Essex Land Girls
Page 3
In the summer of 1918, the Ilford Guardian featured an article describing the Land Girls locally as ‘doing every kind of work from thatching to mole catching’. The article pointed out that most enrolled for six months, when they were sent straight to farms, or for one year in which case they received six weeks’ free training, applicable to the agricultural and timber-cutting sections of the Land Army. Those who wished to do forage work (under the control of the War Office) ‘must sign on for twelve months’. The girls were described as ‘doing excellent work in sending hay to the front, and the usefulness of the timber gangs can hardly be exaggerated’. At the time, however, food shortages placed special stress on the agricultural section, which included ‘dairy work, milking, the care of all kinds of stock and poultry, market gardening, tractor ploughing and every kind of field work’.
Among the impressive collection of photographs at Mersea Museum is one of uniformed Land Girls at Bocking Hall in Mersea working for ‘seed growers’, around 1918. The theory is that the WLA here recruited local girls rather than bringing in ‘outsiders’, backed up by the fact that many of the surnames of those identified are familiar locally, both before and after the photograph.
Appreciation and accolades for the members of the WLA came from diverse sources, right up to the very top, but took time to have any effect. Representatives of the WLA visited Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, 19 March 1918, preceded by a procession featuring a hay wagon with two fine horses from an Essex farm (according to the Chelmsford Chronicle). The girls were the guests of Lady Denman at a vegetarian luncheon, and were subjected to an informal inspection by Queen Mary.
Seed growers at Bocking Hall Farm, West Mersea, 1918. Note the armbands in memory of those who lost their lives in the First World War. (Courtesy of Ron Green’s collection at Mersea Museum)
Demonstrating Their Capabilities
In the summer of 1917, a Women’s Farm Competition was organised by the Hertfordshire and Essex Women’s War Agricultural Committees, and took place in Bishop’s Stortford, just over the Hertfordshire/Essex border, with competitors from a dozen counties in scorching sunshine. An account in the 1 August issue of the Illustrated War News reads:
Probably not a few farmers in the country today are wishing that they had not been quite so hasty in letting prejudice against women’s work over-ride their own common sense. [This] competition was not only the biggest, but easily the most successful, demonstration of women’s farm work ever held in the country. From eleven o’clock onwards, women from all parts of England gave practical proof of their skill in all branches of work connected with farming. One is apt to think of farm girls as the picturesque sun-bonneted maidens with whom we are familiar on the musical-comedy stage. But pretty as the sun-bonnets and immaculate prints were, the drab-coloured breeches and gaiters with the covering tunic affected by the girl on the land today are equally attractive if a little less picturesque. But then carting manure, harnessing horses to carts and harrows, hoeing, killing poultry, and milking, are more serious pursuits than usual for the musical-comedy land girl.
The judges of the competition were ‘sturdy farmers from Hertfordshire and Essex, who confessed themselves frankly delighted with the high standard achieved by so many of the competitors’. Events included ‘carting, tilting, laying out manure, driving a cart between rows of pegs that made very little allowance for errors of judgment, hoeing roots, ditching and hedge-trimming, harrowing, harnessing, poultry killing and plucking, and milking strange cows embarrassed at the publicity of the ordeal, with as much coolness and absence of fuss as if they had never done anything else’. The workers were described as ‘sunburnt and freckled, attractive and picturesque’ striding about ‘in their workmanlike get-up with their hair tucked away under a wide-awake [a hat with brim and low crown, wittily so called because it didn’t have a nap …], a handkerchief, or a sunbonnet’. There are references to the range of backgrounds of the girls – ‘university women, domestic servants’ – and to the ‘very small’ percentage of women who relinquish the work ‘on account of physical incapacity to carry it on’.
In spite of the hazards of the work, one Land Army Girl in Essex managed to do more serious damage simply by falling off her bicycle in September 1919. This was Rose Thorne, aged 22, living then at Broomfield Road in Chelmsford. She sustained a fractured leg, a nasty injury, which was reported in the Essex Newsman.
