When the First World War broke out over 100 years ago, the countryside sent its sons to fight. Soon Britain’s farmers faced the daunting task of feeding a hungry nation, with much of its workforce occupied overseas.
Within hours of the declaration of war in August 1914, newspapers had reached village shops and telegrams had been delivered to country houses. Words spread through the countryside, and rural folk were swept up in war fever as quickly as those in towns.
The departure of young men for the fields of France was the first and most significant impact the First World War had on the countryside.
There was scarcely a hamlet from which some did not join up. Men from every class were affected. Some reservists immediately left their villages to join the colours. Sons of local gentry rejoined their regiments, as did some farmers. Many labourers were also involved – most famously the Wagoners’ Special Reserve, formed by Sir Mark Sykes in 1912 from workers in the villages on his Sledmere estate in Yorkshire. When war started, 1,127 men from the Wagoner’s Reserve went to the front. By the end of September 1914, 750,000 men from town and country had joined up.
But despite the tumultuous events in Europe, farmers still had a job to do. The war would be won as much in the fields of Britain as in those of France and there was a harvest to get in. In those days, when much farming was done by hand, farmers depended on an influx of seasonal labour to gather the crops in August and September.
In the harvest of 1914, special measures were needed in some places due to the loss of manpower. In Northumberland, coal miners joined the farmers in the fields. In Buckinghamshire, two young painters on holiday, John and Paul Nash, patriotically lent a hand with the crops. Paul was later to become an official war artist, painting some of the starkest and most dramatic images of the Front, and after the war they both became brilliant landscape painters.
Once harvest was in, a new wave of men from villages around Britain swapped the ploughshare for the sword, often encouraged by the gentry. Charles Adeane made a recruiting push on his estate at Babraham in Cambridgeshire, with the result that almost all the young men of the village enlisted. By May 1915, recruitment from the countryside matched that from the towns.
There was a continual flow of men to the forces throughout the war: later came conscription, as the Army swelled its ranks from 400,000 at the outbreak of war in 1914, to four million in 1918.
Often all the sons of the family served. Four members of the Moss family from Ridge Farm, Finchamstead, served and, unusually, all survived. In Berkshire, the five sons of William Pope, gardener at Welford Park, joined up in 1914 – four survived but Cecil Pope was killed.
As the war entered its second year, farms were short of workers and relied on extra casual labour, mainly provided by the local women, with help from schoolchildren. Potatoes were encouraged as an important crop and half-term holidays were timed to coincide with potato harvest. With the aid of some off- duty soldiers, farm labour, though under-strength, coped more or less for the first two years of war.
But after conscription was introduced in March 1916, farmers were pleading to keep workers they could ill-afford to lose. They won a concession that no farm labourer was to be called up unless the local agricultural committee agreed (even that concession was dropped after the heavy losses on the front in spring 1918).
By 1917, farms were seriously short- handed. Men in uniform were a common sight in the fields as the government directed more off-duty soldiers on to the land – about 84,000 of them were there as the war ended – and 30,000 prisoners of war were drafted in.
The rise of the women's land army
During this time, women became a vital source of hands. Many were full-time workers, in some places organised into gangs by the local employment registrar – girls left school and went straight into farm work. By 1918, there were more than 113,000 women working on the land.
In 1917, the government created the Women’s Land Army, a new mobile force, whose members, drawn mainly from the middle-class, were prepared to go wherever directed. With uniforms, rallies, training courses and a magazine to boost esprit de corps, the Land Army operated in the same way as its better-known successor of the Second World War. By September 1918, 18,000 Land Army women were at work.
Horses and farming
As well as losing men, farmers lost horses to the war – light horses for the cavalry, heavier
types for draught work. In 1914, the British army possessed just 25,000 horses and the War Office was tasked with sourcing half a million more for battle. In this first year of war, the countryside was emptied of shire horses and riding ponies, a distressing prospect for farming families who saw their valued animals requisitioned by the government.
The lack of horses left farmers in a quandary – alternate beasts of burden had to be found and some even used circus animals to mitigate the shortfall. In Surrey, elephants from a nearby circus were used for ploughing fields and transporting hay.
Equally, the army needed to feed all the horses it had amassed – by 1917, it had a million, despite the high death toll. Each county had a Forage Committee that sent men round to the farms with their balers to collect supplies of hay.
How the government took control of farming
Britain was still not growing enough to feed itself and relied on imports brought by ship. Most got through remarkably well. As a result of these top-ups from abroad and good domestic harvests in 1914 and 1915, there had been no rationing, and farming had been left more or less to market forces.
But 1916’s crop was not good. And by now German submarines were sinking many ships importing food. So grievous were the losses that by 1917 the British people faced the real prospect of starvation. In April that year, losses of Allied and neutral merchant vessels to U-boat attack peaked at 860,000 tons and Britain’s supply of wheat dwindled to just six weeks’ worth. By the end of the war, 5,000 merchant ships had been sunk.
Desperate to increase food production, the government took outright control of farming. A new Ministry of Food organised rationing, a new President of the Board of Agriculture (the predecessor of DEFRA) launched a ‘plough-up’ policy, and farmers found themselves bossed about by the new County War Agricultural Executive Committee, set up to implement the policy.
The ‘ploughing up’ campaign
The ‘ploughing up’ campaign aimed to turn fields of pasture on which cattle grazed into fields growing wheat, oats and potatoes. The nation needed food energy, and wheat and potatoes are a more efficient way of producing calories than letting cattle eat grass to convert into meat.
The pressure was on: men from the county committee told the farmer which fields he should contribute to the campaign. If he didn’t comply, fines, compulsory ploughing orders and even dispossession could come his way. Along with these came minimum wages for the farm workers.
Farmers hated what they saw as Whitehall interference. But there were carrots as well as sticks. The government guaranteed a minimum price for wheat and oats. As it happens that was lower than the market price, but the gesture counted.
The county committee assisted with labour supply – and machines. This war brought machines to farming on a scale not seen hitherto. Steam power for threshing and ploughing made a valuable contribution, but the big change came with the tractor, which was still in its infancy in 1914, as far as British farming was concerned. Its fledging design had, however, inspired the invention of the tank, unveiled in battle in 1916. Meanwhile there were few tractors in use on British soil, not all of them very reliable. The government took control and ordered large numbers from America to be distributed by the county committees.
The government’s ambitious targets for the acres to be ploughed were missed. Even so, nearly two million acres were added to the Britain’s ploughed land by the end of 1918. More wheat, oats and especially potatoes – 50% more – were grown. Harvests were better, so British farmers made a valuable contribution to averting the threat of starvation.
When the British countryside emerged from the war, much had changed. Red tape was here to stay, and Whitehall would never completely relax its grip on the nation’s farms. Further, the challenges of producing food more efficiently, with a smaller workforce, had accelerated the spread of machinery to allow one farmer to do the work once done by many.
Jonathan Brown is a historian of farming and the English countryside. His books include Shepherds and Shepherding and Farming in the 20s and 30s.
Top image: Members of the British Women's Land Army harvesting beets. A woman is driving the Fordson tractor in the foreground, while three others with pitchforks are loading the beetroot's on the truck behind the tractor. © British Ministry of Information, from Fox Photos., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons