Talks – My Mum was a Land Girl
By Ian Everest, 13th September 2019
On 13th September we enjoyed an engaging, fascinating and touching talk from Ian Everest who told us, from a personal point of view, about historic events which took place in Britain over the first half of the 20th Century. Stemming from an interest in his own family history Ian had been lead to research the story of the one of the vital roles that women in this country had played during the two World Wars.
Ian told how he’d started some 35 years ago when he’d asked his Mother if he could look through her old family photographs that she kept in an old shoe box. Ian’s family, from Piddinghoe south of Lewes, were farm workers as were half the country’s workforce around the 1900’s. His Uncle Bert had some local fame as he had married Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s housekeeper and his Father’s family had been in Sussex as far back as the 1600’s. His Mother though had been born in Tottenham, North London and had been posted to Sussex as a girl of eighteen in 1943 after she had joined the Women’s Land Army.
Ian had to coax his mother to tell him her wartime story, she didn’t think it would interest anyone but he appealed to her by saying it should be recorded so her grandchildren would know their family history.
We saw how volunteers were encouraged by posters promising ‘A healthy happy job’ showing the young women chatting to their pals in the fields, at the wheel of a tractor, on a horse talking to villagers. As Ian pointed out the reality was that whilst they were working in the country there would be no time to idly chat and you would be ploughing that field on your own. Above enemy fighters might use spare ammunition on their homeward flight to strafe the farm workers who would need to seek shelter in slit trenches dug for their protection. Working on the land wasn’t new for the women in rural families but it was to a girl who had spent her whole life in North London.
In order to chart the history behind the WLA Ian had needed to go back to its origins in 1914. At the start of the First World War men were encouraged and keen to enlist in the forces and did so in large numbers. In 1914 300,000 agricultural labourers left to fight leaving the UK, a country which had relied on other nations to provide two thirds of the food they consumed. The potential loss of home production was accompanied by an aggressive German naval campaign against merchant shipping to stop imported food reaching Britain. Realising the danger that the country faced of being at risk of being starved into submission the Government put agriculture on a war footing.
In 1917 the Women’s Land Army was launched a concept many men found hard to accept. Many farmers were against the idea stating that women on the farm would be more of pest than weeds this in spite of women always having done a considerable amount of work on the land anyway. The work wear the women were provided with included sturdy leggings which were to all intents trousers an idea so radical for men to take on that there were actually cartoons printed questioning comically what these strange men/women creatures were.
With the start of the Second World War the Government was ready to utilise women again to work on the land and the wife of the former Governor of Australia, Gertrude Denman, who had just returned to Britain was chosen to run the WLA. The recruitment campaign was again a success and Ian showed a photograph of hundreds of girls like his Mother filling the platforms at Victoria waiting for trains to their allocated destinations.
Ian’s Mother was sent to Sussex and billeted in a hostel converted from farm workers’ cottages near Piddinghoe, East Sussex with three other girls, all strangers to each other. This was to be the happiest of times for all these young women transported from their city lives to what must have seemed like a different world. The friendship made during the wartime years would turn out to last all their lives and Ian remembered that in their later years they would still all meet up annually.
The WLA has just in the last few years been officially recognised for its service to our Country and there is now a memorial to these women at The National Arboretum and all the surviving members were given a badge.
For this girl from north London her life course would change forever when she became a Land Girl. As with many of these young women she would meet her future husband in the country becoming the wife of a Sussex farm worker and having her son Ian who many years later would so ably and movingly tell us her story.