ENGLISH FARM UNDER SHELLFIRE

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23718, 17 August 1942, Page 4

ENGLISH FARM UNDER SHELLFIRE

OWNER AND WORKERS REFUSE TO LEAVE LONDON. July 10. Shells from Hitler’s guns, only 22 miles away, have fallen in and round the farmyard on the Dover cliffs, the nearest in Britain to the Nazi artillery; a barrage balloon over it has been shot down 60 times; and often all hands have had to shelter under their tractors and implements from machine-gunners in the sky overhead. But the farmer and his people stubbornly refuse to leave. These defiant farmers, Mr Gilbert Mitchell, his wife, and sister-in-law, took over Reach Court Farm, St. Margarets-at-Cliffe, near Dover, a year before the war, with a dairy herd of 34 cows. In 1939 they ploughed up a large proportion of the 120 acres of permanent pasture to grow the feeding stuffs no longer so easily obtainable from "overseas. Defence works were put up all round their farm, but dur.ing the Battle of Britain they steadfastly refused to leave, gathering in not only their own harvest but rescuing crops on other farms which had to be evacuated.

Further defence works have now been erected and most of Reach Court Farm Is being taken over by the military. But they are carrying on with what is left, and Mr Mitch'ell is managing for the Kent War Agricultural Committee an extensive area of surrounding farmland which would otherwise have borne no crop this year. His 19-year-old sister-in-law. Miss Grace Harrison, has joined the Women’s Land' Army, and is now driving tractors, while Mrs Mitchell is hatching chicks In the most vulnerable incubators in Britain,