Essex Land Girls (21 page)

The
Chelmsford Chronicle
of 5 November 1943 reported:

Dublin girl Patricia Kinmouth joined the WLA in Essex soon after war broke out, and became a gardener for Major Hitchcock at Danbury, where she met Captain John Kojan of the U.S. Army, one of the earliest U.S. arrivals, stationed in Essex. They married in London in October 1943.

The same paper, dated 7 April 1944, carried another story:

At Epping Parish Church, Corporal William Clark married Muriel Wood. The bride and groom passed under an archway of hoes and rakes held aloft by WLA girls forming a guard of honour. The WLA bride is employed by Mr Soper at Harlow.

The
Essex Newsman
of 10 July 1943 has yet another story of a ‘GI bride’, headed ‘Bradwell-on-Sea – Bells for Land Girl Bride’:

When Land Girl Miss Violet Thurgood, of Council Cottages, was married at the Parish Church on Saturday to Flight Sergeant R.D. Ratcliffe from Saskatchewan, the church bells were rung, and friends of the bride formed a guard of honour.

Many of the interviewees featured in these pages met their husbands while employed as Land Girls.
Joyce Theobald
, for instance, met her husband on one of the farms around Braxted Park (the Great Braxted area) where she was a tractor driver. They married in 1947 and she stayed in Essex for the rest of her married life.
Winnie Bell
declared that she ‘married the farmer’s son’ (in 1948) and author Ken Smith, writing about Canewdon, tells of Eve Wharam, sent by the WLA all the way from Huddersfield to Scotts Hall Farm (1941–46), who ended up marrying local man Percy Perryman.

On arriving at their billet for a job at Gray’s Farm in Wethersfield, the landlady told
Winifred Daines
and her friend that the farmer had two sons, and the girls liked the idea of ‘one each’! Winifred announced that ‘the first one out is mine’ but she was apparently a bit disappointed … However, with time, things changed, and she married him in 1949. The two sons were exempt from service because ‘they had to run the farm’, their father having vision problems. After their marriage, incidentally, Winifred and her husband ‘bought a bungalow in two acres’ in, of course, Wethersfield.

The Writtle farmer who employed
Gladys Pudney
married her in 1947 and they moved into a house built with the help of the prisoners of war:

Robert was the biggest chap and he could carry two radiators, one under each arm, up a ladder, a big strong chap. They were lovely fellows. Heinrich bought me an azalea plant for my wedding … they were repatriated soon after.

When
Betty Cloughton
was singing for the troops at pubs around Wickham Bishops, after a hard day’s work on the land, she was joined at one point by ‘The Terlonians’, headed up by Alan Cloughton, an organ player. She sang along with the band on stage and they were married just three months later, singing together for forty years with a marriage lasting another twenty, until Alan’s death.

One of the first farms
Barbara Rix
worked on was Red House Farm, Wix, and ‘the horse-man’ there became her father-in-law, in due course, when she married his son, Russell. Russell was a pilot and got hold of ‘extra rations, especially chocolate … but also chewing gum and sweets’. Barbara knew several Essex girls who married Americans that they met in the local United States Air Force (USAF) base.

Jean Levesque
met her husband when he was stationed at Bishops Stortford with the USAF and she was billeted in Mark Hall, Harlow. The owners of the pubs there ‘got to know us quite well, as we used to go there every week … I bought my wedding ring in Harlow, 22ct gold, still as good as when I married’ (she was writing in 1988 from her home in New Hampshire in the USA). After three enjoyable years in the WLA, she left in 1943 to marry.

When
Vicky Phillips
was working on Wallasea Island, she met her ‘serviceman’ husband ‘while waiting for a bus’. His home was in Southend-on-Sea, not that far from where Vicky had been living pre-WLA. The couple married in 1947. Similarly,
Rita Hoy
spoke of meeting some of the troops at the ‘searchlight site alongside the woods [of Mr Bensusan’s estate]. We were invited out by some of the lads’, and she ‘married one of the searchlight operators’.

One of the Land Girls who fell for ‘the boy next door’ was
Mary Page
. She was working at Mr Wisbey’s farm (Pebmarsh) and billeted nearby. Working on another farm, and a member of the Home Guard, the ‘boy’ next door asked her out, and that relationship ended in marriage on Christmas Day, 1943. Mary continued working with the Land Army, only leaving when she was pregnant in 1944. Also working until she was seven months pregnant, carrying sacks of potatoes, was
Lillian Woodham
, who met her Royal Artillery husband when he was ‘on the ack-ack guns’ near to her billet in Ockendon. They married in 1942.

When
Dorothea Strange
and her runaway tractor were chased down Hambro Hill in Rayleigh by a farm worker who leapt on board to help, his heroic act obviously captured her heart. James, who trained WLA girls and was in the Home Guard, became Dorothea’s husband in 1948. It was another farmhand ‘in charge of mechanics’ who stole
Ellen Brown
’s heart on the farm she was assigned to in Galleywood, Chelmsford. They married in February 1946 at the same time as she left the WLA.

The romance between
Vera Osborne
and her husband, serving in Burma, began as a penfriendship at the instigation of his sister, another Land Girl, Lilian. They married in 1949. (This meant that Lilian eventually became aunt to Vera’s daughter Jan, and Maude – or Pips – a lifelong WLA friend of Vera and Lilian, became Jan’s godmother!)

