Essex Land Girls

by Dee Gordon

  The first assignment for Connie Robinson was in Boreham, which ‘seemed miles away’ from her home in Chadwell Heath. She had to:

  … get a train, then a bike ride to my billet with a young couple and their little girl; he was a horseman. The very first day, they gave me corned beef fritters, and I was ill with a tummy bug as a result. Everyone spoke broad Essex, and on my first morning, the foreman greeted me with ‘Morning, together …’

  Which, Connie recalled, left her completely baffled.

  Hilda Gentry preferred the hostel, in an old rectory near Chelmsford, to the isolation of ‘private lodgings’. She lived there with twenty girls and remembers the ‘oil lamps and the cess pits’. No main drainage meant that facilities were ‘very crude … and I had to go home once when I needed fumigating’. The hostel had a cook, Betty, and a supervisor, Miss Villiers, and Hilda ‘had to sign in by 10 p.m. unless you had a late pass’.

  One of the Land Girls featured in All Muck, Now Medals was Gladys Sirs, who was sent to a dairy farm in Leaden Roding. Her parents accompanied her on the train, stopping off at Chelmsford, and the farmer’s family gave them a ‘royal welcome … country hospitality at its very best … quickly made to feel like one of the family … My parents were invited to visit … to see me and have a report on my progress caring for a mixed herd of Friesians and dairy shorthorns.’

  Ramsden Bellhouse Farm was the destination for Florence Rawlings. Although from the East End, she was not fazed by the thought of working with the bulls that were bred there for showing. From home, she took a train to Wickford and then ‘cycled for three miles’ to stay with the farmer, Mr Thorn(e) and his family.

  It was a happy experience for Mary Page, when she moved from Northamptonshire to Pebmarsh. She had ‘a lovely billet next door to Mr Wisbey’s farm’ with her ‘own room with a lovely family’.

  At Ivy Cardy’s first billet in Clacton, she was not provided with a lunch and she ‘had to take her shoes off in the house [and] couldn’t use the kitchen to make a drink’, but the second was friendlier and she was treated as part of the family. The main rule there was that she and the other Land Girls had to ‘clean their shoes’. She preferred being billeted in the town to being on a farm, with hotels being utilised along the seafront – a ‘lively area’.

  Braintree District Museum has an interesting account donated by ‘Joyce’ regarding her arrival, post-1942, at Coggeshall House, which had taken on a temporary role as a WLA Hostel:

  It is a large, beautiful Georgian house, three reception rooms, a very large kitchen, a couple of utility rooms, six plus bedrooms, two bathrooms. As you walked in the heavy wooden front door, the first thing you noticed was the well-polished parquet floor and beautiful double entry stairway. About thirty WLA girls and domestic staff lived here. Ann and I arrived midday by train and taxi. The warden, Mrs Settle, showed us to our room and we waited until the girls arrived back from the fields. Everyone was very friendly and I immediately felt at home.

  Interestingly, historian Stan Haines feels that the ‘Matron’ here was remembered ‘as a bit of a martinet’.

  No sooner had Leyton girl Ellen Brown signed up, than she was called into the office at Writtle where there was a farmer ‘desperate for a Land Girl’ and told ‘he will train you’. So she ‘went home, packed, and got a train to Chelmsford where I was met at the station and supplied with a bike… I lived with a widow and her daughter’ 1 mile from the farmer – Charles – at Wood Farm, who was undeterred by the fact that ‘I had never been on a farm before …’ Her first reaction was to telephone her dad and tell him she wanted to go home, but he, to her surprise, told her to give it a chance, which she did, and was pleased she stuck with it.

  Gladys Pudney was billeted with a Mr and Mrs Lang in St John’s Road, Writtle. She described Mrs Lang as a ‘dear little country woman with pink cheeks … Mr Lang was a Scot’. To get to work Gladys used her own bicycle and took a packed lunch provided by Mrs Lang.

  Similarly, Barbara Rix cycled to Red House Farm every day from the ‘little cottage’ where she was billeted in Wix with an ‘old couple who treated me like a daughter … I had to take the candle upstairs and had to wash in the bedroom with frozen water in a jug’.

