Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45

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.’

‘We haven’t got any land to plant them,’ Barber protested.

‘Plant ’em,’ said Boutflour, and put the receiver down. ‘A patch of ground was found on the side of a hill, the spuds were planted, and it became known as “Barber’s folly”.’

Boutflour was nothing if not outspoken. One of his well-known observations was that ‘a farmer with 150 acres is equal to a brigadier-general in the army’.

When people started complaining about bacon rationing, he wrote in Country Life: ‘One British habit is causing a great deal of worry, and that is the demand for bacon for an Englishman’s breakfast. Why should we worry? No other man in the world asks for such a breakfast, not even in countries where most bacon is produced.’ He went on to say that the oatmeal from a field of oats would produce ‘eight times as many good breakfasts in the form of porridge as would the same oat-meal converted into bacon … Bacon for breakfast is a habit, almost a vice.’

Ploughing was accelerated by the issue of tractors, of which the Ministry had a pool. Through the War Ags it distributed them all over the country according to the nature of the land: fifty went to Devon, where grassland predominated, but only ten to Essex, much of which was already down to cereal crops. Progress was hampered by violent changes in the weather. The summer of 1939 had been gloriously hot (bringing out a plague of adders in the New Forest), but it left the ground baked hard and difficult to break up. Then October turned cold and wet, and in November frosts set in – the first of a bitter winter which brought cultivation to a halt and, in several places, froze the Thames from bank to bank, so that ice-breakers were working in the river.

When the weather eased, and March 1940 came in with two blessedly dry weeks, farmers began ploughing at night as well as during the day: a special amendment of the blackout regulations allowed them to use headlamps, provided they were screened so that they could not be seen from above – and in any case, on moonlit nights they could work with no lights at all. Phenomenal progress was made, and by the middle of the month 1,370,000 acres had been brought under the plough. In Scotland alone, by the beginning of June, farmers had notified the Ministry of their intention to plough 252,000 acres of old grassland, and the War Ags had taken almost 2000 acres from nine farms ‘which were not being cultivated in accordance with the rules of good husbandry.’

Wheat, for bread-making, was the principal crop; but another promoted by the Ministry was flax, or linseed, which was needed to replace the supply of cotton from abroad, cut off by the war. The plants had almost gone out of cultivation in England, though they were still grown in Northern Ireland for their tough fibre; but now, for the coming season, the Government ordered a fourfold increase in English production, from 4000 to 16,000 acres. One advantage of flax – whose flowers open and turn a glorious pale slate-blue when the sun comes on them – is that it grows fast: a crop sown in March should be ready by July. Another bonus is that rabbits do not like it, and will eat almost anything in preference.

In the old days flax used to be pulled by hand, but by 1940 pulling machines could be hired; the seed heads were crushed for oil, and the tough stalks processed to make cloth. Earl de la Warr, Chairman of the Flax Board, called flax one of the main munitions of war: when used in the manufacture of wing fabric for aircraft, it was claimed to add five miles per hour to the speed of certain bombers. Potatoes also came under the control of the Ministry, which ordered a far larger acreage to be planted.

According to Derek Barber ‘the impact of the war effort on the character of the countryside was quite incredible’. He cited the example of a 2000-acre block of land close to Cheltenham, on the edge of the Cotswolds, which half a dozen farmers had been using as a huge ranch. One of them had a flourishing trade in pit ponies, which he bred, but none did any cultivation, and the ground had degenerated into bush, ‘just like in Africa’. With the thorns ripped out by tractors and winches, the land ploughed and sown, it turned into 2000 acres of wheat, and the change wrought on the appearance of the landscape was as drastic as that caused by Dutch elm disease fifty years later.

Similar transformations occurred all over Britain. Every possible piece of ground was ploughed: not just meadows and the lower slopes of mountains in Wales and the Peak District, but cricket fields, commons and golf courses. The parkland surrounding large country houses excited much irritation. Farmers argued that the parks were a conspicuous waste of land, lost to agriculture for the sake of mere display. ‘Private parks,’ wrote one, ‘are now the exercising ground of deer and pheasants … Much of it would grow cereals well. The deer and pheasants could be killed to augment the meagre [ration of] 1s 2d worth of meat a week, which is by no means enough for heavy manual workers.’ Golf courses, he added, ‘should be made to produce food for man or beast … I say we are fighting a life-and-death struggle, and money does not enter into it.’

