Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  By the middle of the 1930s huge areas of the countryside had fallen into a state of dereliction. Landowners had lost heart and let their acres go to ruin; tenant farmers, unable to make a living, had simply given up and gone away, leaving houses to decay or fall down and fields to rot. In the absence of grazing animals or cultivation, thousands of acres had been overrun by weeds, brambles and shrubs. In the high Cotswolds huge tracts had been taken over by thorn bushes and stunted trees. In low-lying areas drain clearance had been abandoned, with the result that hawthorn and bramble had spread so far outwards from the hedges that the undergrowth almost met in the middle of soggy fields.

  Farming was decidedly old-fashioned. Mechanization was creeping in, but heavy horses still provided most of the power, outnumbering tractors by thirty to one. At the Centenary Royal Show held in Windsor Great Park early in July 1939 and attended by the King and Queen, the entries included 150 Suffolk Punches, along with 100 Percherons, eighty Shires and fifty Clydesdales.

  As Ronald Blythe recorded, the horsemen were always the ‘big men’ on the farm:

  They kept in with each other and had secrets. They were a whispering lot. If someone who wasn’t a ploughman came upon them and they happened to be talking, they’d soon change the conversation! The horses were friends and loved like men. Some men would do more for a horse than they would for a wife. The ploughmen talked softly to their teams all day long, and you could see the horses listening.

  Since, in 1939, most tasks were still tackled by hand, farm workers needed to be strong, fit and hardy. A ploughman plodded over ten or eleven miles of ground every day, guiding his team, as did a man broadcasting seed or fertilizer by hand. A tractor driver had no protection from sun, wind, rain and snow except for his coat and hat: winter and summer he sat in the open on a steel seat, sprung on a flat steel tongue, and maybe slightly padded with an old hessian sack. He had no cab to shield him from the elements, still less any ear-defenders. His only air conditioning was provided by nature.

  Starting one of those old bangers was a labour in itself, especially in winter. Having primed the fuel pump, the driver had to turn the engine over by swinging the crank handle at the front – a procedure that might drag on for ten minutes or more in cold weather. If he failed to keep his thumb on the same side of the handle as his fingers, and the engine kicked back, his thumb could be dislocated or broken. Some farmers had trouble progressing from old equipment to new: one in Cornwall tried to get his new machine to stop by shouting ‘Whoa!’ – and in consequence drove straight through the wall of a shed.

  A tractor with rubber tyres was rare. The majority had all-steel rear wheels fitted with angled cleats or protruding lumps called spade-lugs. These gave a grip on fields, but made driving along hard roads impossibly rough – on the surface, the machine and the driver – so whenever a farmer wanted to move his machine any distance along a highway, he had to go through the laborious process of fitting protective metal covers round each wheel, bolting two semi-circular sections together. Rubber tyres were much coveted; they gradually became more available, in effect making a tractor a dual-purpose vehicle, equally at home on field or road; but early in the war any tractor passing along a road attracted attention.

  In March 1940 the law was amended to allow boys of twelve and upwards to drive tractors on roads. But boys of eleven or twelve, who had never taken a test, were already working unsupervised on the land. Francis Evans, son of a Gloucestershire farmer, was eleven in 1941 and frequently went ploughing on his own all day. ‘My father would come with me along the road to the field being worked, and then go home on his bicycle, leaving me to carry on.’

  At hay-time, in June, everyone turned out to help make the most of good weather: wives and children as well as men. Round the edges of fields, where the grass might be wet and choke a mechanical knife, the hay was still mown with scythes. The mechanical cutter was a reciprocating knife with jagged teeth, powered by gears from the axle, and (in the absence of a tractor) it was pulled by two horses walking slowly.

  The cut grass was evenly spread with pitchforks until it had begun to dry in the sun, giving off a delicious smell like that of biscuits cooking; then it was turned and left until it was ready to be collected, either by hand or by a horse-drawn rake with long, curved, downward-facing tines, which could be lifted clear of the ground by pulling a lever. A boy riding jockey on the rake had to pay attention, for if he fell off he might be impaled on the tines before he could stop the horse.

