THE ISLAND AT WAR 1939 - 1945
munching in the stalls, of the milk filling
the buckets with a good head of foam and
the smells of dung, warm cow and straw.
“When I went home,” she remembers, “my
family complained my smell preceded me
into the house.”
Dorothy met Mary Barrenger who was in
digs in the village with another land girl
but neither of them liked sharing a double
bed, “We put a bolster down the centre
known as ‘the middle man’”, says Mary,
“and we had to use a toilet which was a
two-seater over buckets in a shed up the
garden.”
Her working week was 60 hours with one
weekend in three off. Living in Kent she
was under ‘bomb alley’ with the dreaded
doodle bugs and later the V2’s buzzing
overhead while they were milking. “It was
long hours of hard work but I enjoyed it
as I’d wanted to be with animals ever since
I can remember.”
Joyce Maynard was born on the Island
but went to work in Berkshire and Surrey
while she was in the Land Army and
her first job was growing vegetables for
a wartime factory canteen. “My worst
job was crawling over frosty ground to
pick a bushel of spinach,” she says, “my
best job was sitting on a large flower pot
picking currants.” Later she went to the
Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley
where six land girls were employed on the
Lease-lend Seed Trials Scheme. A few
of the girls’ landladies became lifelong
friends and Joyce says they were
visited regularly by a welfare lady
who organised the replacement of
worn-out clothing and invited the
girls to her house.
Some of the land girls stayed
on after the end of the war until
the Women’s Land Army was
finally disbanded in 1950. It’s
not surprising they felt they were
a ‘forgotten army’ as they were
excluded from all the post-war
benefits granted to the other war
services; Winston Churchill had
insisted that they were to be treated
in the same way as the munitions
and industrial workers. They were
allowed to keep their shoes and their
greatcoats provided they dyed the
coats blue and until recently, ex-land
girls were not allowed to take part
in the march past the Cenotaph in
London on Remembrance Sunday.
But on 6 December 2007 the
government announced that any
surviving members of the Women’s
Land Army and the Women’s Timber
Corps were to be awarded a badge to
commemorate their war efforts. This
recognition comes after decades of
campaigning by the WLA and the WTC
but sadly, it comes too late for some of the
WLA as there are only 20,000 members
living today out of the 80,000 land girls
working for their country in 1943.
life
Photos P 57:
Above: Enid Attrill
Bottom: Dorothy Wright and Mary Barrenger
wearing sacks for whitewashing the
cowsheds.
Photos P56:
Top: Helen pictured with a cart full of
landgirls in 1940 working for the Forestry
Commission (Helen circled)
Inset: Helen wearing the hat.
Bottom: An original 1940's
recruitment poster which
made the job look very
appealing, far
from the truth.
Island Life - www.isleofwight.net
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