  Two girls who had no time to settle in were Lynette Vince and her sister. They travelled to a billet in Wivenhoe and were sent straight out to a farm ‘just in time for milking’. They ‘were given a bucket and stool each … [and] my sister said “Are you going to show us how to do it?” I had never even seen a cow!’ They did not like this billet, where Lynette’s long hair was blamed for jamming the carpet sweeper, and she turned up on her mum’s doorstep in Wanstead and wrote a letter about her unhappiness with ‘a landlady who was dreadful to us’ and was moved to Peldon. This was a hostel ‘built for prisoners of war with one big dormitory’, and Eva Parratt wrote of it as housing about forty girls in double bunks with ‘no sheets, just blankets’. Lynette was ‘moved again to a lovely old house called Orleans near the coast at Mersea with about seventy girls … here there was a lovely old Norwegian cook, Mrs Valentine … always cheese sandwiches for lunch but always a wonderful meal on our return …’ Transport from the billet was provided either by ‘lorry or coach’.

  Some were lucky enough to be able to live at home. Amongst these was Joan Carpenter from Boreham who spent her WLA years working at nearby New Hall, a former Tudor hunting lodge with a 4-acre garden full of vegetables and fruit. The location seems to have been the luck of the draw. Elsie Haysman ‘stayed at home’ in Ashingdon Hill for the duration, getting around on her WLA bicycle which she had ‘customised red, white and blue’ to ‘prevent it being stolen’. These Land Army issue bicycles were otherwise painted black with heavy frames, and not easy to pedal in rigid boots. The Suffolk Review of autumn 2004 features Kathleen Kellock, who ‘stayed living with her parents in Wickham Bishops and cycled to work on two farms, joined by nine other Land Girls, three local and six living in a hostel in Great Totham’.

  Eva Parratt née Funnell (front row, left) and unidentified chums. (Courtesy of Rosemary Pepper)

  Others, like Dorothea Strange from Hockley, would stay at home when they could, dependent on the farm they had been allocated. In her case, she also ‘used billets at Broxted and Stansted’. Iris Richardson had a few opportunities to live at home when working in Essex, but also worked on ‘much bigger farms in Buckinghamshire’ where she stayed in a hostel, travelling there on her ‘first ever train journey’ in 1942. As for Margaret Penfold, she was ‘billeted a long way out [in Halstead], one place an old Victorian house and another a hostel built for Italian prisoners of war but taken over by the WLA …’ but at one point, when working on a ‘farm in Chigwell Row, nearer home in Ilford’, she would travel home. Working on a ‘farm in Boreham’ though, meant another move, to Chelmsford, and she ‘was issued with a heavy bike’ for the daily journey.

  Diana Thake was a trainee hairdresser in Loughton when she volunteered to join the WLA. She was sent to Woodredon Farm at Waltham Abbey, where pedigree Ayrshires were bred. In the September/October 2005 Loughton & District Historical Society Newsletter, she had this to say: ‘I was really lucky … It was around four miles away from where I lived and I used to cycle there and back every day.’

  Because Babs Newman joined in 1943, she was sent straight from her home in Lexden to a hostel. This was in Takeley, near Stansted, where she ‘lived with twelve cockney girls’.

  Betty Cloughton ‘was billeted with a family [in West Mersea] who remained good friends for many years. From there, I was sent to a hostel in Wickham Bishops, then into a private billet in the same village with a couple who were so nice and treated me like a daughter then and for many years.’

  Edna Green stayed in the farmhouse attached to Graveleys Farm at Great Waltham, run by:

  … a loving couple [who] took me to their hearts straight away. They were a devoted couple, hardworking and caring people, and I grew to love them dearly. In the evening we would sit by the
light of the oil lamp, and talk about our hard day’s work and … later, after a warm cup of cocoa, but never ever later than nine o’clock, a candle lit my way up the old oak stairs to my cosy room.

  A later billet, however, ‘shared with 40 girls’, offered ‘atrocious food’ and, even worse, when it was being decorated they were ‘moved to an original doctor’s surgery, complete with a skeleton in a cupboard’ which came as quite a surprise …

  Another account of the WLA hostel experience was given by Rene Wilkinson. She lived with ‘forty girls in a hostel in Station Road, Stansted, [with] Mrs Dover, a dragon, in charge’. Facilities here included ‘a pot-bellied stove, an ablution block, dormitories with four bunks in each bay, a dining hall and kitchen. After an alarm call at 7 a.m., cereal [was provided] for breakfast [and we] collected lunch … four slices … with a cooked meal at night.’

