Essex Land Girls (22 page)

Many mentioned the diverse range of girls they would not have met otherwise – court dressmakers, ballet dancers, solicitors, shop girls, office workers, florists, domestics – the whole spectrum. The social mix did occasionally cause a problem, and
Dorothy Jennings
wrote in her diary of 8 December 1943 that ‘we had two new girls come this evening. I don’t think I’m going to like them. They are a bit la-di-da.’

There were some small perks the girls appreciated.
Dorothy Jennings
was able to take parsnips and daffodils home to her granddad in East London at the end of her working week, and others were able to enjoy similar small treats.
Elsie Haysman
recalls being given a huge Christmas tree from one of the farms she worked on in south Essex, and having a real struggle getting it on to the bus home to Ashingdon, where it was much appreciated by the evacuees her mother had taken in.

The public did seem supportive of the Land Army, and the cheers they received at the Victory Parade in London in 1946 (where they marched along with other services) must have been a morale boost. However, public support was not always enough.

Sometimes described as the ‘Cinderella of the Services’, many WLA Girls did not feel they were appreciated by their employers, or by the government.
Lynette Vince
spoke of being ‘treated as just a joke to start with, but in the end [we] were valued’. Some had mixed reactions, like
Doreen Morey
who said that ‘some farmers expected a lot of work and were not very nice. Others were very kind, perhaps letting you have free time if a machine broke down, instead of finding you another – worse – job while waiting for it to be fixed.’

A recording of
Jack
Bishop
’s experiences on a farm at Easthorpe reveals that the girls ‘never had a chance … Londoners [who] didn’t know the right end of a tool from the other’ and thought of the Land Army as a soft option.

The ‘Cinderella’ experience was emphasised by
Winifred Daines
in particular, who spoke of ‘one girl feeling faint and needing water when queueing at the YMCA in Braintree. But soldiers and sailors were there and were served first, so she had to wait.’ She also felt that some farmers’ wives were a bit jealous, and this may have been understandable. As for the cold, damp lorries used for their transport, these were often ‘used for carting sugar beet, then hosed out ready to pick the Land Girls up. Often the floor of the lorry would be part frozen.’

It is certainly true that there was some negative response to the Land Army Girls.
Vie Milbourne
was at school during the war on Foulness Island, but she lived on a farm at Great Shelford and remembers the Land Girls arriving on the lorries, and working with them after the war on Barling Hall Farm, whose crops included wheat, cabbages and onions. She didn’t feel they were ‘very good’ at their work – which included land draining – and that they ‘had no training’ although they ‘were good enough for potato picking’. She also felt that the ones she came into contact with ‘only joined for the uniform!’

Of course, there were also sexist interpretations of the WLA – ‘Will Love Anyone, Will Lay Anywhere …’ – but this was something that all women in services had to contend with. At least these women now had a vote, a privilege not accorded to their First World War counterparts.

Vera Osborne
spoke to her local newspaper, the
Evening Echo
, of one Land Girl, Vi Goodbody, who ‘went for’ the foreman (at Wallasea Island) ‘with a pitchfork’ because he ‘hated Land Army girls. Nothing ever suited that foreman.’ For her, however, the worst insult came from a lady ‘at a bus-stop in Rayleigh’ when she was queueing after a dirty, mucky day’s threshing: ‘They shouldn’t let those Land Girls on the bus looking like that’ was certainly an uninformed and unkind response to someone ‘saving the nation from starvation’.

Vicky Phillips
also spoke of resentment from some of the male farmhands in Essex, who left ‘gutted rabbits, complete with innards’ for her to see, presumably in the hope of upsetting her. She pointed out that, although Land Girls were allowed to use the Women’s Voluntary Service centres, they were not allowed in the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) which was reserved for ‘the proper services’. Some resented being used as ‘skivvies’ by farmers’ wives during bad weather, which was not how their time was supposed to be utilised, but these were in the minority.

