BRITAIN’S WOMEN AT WORK

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21035, 10 February 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

BRITAIN’S WOMEN AT WORK

Thirty Thousand Farmerettes In Arms

(Phyllis M. Lovell, in Christian Science Monitor.)

JF YOU CAN RISE before the sun of an English winter’s morning, if you can face into a keen wind blowing over fields ploughed and barren, if you can take a delight in the deep wet ruts of country lanes and feel friendly—really friendly—toward a recalcitrant motor tractor which, sullen and cold after a night’s stand, refuses to start, then you are a Land Girl born—no mistake about it. And Great Britain wants Land Girls. In Great Britain a ploughing-up campaign is in progress, because there is a stern need for securing of food supplies. Coupled with this, there is the likelihood that, as months pass, more and more men will be called to the colours. So Great Britain is turning for land work tc it women, and out of the towns are coming recruits who, all unused to the ways of the countryside, are yet willing to “do their bit.” Thirty thousand women, mostly from the towns and cities, have volunteered for the Women’s Land Army. Some 28,000 of them have gone or are now in process of going through the short war training that is provided free by the Government. Slowly but surely they are being absorbed into the work of farms all up and down the country. There are No Pretensions About the Job. Nobody claims that a training of four weeks’ duration is going to turn a shorthand typist into a farmer, or even into a qualified farm labourer. Nobody claims either that a wage of 28 shillings a week, “with appropriate deductions for lodging and insurances,” is adequate payment for a young woman who in ordinary peacetime might be earning three or four times that amount without considering herseli overpaid. But the Women’s Land Army is not intended for ordinary peacetime. It is a thing of emergency, a matter of national service which will disappear as lapidly as it has appeared when war is over and done with. When the Women’s Land Army was first considered, the organisation of it was undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture rnd Fisheries, and the Ministry chose Lady Gertrude Denman —chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, and herself an enthusiastic expert in the ways of the countryside—a:, its Director. Under Lady Denman, county committees were set up with instructions to work in connection with the appropriate Local Authorities of each district. It has been the duty of these committees first to enroll and then to place in employment the women who pass through their hands. Training, for the most part, lias been and is being done by the Agricultural Colleges and Farm Institutes of the whole country, normal courses having been, for the time, abandoned in favour of the emergency work. In certain instances, approved farmers who have offered their services have had recruits turned over to them for instruction. Women of the Land Army may undertake any one of Five Lines of Work. They mav take up general farming work in tiio fields oil arable crops, with experience in tractor driving and in handling other farm machinery. They may undertake the care of livestock, which means that they must master machine milking during their training and become as good as they can at milking by hand. They must be prepared, too. to keep cows and cowsheds, and pigs and pigsties, in good order, and must know something of the ways of an up-to-date dairy. They may turn their attention, if they wish, to poultry-keeping, learning about the rearing of chick: in incubators, the methods of feeding and cleaning approved by modern farmers. They must go in for market gardening in the open and under glass.

They may study something of forestry. Recently I spent a day with a band of land recruits in their second week of training. We had meals together at a long trestle table, eating a wonderful dish —Yorkshire pudding and syrup—designed to appease appetites freshened by unwonted exercise and keen air. And then we Went Out Into the Wind. I counted the various peacetime occupations represented. A mannequin, a dressmaker, several shop assistants, a number ol office workers, a tap-dancer, a milliner, several young people straight from home who were now entering paid employment for the first time. Their clothing was odd, though by no means inefficient. The Government is soon to issue khaki coats, skirts, breeches and stockings, green woollen pullovers, heavy shoes, and armlets in red and green. But none of such finery is available as yet. In the absence of it, the young women wore a temporary issue of dungarees, khaki mackintoshes and rubber boots. Their heads were, for the most part, uncovered. Their hands and their cheeks were red. They wanted to tell me what it was like, these mornings of late autumn, to turn out of bed at 4.30 and to grope your way by the aid of an electric torch to the stables where the horse must be harnessed to the cart which took them out to the milking. The other morning, the toren had petered out. Neither lantern nor candle had been handy, so the business had been accomplished in darkness. “But the horse was very helpful,” they explained when I began to say something about cold fingers and heroism. “He knew it was difficult, and helped all he could!” And they wanted to show me the motor tractor, its wheels deep in heavy mud, and to tell how. the day before, with the steering clean out of hand, somebody had charged a barbed wire fence. The steering of a tractor is the heaviest farm job. they explained. Only the toughest recruits could stand up to it, ana not one could as yet plough a straight furrow. And it was noisy, with an incessant clatter, and bumpy beyond expression, and the gears were complicated, and the clutch fierce, and altogether—taking one thing with another, they said—well, it was the most sought-after occupation of the day’s routine. Everybody wanted to “have a shot." I watched them go off. a laughing crew, on a cart to the fields, where potatoes had to be tossed into sacks— two girls to a sack, holding the mouth wide, bending to gather with the free hand the lines of potatoes turned up by the machine. Then I went back to the road. These young women, I thought, might not possess much skill. Undoubtedly some of them might be More Embarrassment Than Help to a harassed farmer — like the milliner in the hothouse, the milliner who, I had been informed, “simply could not handle tools in a professional way.” Or like the tap dancer, diminutive and pretty, who found it inexpressibly difficult to wash down « cow. But undoubtedly they were, as Lady Denman had said of them, “just the rigid sort.” And undoubtedly being the right sort, possessing the right idea, goes a long way in winning a war. Walking up the winding roal to the v”. lage. the afternoon was cold. I . up the collar of a heavy coat ano .. little mean. Away across the top of tiu hedge, in a field that ran in strips of gree and brown to the gray skyline. I ooul see a group of brown spots that move slowly. Two by two the wenua t t r Land Army were gathering potaL 1. - hind the machine.