Some Personal Stories
Alice Walker, born towards the end of the nineteenth century, was at Langdon Hall near Dunton, working in domestic service like so many of her age, at the outbreak of war. She broke away from this environment by signing on as a Land Army Girl and worked at local farms: primarily, it seems, Blue House Farm and latterly Rose Farm, in Laindon. Although from a rural area, she had no farming experience, and worked with the animals, learning to milk the cows and churn the butter, all by hand. She also learned to shoot local vermin, a threat to the food crops, including rabbits – as evidenced by this image of her in uniform complete with shotgun. (‘Excess rabbits’ were mentioned at Norsey Wood, Billericay, in the minutes of one of the 1918 meetings of the Agricultural Executive Committee.) Alice’s experiences gained her a husband, because in 1919 she married the farmer’s son, George Walker, and the couple lived and farmed out of Rose Farm. Her memories were passed to her great-niece, Margaret King from Benfleet, who actually saw the butter churn as a youngster but wasn’t able to turn the handle.
Alice Walker (née Stenning), in the Laindon area, 1917. (Courtesy of Edmund King)
Another Land Army Girl at Blue House Farm was Lynette Ashley. Her story is recounted in Laindon in the Great War. Starting time for Lynette was apparently 4.30 a.m., with a walk across the fields while eating large slices of bread and jam. Her main task was getting the herd of cattle in for milking in time for the 7 a.m. train to London, delivered by horse and cart to Laindon Station at breakneck speed. At calmer moments, with the cows chewing the cud, falling asleep caused her an occasional scare in case the herd had wandered off.
Born in 1895, Doris Robinson recorded an account (for the Imperial War Museum) of working ‘for a strange man’ on a ‘farm in Loughton’ after just two weeks’ training at Little Baddow. Here she ‘looked after seven jersey cows, 400 hens, goats and ducks’ on her own! There were some extra staff employed ‘at haymaking’ but there were ‘no days off, even on Christmas day’ when she was ‘given mouldy fruit as a Christmas gift’.
The only reference she made to her uniform was to the armbands she wore, but she refers to her ‘lodgings with the carpenter and his wife, paying them 18s per week out of my £1 per week pay’, with another 3d payable for insurance. These lodgings were described as a ‘large house with nowhere to wash except in the cowshed’, but she stayed there for two years until marrying in 1917. She ‘enjoyed working with animals’ and ‘rode a pony, using a sack, not a saddle’. Originally from Rochdale, Doris had decided that the WLA was easier than nursing – her original choice, but with ‘too many questions’ she couldn’t answer!
She spoke of the ‘bath in the greenhouse’ and the danger of ‘climbing ladders’ and the pain of chilblains as a result of the cold. Although ‘left to my own devices’, she was not unhappy because she ‘was surrounded by creatures … I even enjoyed rounding up the ducks’.
Annie Russell from Little Horkesley was born in 1903 and lived on the family farm at Boxted, where she helped out as a very young member of the WLA. Her daughter felt she was well suited to the tough tasks involved, and in an interview for the Southend Echo (30 July 2014), described Annie as ‘very good with horses’. She learnt to plough ‘as well as any man with a team of two heavy horses’. Her father, the farm bailiff, would trust no one else to ‘hold a horse’ if it needed medical treatment. ‘The most important duty she had was to drive the pony and trap to North Station, Colchester, to collect the rations for the German prisoners of war who had been sent to work on the farm.’ Apparently, ‘her father always knew if she had whipped
the horse up the hill on her way home, and she would get into a lot of trouble for this’. Annie could ‘lay a hedge, prune fruit trees, rotate crops’, knew all about harvesting, was aware of the importance of deep drained ditches to keep the land in good condition, and the conservation of the rainfall to avoid flooding. Although fond of animals, she could ‘wring a chicken’s neck and hit a rabbit on the back of the head’.