  Winnie Bell was billeted in Ingatestone High Street to start with, along with three other Land Girls, but was also able to travel home every night when working at Rainham. She remembers one billet ‘in a village with a tractor driver and his wife’, and a hostel near Margaretting, ‘now a listed building’, where she ‘shared a bed’ with her friend. Sharing a bed was not at all unusual and readily accepted. East Ender Florence Rawlings recalls being billeted at one time with the Barker family close to Ramsden Bellhouse, and ‘sharing a bed with their eight year old daughter … an uncomfortable bed with a flock pillow’.

  Rather different accommodation was provided for several members of the Dagenham Girl Pipers. They camped in chalets in the garden of a thatched cottage owned by Reverend Graves (the founder and manager of the band) at Great Sampford. There is a mention of three pipers ‘working the land’ in the Dagenham Post, dated 12 July 1940, referring to a farm near Saffron Walden.

  Irene Verlander wrote of a billet in Boxted which was a pretty country cottage, but with ‘damp beds, and the cook often missing because she was always at Boxted Airfield [near Langham] with the American pilots’! When she and her friend complained to the local secretary, Mrs Solly-Flood, they had to travel to Witham to explain the situation and were told off for their lack of forbearance, but Irene was given work nearer her home, so it had been worth making a fuss.

  Left to right: Grace Richards, Margaret Fraser and Ada Clatworthy. Dagenham Girl Pipers working the land. (Courtesy of Linda Rhodes)

  Many girls – including a large contingent from Romford – were billeted in Orleans, on Mersea, a big old house now long gone. They were taken to their place of work by Underwood’s coal lorry, not the best or cleanest form of travel!

  A different viewpoint was offered by Winifred Daines from Plaistow. She felt that the WLA ‘opened hostels just to save money’, but ‘the landladies had prepared their homes to take in Land Girls, and needed the money’. As a result, she ‘invented a special diet, and was allowed to continue to stay in billets’ which were mainly around Braintree and Grays. A lady of principles!

  THE HOSTEL EXPERIENCE

  There is no published list of WLA hostels in Essex. The following list may not be complete, and is reliant on press references and the memories of those that were there, with memory being a capricious animal. However, it gives some idea of the spread of hostels across the county:

  • Wigborough Road, Peldon, Colchester

  • The Avenue, Colchester

  • Lexden Road, Colchester (Colchester had its own WLA organiser because of the numbers billeted in the town – around 150)

  • Nazeing

  • Layer Marney

  • Fordham

  • Creeksea Hall, Burnham-on-Crouch

  • Totham, near Maldon

  • Rettendon

  • Halstead, Bluebridge Hill

  • Garth End, Little Braxted

  • Mark Hall, Harlow

  • Cranham

  • Thundersley

  • Coggeshall House

  • Orleans, Mersea

  • Great Totham

  • Wickham Bishops

  • Broxted

  • Station Road, Stansted

  • The Limes, Takeley

  • Great Codham Hall, near Braintree

  • Thoby Hall, Mountnessing

  • Butlers Hostel, Broomfield

  • Langley

  • Margaretting

  • Great Dunmow (possibly two here)

  • Warley

  • Park House, Bradwell

  • Mangapp’s, near Burnham on Crouch

  • Stambridge

  • Rochford

  The wardens or supervisors employed to take charge of these hostels and the Land Girls were a diverse range of women and did not always stay the distance. Joanna Round, for instance, was the supervisor at Peldon in 1942, having previously been in the EWAG office at Colchester, but left in July 1943 to be replaced by ‘Mrs V.’ who was given notice to leave soon after. This apparently put her in quite a rage, according to E.J. Rudsdale’s Journals of Wartime Colchester, but as she had a reputation for doing more harm than good, she was perhaps not a great loss.

  When the hostel at Langley opened in 1943 (the nearest hostel prior to this for Land Girls in north Essex was over the Hertfordshire border at Brent Pelham) it took some time to find a warden because of the remoteness of the village. The vicar called upon his wife Doris, an ex-teacher, to act as a live-in warden until a permanent one could be found, and she moved in with their 5-year-old daughter plus a cook to help out. Jacqueline Cooper (in Clavering at War) quotes the vicar as announcing:

  It is a return to bachelor days, but I shall do that gladly knowing that the national effort is being helped on in a small way by my household. I am sure that in both Langley and Clavering a welcome will be given to these girls, most of whom are new recruits from London and quite unused to life as we know it in a small village.