Edna Green
wrote her own romantic tale of love found sitting on the back of a shire horse while working for Graveleys Farm, Hartford End (near Chelmsford), in 1947:

The day that changed my life was the day that I was to take old Blossom to be shod at the smithy’s. She was … a true gentle giant. Sitting astride her broad back … with my collie, Bob, running alongside, what could be more perfect, plodding slowly along the country lane, when I saw coming towards me a brown lorry, owned by the local brewery. As it slowed to let me pass I saw, sitting at the wheel, a dark-haired young man, smiling broadly, almost daring me to dismount for he knew that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to get up again. I wasn’t amused and I felt cross, but I managed to stay mounted, and Blossom plodded on once again, thankfully. Little did I know then that two years later that same young man would be my husband. Recently demobbed from the Royal Marines, he was young, tanned and amazingly handsome. I became so proud to be at his side, as I was, constantly. We met up again a week later, in the local pub, and he bought me lemonade. After that second meeting, we were rarely apart. He taught me the names of the wild flowers, the crops in the fields, the wild animals … I felt I had found my Prince Charming … summer evenings would find us walking the meadows with his terrier, Nell. We would stay as still as mice as we looked in awe at the kingfishers with their bright coloured plumage plunging into the flowing river. We would pick plump blackberries and feed each other and, in the spring, we would sit by the river on a bank of yellow primroses. When autumn brought forth the hazelnuts, somehow he always knew which hedge held the greatest amount of nut boughs, and whilst Nell chased the rabbits from the deepest ditches, we feasted on the sweet fresh fruit of blackberries, and often we carried home our bounty of freshly gathered mushrooms … We did stay together constantly for two years, before we married in 1949 … before my twentieth birthday. [Her husband continued to work as a drayman for the brewery.]

Edna Green (née Mead) in centre of back row with East End friends. (Courtesy of the Braintree District Museum Trust)

Prisoners of war, too, became involved with Land Girls, in spite of the difficult circumstances and the hostility it could generate. One girl and the German she met when they were working at a farm at Theydon Garnon, near Epping (George H.) celebrated their diamond wedding in 2008. The headquarters of the WLA did try and point out the ‘dangers’ of being too friendly when working with prisoners of war, however, citing the ‘world of difference between courteous behaviour and foolish over-friendliness’ in their guidance notes.

There was some opportunity post-war to train in domestic skills at a centre in Suffolk, but this was rather limited compared to training opportunities offered to other ex-service women. Land Girls who had taken proficiency tests and been awarded the appropriate certificate and badge (in tractor driving, pest control, glasshouse work, poultry husbandry, dairy work, etc.), could produce these as evidence of their ability when seeking work in farms or gardens, the qualification being similar to the modern NVQ. Author, gardener and WLA representative Vita Sackville-West’s 1944 book about the WLA addressed its final chapter to ‘Suggested Post War Careers for Women’, at a time when women had finally realised that they were no longer chained to the kitchen sink. She listed not only work in agriculture but in the professions, social services, public health, industry, offices and shops, and with young children, or in domestic economy such as dietetics.

After leaving the WLA in 1946,
Winifred Daines
worked in Braintree for the Courtauld’s factory, and
Iris Shead
returned to her work as a shirt maker in Upminster. Similarly,
Dorothy Jennings
, after her discharge for medical reasons, went back to working in the pharmacy in East London, and
Maude Hansford
returned to her pre-war work as a shorthand typist.

Changing direction, however, were such as
Lynette Vince
who went to work as a mess room orderly in a local hospital, and
Joyce Willsher
who found a job at Shoebury Barracks, emptying trucks. It seems
Iris Jiggens
acquired a taste for service life, because she joined the WRAC and served from 1950–52, acquiring a driving licence and rifle shooting skills in the process.

Iris Jiggens (right) and pal in off-duty mode outside the Anne Boleyn pub in Rochford. (Courtesy of Janet Ouchterlonie)

John Threadgold of Miller’s Farm in Great Wakering had a fascinating tale to tell when asked about Land Girls in 2014 (talking to researcher John Street). From 1942 onwards, the farm had the help of Joan Culham, a Land Girl from Southend-on-Sea. Joan, a teenager, was apparently over 6ft tall and wore a corn dolly favour in her lapel (not part of the official uniform) which was apparently worn by agricultural labourers at hiring fairs to show they were available for work – shades of Thomas Hardy! (See p. 120.) She stayed on until she married Eric Matthews, a marine, and she opened a greengrocer’s shop in Wakering High Street – so some relevance in her choice of shop.

Some girls continued in farm work, however.
Iris Richardson
was one of these, because she had enjoyed the work in Essex and on larger farms in Buckinghamshire. She remembers men returning from the war to work the land once again and the many soldiers who were still billeted at the end of the war in Warwick Drive in Rayleigh, not far from her family home. After the war, she was interested to note that a farm she had worked on, Butler’s at Shopland, upgraded from horses to tractors.
Ivy Cardy
also continued in farm work, and
Vera Pratt
stayed in the St Osyth area, where the WLA had kept her busy until 1946, because she had been offered work by a farmer she met at the local pub. He ‘had a herd of Friesians but was failing the milk hygiene tests’ and asked Vera to ‘help get things back on track’. Although Vera eventually left farming, she stayed on in the area.

The camaraderie mentioned by so many of the Land Girls was a very positive experience and helped offset the homesickness experienced by many. Sharing cigarettes and clothes was common, and many girls made lifelong friends, especially those in hostels. Some, like
Babs Newman
, kept in touch by letter with some of the Americans they met at the Stansted dances. Others, like
Iris Richardson
and
Maude Hansford
, stayed in touch with many of the WLA girls they met, who were from as far afield as Yorkshire and Portsmouth.