Essex Land Girls (7 page)

Boreham House trainees, with Maud Amess (née Martin) back row, fifth from the right, the only one identified. (Courtesy of Angela Burns)

By 1943 training farms had been established, and Mr Trenbath of Ravens Farm, Little Easton, organised a number of local farmers to train girls. Mrs Howard, of Kingston’s Farm in Matching, trained 190 girls who were employed on a total of 1,287 Essex farms. Hands-on training was available in milking, grooming heavy horses, ploughing, harrowing, tractor driving, hedging and ditching, and maintenance of farming machinery.

Where gardening was concerned, training included how to pick weevils out of beans and how to plant tomatoes in greenhouses. From March 1942, members of the Timber Corps would learn how to measure wood, to use a circular saw, to fell timber with an axe, and to light a fire. There were also correspondence courses advertised in
The Land Girl
, the WLA magazine, with such titles as ‘Elements of Agriculture’. Classes in first aid and firefighting were initiated, and those wanting promotion within the WLA could take a foreman’s course at Writtle and other locations, or move on to such specialisms as hedge laying or thatching. An intensive practical and theoretical gardening course was held in 1942 for ten selected WLA gardeners in Essex.

New courses were introduced from time to time.
The Land Girl
of December 1943 mentions new first aid and firefighting classes in Essex, and refers to training courses for leaders and for pest destruction training as being ‘in full swing, with seventy-two leaders in charge of small gangs in every district’. Plenty of proficiency badges and certificates were on offer from 1944 for those who took the work seriously enough. However, when there was a great demand (such as at harvest time), many girls were sent off without training.

For those who were going to be working on dairy farms, a training device for milking was developed for the WLA – the ‘Mark One’. This was known as ‘Daisy’ and was made of canvas and wood, with two girls being able to be trained at the same time, one on each side!

East Ender Jill Macey trained on a real cow, however, in Herne Bay, Kent, according to Lynda Burrows’ article in the
Suffolk Review
. The 17 year old’s first attempt ‘produced four ounces from a cow that usually gave four gallons at a time’ but she ‘quickly improved, and was sent to a farm in Wickham Bishops with twenty cows’ all milked by hand.
Gwen Thorogood
told her husband, Geoff, that she had some training on a farm at Matching Green in 1940 by the ‘aristocratic owners’, and then worked with the Aston family at Truelove’s Farm, Ingatestone, ‘milking pedigree red polls’ with some back-breaking experiences.

A rather unusual approach to training was an account reported by Michael Foley in
Essex, Ready for Anything
. He tells of Joan Francis being not only interviewed at home (in Thorpe-le-Soken) by the Essex Land Army welfare superintendent (her local WLA representative), but also being trained by her at her own home. She learned to muck out bullock pens, collect eggs, make butter, and pluck turkeys, although it may be that not all of this training took place in the one location, as Joan worked at Ray Park in Woodford and on a farm in Beaumont (or Beaumont-cum-Moze), nearer home.

Practical and oral examinations took place in a number of branches of the WLA’s work, although these do not seem to have been obligatory. Proficiency certificates were awarded in the following:

•
  Milking/dairy work

•
  General farm work

•
  Poultry

•
  Tractor driving

•
  Outside garden and glasshouse work

•
  Fruit work

•
  Pest destruction

Courses for those who were ambitious and wanted to train as forewomen involved practical work such as hoeing, laying a hedge, fencing, grooming a horse, and setting a gang to work. There were also lectures on agriculture and the cow and on first aid, farm management, War Ag committee organisation, income tax and sick pay, etc. Machinery, too (tractor, plough, cultivator, disc harrow, hay rake, binder and everything else they might encounter on a farm), had to be seen at work and explained.

The stories of those who do remember their training follow:

Kathy Firmin

I remember my lessons in tractor driving at a school near Wickford … I was told to ‘drive as close to that ditch as you can get’ and I got so close that I ended up in it, in the ditch. But I managed to get it out of the ditch, and was told I deserved a medal, because no one had ever managed that before. This became my favourite job while in the Land Army.

Barbara Rix

I was sent to an agricultural college in Sussex [from Leyton] to train for six weeks. There were about 80 other girls at the college. We all did a session on horses, cows, small animals, everything really, and they decided what we were best at. On my first day with shire horses, I couldn’t believe they had such big feet! At the end of our training, we were all assembled together and told where we were going. My friend and I both ended up in Essex. She was sent to Woodham Ferrers, and I went to Wix, near Colchester, which all the girls envied because Colchester was a barrack town. But I was the only one on the station in the pouring rain when I arrived, and greeted by ‘Are you the Land Girl? Come with me.’ He was the farmer, and I was the only Land Girl on the farm. [Not so much to be envious about at this stage …]

Rita Hoy

After completing my application at Writtle to join the Women’s Timber Corps [1942] I was accepted for one month’s training and knew that I would need to work all over the country. The training took place near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for one month, with full board provided and 10s per week. I didn’t like the sound of the wages, less than I had been earning [in an office]. There were 120 of us at Bury St Edmunds station, all in our new uniforms, and we were transported by coaches to the training camp, a small place surrounded by huge forests. Accommodation was in ten wooden huts, twelve girls to a hut, from all over the U.K. The beds were palliasses on wooden planks, with army blankets. The wash basins were made of lead, located in tin huts with concrete floors and no privacy.