The ‘elderly men’ that
Connie Robinson
worked with at Boreham ‘looked down on’ the Land Girls and ‘didn’t help us’ but this could have been an initial, rather than long-term, viewpoint. Although
Doreen Morey
described the ‘young lads’ she worked with on local farms as ‘okay’ she thought the ‘older ones were not keen on helping … they would rather laugh at you. It paid to plead stupid and they took pity on you.’

In April 1945, 100 Land Girls in the Upminster area went on strike to protest against the government’s refusal to grant war gratuities to the WLA – and Land Girls in Suffolk also went on strike in support. After a few days, they went back to work when assured that ‘the question’ was being considered. However, in May, those in north-west Essex formed a committee to press their claim, because nothing had yet been promised. At a meeting at Stansted, Land Girls were urged to contact their local MPs to demand support in Parliament for the inclusion of the WLA in the gratuity scheme. Fifty WLA members at Mark Hall Hostel in Harlow went on a one-day strike because they were refused a meal after returning late from leave, feeling tired and hungry.

Internationally renowned Ilford poet Denise Levertov had dreamed of becoming a ballerina as a young girl but joined the WLA expecting to live a rural life, ‘nurtured by books’ she had read on English farming. However, she was not enamoured with her assignment ‘at a turkey farm’, which was different from the rural idyll she had imagined. She was terrified to approach the fence at feeding time with ‘thousands of screaming turkeys’ rushing at her. In a panic she hurled the feed at them, ‘practically stoning them’. She was ‘allowed to resign’ since she was still under age for female conscription, and she joined the Civil Nursing Reserve. In spite of her experiences, her first poems appear to have been written when she was a Land Girl in Essex, and at the end of the war she published a small book of her work before marrying a GI and moving to the US.

Dorothy Jennings
had also struggled with the work, and with the authorities. She was one of those who did not stay the distance. As she had so much time off with minor ailments, including toothache, coughs and colds, the Essex County Committee sent her a letter in March 1945 saying that the WLA was:

 … not permitted to retain … volunteers who have been unable to work for a period of two months or more. Owing to your prolonged absence I am therefore enclosing your formal release from the Women’s Land Army. Will you please return the whole of your uniform in a clean and laundered condition, together with your armlet, badge, gumboots and towels.

Vera Osborne
was a Barnardo’s girl, with her roots in Yorkshire, and a background in domestic service as a teenager. During the war years she was back again at Barnardo’s (working this time, in various locations including Thaxted and Barkingside), but in 1945 she joined the WLA and ended up living in a WLA hostel in Kenneth Road, Thundersley.

When working at Wakering, she met
Maude Hansford
, known as ‘Pips’, from a middle-class philanthropic family in Thorpe Bay, the coastal area chosen to benefit one of her brothers who had asthma. Although Pips lived at home, not the hostel, they worked together, mainly on Montgomery’s Farm at Wakering and mainly on potato picking, though Pips had also worked in Boxford (or Boxted?), in north Essex and in Woodford and Barling, and Hertfordshire.

The two girls (both born in 1918) were joined at Montgomery’s by Lilian (‘Lilian X’ as she prefers to be called here), five years younger, from a large family originally from Bethnal Green who had moved to Benfleet to escape the Blitz but ended up under the flight path of German bombers. Lilian also lived at home while in the WLA, not far from Vera’s hostel, and would join the girls at break time, when Vera would knit and Pips would do the crossword or fuss with her curls, and all three listened to the radio.

So, three diverse backgrounds came together picking potatoes (at which they were so good that Mr Montgomery gradually increased their daily workload) and beetroots, digging ditches, laying barbed wire, and bringing in the harvest stooks. But the friendship they formed in the WLA lasted them a lifetime, and all settled locally around the Southend-on-Sea area.
In 1953, Maude received something to be proud of, a gold armband for eight years’ service – quite a rarity.

