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Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45
Duff Hart-Davis


A rich account of the impact of the Second World War on the lives of people living in the farms and villages of Britain.On the outbreak of war, the countryside was invaded by service personnel and evacuee children by the thousand; land was taken arbitrarily for airfields, training grounds and firing ranges, and whole communities were evicted. Prisoner-of-war camps brought captured enemy soldiers to close quarters, and as horses gave way to tractors and combines farmers were burdened with aggressive new restrictions on what they could and could not grow. Land Girls and Lumber Jills worked in fields and forests. Food – or the lack of it – was a major preoccupation and rationing strictly enforced. And although rabbits were poached, apples scrumped and mushrooms gathered, there was still not enough to eat.Drawing from diaries, letters, books, official records and interviews, Duff Hart Davis revisits rural Britain to describe how ordinary people survived the war years. He tells of houses turned over to military use such as Bletchley and RAF Medmenham as well as those that became schools, notably Chatsworth in Derbyshire.Combining both hardship and farce, the book examines the profound changes war brought to Britain’s countryside: from the Home Guard, struggling with the provision of ludicrous equipment, to the role of the XII Corps Observation Unit. whose task was to enlarge rabbit warrens and badger setts into bunkers for harassing the enemy in the event of a German invasion; to the unexpected tenderness shown by many to German and Italian prisoners-of-war at work on the land. Fascinating, sad and at times hilarious, this warm-hearted book tells great stories – and casts new light on Britain during the war.










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Copyright (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362)


William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.williamcollinsbooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

Copyright В© Duff Hart-Davis 2015

Duff Hart-Davis asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Cover photograph © John Topham/Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images – Autumn 1940. All eyes on the dog-fight as children in Kent, released from school to help with the hop harvest, take cover in a slit trench.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007516537

Ebook Edition В© May 2015 ISBN: 9780007516544

Version: 2016-01-05




Contents


Cover (#ue3fd96fa-e190-586a-8ba2-b626d6f547c6)

Title Page (#ulink_cf9daba9-5175-5c25-86b7-b870f06eeba1)

Copyright (#ulink_46bd2e80-d9fb-5d31-8282-41fc0b457012)

Prologue (#ulink_d5e73bde-baa2-504c-92cf-5663e1955103)

1. The Old Ways (#ulink_c4150838-8ce7-553d-b2ed-ab4c5740f120)

2. All Hands to the Plough (#ulink_19b7a369-661c-5691-8977-513d6d1902f8)

3. Exodus (#ulink_97701906-7d54-55d8-8cb8-4c211cc048ed)

4. Braced for Invasion

5. Going to Ground

6. Adapting to War

7. Rain of Death

8. Food from Everywhere

9. Girls to the Fields

10. In the Woods

11. Laying Up Treasure

12. White Elephants

13. Rescue Operations

14. Plane Fields

15. American Invasion

16. On the Wing

17. Fun and Games

18. Field Sports

19. Animals Under Fire

20. Slate Country

21. Evictions

22. Far North

23. On the Springboard

24. Flying Bombs

25. Unfinished Business

Acknowledgements (#ulink_cd037008-fbb4-539d-b392-1e76084b514a)

Sources (#ulink_dc99df2e-fb9b-5b53-a433-d2b89803e4d6)

Notes (#ulink_ee7a4e82-90cf-56b2-b5fe-d14cacc59559)

Picture Section (#u64e376f0-f3a1-5236-b317-ca3f2215b624)

Index (#ulink_861a8e8d-4ad8-5431-afe2-bbadae046b19)

About the Publisher (#u4aebf47b-9bb2-54f6-b7a3-c3ff9fb78613)




Prologue (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362)


They shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

There was once a road through the woods …

Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through the Woods

I was too young to understand what people meant when they said that war had broken out on 3 September 1939; and as our home was some forty miles west of London, we escaped most of the hazards that harassed rural people closer to the enemy. But I do remember occasional fighter aircraft streaking overhead, searchlight beams flicking about the night sky, and, one afternoon, the rough roar of a V-1 flying bomb – like a malfunctioning motorbike engine – which suddenly cut out above us, leaving the doodlebug to crash and explode a mile away.

