Читать книгу Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45 - Duff Hart-Davis - Страница 17

Necessity is the mother of invention

Traditional proverb

When petrol rationing came into force on 19 September 1939, only 10 per cent of the population had cars; and now each owner was limited to seven gallons – or about 200 miles – a month. The result was that many people put their vehicles into storage, mounting them on blocks in shed or garage to take the weight off the tyres. After November 1940 no new cars were built for civilian use, and those that were available (about 400 in the whole country) were allocated for use by doctors, police and so on. Buses ceased to run, leaving many country people marooned, and most rural roads were almost free of traffic.

Restrictions brought out a rash of new bicyclists, who often discovered that travel on velocipedes is hard going: as someone pointed out, ‘A bicycle finds out the uphill gradients in a remarkable manner.’ Because they lacked both practice and confidence, and rode machines bedevilled by lack of maintenance, these novices were a menace to other road-users; but boys soon mastered the trick of catching hold of the back of a slow-moving lorry and getting a tow uphill. Children lucky enough to own bicycles rode to and from school as a matter of course.

Old pony traps and governess carts were dragged out of sheds in surprising numbers: dusted down and polished up, they commanded two or three times the price that any owner would have dared ask before the war: £30 or £40 instead of £10 or £12. The writer Penelope Chetwode (wife of the poet John Betjeman) described how she taught Mrs John Piper, wife of the artist, to ride. Myfanwy had never been near a horse before, but now she sold her car, bought a 14.1 hands black gelding, and after minimal instruction was riding twenty or thirty miles a day around her home near Henley-on-Thames.

Farmers were allowed an extra ration of fuel. Even so, lack of petrol often meant that they had to move their sheep and cattle to market on foot, sometimes walking ten or twenty miles a day. Because the police began to stop private cars and ask drivers to justify their journey, many farmers took to carrying a decoy sack of wheat, or the punctured front tyre of a tractor, which remained on board indefinitely as a decoy to allay suspicion.

Fuel shortages put new life into another transport medium: the canals. The Grand Union Canal from London to Birmingham was a key route for shifting heavy loads: boats carried fifty tons of steel, aluminium and cement northwards to the industrial Midlands and brought back coal. When some of the barges were laid up for lack of crew, a scheme was launched to recruit women, and more than sixty took up the offer. One, Emma Smith, found that the experience changed her life. Having grown up in a privileged background, the daughter of a banker, she felt that in joining the dockers, the boatmen and the regular boaters who travelled with their families, she had ‘crossed over a boundary line, and never went back. I became a working-class girl.’

On the land, every effort was being made to increase food production. In a message to The Farmers’ Weekly the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dornan-Smith – a popular figure, who had served with a Sikh regiment in India, and was a former President of the National Farmers’ Union – offered the magazine’s readers some stirring thoughts:

The fresh-turned furrows are our trenches: the added blades of grass are our bullets, and every extra sheaf of corn is a shell in this war of resources … The war is here in earnest, and two opposing ideas, freedom versus a ruthless tyranny, are locked in a grip in which one or other must die … The farmer is a key man in the events which now shake Western civilisation.

In response to the Government’s urgent appeal, agricultural machinery began pouring into the country: from America, under the Lend-Lease agreements made in the spring of 1941, came big Allis-Chalmers and Minneapolis-Molines tractors, but also small Ford Fergusons, built in Detroit under a contract signed in 1938 between the Irish engineer-inventor Harry Ferguson and Henry Ford Senior. Ferguson’s key innovation was the revolutionary three-point linkage, which attached the tractor to an implement (for instance a plough) with hydraulically operated arms, and in effect made the pair a single unit, instead of one pulling the other. During the war thousands of Ford Fergusons were made in America and shipped to Britain, and the three-point linkage has been taken up all over the world.

Besides tractors, Massey-Harris combine harvesters came in from America, Sunshine combines from Australia, and various types of drill for sowing seed. Crawler tractors went high up hillsides in the north of England and in Wales, ripping out bracken, which had invaded over two million acres and was useless as fodder, being poisonous to ruminants. A study by the Oxford Agricultural Research Institute worked out that ploughing with a horse and a single-furrow plough cost 12s per acre, whereas a two- or three-furrow tractor cost just over 9s per acre – and the tractor could cover at least four times as much ground in a day.

