point in 1916 when a poor harvest and the announcement by Germany of a sustained submarine war forced the Government to intervene in farming policy. In December 1916 a new coalition under Lloyd George took office. County Agricultural Executive committees were set up with the mandate of bringing grassland back into cultivation and taking over badly run farms. Between 1917 and 1918 1.75 million acres of grassland were ploughed up to grow wheat. For the first time the Government introduced minimum prices for cereals and potatoes. During the years of peace which followed, however, the hungry lessons of the First World War were quickly forgotten. The policy of guaranteeing farmers a minimum price for crops was abandoned, as world supplies of grain grew and prices fell. Farming, like everything else, fell victim to the Great Depression of 1929. Over the next three years the price of agricultural land fell by over a third. More than a third of agricultural labourers left the land as farmers turned to less labour-intensive forms of agriculture, such as dairy farming, in an attempt to trim wage bills. Arable land returned to grass and thousands of acres of land were simply left untended, soon to be choked with weeds, scrub and bracken. Many farmers gave up altogether. The small number who prospered were those who switched to dairy farming.

By the early Thirties the Government was forced to reintroduce subsidies and marketing boards were set up to improve distribution. Import quotas were negotiated with foreign suppliers but the concept of Imperial Preference meant that between 1932 and 1939 supplies from the colonies rose by almost fifty per cent. The introduction of refrigeration meant that not only cereal but meat could be imported. It was only by the spring of 1939 that the British Government, realising that there would soon be a huge population of soldiers and factory workers to be fed, decided that something had to be done. The dilatoriness seems particularly hard to comprehend since Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, had been a Cabinet Minister during the First World War, had seen the dire consequences of a blockade at first hand, and knew only too well how vulnerable Britain’s supply lines were.

Under the new Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, farmers were offered £2 per acre of grassland they ploughed up between 3 May and 30 September 1939. Incentives were offered to persuade farmers to grow grain. Tractor drivers and other agricultural mechanics were exempted from conscription from the age of twenty-one. Four days before the outbreak of war–the end of August 1939–the Government’s food policies were finally put into effect. The War Agricultural Committees, universally known as the War Ags., which had been formed in 1936 along county lines, each having a chairman, executive officer and secretary, were told to start work as a matter of urgency. The initial target of what was known as the ‘battle for wheat’ was to get two million acres of grassland ploughed by the time of the 1940 harvest. Commendably, in view of the hand-to-mouth nature of government policy, this target was reached by April 1940 with only eight counties failing to fulfil their quota. But labour shortage was an acute problem. By 1940, due to decades of farm workers leaving the countryside in the search for a better life, an intensive forces recruiting campaign in the spring of 1939 and then conscription, it was estimated that there was a shortfall of 50,000 agricultural workers.

It was to fill this gap that on 1 June 1939–after a prolonged and often calamitous gestation–that the Women’s Land Army was reborn. Calamitous because war was imminent and because Government officials and civil servants displayed precisely the same indecision and lack of vigour in setting up the Land Army that they had shown in resuscitating British farming.

The idea of using women to fill the gap in the ranks of farm workers was first discussed at an official level a good eighteen months before the outbreak of war on 9 April 1938. The Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture called a meeting with four senior officials to discuss farming labour in the event of war. Exactly as had been done twenty years earlier it was decided, if war was declared, to set up a Women’s Branch of the Ministry under the Directorship of a woman. Lady Denman, who had been a pioneer of the Women’s Institute movement in Britain, seemed the obvious choice. Lady Denman had assisted Dame Meriel Talbot in setting up the first Land Army, serving a stint at the original Women’s Branch at the Ministry of Agriculture and touring the country, promoting recruitment to the Land Army in 1918. A passionate and articulate champion of everything to do with rural life and, due to her Women’s Institute contacts spread throughout the counties, a ready-made ‘networker’, it is easy to see why Lady Denman appealed to the men at the Ministry. At this stage her brief was twofold: to put forward a list of people qualified to act as her assistants in administering a national organisation and to explore the idea of setting up Land Army committees in every county, with a list of women qualified to act as chairmen. Lady Denman hesitated before accepting the Ministry’s invitation. Her one fear was that any new role could limit her contribution to the work of the Women’s Institutes. When she consulted the National Federation’s Executive Committee, however, they urged her to assume her new role. She lost little time, for by the end of April 1939 she was hard at work at the Institutes’ headquarters in Eccleston Street in London’s Belgravia, sketching in the outlines of a Women’s Land Army to go into action in the event of war.

