Fields of Conflict (From Bournemouth Echo)

Fields of Conflict

7:15pm Wednesday 23rd July 2008 in

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DIG for Victory was one of the clarion calls of WWII. But who were the people who actually had to do that digging? And harvesting, pig-castrating and cow-milking, while the men were all at war? The Women's Land Army, that's who.

Sixty years on, the government has finally got around to recognising the women's work, on the land and in the forests, where they were affectionately known as Lumber-Jills.

At 10 Downing Street yesterday, Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, presented 50 Land Girls and Lumber-Jills with a new badge commemorating their war work.

"I thought we needed to do something," he said. "They made a huge difference at the time and it is absolutely right and proper that we as a nation should be saying thank you very much for what they did."

Thirty thousand women have applied for the badge and certificate but, at the height of the war, more than 100,000 volunteers and conscripted women were working the land.

Thanks to the David Leland film The Land Girls, made in 1998, and telling the story of three women who worked on a Dorset Farm, the post-war impression was of pretty, cheery girls who always had time for a little hanky-panky among the hay-ricks. The truth was somewhat different.

Parkstone Land Girl Brenda Chapman told the Daily Echo in 1998: "My memories were of hard work but of happy times as well."

She remembered the 5am starts and the day she tried to gently tap a cow along with a stick one foggy morning, only to discover she was trying to herd a bush!

"In all weathers we were expected to tackle any job carrying sacks, scrubbing out cow stalls, grooming horses, cutting sugar beet or turnips on a freezing morning with hands so cold you could cut your thumb and not even know it."

She recalled cycling to village dances with a friend hitching a lift in the vehicle's front basket cheaper than a taxi!' and soaking herself at the end of a day's harvesting in a big, tin bath.

Most people assume the Land Army formed at the beginning of the First World War but it was actually started in 1917 by Roland Prothero, the then Minister for Agriculture. The Great War had seen food supplies dwindle and the Women's Land Army was formed.

It was hastily revived in 1939 when, between May and September that year, farmers were paid £2 per acre of grassland they ploughed up for wheat. The aim was to have two million acres of grassland ploughed in time for the 1940 harvest. The target was reached in April 1940 and the Women's Land Army, so unpopular originally with the National Farmers Union, didn't disband until 1950.

In May 1940 the Daily Echo carried a story about Miss Cherry Donnison of Lonsdale Road, the only member of the women's Land Army working on a farm in the Bournemouth area'.

Miss Donnison, who originally trained as a professional ballroom dancer, found herself at the forefront of the local appeal to get more volunteers to sign up. Resistance to these new workers came from the farmers themselves and, said the Daily Echo from their wives, who were inclined to look askance at the smart town girls thrown into close association with their menfolk'!

All armies needed a leader and the Women's Land Army was headed by the redoubtable Lady Denman, head of the Women's Institute and a campaigner for women's suffrage, as well as being President of the Poultry Association.

Baroness Denman fought for decent wages for her Army and extra rations to keep up their strength.

"The Land Army fights in the fields," she declared. " It is in the fields of Britain that the most critical battle of the war may well be fought and won."

She was right. The Land Girls and the 6,000 Lumber-Jills of the Women's Timber Corps ensured that whatever else happened, the United Kingdom did not run out of food or wood.

Memories of those days have formed part of the national archive of Land Girl experiences collated by BBC Radio Norfolk.

One former Land girl, Mrs Esther Watson, was billeted at Rothesay House in Dorset and recalled her experiences for the People's War archive, from being charged by a boar, to leading a parade of land girls in Dorchester.

"I still like beetroot sandwiches which I made to supplement my work lunch," she said.