  Every available person and every available vehicle joined in. In the summer of 1940 the actress, singer and monologist Joyce Grenfell turned out to help at Cliveden, the Astors’ home in Buckinghamshire, driving a twelve-year-old, two-seater Chrysler. ‘Now it is entirely paintless, bonnetless, brakeless, roofless, floorless and hornless,’ she wrote of the car,

  but still it goes in bottom gear. It is equipped with a giant wooden comb-like device that is fixed on in front. You drive the car along rows of raked hay and this arrangement collects it up. When you have enough you steer off the row into the open and deliver your load in a part of the field near the rick. To unload you merely reverse; in fact, that is the only means of stopping anyway!

  Loaded onto horse-drawn wagons, the hay was transported to the farm, where, again, pitchforks lifted it onto a rick. The entire process was labour-intensive, and greatly dependent on the weather: for good hay, dry days and hot sun were essential. As one reader of The Farmers’ Weekly remarked, ‘Of course, the ideal is to have ideal weather, but only in the fields of Elysium is the ideal continuous.’ In the rick, during autumn and winter, the hay gradually solidified, so that when it was needed for feeding horses and cattle, slices of it had to be cut as if from a loaf of bread with a knife three feet long.

  After haymaking, the busiest time of year was harvest, from July to September, when everybody again joined forces to bring in the corn. Cutting and stooking were only the start. The next step was to load the sheaves onto a cart, passing them up one at a time with a pitchfork to a man who had the skill to lay them in overlapping layers so that they bound each other in and did not slip off as the cart lurched towards the farmyard on its wooden wheels. Once there, the process had to be repeated: an elevator ferried the sheaves up onto a rick, and again a skilled operator built them up so that they would hold together and not slide outwards.

  By the beginning of the war a few early combine harvesters were working, but these were large, inefficient contraptions and needed tractors to pull them – which meant that a good deal of the corn was flattened ahead of the cutter. The first self-propelled prototype, the Canadian Massey-Harris M-H 20, which appeared in 1938, travelled at four miles per hour without running down any of the crop, and cut, threshed and delivered a continuous stream of grain into sacks. Two men were needed to operate it – one to drive, and one to stand on a platform at the back, changing the sacks and sliding them off onto the ground when they became full. As each of them weighed 200 lb or more, and they were scattered about the field, collecting them up and lifting them onto a wagon was no easy task – and then at the farmyard they had to be carried up a long plank or flight of steps and tipped into the barn.

  Other farm tasks were less dramatic. Ploughing was one of the slowest, demanding skill, patience, strength and stamina. Although even early tractors could plough far faster than horses, many people clung to the old ways. Angus Nudds, who started work on a farm in Wiltshire when he was fourteen, and later became a gamekeeper, remembered, ‘Not many people have had the pleasure of ploughing with horses.’

  Instead of the roar of the tractor, there was just the occasional gentle cough of one of the horses, the sound of the soil coming off the plough-share, the jingle of the harness and the constant cry of the seagulls which competed for the worms that were turned up out of the ground. I loved working with horses; they are such noble animals, not asking much out of life, just a warm stable, some good food and a bit of kindness, and they repay you by working for you eight hours
a day.

  No one endorsed those feelings more warmly than John Stewart Collis, an intellectual who worked as a farm labourer in Sussex and Dorset from 1940 to 1946. Already almost forty when the war broke out, he opted for work on the land and wrote two classic books about it, While Following the Plough and Down to Earth, which he later combined into a single volume, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Precise, accurate and never for a moment boring, he described the ancient rituals of farming in a marvellously lucid narrative of day-to-day tasks and events.

  He scarcely mentioned his wife Eirene and two daughters, whom he packed off as evacuees to America: he referred but rarely to Bindo, the devoted dog which always accompanied him. His whole narrative was dedicated to describing work on the land, and he wrote about the most basic tasks with lyrical grace. Like Angus Nudds, he loved ploughing with a horse:

  Your feet are upon the earth, your hands upon the plough. You seem to be holding more than the plough, and treading across more than this one field: you are holding together the life of mankind, you are walking through the fields of time.