I was lucky enough to be brought up in an isolated farmhouse in the Chiltern Hills, and images of rural England at that time remain vivid in my mind. My family were not farmers: we merely rented the house. But we lived deep in the countryside, surrounded by the woods and fields of a large estate, and joined in many of the farm activities. With five bedrooms, the Victorian house was quite large, and perhaps had been built for a farm manager; but its facilities were primitive, and much the same as those in the cottages round about. We had no mains water, and our supply had to be pumped up by hand from one of the brick-lined underground cisterns built around the farm to collect rain for animals and humans. Our electricity – fit only to light feeble bulbs – came from a temperamental generator in one of the sheds.

With my father away in the army, my mother must have had a tough time managing our household. She cooked on an ancient, coal-fired iron range, boiled up the laundry in a copper heated by wood and coal, and wrung out the washing through a mangle before hanging it on a line slung between two old apple trees. She heated her iron on the range, and the only means of keeping the other rooms warm were small open fires. How she did her shopping, I do not know – but as our little Morris Eight was off the road for lack of petrol, I can only assume that she walked the mile to the main road and caught the bus into town, or else that a van from the local grocer made occasional deliveries.

We were seldom short of food, for we had rabbits from the gamekeeper, eggs from our own chickens, vegetables from the garden and any amount of fruit – apples for cooking and eating, currants black and red, blackberries in the autumn and huge white-heart cherries from two splendid trees in the paddock. My mother preserved everything she could lay hands on – eggs in earthenware tubs of slimy waterglass, fruit in Kilner jars with clipped-on lids. In good seasons another venerable tree showered down hundreds of walnuts, and in autumn meadows turned white with mushrooms.

We children had wonderful freedom outdoors. Petrol rationing meant that my sister and I had to make our own way to school, pedalling our bikes along farm lanes or wheeling them through woodland rides to the point on a minor road where a school bus picked us up. Dense laurel thickets and towering beech trees held no terrors, even in the dark of winter afternoons, for the way through the woods was as familiar to us as our garden paths. No sign or building marked our rendezvous on the public highway: the only shelter for our machines was the hollowed-out trunk of a huge beech tree which stood beside the road – and in that fire-blasted cavern we left them, unlocked and unprotected, until the bus brought us back and we recovered them to ride home.

Having been born with a hunter’s instinct, I spent every available minute out of doors. Spring was the time to search for birds’ nests and augment my collection of eggs, which I emptied, in time-honoured fashion, by making a pin-hole at either end and blowing out the contents. I was under strict orders from my parents not to take more than one egg from any nest I found – but the temptation was always strong, and in any case for species deemed harmful, like crows and magpies, the prohibition was waived. Twice I hurt myself quite badly and was carried home with my head covered in blood after falling from a height in attempts to reach the stinking, domed structures built by magpies in the tree-tops. I shall never forget landing face-first in a patch of brambles and ripping my hands to shreds as I crawled desperately through the thorns in an attempt to get breath into my lungs.

Accidents notwithstanding, the nesting season was always a time of miracles. How did a pair of long-tailed tits manage to rear a dozen or fifteen babies inside their tiny, vertical oblong of wool and moss and grass? How did wood pigeons stop their bright-white eggs rolling off their platforms of dry sticks, from which they were constantly departing with a great clatter? How did green woodpeckers interpret the messages they sent each other in the bursts of gunfire – brrrrrp, brrrrrp – which they generated when hammering out nest-holes in the trunks of trees?

Wandering about the woods, I often made for a clearing in which a gnarled and grizzled ancient, with a filthy pork-pie hat crammed down on his head, sat upright on a section of tree trunk, cutting tent pegs from hazel branches. One, two, three jabs against a long blade fixed upright in front of him – and almost before the chips had landed on the ground another peg went onto the pile. He hardly ever spoke; but as he did not seem to resent my presence, I used to stand and watch him, fascinated by the precision and economy of his movements. I see him now, chipping away in a sea of bluebells every spring.

Other choice destinations were the dew ponds scattered about the woods – small, circular pools ten or fifteen yards across, all perfectly round and enclosed by trees or bushes. It was clear from their shape that they had been dug by humans, but there was something mysterious about the way they always contained water. In that high chalk country there were no springs or streams to replenish them, yet they never dried out. Was it rain that filled them, or, as their name suggested, condensing dew? One pool was so thickly covered with algae that we called it the Green Slime – and it was there that I witnessed the magical sight of a woodcock carrying chicks, one at a time, between its thighs. The bird flew low and heavily for about fifty yards, before depositing its freight at a point which it obviously thought safe.