On 14 May, assisted by Miss Farrer, the General Secretary of the WI federation, and using the Institutes’ lists, Lady Denman wrote to the women she had personally chosen to be chairmen of each county committee.

2

Lady Denman

Gertrude Denman was one of the last members of a breed that today has almost totally disappeared–the philanthropist. As her granddaughter Penelope, now Mrs John Greenwood, puts it: ‘she had been brought up to believe that of those to whom much is given much is also expected.’

To us, with our black-and-white views on class, she appears an intriguingly paradoxical figure. Born Gertrude Pearson in 1884, she was the only daughter of the immensely wealthy first Viscount and Viscountess Cowdray. Sir Weetman Pearson had been elevated to the peerage in 1910, having made a fortune from construction. Among the monuments of the family firm, S. Pearson and Son, which originated in Yorkshire, were the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames, the East River Tunnel in New York, and countless docks, harbours, canals and railways all over the world.

Gertrude, known to her friends as ‘Trudie’, had grown up in a world of chauffeured Rolls-Royces, luxurious country houses and African safari holidays. For her twenty-first birthday her millionaire father bought her her own 3,000-acre country estate. Yet throughout his life Pearson remained a dedicated Liberal, supporting a range of radical causes embracing Home Rule for Ireland, Women’s Suffrage, old age pensions and sickness insurance. Her deep love of her father and respect for his values explains why Lady Denman’s privileged background did not prevent her, unlike many other titled ladies, from feeling genuine compassion for those who were less fortunate than herself, and from displaying an almost ascetic approach to luxury which contrasts strongly with the hedonistic playboy lifestyle pursued by so many of the very rich, both then and now. Indeed she devoted much of her life to campaigning for better living conditions, better education and better medical facilities for the working classes.

After a sketchy education which included a spell at a girls’ day school in Kensington, a governess, and a finishing school in Dresden, Trudie had, like other girls of her background, done the London season. In 1903 at the age of nineteen, much to the satisfaction of her ambitious mother, Lady Cowdray, she married into the aristrocracy in the shape of Thomas Denman, a twenty-eight-year-old Liberal peer whom she had met at a ball in London. Her first sight of him was at the top of a grand staircase, standing on crutches like the archetypally romantic wounded soldier–he had been invalided out of the Boer War. Thomas’s immediate antecedents were unremarkable–his father was an unambitious and impecunious Sussex squire. The first Baron, however, had distinguished himself when in 1820 he appeared as one of the counsels for the defence of Queen Caroline at her trial at the House of Lords on a charge of adultery. The match between Trudie and Thomas Denman, an asthmatic who later developed a reputation for hypochondria, appears to have taken place more because it suited both sets of parents than out of any genuine passion on the part of the young people. In 1905 their first child Thomas, was born, followed two years later by a daughter, Judith. In 1910 Lord Denman was appointed Governor General of Australia, taking Trudie off to the southern hemisphere for four years. There she loved the Australian countryside but loathed the pomp and ceremony and the endless entertaining that went with being the Governor’s wife. ‘The people I like best’, she wrote to a friend, ‘are the Labour people. They are very simple and nice.’

By the time she became head of the Women’s Land Army, Lady Denman was known to the public chiefly through her association with the Women’s Institutes. In the last three decades the WI has acquired an unfortunate, cosy, jam-making image, much derided by the ambitious career women of today. In 1917, however, when Lady Denman first became chairman, the movement was distinctly radical. Far from promoting home-making skills, the Institutes, which had originated in Canada at the end of the nineteenth century, had the express aim of widening countrywomen’s horizons. The idea was to encourage them to come out of the damp, draughty cottages in which they spent a monotonous, careworn existence raising children they struggled to feed, and step into a new world of opportunity and education in which they could learn not only new practical skills, but self-confidence, self-expression, citizenship and self-improvement.