Although members of the WLA were not subject to military discipline:

There were lots of rules: you had to report back before 10 p.m. and there was a 6 a.m. bell for P.T. [physical training]. Breakfast at 7 a.m. was usually watery porridge and scrambled, powdered eggs with bread and marge. Then you had to tidy the hut and make the bed and then report to open-sided lorries in the yard which would take you to the woods. Mrs Jackson was the Superintendent in charge of the camp, a very stern lady with tweeds, brogues and horn-rimmed glasses. Mr Davis was in charge once we were in the woods, and he was kind, though also strict, a forester. When we got on to the lorry, we were each given a big black tin box with our lunch, and we had to make our tea in a billy-can after making a fire. Lunch was usually paste sandwiches, a brown roll and a lump of cheese, but we had a meal when we got back to camp around 5.30 after a wash and tidy.

The first lesson was how to cut a V-shaped piece of wood from the base of a tree, and I still have the piece of larch wood cut from my first tree. Then I was shown how to saw a tree into logs for pit props, learning to use a cross-cut saw – ‘pull, don’t push’.

Training for the Timber Corps was obviously more in-depth than for many members of the WLA, and Rita was sent to a saw mill to:

… learn how to push timber through a machine-driven saw and cut it into planks, and learned how to use a tractor, the John Deere being much easier than the larger Fordson. I also learned how to use a long-handle grapple iron to move trees with, fixing them on to the back of a tractor. One of my first trainers at the saw mill had half his fingers missing, not a good start! The last lesson was the administration – calculating and measuring the trees and timbers, which was easier for me because of my office experience. [The end of my training] resulted in promotion to sub-foreman and I went back to Essex to work at Castle Hedingham, with a billet at High Garrett, near Braintree.

Mary Page (née Nichols) on milking duty. (Courtesy of Braintree District Museum Trust)

Mary Page

I didn’t like working in the shoe department at the Romford Co-op when war started. So three of us from the Co-op signed up to the Land Army and were all sent to be trained at Northamptonshire Agricultural College. Here we were treated like royalty, had our own room, and were very lucky. I wanted to be a tractor driver, but was pointed towards the milking parlour. My friend had little hands and was always getting kicked. I was more fortunate, with big hands which were an asset. I found I could milk beautifully … I was pleased to be back in Essex, at a farm in Pebmarsh.

Mary Marsh

Although training for Mary took place outside Essex, like some others, she ended up working in Essex, which was just what she wanted. She first enrolled in the Timber Corps in March 1943 and:

… was taught to use axes, crosscut saws, and circular saws for tree work in saw mills, but got thrown out through being under age and was told to re-enlist when old enough … then joined the WLA in July, with minimal training in Roydon, Hertfordshire, the job mainly learned as I went along.

Betty Shaw

Ending up in Essex, like Mary, Betty ‘travelled from Barking to Chadacre Agricultural Institute in Suffolk in October 1939, for two months’ training prior to starting work as a Land Girl and then went home to wait for a job’.

Hilda Gentry

Training at Writtle College for three weeks, Hilda’s course was ‘for pest destruction and rat catching. I learnt how to mix rat poison, how to gas rabbits, how to kill the moles with poisoned worms and how to put ferrets down holes to flush out the rabbits. But rats were the main pest in the barns’ (rats did not just eat the grain voraciously, but were known to harass livestock, and pollute drinking water and food with their droppings). She was sent out hoeing on her second day, although her only experience was on her allotment and in her garden, and received ‘training on the job’.

The general consensus was a pride in wearing the uniform of the WLA which was sent to the girls by post on joining. The choice of a predominantly green uniform was not too popular, however, green generally being considered unlucky, but the other colours had been ‘taken’ by the rest of the services. It was certainly more flattering than that of the First World War, although the following official description may not sound particularly attractive:

•
  Serviceable rainproof mackintosh

•
  Khaki overall coat

•
  Two fawn shirts with turn-down collar

•
  Pair of corduroy breeches

•
  Pair of dungarees

•
  Green knitted pullover

•
  Three pairs of fawn stockings [the woolly type, more like long socks]

•
  Pair of heavy brown shoes

•
  Pair of rubber gum boots

•
  Brown felt hat

•
  Green armlet with red royal crown on it

•
  Badge to wear on civilian clothes

The girls were enterprising in their interpretations of the uniform, however, rolling up the breeches or dungarees to form shorts, dispensing with the stockings and adopting a variety of jaunty angles for the hat with the assistance of a steaming kettle. If you were lucky enough to have a dressmaker in the family, then you could remodel the uniform to fit, and this was not uncommon. A manual was issued to all volunteers detailing how they could make shoes waterproof and make stockings last longer, etc. but many girls mixed some civilian clothing with their uniforms – unless expecting a visit from a WLA official. In
The Land Girl
of August 1940, there was an article on ‘How to Wear’ the WLA hat correctly.