  Most farm workers’ language was as old-fashioned as the plough. In many counties ‘w’s were dropped – for example, the word ‘woman’ was pronounced ‘ooman’, and grammar was all over the place. When an old gamekeeper agreed that one of the park deer looked poorly, and said, ‘Arr, I seed one up there crope about fairish’, it was clear that he meant the animal looked pretty sick. No point in telling him that ‘seed’ was not the past tense of ‘see’, nor ‘crope’ that of ‘creep’. One day Jack Hatt, who farmed at Checkendon in Oxfordshire, returned from market to see Olive, his Shire horse, lying prostrate on the field, with the ploughman, Danny, standing disconsolately beside her.

  ‘Danny! Danny!’ cried Jack, running up. ‘What’s wrong with Olive?’

  ‘Blamed if er didn’t go and die on me,’ Danny answered, ‘and I’ve never knowed she do that afore.’

  Two

  All Hands to the Plough

  His way is still the obstinate old way,

  Even though his horses stare above the hedge,

  And whinny, while the tractor drives its wedge

  Where they were wont to serve,

  And iron robs them of their privilege.

  The Yeoman, from Vita Sackville-West’s The Land

  The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, passed on 1 September 1939, gave the Ministry of Agriculture drastic powers to intervene in the countryside. When the Government announced that it would pay £2 for every acre of old grassland ploughed up, there was a stampede of applications. By the middle of September 12,000 farmers had applied, and 220,000 acres had qualified for the grant. On 15 September The Farmers’ Weekly declared:

  Within the last ten days the whole face of British farming has been transformed. The industry … has been brought under a degree of Government control which has never been experienced before, and which only a few weeks ago would have been unthinkable. Maximum prices have been fixed for many of the things the farmer has to buy or sell. Within certain limits he will be told what he may or may not grow. Many of his younger employees will be taken away and replaced by labour which, in many cases, will be less efficient.

  In a national farm survey owners and tenants were required to record the condition of their land – the nature of the soil, the acreage of arable crops and grass, the areas that were derelict, the state of their cottages, buildings, tracks, fences, ditches and water. They also had to declare if their property was infested with rats or rabbits, and to suggest ways of improving land in poor condition. The survey, which took more than two years, was an enormous undertaking: there were 300,000 farmers in England and Wales, and as one expert pointed out, ‘No two farms were identical in soil, in layout, in buildings or in climate; no two farmers, in temperament, training and experience.’

  The agents created for achieving results were the County War Agricultural Executive Committees (commonly known as ‘War Ags’), reincarnations of similar bodies set up during the First World War. There was one War Ag committee for each of the fifty-two counties, made up of seven to ten unpaid local men, experts in various fields, principally farming. These then appointed sub-committees to deal with individual areas. Whenever they were photographed for one of the agricultural journals, attending demonstrations of new machinery or going out to inspect a farm, committee members turned out in uniform of suits and bowler hats or trilbies – although often the Chairman can easily be identified as a landed gentleman from his tweed jacket and plus-fours as he sits in the centre of the front row.

  The officials were empowered to walk anybody’s land and prescribe what needed to be done, even down to decreeing which crop was to go in which field, and the dates by which crops must be planted. If a farmer agreed to be helped, the Committee would loan him machinery from a pool, and extra labour whenever it could be found. If he refused to plough as directed, or his land was in too bad a state for him to tackle it, the War Ag could take over his whole operation and run it with their own men and machinery, or offer the tenancy to someone else.

  A leader in the The Farmers’ Weekly warned readers that the Minister might also ‘authorise persons to enter upon land for the purpose of preventing or minimising injury to crops or wastage of pasture by birds, hares, rabbits, deer, vermin or pests, for the purpose of increasing the supply of food to the United Kingdom’.

  In other words, the Minister of Agriculture has more or less complete power over the farming of this country … County authorities will have a difficult and thankless task. They will be servant and whipping-boy, adviser and master. They will do their best to be friend as well.