On the farm most of the power came from heavy horses, which did the ploughing and drilling, and hauled the wooden-wheeled harvest wagons into the rickyard behind the barns. They were driven and looked after by old Dave Collis, a small, bent man with one rheumy eye, who was reputed to be deaf only when he wanted to be. The farm also boasted one veteran blue tractor – a sign of things to come; but, like the horses, life moved at a leisurely pace.

The two great events of the year were harvest and threshing. As the corn ripened in July, everybody available joined forces to bring in the barley, wheat and oats: children, office workers, shop girls, boys from school camps organized by the Government – all came out to help. Our harvesting machine was a binder, drawn by two horses – a weird looking contraption with spinning wheels and unguarded drive belts, topped by a skeletal rotating flail which swept the crop backwards onto a reciprocating knife. Round and round the field it crawled, cutting the stalks, ingesting them and binding them into bundles with heavy twine, the knife chattering and the release mechanism giving a loud clack every time it ejected a sheaf.

Great was the excitement as the area of standing corn gradually diminished and rabbits trapped in it began to panic, weaving tell-tale trails of ripples through the ears as they dashed back and forth in search of a safe exit. Boys with sticks and, further out, old farmhands with guns, surrounded the shrinking patch, eager for the quarry to break cover. With the light failing and their shelter almost gone, the rabbits had no option but to run for it – and suddenly all was action: the men firing, the boys yelling, lashing out with our sticks and diving onto individual sheaves as we tried to pin down fugitives which had taken temporary cover. Nobody was squeamish in those days: we knew how to kill a rabbit by chopping it on the back of its neck with the edge of a hand, and how to paunch it by slitting open the skin over its stomach and scooping out the warm entrails with our fingers.

Cutting the corn was only the start of the laborious harvesting operation. The sheaves had to be picked up by hand and stood in pairs to make stooks – three pairs for a wheat or oat stook, four for barley, with a neat tunnel along the middle so that air would flow through and dry the grain in the ears. Boys could make good pocket money from stooking – and we earned it, for wheat sheaves were heavy, and the prickly hairs on barley stalks lacerated the inside of our wrists and forearms, as did the spines of thistles.

Threshing, which took place in winter, was heralded by the arrival of a majestic steam engine, which gave a couple of saucy hoots as it crawled down the last stretch of the lane, crunching gravel under its steel wheels and towing the great drum or barn worker – the threshing machine itself. In the rickyard the two had to be precisely aligned, so that a long canvas belt could transmit power from the flywheel of the traction engine to the drive wheel on the drum. When all was set, work began.

A man, woman or boy on top of the rick pitched sheaves down, one at a time, to a man on the drum, who cut the strings and dropped the loose stalks into the maw of the greasy monster. Standing aloft on the rick, lifting the sheaves with a pitchfork, was exciting work, for every movement might lay bare a nest of mice or rats, which would erupt and make a dash for the edge, launching themselves into space – only to meet their doom among the dogs and boys below. Experienced workers tied twine round the bottoms of their trouser legs to deny mice access, but often a yell or a shriek meant that their defences had been penetrated.

As the sheaves were beaten out in the drum, the air filled with dust, sending hay-fever sufferers into paroxysms of sneezing. Wheat was bad enough, but barley was worse, as the spiky ears set floating in the air left faces red and raw. From a tube on the side of the drum golden corn came pouring out into sacks, and these had to be lifted by hand and carried away for storage. The noise was intoxicating: the steam engine hissing, the drum roaring and rattling, the canvas belt flapping, boys shouting, terriers yapping, whippets and collies barking.

In spite of the war, everything about the farm seemed comfortably old and settled – the eighteenth-century barns, with their huge beams, red-tiled roofs, walls of blackened feather-edge planks and their fusty smell of rats and mice; the carthorses and their stable hung with leather harness; the wooden wagons, some of them gaily painted; the cast-iron hand pumps, mounted on little brick pillars, for bringing up water from the underground cisterns; the hand-turned mangold-cutter; the huge hay knife, three feet long, for chopping slices from the stacks; the heavy platform scales with their 56-lb iron weights. Yet my favourite emblem of perpetuity was not on the farm at all.