With American imports pouring in, the number of tractors available to farmers increased so fast that in 1941 190 Oxford undergraduates (a third of them girls) were given instruction in the basics of driving and maintenance and sent to a hundred public and secondary schools to pass on their skills to older boys. Each instructor was detailed to take on twenty-four boys of sixteen or over, who would learn to drive ‘dead straight’, and to back a two-wheel trailer between stakes (no easy task). They were also to learn about servicing, ‘the meaning and use of the grease gun and nipples’. The idea of fitting tractors with cabs was still so new that a photograph of a man ploughing steep ground at Almondbank in Perthshire was captioned: ‘The cab on this caterpillar tractor makes the driver independent of good weather.’

Some farmers invented methods of their own for speeding production. One was Jack Hatt, who hitched four implements in line behind a powerful tractor and proclaimed the virtues of PPDH – Plough, for turning the furrows over, Press, for levelling, Drill, for sowing the seed, and Harrow, for working it in. By this means he was able to cover enormous acreages, saving time and fuel.

On waterlogged land, especially in the clay of East Anglia, ploughing had to be preceded by the restoration or creation of drains – and here again astonishing results were achieved. By February 1943 the Government had sanctioned 10,380 mole-drainage schemes, 19,725 tile-drainage schemes, 66,011 farm-ditch schemes and 5338 schemes for small areas. The land improved extended to more than four and a half million acres. One outstanding success was the reclamation of 400 acres on Ferrymoor Common in Yorkshire, which until then had been used as a camping ground by gypsies, but after treatment yielded huge crops of potatoes, wheat, oats, rye, clover and turnips.

The frenzy of ploughing led to some unforeseen results. One was that on upland farms the pastures on which dairy cattle had been grazing disappeared under corn, and the cows had to move to higher ground. Up there, however, there was often no water, so that the Government had to offer farmers 50 per cent grants to install piped systems.

So urgent was the need to increase food production that the Government declared war on all species which it reckoned were inhibiting farmers’ efforts. The first and foremost enemies were rabbits; thousands of acres round the edges of fields close to woods and spinneys were being eaten to the ground, yielding only a quarter of their potential output. Norman Sharpe, gamekeeper on the Apley Hall estate in Shropshire, attributed their proliferation to the fact that control measures had been abandoned during the Great War, and remembered how some of the fields bordering the Spring Copse at Apley Hall ‘simply appeared to be moving of an evening’.

On a farm at Linkenholt in Hampshire four guns killed 940 rabbits in a morning, but that made little difference, and the owner became so desperate that he decided to wire in his whole estate. This drastic solution took fourteen miles of rabbit netting, four feet tall, with a mesh of 1⅝ inches, and with the bottom turned outwards horizontally so that rabbits outside the pale could not burrow underneath. Those that remained inside were exterminated by gun, dog, trap, snare and gas; and although fiendishly expensive, the experiment was reckoned to have paid off in the amount of crops saved.

If live rabbits were a menace, dead ones were very popular. On one farm near Newton-by-the-Sea, on the Northumbrian coast, the assembled villagers killed 250 out of a single field of corn, whereupon the chief vermin-catcher gave one to everybody present and loaded the rest into his Austin Seven. He and the farmer then drove to the Ship Inn to celebrate their record bag, but got so drunk that when they reached home they failed to empty the car – only to find, in the morning, that most of their cargo had disappeared.

As for rats – the annual damage done by them was estimated at £12 million (over £600 million in today’s terms), and Mr E. C. Read, later technical adviser to the Ministry, quoted the cost of every rat as 30s a year. The Ministry commissioned a study to determine the cost of rat-proofing corn stacks with circular walls of corrugated-iron sheets, sunk two feet into the ground and protruding four feet above it. Estimating that 411,000 stacks would have been needed to store the 1939 harvest, researchers concluded that the cost of corrugated iron for 1940 would be £2,719,000. Since this was clearly prohibitive, the Ministry urged farmers to use every means to destroy the vermin: ‘Spring traps, wire traps, snares, sunk pit traps, barrel traps, break-back traps and varnish traps, known as sticky boards.’

In October 1940 the Minister, invoking the Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act of 1919, announced that the annual Rat Week should be held, ‘notwithstanding the war’. Everyone in the country was asked to ‘take concerted action against these vermin’. The success or failure of the initiative was not recorded – but the Pied Piper himself could hardly have matched the performance of Louth Rural District Council, in Lincolnshire, which in the previous November had begun paying 2d for each rat’s tail handed in. By 31 March 1940 almost 42,500 rats had been destroyed. This astonishing cull must have reduced the local population substantially; but as Country Life declared, ‘A combined effort is necessary for their extermination. Every method must be brought to bear simultaneously – rat-hunts, gassing, poisoning, trapping, and particularly the surrounding of ricks before thrashing.’ The Government was doing its best. ‘Kill that rat!’ cried one of its posters. ‘Rats rob us of food. Rats spread disease. Rats delay our victory.’