In 1939, aged fifty-five and not in the best of health, Gertrude Denman was at the height of her intellectual and organisational powers. A bungled operation years before which condemned her to wear a surgical corset did not inhibit her impressive energy, or prevent her playing tennis and golf regularly and riding to hounds whenever she could. Physically she was slim and rather masculine-looking. She took little interest in clothes and possessed a face that was characterful rather than pretty. What had once been flaming red hair had now faded to pepper and salt surmounted by a strikingly misshapen beaky nose (a younger brother had broken it during a game of croquet). Despite her limited education she was highly intelligent and naturally efficient–the kind of woman who in those days would have led a more fulfilling life had she been born a man. Domestic life didn’t appeal to her and she was glad to leave the business of child-rearing to her domestic staff. By the time the Land Army was set up she and her husband, a somewhat lacklustre character, who, as far as his political career was concerned, had failed to fulfil his early promise, were leading more or less separate lives. Today Lady Denman might have been a businesswoman, a barrister or an MP. The naturally succinct and lucid way she expressed herself would have brought a breath of fresh air to the rambling nature of much contemporary political debate.

Lady Denman was regarded by some of her colleagues as having a rather cold manner. Those who knew her well say she was shy in the company of strangers, particularly those who were from a different social class–despite her earnest wish to be a good mixer. In 1926 the Denmans had suffered a personal tragedy which may have had some bearing on Lady Denman’s reserve. On the eve of his twenty-first birthday their son, Thomas, who had made a promising start, having graduated from Eton to Trinity College, Cambridge, had undergone a severe mental breakdown from which he failed to recover. The celebrations were cancelled and Thomas was sent to a mental institution from which he never emerged.

The Women’s Institutes were only one of a number of progressive social causes Gertrude Denman had espoused before the Land Army took over her life. In 1908, adopting her father’s political convictions, she had joined the Women’s Liberal Federation Executive to campaign for the introduction of votes for women. In 1917, after her return from Australia, she became involved in organising the first Land Army. The following year she spearheaded a national recruiting drive. In pre-radio days open-air rallies were deemed the best way to spread the word and Trudie and a friend drove round the Southern counties, dressed in Land Army uniform, which consisted not just of breeches, but, in those pre-rubber days, of leather gaiters, attracting the attention of passers-by with a policeman’s rattle. Once this had been achieved she would address a rallying speech to the crowd, either from the steps of her car, or occasionally from the stage of a local theatre. On one occasion in Portsmouth she followed a turn by performing dogs and won warm applause from a naval audience.

Another good cause which had attracted Lady Denman’s support was the Land Settlement Association. This was the idealistic response of a small group of wealthy philanthropists to the general urban unemployment that characterised the inter-war years. Its aim was to provide smallholdings and allotments in the country for the jobless–Welsh miners were one group–in the hope that by becoming self-employed they might recover dignity and self-reliance. Lady Denman had herself helped one family move, housing and employing them on her own country estate, but plans to put this bold social experiment into action on a larger scale were put paid to by the war.

The campaign which best expressed Lady Denman’s particular brand of courage and far-sightedness, however, was her championing from the beginning of the Thirties, of family planning. She became the first chairman of the Family Planning Association. Her readiness to promote this cause at a time when to favour birth control was tantamount to condoning promiscuity, was the direct result of her first-hand experience of the lives led by the wives of agricultural workers. ‘Breeding and feeding children’ was how she summarised their grim existence. Her support for birth control lay not so much in the fact that it prevented unwanted pregnancies, as that it helped mothers to space their children. This way, she argued, each had maximum chance of health and happiness. The movement was attacked by many branches of the Establishment and the Church in particular. Mrs Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army denounced it as ‘utterly wrong and not in God’s plan’, claiming in an article in the Daily Mirror that ‘young girls were being destroyed in great numbers every year because of it’. The president of the Catholic Women’s League forecast ‘race suicide and moral degeneracy’.

In her fight to establish family planning centres in country towns so that all married women, and not only those who lived in city centres, had access to contraception, Lady Denman came face to face with the conservatism and prejudice of the British Establishment. This, combined with her own brand of moral courage was to stand her in good stead in her fight to establish the Women’s Land Army.

EVELYN ELLIOT

(née Webster). Joined Land Army at seventeen.