  Doris did a grand job, by all accounts, for the few weeks until her replacement arrived and by September 1943 there were twenty girls in residence.

  The Essex WLA were still recruiting staff for local hostels in February 1944. There was an advertisement in the Chelmsford Chronicle (4 February) pointing out an ‘urgent’ need for ‘cooks and domestics’ offering ‘good pay and outings’. Applications were being dealt with by the organising secretary of the WLA at the Essex Institute of Agriculture, Writtle. The wardens were effectively advised by the county offices of the WLA to make the hostel the centre of the social life of the neighbourhood, and to include billeted Land Girls and local residents in hostel activities whether these were mainly dances or such down-to-earth pastimes as make-and-mend classes or lectures.

  In October 1944, ‘K. Brenner’ from ‘The Limes, Takeley’, wrote to The Land Girl. She announced the introduction of a hostel news-sheet with contributions from members of the hostel in the form of poems and experiences, with the addition of local newspaper cuttings. The writer’s idea was to produce something that ‘everyone had a hand in’ to make them ‘feel closer in spirit as well as in achievement’.

  Gaining Acceptance

  Once male labour was at a minimum (c. 1941) the Land Girls were gradually accepted, though at first many farmers were dubious. Farm worker Victor Sibley remembers five Land Army Girls arriving on his Halstead farm who had ‘never seen a pitchfork or even a mouse …’ and took three to four weeks to learn how to use basic implements. He described some of them as having had ‘butlers waiting on them at home’ so were now leading a very different life, based in the hostel nearby and cycling to the farm. He was not unsympathetic to their working conditions, however, especially the lack of toilet facilities in a 20-acre field where only ‘dock leaves were available as toilet paper’.

  The Essex Chronicle of 11 July 1941 described the Land Girls as ‘excellent workers’ with particular reference to those ‘specialising in market gardening and poultry work’ and praised them for working in conditions which meant some of them sleeping in ‘converted poultry houses’.

  In January 1943, however, the Essex Chronicle was s
till pointing out the lack of training for too many Land Girls. The annual meeting of the Waltham Abbey branch of the National Farmers’ Union passed a resolution to ‘make representations to the proper authority to ensure that Land Girls receive some training before being posted to farms’. Mr Willis Chapman complained of ‘absolutely green girls being dumped on the farms … the authorities would not dump an untrained A.T.S. on a searchlight site’, he said. At least one member was fighting the WLA’s corner, however, with Mr Walker, the county secretary, reminding members that ‘the training ground for them is the farm’.

  This was around the same time that the local War Ag committee staged Land Army exhibitions at the Corn Exchanges in Saffron Walden, Braintree, Chelmsford, and Colchester, described in The Land Girl of February 1943. The exhibitions, aimed at ‘sceptical’ farmers who were unaware of what a ‘mere girl’ could do, included photographs of volunteers at work and a model farm with thirteen volunteers giving demonstrations, evoking ‘heartening’ interest. Two months later, the Essex Newsman reported a meeting of the Southminster Farmers’ Union, whose president announced that Land Girls were ‘tackling their work in a splendid way and doing yeoman service … on the whole they were taking on men’s jobs and doing them thoroughly’.

  The Essex WLA Touring Exhibition of March 1943 visited many venues. From The Land Girl, March 1943. (Courtesy of Stuart Antrobus and www.womens landarmy.co.uk)

  Some wannabe Land Girls found it less easy to be accepted, however. A story that made the national press – and even the front page of the Daily Mirror on 24 September 1943 – was the story of Amelia King from John Scurr House in Stepney. Like others, she had been interviewed at the Oxford Street, London, offices of the WLA but been told that farmers would object to ‘her colour’ – Amelia was of African-Caribbean descent. She was latterly informed by the Stratford Labour Exchange in East London that she had been turned down for the Land Army by the Essex County Committee, with no reason being given. Amelia was offered munitions work but, with her father a merchant seaman and a brother in the navy, she wasn’t going to settle for that and took her case to Parliament. The Minister of Agriculture did not feel he could force the Essex branch of the War Ag to accept Amelia, because it seemed that other Afro-Caribbean girls had also been turned away, with the WLA powerless to overcome ‘individual prejudice’. A farmer from Portsmouth came forward and offered Amelia work, although she insisted that she was employed by the WLA, and in this she finally succeeded, having made her point. Defiant, courageous and spirited, what else could the WLA ask of anyone.