The Ministry also turned its fire on the poor house sparrow. A pamphlet emphasized the bird’s destructive habits – pecking blossoms of currants and gooseberries, eating whatever seedlings it could reach, and, at harvest time, flocking to the fields to devour huge quantities of corn. A ‘wanton pest’, the sparrow was said to destroy fledglings of other species. The campaign was welcomed by many War Ags, including that of Lancashire, which encouraged people to destroy nests and eggs; and Country Life suggested that the best way to deal with the menace might be to recruit village boys in spring and pay them a small sum for every dozen eggs collected. Vermin bounties paid by the War Ags varied from place to place, but were generally 2d for a rat’s tail, 3d for a grey squirrel’s tail and a halfpenny for a sparrow’s head.

Another detested species was the wood pigeon, described as the ‘food growers’ enemy No. 1’, which was notorious for plundering newly planted crops of peas, beans and corn. One experiment seemed to justify the farmers’ hostility. A sweepstake was held on the number of grains of barley a single bird had swallowed: the highest guess was 722, and investigation of its crop showed that the answer was 711. In November, when flocks had begun their seasonal migration from north to south, Country Life was again in an aggressive mood: ‘It is more than ever necessary this winter that an attack should be made on the flocks of migrant wood pigeons which have already begun to come in.’ The best method, the article recommended, was for the National Farmers’ Union to organize country-wide shoots in the afternoons, when the birds were flighting into the woods to roost. Even the starling (‘a most unpleasant bird’) attracted the magazine’s wrath: by January 1940 flocks were said to be making an unprecedented assault on holly berries, and were almost as great a threat to agriculture as other ‘feathered pests’.

As always, from time to time curious incidents were reported in farming journals. On one grass airfield a swarm of bees settled on a wheel chock underneath a fighter. The mechanics working on the plane panicked and started the engine, trying to scare them off; but when they found that the bees remained unmoved by the noise, they calmed down, switched off and continued their maintenance. In the middle of March a calf was ‘born underground’ in Cornwall. A terminally pregnant cow had been standing in the farmyard when the ground beneath her gave way, and she fell fifty feet into an old mine working. Next day she was found partially buried, with a newborn calf by her side, and neither of them any the worse.

Life on a wartime farm was brilliantly evoked by Xandra Bingley in her memoir Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, a headlong narrative of the author’s early days, almost all in the present tense, set in a decrepit smallholding high on the Cotswolds above Cheltenham. Bertie is her father – explosive, loving, mostly away in the army; May is her mother – wonderfully capable and compassionate, as ready to release gas from a bloated cow by driving a needle into its stomach as she is to shoot pigeons or comfort Xandra when she breaks an arm; Mrs Fish, with her orange ringlets and an ungovernable thirst for gin, is a neighbour who comes in to help. Crisis follows crisis. Horses escape; the farmhand cuts off two fingers with the circular saw; the police arrive hunting a murderer. One extract must suffice to give an idea of May’s character:

She has an accident when her car hits a black bull on a narrow road near Guiting Power … She drives into the bull head-on and breaks his front legs. She gets out of the car and kneels by him, and her hands feel his broken bones as he tries to stand up and falls.

She sits on the tarmac and rests his heavy head in her lap and she strokes and strokes his face and says … I’m sorry … I’m so sorry … In the dark I didn’t see you … Why were you in the road? Where were you coming from at nearly midnight? Try to lie still my darling. Before long someone will find us. Sooner or later the pain will go. She sings … There is a green hill far away … without a city wall … Where our dear Lord was crucified … he died to save us all.

Just before sunrise a lorry stops and the driver stands over her and says … Those Yanks do him … all over the shop they are, going like the clappers.

My mother says … No … I did. I saw him too late … Will you go to a telephone box and dial the Hunt Kennels … Andoversford 248 … they’ll be up and about … tell them where I am and tell them to send a winch lorry and a kennelman with a gun.

The milkman says … You’ll be half dead of cold … and my mother says … He keeps me warm … be as quick as you can.

The kennel lorry arrives and the kennelman in black rubber boots and a brown overall says … You can slip out from under him … then I’ll get to work.

My mother says … I’ll stay put where I am … he’s been through a lot tonight … he’s very brave.

