Chapter Fifteen
THE WOMEN’S LAND ARMY
During the summer of 1915, I began to think a great deal about the farms in Wiltshire. I was already on good terms with many of the farmers near Salisbury, as for years I had carried on a branch of the National Poultry Organization Society. I now felt sure that before long there would be no able-bodied men left on the farms and that women would have to carry on their work. I talked this over with Lady Pembroke, and then we discussed it with Lord Bath, the Chairman of the Wiltshire County Council. He agreed that the day must come when women would be needed, but he also knew that the farmers would hate taking female labourers until they were actually driven to it. He tactfully advised us to hold our tongues and to keep ourselves in readiness. I also had a good deal of talk on the subject with Charles Bathurst, afterwards Lord Bledisloe. He thought that the question might become imminent sooner than we expected, as he then believed that all men of military age would be called to the Colours directly after the forthcoming harvest. But it was not until the summer of 1916 that the County Agricultural Committee first asked us to begin training girls as milkers. Wiltshire was thus a pioneer in what eventually developed into the Women’s Land Army. We began on a very small scale. Mr. Louis Greville lent us a cottage at Woodford where we installed six would-be milkers with a very entertaining old Miss Snow as matron of the little hostel. She was the sister of a General and looked like one herself. The girls were taught to milk by Mr. Greville’s dairyman. Several problems arose in that first August. There was naughty Florrie, who was thought to be insane, because she jumped out of the window a night or two before she was going to her first place. We sent for the doctor, who found no traces of insanity and so she went off to Heytesbury but was soon returned as too unmanageable to stay. Then there was Emma, from Dorchester—a most alarming creature. She was expected to arrive one morning, and I met train after train till between eight and nine at night, when she arrived at Salisbury and flew into a furious passion on the station because she was not allowed to take her bicycle to Woodford. She sprang at me like a pale murderess, and then thought better of it and leapt on to her bicycle, saying she should ride back at once to Blandford, I hoped that she would, but as a matter of fact she changed her mind and rode to Woodford, where she and the sporting Miss Snow after all got on very well together. A few days later I found all the Woodford girls in floods of tears, because somebody had brought ‘things in the head’ to the hostel; and after this I was called on to deal with someone whom I described as ‘a tart who stinks of onions’. She soon returned whence she came, as she did not like the dairyman.
After a few months of this, Lord Radnor offered us the Longford Estate Office, where we had room for twice as many girls as we could take at Woodford. These Longford pupils were girls of the so-called ‘educated’ classes, and I always met them at Salisbury station and drove them to Longford. The first time I went to meet a batch, I accosted all the most attractive looking girls that I saw and asked if they were coming to the Dairy School. Most of them looked very much offended, and, drawing themselves up with great haughtiness, they answered: ‘No.’ I learnt my lesson, and the next time I met a train I asked the girls:
‘Are you coming to Longford Castle?’
They always looked rather flattered at this, and if I had made a mistake they answered quite apologetically ‘ No, not to-day’. Then they watched with impressed faces as I led off my little band.
At this time we made a register of about four thousand women, living in Wiltshire villages, who volunteered to go into the fields at times of seasonal emergency and to work as unskilled labourers. These women were useful in harvesting and weeding, but it was becoming obvious that a far more organized service was essential. In the October of that year I went to a meeting at the House of Commons to discuss creating a National Organization to carry on what had hitherto been done sporadically by County Agricultural Committees. We learnt from the Director-General of recruiting that every available man on the farms would have to be called up by the following April and that our Women’s Committees would have to fill the gaps. He said: ‘No man is indispensable except in the fighting line.’ My cousin Sydney Olivier was then President of the Board of Agriculture, and I had tea with him that day to discuss the various plans. All through the following winter, we held meetings with farmers in different parts of the county to explain what was going to be done. They all hated the idea of this ‘Regiment of Women’ coming into their farms, and it was a very depressing experience to go from place to place outlining our programme, and to be met everywhere by rows of silent, antagonistic faces.
The new Women’s Land Army was a corps of women and girls who enlisted for the duration of the war, were given uniform suited for farm work, and, after a preliminary training in the various branches of agricultural labour, were allotted to farms as they were required.
We recruited the Land Army in co-operation with the Labour Exchanges, and we held our Selection Committees in their offices. One day a candidate
