THE ISLAND AT WAR 1939 - 1945
trees and run sawmills to help the war
effort.
Not all farms had machinery and the
land girls had to cope with horse-drawn
hand ploughs and to harvest the crops
by hand. Some of the farmhouses and
cottages where they were billeted had no
running water, electricity or indoor toilets
and the farmer’s wife might be jealous of
a girl coming to work with her husband.
As agricultural labourers they were
entitled to an allowance of eight ounces of
cheese a week but many of the girls never
saw it or were never given a hot meal.
Kathleen Long was seventeen-years-old
when she volunteered to join the WLA
and was sent to work at Guildford Farm
in Havenstreet. “I used to bring the cows
in from the field at five o’clock in the
morning,” she says, “and I had to learn
how to milk them. I was nervous at first
as sometimes a cow would kick out and
knock over the bucket of milk”. A slip of
girl, it was her job to roll the heavy milk
churns from the cowshed and take them
down to Havenstreet station.
A year later she went to work at Redhill
Farm in Wroxall. She remembers looking
Island Life - www.isleofwight.net
after the poultry, hoeing the fields and
helping with the haymaking. “It was
double summer time and we worked
until ten or eleven at night getting in the
harvest,” Kathleen says. She still has her
WLA armband, a certificate and badge
for proficiency in dairy work and milking
together with her release certificate.
Kathleen’s husband Henry remembers
some of the land girls were billeted in a
hostel in Sandown. “They were brought
by lorry to Westover farm where I
worked,’ he says, ‘but they were city girls
and pretty useless.”
Away from home for the first time,
the girls often felt homesick but Ennis
Noska-Smith who was seventeen and
came from Coventry, loved the life. “We
had no training,” she says, “and on the
first day I drove the horse and cart into
a hedge. The farmer was furious but
when one of the German prisoners-of-war
working on the farm put a handful of
baby rats down my back, the farmer gave
him a good ticking off.”
At harvest time, the new girls were given
the worst job of removing the chaff from
underneath the thresher. “We wore
life
dinky curlers and a headscarf to protect
our hair” says Ennis, “but our faces were
black at the end of the day. My boyfriend
laughed when he saw my black face, my
white teeth and the whites of my eyes.”
The Land Girls’ badge was a wheat sheaf
below a crown. They wore fawn cord
knee breeches, matching shirts, a green tie
and a figure-hugging green sweater - the
breeches were exchanged for dungarees
in the summer. The girls were also given
a fawn greatcoat, a felt hat, black oilskin
mac, a sou’wester and leather boots and
they sewed red flashes on their arm bands
to show how long they had served.
The girls in the WLA had the hardest
work of any of the women’s services, were
paid less, got fewer clothing coupons
and less holidays. But unlike the other
women’s services, the Land Army was a
one-rank force and a girl could request to
be released from the service at any time.
Enid Attrill worked at Locks Farm in
Photos:
Below: Helen Hart pictured at Billingham
Manor in 1941-42 with Helen, Audrey, Eve,
Rita and Vera - Helen Back row - left
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