The hunt kennelman says … He’s carrying a mountain of flesh … and kneels and puts the gun to the bull’s black curly-haired forehead.

My mother says … May his spirit for ever rest in peace … for the sake of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

The gun fires and the kennelman says … I’ll lift his head … Out you come … You going far?

She says … Only another seven miles … I thought at first he must be Zeus … He was a god and a black bull.

The kennelman says … Master will be pleased … hounds can live off his flesh for a week.

For May, and for all the other country housewives working day in, day out to sustain their households with primitive equipment, there was little entertainment to be had. But one great morale-booster was the radio. In the mornings and afternoons the half-hour programmes of continuous Music While You Work had the same soothing effect on rural housewives as on women toiling in factories, where productivity increased sharply for a while after each broadcast. Another infallible solace was the voice of Vera Lynn, the nation’s best-loved singer, who received a thousand letters a week begging her to sing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘You’ll Never Know’ and other favourites. (When rationing began to bite, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was sometimes parodied as ‘Whale meat again’.)

Children’s Hour, broadcast from 5 to 6 p.m., was also immensely popular. Under the direction of Derek McCullough – ‘Uncle Mac’ – the programme achieved an audience of four million in 1939, and young listeners eagerly awaited his invariable valediction, ‘Goodnight children, everywhere’. In the evenings people out in the sticks crowded round their Bakelite sets to hear BBC news bulletins. The readers always identified themselves, to prove that Lord Haw-Haw or some other obnoxious interloper had not taken over the microphone: ‘Here is the news, and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it.’

A farmer’s wife living at Thornton-le-Moor in Lincolnshire, eight miles from one town and nine from another, gave a dispassionate account of how she adapted to wartime exigencies and was, as she put it, ‘plodding away very happily’. She sent postcards to order her groceries, which were delivered once a fortnight by van, along with her allowance of paraffin. A baker left bread at a neighbour’s house. Newspapers arrived by post, at least one day old. Movies were ‘out of the question’, but she got books from the local library, and belonged to a club with twelve members, each of whom bought one book a year and passed it on after a month, so that at the end of a year all volumes came back to their original owners.

Village halls became hives of activity, used for numerous purposes. At Trumpington, near Cambridge, the hall was let to the local Education Committee as a canteen for school dinners. Evacuee children from St James’s School in Muswell Hill, north London, had a classroom there and held a Christmas party in the building. The British Legion and Women’s Institute opened a canteen for soldiers from nearby camps. Outside the hall was a National Savings indicator, with a moveable seagull showing how much the village had raised. In 1941 the ARP unit set up a feeding centre in the hall, in case of enemy attack, and the Brigade Headquarters at Anstey Hall, near Trumpington, used the building for dances, causing (as a local report put it) ‘inevitable problems’. Dances were held on Saturday nights (tickets 1s), and on 18 November 1944 (the day street lights were turned on again) a reception was held after the wedding of Percy and Mabel Seeby – she having come to the village as an evacuee.

The passion for dancing spread all over the country. Frank Mee, who grew up during the war in Norton-on-Tees in Co. Durham, and ‘lived for dancing’, was told by his father that, given some music, he’d ‘dance on the roof of the pigsty’. He remembered how ‘every town and village had a hall where dancing could take place’, and reckoned that later generations had ‘no idea what part the dance halls played in keeping up morale’. The bigger halls had orchestras, the smaller ones three-piece bands, a gramophone, or sometimes only a piano.

In the small halls it was plank floors with nails sticking up or concrete with linoleum squares glued down … Any kind of footwear would do, but some people had dancing pumps and others wore what they had, down to hob-nail boots. The lights, the music and the company let you forget the misery, austerity and danger of the war … You could live your dreams for a few sweet hours. Escapism? Yes, but we came out of those places light of heart and uplifted to another planet for a short while. We would come back down with a crash when someone asked whose turn it was to buy the fish and chips.

Music and singing played an important part in village life, as at Spondon, near Derby, where a choral group formed in 1941 grew rapidly until it became a well-balanced choir of eighty. In the words of one member, Gwendolyn Hughes, ‘It gave people something different to think and talk about, instead of surmising and worrying about the war.’ But the war was constantly on every villager’s mind, and event after event – dog show, pony show, garden show, baby show, whist drive, fête – was organized to raise money for some sector of the armed forces. In the summer and autumn of 1941 the village of Foxholes, near Driffield, raised £212 for the Red Cross Agricultural Fund – part of a total of £48,000 collected in Yorkshire.