Annie Russell (née Balls), aged around 14, in Boxted area, c. 1917 (Courtesy of Pauline Taylor)
A very detailed account was produced by Southampton Museum in 1983 for an oral history project. This was provided by Olive Crosswell from Great Baddow who joined the Land Army at nearby Chelmsford between 1917 and 1918. She received her training ‘on the job’, i.e. on the farm.
One of the first things she learned was how to milk a cow, and she points out that if you were ‘the first to go’ then you were working with a ‘dry cow’ and this made it even more difficult for someone with no experience, and resulted in swollen arms and wrists. If you managed to get a froth on the milk, that meant you were ‘doing well’. She remembers one cow kicking the ‘first lot of good milk’ into the gully, to her obvious dismay. Milk had to be put through the cooler (which looked to her like a washboard), and into a separator to divide the cream and milk. Turning the butter churn was one of the best jobs, achieving gorgeous results.
Apart from the milking, Olive was involved in general farm work and was moved around a lot, though most of the farms she remembers were in Essex. She cut hay and tied it into stooks from around 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., following this up with muck spreading and feeding the horses and/or cows, depending on the farm. She also used a harvester and a big scythe for cutting edges (dangerous work it seems), and loaded up the pony carts. When one such pony got himself stuck in a gate, the farmer swore at her, and she felt that he (and others) were not happy with being fobbed off with Land Girls rather than ‘proper’ farm workers. One farmer also objected to her being given a glass of milk, declaring that it should have been water. But the nastiest incident she remembers was more painful: the time she went flying through the door to the cow-house yard and ended up on her rear, bursting one of several unpleasant boils! This put her in bed for the afternoon, and she had to explain the embarrassing experience to her overseer when she didn’t turn up to feed the pigs, who had begun protesting in a very noisy fashion. The wound was bound up in a strip torn from her chemise and she was at work the next morning.
Olive admitted that she did occasionally need help from the few men that were left working on the farms. For instance, when in Bentley (there are two Bentleys in Essex, but which one is not defined) she had been trying to get a pony into its trap when it broke away. Her hair ribbon flew off as she struggled to hang on, but passing workers stood with their arms out and the pony stopped and calmed down, a literally hair-raising experience. ‘At least it wasn’t the stallion,’ she recalls, ‘he was kept for breeding, and was a very noisy animal which I had to feed.’ The same pony, named Punch, refused to increase his pace when going downhill; he would be completely oblivious to any of the rural noises around him but a piece of fluttering paper could frighten him and then he would pick up speed inordinately.
At one farm, Olive also had to tend a couple of goats, one male and one pregnant female. She claims that seeing the birth of that goat put her off having a baby of her own! It was not unusual for two people to have to hold down one goat before it would stand still long enough to be milked.
She also worked on a market garden in Essex, described as being ‘opposite a Royal Artillery Camp’ (of which there were several) and was amazed to see a woman farmer who smoked and rolled her own. She had ‘never seen a lady smoking’ before. She hung on to a black cigarette given to her by one of the troops while at the market garden and she still had it in the 1980s. An advantage of this particular job was that she was able to take home – i.e. to her billet – spring onions and radishes, and also give some to the soldiers in the camp. A disadvantage was scrubbing the plant pots in cold water in the winter. Another memory was:
The officers had horses and the men had mules … which were fed from troughs, to the accompaniment of a bugle playing:
Oh come to the stable you men that are able
And walk to your horses and give them some corn.
Other unforgettable incidents include the day Olive came back from lunch at her billet and an officer spoke to her, but she had a mouthful of toffee and couldn’t answer him back, and the day she lost one farming job because she went to church with the stable boy. Then there was the time she was picking currants and saw her first German aeroplane coming over from the direction of Southend, falling down in her haste to get away. This was one of the few reminders of the war going on around her – another was seeing a Zeppelin coming down over Billericay in 1916. But her memories are mainly of less alarming times.