The last hostel to close in Essex was at Nazeing, in October 1950, with local girls attending a farewell party. Nationally, a farewell parade was held at Buckingham Palace on 21 October that year, with the following representatives from Essex (these may have been WLA girls from Essex, but this does not necessarily mean that they worked in Essex):

Doris Biscoe

Beryl Blair

Edna Clewer

Vera Cook

Marjorie Dawson

Florence Finch

Candida Fox

Lottie Hensleet

Georgina Jupp

Doris May

Constance Musson

Elsie Peacock

Kathleen Warner

The end of the war did not mean the end of the WLA, which was not finally wound up until 1950, although numbers had obviously been dwindling since the end of hostilities. Even as late as 1946, Chelmsford High Street had attractive window displays and posters, with pamphlets laying out the benefits of the WLA, which was still recruiting. In April that year, a tractor drawing a truck containing a hay rick and three Land Army Girls paraded through the streets, looking to attract girls of 18 years plus who were not engaged in essential industries.

In January 1947, the
Essex Newsman
reported that ‘many more girls were needed’ but there was only a ‘trickle of enquiries’ according to the Essex secretary of the WLA, Mrs Wakeland-Smith. Those girls who joined post-war found themselves doing rather different chores, like removing the barbed wire entanglement at Rochford Golf Course and transporting it to Creeksea, where it was dumped in a sandpit.

In October 1950, 500 Land Girls, with every county represented, marched past Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In her address, she said that she had:

 … always admired their courage in responding so readily to a call which they knew must bring them … hardship and sometimes loneliness. Now the time has come to say goodbye because the job has been done, but the sadness which many feel should be outweighed by pride in the achievement.

Soon after, the queen sent out congratulatory letters to all those with long service, announcing that:

Your unsparing efforts at a time when the victory of our cause depended on the utmost use of the resources of our land have earned for you the country’s gratitude.

‘Best days of my life’ and ‘wouldn’t have missed it for the world’ were regular summations by so many members of the WLA, in spite of the hard work and sometimes onerous conditions. Fresh air, and the feeling that they were ‘harvesting for victory’ were also by-products of the WLA lifestyle and something that many girls preferred to their old lives in factories, offices and shops, especially in the East End. There were also the following comments:

One of the happiest times.

[Joyce Clancy, see bibliography]

I felt I was doing something.

[
Barbara Rix
]

The work kept me fit … I still swim daily in the local baths.

[Barbara Lodge,
Essex Chronicle
, 24 November 2011]

The memories will stay with me forever.

[
Winifred Daines
]

A wonderful life … loved every moment … lovely memories.

[
Babs Newman
]

I was loathe to leave … I just loved the life.

[Diana Thake, see bibliography]

A very happy time … fond memories.

[Frances Ilines, see bibliography]

Smashing. Really lovely. Enjoyed it. Friendly.

[
Vera Pratt
]

Good fun but a tough life.

[
Rita Hoy
]

WLA armband belonging to Irene Verlander. (Courtesy of Linda Medcalf Collection; image by author)

By 1947, there was growing pressure for the German prisoners of war to be sent home, but as the Germans were taken from the farms, the WLA had to find replacements, and it was not an easy task now that the war was regarded as ‘over’, although rationing stayed in force for a few years more.

One of the German prisoners of war from the camp north of Wakering Common in south Essex did not start working with the horses at Miller’s Farm in Great Wakering until 1946, joining a couple of Land Girls. He stayed until early 1948. Wolfgang Kerwitz sent a long, detailed letter to the farmer about his journey home through a decimated Germany, and sent regards to, among others, Audrey, a local Land Girl. He subsequently kept in touch with the family, returning for a risky visit in 1987 as he was then living back in East Germany. Similarly, other prisoners of war, like Sergeant Heinrich who worked at The Orchards in Writtle, remained in touch with the farmer and the farmer’s family. They visited him in Germany, and remained in contact until his death.