  To men with strong territorial instincts, whose families had always managed their own land, at their own pace, for generations, such draconian intervention came as a shock. Many resented being given orders by strangers, and were suspicious of officials who, having walked their fields in city suits, then told them what to do. Still worse, if a difficult decision had to be taken, the whole of the War Ag committee might turn out in force to assess the position – a posse of interlopers tramping over the fields, and an even greater insult. Yet it was no use arguing. Anyone who rejected the Committee’s suggestions was liable to be fined, and, if he still refused to cooperate, to be evicted from his house and holding.

  One such was Merriam Lloyd, owner of Dove Farm at Akenfield, in Suffolk. The story was told to Ronald Blythe by Lloyd’s grandson Terry:

  He was a bachelor who walked about with a gun – you know the sort. He was very independent, and nobody could tell him anything. He knew it all. His farm wasn’t much when he bought it, by all accounts, but it was a sight worse when the Second World War broke out. He hadn’t done a thing except walk round it. Of course the War Ag told him to plough up his meadows – told him! Of course, he wasn’t having that. He took no notice. So they pushed him out. Some men came and literally pushed him out of his own front door. Then they brought some bits of furniture out and stood it round him on the lawn. They wanted the house, you see, for administration. Well, he went to live in a shepherd’s hut in the orchard, where he stayed all through the war, and doing absolutely nothing, of course, and the Dove was given to Jolly Beeston to farm.

  In a still more extreme case a farmer refused to plough his land, as directed, then ignored an eviction order. In the words of the historian Sadie Ward,

  The police were sent in, only to find the farmhouse secured against them and the farmer armed with a shotgun. After an exchange of shots and the unsuccessful use of tear gas, the police, backed up by troops, forced an entry. Continuing to resist arrest, the farmer was shot dead.

  Even minor infringements of the Tillage Act were mercilessly punished. Two poor old farmers in Northern Ireland, both in their seventies, and with tiny holdings of ten and eleven acres, were fined £20 and £18 for falling short with their ploughing. The Ministry of Agriculture rejected their appeal, saying that the Act had been introduced in the national interest, and that no breaches of its
provisions would be tolerated.

  Between 1939 and 1945 some 15,000 farmers were forcibly dispossessed – a figure that sounds distressingly high, until one takes account of the fact that it represented only about 5 per cent of the agricultural holdings at that time. A great many farms changed hands: some were sold at auction in the normal way, but at the end of the war land would be offered back to an evicted owner, and if for any reason he did not want it, or if he had died, it would go on the market.

  Most farmers were glad of help, and many were grateful to be relieved of responsibility. As one former official put it, ‘They looked upon us as saviours.’ When, after struggling with years of deficits, they saw money begin to roll in, they often became positively enthusiastic.

  In the experience of Derek Barber (later Lord Barber), who was a student at the Royal Agricultural College in 1938, and then a member of the Gloucestershire War Ag committee, ‘the war made everyone realise how important food production was. Simple people were introduced to more sophisticated ways of working the land.’ Seventy years later he was still haunted by the memory of finding a young man dragging dung out of a horse-drawn cart with a pitchfork. The farm was a mass of weeds, and the mother sat in the house all day while her son did what he could to keep things under control. The farm had ‘got into a terrible muddle’, and Barber managed to persuade the family to accept help. The War Ag took over, paid some rent and lifted the family out of their despair.

  Derek Barber’s mentor was Professor Robert Boutflour, Principal of the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester since 1931, and Chief Executive Officer of the Gloucestershire War Ag. Son of a farmer in Northumberland, he was short, stocky and boiling with energy – a tremendous man-manager: his ability to generate enthusiasm spurred countless farmers into far more effective action than they had thought possible, and he became a symbol of the war effort, in that he made the best of everything given him. One night he telephoned Barber and said, ‘There are a hundred tons of potatoes arriving at Moreton-in-Marsh station at six tomorrow morning. Plant ’em.’