Demobilisation
The Chelmsford Chronicle continued to report meetings of the EWWAA in May 1919, with Lady Petre still at the helm. A member of the Executive Committee confirmed that the ‘woman on the land’ was likely to remain in Essex as ‘a blessing of peace’. The high standards required by the WLA during the First World War were stressed, with 1,500 girls being interviewed in Essex during the previous two years and just 535 accepted, and another 500 girls had been trained up, meaning that 300 had been ‘imported’ from other counties. The average wage had inched its way up to 27s 8¼d, with billets being charged at 16s 11d. During the preceding year, sixty-two girls had been tested for efficiency certificates, with twelve passing Class A and thirty-six passing Class B.
Members of the WLA in Essex were presented with ‘Good Service’ ribbons early in 1919, soon after the end of the First World War. Such awards revealed satisfactory evidence regarding their work and conduct, sourced from their employers who had been asked questions regarding their punctuality, behaviour and industry. Comments received from employers were satisfyingly complimentary – ‘could not wish for a better’, ‘cannot speak too highly’ and even, ‘better than any man’.
At the end of 1919 (29 November), Princess Mary presented a number of Land Girls with the Distinguished Service Bar (DSB), popularly known as the ‘Land Girls’ VC’. The princess attended a meeting at Shire Hall in Chelmsford where a resolution, invoked by Lady Petre among others, was passed to approve the formation of an Essex branch of the National Association of Landswomen following the demobilisation of the WLA. Recipients of the DSB included ‘Miss C. Capper’ and ‘Miss G. Chapman’, the latter described as an Essex Land Girl who had been decorated for more than one ‘plucky deed’ (the terminology of the Essex Newsman). On one occasion, she had broken a bone in her foot and injured a rib in an accident, but insisted upon finishing her milk round as no other workers were available. On another, when in charge of a hay wagon, a horse took fright, reared and bolted, but she managed to hold on to his head until he came to a standstill. Two other members of the WLA, Miss M. Skeats and Miss G. Tyler, were specially invited to attend the subsequent supper and concert as a thank you for their long service and good record.
In Memory
At Tiptree Jam Museum, a rhyme has been archived, dedicated to ‘The Lady Carter’ delivering fruit to the factory. It is adapted from Thomas Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, and is of particular interest because of its references during the First World War to ‘young maids’ reaping the harvests of East Anglia, and to ‘strapping wenches’ stirring the ‘foaming vats at Tiptree’. Whether this was a WLA recruit is, of course, impossible to establish without a name, but she is certainly a contender.
Another poem was quoted in the Essex Newsman on 6 December 1919, entitled ‘Goodbye Girls’. This is quoted in part, and is a rather touching, though anonymous, appreciation of the work done by ‘Rose’, a WLA member:
No other Rose is half so sweet
As she who milked our cow;
I fancy still I hear her feet –
I would she were here now.
‘The Lady Carter’, as she was known. An anonymous Land Girl at Tiptree Fruit Farm during the First World War. (Courtesy of Tiptree Museum)
Three
The Second World War in Essex
The Growth of the WLA in Essex: Preparations
In 1939, the UK was importing 60 per cent of its food from overseas. More land was needed for food production, and local War Agricultural Executive Committees had been established before the war to find and utilise the great swathes of Essex countryside massed with thorn bushes and untrimmed hedges the size of small copses. Members of the committee visited farms and decided on which fields needed ploughing, with the farmers being paid a grant of £2 per acre as compensation. Inefficient farmers were threatened with eviction, so there was certainly pressure on them to produce the goods.
This was also the very beginning of mechanised farming, an essential requirement for some of the heavy clay lands of Essex. Mechanisation slowly helped to boost food production, turning the eastern counties into the ‘granary of England’ with 60,000 additional acres in Essex identified for ploughing by the Ministry of Agriculture.
However, between 1921 and 1939, over 20 per cent of farm workers left their jobs in Essex, leaving insufficient labour to provide the increased production that was now necessary. All male farm workers, shepherds, pig men, cattle men and greenhouse workers aged 21 and over were called up.