On 4 July 1940, in the House of Commons, Mr J. J. Tinker, Labour MP for Leigh, in Essex, asked if a survey could be made of the Royal Parks in London, ‘to see whether some parts of them could be used for growing foodstuffs, and in particular, whether the stretch of ground known as Rotten Row, in Hyde Park, could be utilised for this purpose’. The answer was that sixty-three acres had already been devoted to allotments, and eighty acres to the cultivation of oat and root crops. ‘In addition, two-thirds of the greenhouse space normally used for the production of flowers is being used for the cultivation of vegetables.’ As for Rotten Row: ‘It consists of sand up to a depth of six inches on a brick floor about a foot thick, and, further, for a great part of its length it is lined by tall trees.’

The War Ags were certainly proud of what they achieved. A makeshift notice stuck up in a field proclaimed:

War Agric

47 Acres

Debushed – Drained – Reclaimed

WHEAT

52,000 Loaves?

Growing more food was essential for the nation’s survival, but so was the harvesting of the crops; and farmers were soon severely handicapped by the shortage of labour, particularly for potato-picking in late autumn. The list of reserved occupations which exempted men from call-up included agricultural workers; but many farm boys, eager to escape the drudgery of life on the land, volunteered for the army, navy or air force, or went to earn better money on the building sites springing up all over the country in the rush to construct new military camps and airfields. All this created a serious deficiency, exacerbated by the fact that the seasonal influx of migratory workers from Ireland had been cut off.

In one issue after another The Farmers’ Weekly bewailed the fact that farmers were losing stockmen, milkers, dairymen. ‘From all over the country they are asking for skilled women to fill the abruptly-emptied places. If you have daughters who are clever with stock, or in the dairy, or are good milkmaids, urge them to think quickly about responding to this call.’ The Situations Vacant columns were packed with advertisements seeking ‘foreman cowman … girl calf rearer … young man to work horse … intelligent young Lady or Girl for milk round … cheesemaker man or woman … Respectable youth wanted, improver, general farm work … Strong woman wanted … Strong girl wanted for milk delivery in the City of Oxford. Horse vans used.’

In summer civil servants were given special leave to do farm work, and many rose to the challenge. But a still more valuable source of extra labour lay in the harvest camps for schoolchildren, organized by the Government. At first, in 1941, only boys were allowed to take part, but in 1942 girls joined them, and the number of camps rose sharply from 335 in the first year to a peak of 1068 in 1943, putting 68,000 young workers into the field, for an average stay of four weeks. Boys earned between 6d and 8d an hour, but they had to pay for travel to and from the site, and contribute towards the cost of their food – which left little in hand at the end of a three-week stint.

Although the work was tough, the camps were much enjoyed by most of the inmates, who remembered ‘the pleasures of tent life, camp food, fireside sing-songs, the camaraderie with older farm workers and, in particular, the fact that campers found a new freedom and gained a sense of independence denied to many at the time’. Even so, pea-picking was regarded as a ‘horrendous’ job by the girls of Manchester High School, who were sent out to tackle the crop near Ormskirk in 1943, and worked with hessian sacks over their heads to protect them from the rain. Their miserable lot was to move along the rows, pulling up plants with their left hand, and with their right stripping the pods, which they dropped into a skip that held 40 lb when full.

That freedom of the fields often extended to the complete absence of safety precautions. Gerald Pendry, who went from a London school to a harvest camp in Warwickshire in 1941, was set to work with another boy on a flax-pulling machine, which had to be constantly unblocked, as the tough fibres kept jamming the rubber belts. Drive-shafts and belts had no form of protection, and the lads were supervised by a Polish tractor driver who spoke no English.

With still more harvesting hands needed, in 1943 camps for adults were introduced, and after a series of appeals by Robert Hudson, the Minister of Agriculture, thousands of men and women applied to join.