Land Army 1946–50. Home town: Sunderland.

Civilian occupation: Butcher’s assistant.

‘I went from dead meat to live when I joined the Land Army. I left school at fourteen and went to work first in a greengrocer’s and then in the butcher’s. The reason I joined the Land Army was that the men hadn’t got back from the war and there was a recruiting drive in Sunderland. I got sent down to a hostel in Reading for my training. I’d never been so far from home before. When you were being trained you lived in the hostel and went out to different farms in the day. Specific farms run by the local War Ag. took on trainee land girls. On these farms there would be an experienced land girl and it was her job to teach you what to do. My pay went down. I was getting 25 shillings a week in the butcher’s shop.

When I joined the Land Army I only got 17 shillings. For the month of training we got our board and lodging paid by the Government. When I started work, which was in Henley-on-Thames, I got 2 shillings and 10 pence for a 48-50 hour week. In the summer it was longer. Sometimes you’d start at 5 a.m. and still be in the fields at 8 o’clock at night. If I worked on a Sunday or a Bank Holiday the overtime rate went up to 1 shilling and 11 pence an hour. But I had to pay for my keep out of that.

I chose dairy farming because I wanted to work with animals. But you were so green; I’d no idea that bulls behaved differently from cows. One day I was told to take feed and water in to the bull. He was in a pen and tied up. He was a Friesian, which is a big breed. He seemed about ten foot high to me. I walked gaily in with my buckets of water. First he knocked me off my feet with a toss of his head. Then, as I got up he gave a great kick and practically kicked me out of the byre.’

3

Prejudice

The contrast between the urgent, businesslike way Lady Denman set about her new task–she too remembered the beleaguered city of 1917–and the procrastinating, patronising attitude of the politicians and civil servants she had to deal with was striking. She grasped, in a way they seemed unable to, the central role the WLA would need to play in winning the war. As she herself wrote in the Land Army Manual: ‘Germany is attempting to starve the British people into submission. To win the war our country must defeat the blockade. This is the joint task of the British Navy and of Britain’s great field force of agricultural workers.’

No sooner had Lady Denman been invited to set up women’s committees in every county, using her national network of Women’s Institute contacts as a starting point, than she handed over the running of the Women’s Institutes to her deputy, Miss Grace Hadow, and set to work. Installing herself at the headquarters of the Women’s Institutes in Eccleston Street in London’s Belgravia, with a handful of trusted assistants, Lady Denman drew up detailed plans for the administration of a wartime Land Army. She worked in circumstances of the utmost secrecy. It was vital not to hand propaganda material to the enemy, or to reveal the acutely vulnerable state of the country’s food supplies. Within six weeks of the initial Ministry meeting–on 14 May–letters were on their way to the chosen candidate for each county committee. The Munich crisis of the autumn of 1938 brought the threat of war nearer than ever. Lady Denman followed up her initial approach to the County Chairmen designate by asking them to form their committees in readiness for war. The response of the Ministry of Agriculture to such efficiency was to do nothing. That autumn Lady Denman appealed to the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Dorman-Smith, to meet the chairmen to convince them that they would be needed and to maintain morale. Not only was this request ignored but Lady Denman herself was not granted an interview with him until March 1939–just five months before war was declared. When she finally saw him she handed him a campaign plan urging the Ministry to instruct the chairmen to canvass farmers willing to take on land girls, to find who was prepared to offer billets and to establish a minimum wage. But behind the scenes in Whitehall her sense of urgency was the subject of sneering. The Treasury’s extraordinarily complacent reaction to Lady Denman’s proposals, expressed in a letter to the Minister of Agriculture, was that they were ‘a sledgehammer to crack a nut’.

Towards the end of April 1939, pushed to the limits of her patience by the bumbling incompetence and sheer discourtesy of the officials with whom she was supposed to be in partnership, Lady Denman issued an ultimatum, threatening to resign if she were not authorised to appoint her own headquarters staff. Unlike the only other ultimatum she issued during her time as Director of the Women’s Land Army, this had the desired effect. The Permanent Secretary at the Ministry wrote that her ‘request was completely reasonable’. The suggestions outlined in the campaign plan she had presented to Dorman-Smith were authorised.