Far out in one of the woods was an ancient shepherd’s caravan, with a hooped roof and steps leading up to the door. It stood in a clearing, and although it was still on its wheels in my imagination it had been there for ever: long grass had grown over its axles, and the planks along its walls had weathered to a shade of soft, pale grey furred with lichen. Once a shepherd’s mobile summer home, it was used in my day by the gamekeeper as a store for pheasant food, rabbit traps and so on. But it also had another, more subtle role.

In the middle of one board on its south face was a knot-hole, and anyone peering through it, as though through a pin-hole camera, could see a small area of the opposite wall. At dusk on winter evenings the keeper would light an oil lamp, hang it from the ceiling, and, at the point on which any nocturnal snooper’s eye would fall, prop up a crudely written notice proclaiming in big letters painted on cardboard, BACK IN HALF AN HOUR. Whether or not this enigmatic device had the effect of deterring poachers, none could say; but now, seventy years later, I feel it epitomized the simplicity of country life in those far-off days.

I was not old enough to realize that change was coming apace. Blocks of woodland were being clear-felled, one after another, to help meet the nation’s desperate need of timber – softwood like larch for pit props, hardwood like beech (for which the Chilterns are famous) for building Mosquito fighter-bombers. Another tractor arrived on the farm. Fields that had always been meadows were ploughed for corn, throwing up flints by the million. Long Field, Marlins, Amos – even Shanty Meadow, traditionally sheep ground – down they all went to wheat. Another field was renamed Searchlight, from the installation built there early in the war, and at night slender, incandescent beams blazed from it, raking the sky for intruders. Centuries-old work patterns were being shaken apart by the growing crisis, and gradually life had to change.



One




The Old Ways (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362)


Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke.

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The First World War had taken thousands of young men from the land. Farmers paid them such miserable wages that they were virtually slaves, so when they saw a chance of escape from drudgery they jumped at it. In Akenfield, his classic evocation of a Suffolk village, Ronald Blythe recorded that in March 1914 one nineteen-year-old, Leonard Thompson, was earning 11s a week, and later told the author: �The village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It was not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly.’

When the farmer stopped his pay because it was raining and the men couldn’t thresh,

I said to my seventeen-year-old mate, �Bugger him. We’ll go off and join the army …’ We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy. At the barracks we kissed the Bible and were given a shilling … In my four months’ training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food, but it was really because for the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work … We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th.

Leonard survived the horrors of Gallipoli, the Somme and German prison camp, but thousands of his contemporaries did not. When he returned to Suffolk, for a while things were better on the land. The Corn Production Act of 1917, which guaranteed cereal growers good prices for wheat and oats, enabled farmers to pay higher wages, and hundreds of men joined the Agricultural Labourers’ Union. But then a severe drought in the summer of 1921, and a repeal of the Act in August, precipitated a decline which led to a prolonged agricultural slump.

In 1938 Britain was growing only 30 per cent of its food, and only nine million acres of arable land were under cultivation, compared with eleven million in 1914. The Government saw that if war came the nation’s essential supplies of wheat travelling by ship from North America and Canada would be threatened by Germany’s U-boats. It was imperative that more corn should be grown at home.

Life in the countryside was still largely feudal. Many of the great estates had remained intact, and even if the proprietors no longer flaunted the size of their possessions in their Who’s Who entries (�Owns 22,000 acres’), they still presided over very substantial areas of the country. Yeoman farmers had their own relatively modest houses and land-holdings, but most farm workers lived in tied cottages – that is, in houses owned by their landlords which went with their jobs. If a man lost his job, he lost his house as well – a system which gave owners an absolute grip of their employees.

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 (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362)


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 ВЈ20 and ВЈ18 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.

Perhaps it was a sense of achievement, coupled with hope that the war might not last long, which lent buoyancy to the sale of farms early in the war. Estate agents cheerfully reported good business, �and plenty of eager applicants for good holdings, either for investment or occupation’. Prices seem ridiculously low. In March 1940 a freehold, �highly farmed’ holding of 163 acres in Suffolk, including an �excellent residence’ with five bedrooms, �splendid premises’ and two �superior cottages’, was advertised at £2500. A 170-acre grass farm in Nottinghamshire, including a cottage, could be had for £1750. In July Country Life reported that �The investor’s quest for first-rate farms goes on with increasing vigour’. The Yews Farm, near Rugby, with 215 acres, went at auction for £4800. On the other hand, with cement scarce, and bags of it described as �precious as gold dust’, repairs were difficult and farm buildings were tending to fall into decay.




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