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