Land Girls: Why Do We Not Celebrate Them?
I know we can all agree that this Covid ‘era’ has thrown everything into a state of turmoil. Almost everyone’s lives have been turned upside down. Perhaps none more so than the people who heard the call to #feedthenation and have left their normal lives to go and fill the gap left by the thousands of migrant seasonal workers who usually come to Britain to pick our fruit. British people are now really stepping up to the plate to help harvest our crop of homegrown produce. But this isn’t the first time this has happened. In this time of turmoil, we should celebrate those who have paved the way for others; we need to celebrate our unsung heroes.
Have you ever heard of the Women’s Land Army? Or perhaps the Land Girls? They aren’t talked about very much, but they played a vital part in winning both world wars.
As the men signed up for the regular army in their thousands, many farmworkers were leaving the countryside to fight in the war so there were very few men left to work the fields. However, with a country full of people, and an entire army to feed, a lot of food still needed to be produced.
Meriel Talbot, a civil servant working in the ministry of Agriculture, had a solution, she formed the Women’s Land Army on behalf of the government. This was a group of young women dedicated to producing food in this country, and despite only being formed 2 and a half years after it started, over 23,000 women had signed up by the end of WW1. It was such a success that the second time around recruitment for the WLA started in earnest before the war was even officially announced.
The WLA was a well-organised army. These women weren’t just picked up and shipped to the deepest darkest nowhere on a whim. Application processes were stringent. They had to pass a medical examination and an interview which determined whether they could cope with the potential isolation of working in the countryside, so far from civilisation, or whether they would be able to keep up with the tough physical demands of the farm work.
If their application was accepted, they were sent to be trained for 4 to 6 weeks on various farms around the country. They were taught as much as possible, but they still had a LOT to learn on the job! Farming is very seasonal work and there is a lot of hands-on practical stuff that you just can’t experience in the wrong season; not to mention the near-infinite number of things that can and will go wrong on a daily basis.
The work that the women went on to do was varied and hard. Some 4000 women joined the Timber corps; a section of the WLA that trained women to work in forestry - planting trees, felling trees, and milling the wood into planks later used for trench reinforcement and ammunition boxes.
Other women worked in the Forage sector. This meant that they travelled the country in teams for the duration of the Spring and Summer months, exclusively making hay. They were manually cutting and turning the grass to dry it properly. Then bailing it and stacking the bails somewhere dry. All of this was very physically demanding as turning the grass was time-consuming and the bails were incredibly heavy. They had to do all of this without the aid of the modern machinery that we have today.
The final, and largest, group of women worked as general farmhands, primarily in the dairy industry. One such girl was Jean Bannister, a 20-year-old from Essex who worked at a local dairy farm. She worked 6 and a half days a week with one day off a month. Her basic day started with milking the cows at 5am. She had half an hour for breakfast at 8 o’clock, then was back on the farm mucking out the cows and sterilising the milking equipment. She got lunch at 12:30 then started the whole milking process again at 1:15. While this day seems fairly straightforward, if not rather long, she also describes how many spare hours would be taken up in other ways: helping cows give birth to calves, harvesting fruit and vegetables to be sent to the cities, eradicating pests or driving ploughs. Another job that many women like Jean were given, was to dig ditches (by hand) to drain marshy areas and bogs, to increase the area of land available for farming.
Come harvest time in the summer it was likely that most of the women would have been involved, on top of their usual jobs on the farm. Jean describes how they worked alongside members of the local community until 9 pm everyday, to cut the wheat, barley and oat crops, separating the straw from the seeds and then threshing the seeds from their casing. Threshing machines were used on many farms by this point, but managing them was still a dusty, dirty labour-intensive job.
It was a tough job. The women worked 48 to 50-hour weeks, being paid less than their male counterparts and in some cases were living in poor conditions; whether that was being poorly treated by their hosts or living in hostels with no running water or electricity. So why do the job? Firstly, the age of acceptance for land girls was much lower than any other job, at 17 and a half, meaning girls could leave home earlier and live a life of independence. On top of this, the medical exam was easier to pass than for the Auxiliary Airforce. The work was advertised as an exciting new opportunity and for girls who faced a future in the munition’s factories, a life on the farm might have been rather more appealing. Finally, there was the uniform. A revolutionary uniform, it included breeches which up until then, women had never been allowed to wear.
These women did not set out to be heroes, they weren’t treated as such for most of the life of the WLA, but without them the world would be a very different place. They fed the nation while there was little hope of sourcing food from elsewhere, as Europe was occupied by enemy forces and boats carrying food supplies from America and Canada were targets for U-boats. Moreover, the WLA continued working for 5 years after the end of the war to maintain levels of food production while men returned home. But it’s not just that. They changed the physical face of the country with their work in draining boggy areas and creating more fertile land to work; they proved that women were perfectly capable of doing the same work a man had previously. They proved that it was perfectly acceptable for a woman to wear breeches – a forerunner in female liberation. So why do we not know about these women? Why is there no list of all the women who worked for the WLA. Why were they given no compensation and no medals? The honest answer is that I don’t know, but I think it’s about time that we celebrated these amazing women.
On a personal level, the land girls have, and still do, inspire me. Being able to follow in the footsteps of these 100,000+ unnamed women who worked hard to keep the nation fed during the world wars; to join the ranks of the 30,000 current female farmers in this country - for me, that is a privilege.
Maddie lives and works on her family farm on the outskirts of Bath. In her spare time she does a bit more farming, and a bit more. But she equally enjoys spending her evenings sitting by the telly with a glass of wine doing some knitting. Or perhaps baking some sourdough. If you want to know more about British farming you can follow her Instagram @livinginwellies