Land Girls At Plumpton

As the Battle of Britain raged overhead, in the fields of Sussex below an army of young ladies was being enrolled to learn the basics of agriculture and animal husbandry, to provide a new rural workforce as Lindsey Tydeman from The Keep explains

You can imagine the noise in this dining room… It’s 1940 and around 70 young women who have probably only just met, are sharing their first meal together and talking excitedly about the weeks ahead. From the way the waiters are hovering at the door watching the diners, it’s clear to see it’s obviously a special sitting. The women are about to embark on the shortened course designed for entrants to the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War. The government idea was for women to learn the basics of agriculture and animal farming, and then be placed on farms around Britain to take the place of the men who had been called up for the army. Archivists at The Keep think that this photograph (ref PAC/9/1/1/1) was taken at the East Sussex School of Agriculture in Plumpton (now Plumpton Agricultural College), which had been training students since 1926. At that time both men and women were admitted as students although they weren’t taught the same things. The men’s twoterm course covered animals, crops, poultry, horticulture and bookkeeping. The women’s one-term course covered dairying, cheese-making and the preservation of fruit and vegetables. All that changed in 1940. After their brief training, land girls were expected to take a full role on a farm, from the major agricultural tasks to the details of bee keeping, jammaking and fruit-bottling.

The Keep hold a vast amount of information about Plumpton Agricultural College. Among the early prospectuses, course leaflets and menus from reunion dinners in the 1930s are some typed reminiscences by Enid Schofield, a lady who attended Plumpton soon after the

college opened in 1926. She described the dawn shift of milking the herd, feeding the calves and weighing the milk into the vats. ‘No one went to breakfast until Miss Macdonald had warmed it to the correct temperature and added the rennet’. Enid learned

how to distinguish between the milk of different cows: ‘The Friesians gave quantity, the Shorthorns quality and the Jerseys richness’. And then there was the poultry dressing challenge, ‘We had to be able to kill, pluck and truss ready for the table in forty minutes’.

Enid went on to work an 800-acre farm in Berkshire during the Second World War, like her contemporaries, ‘driving the tractor, ploughing, harrowing, rolling and harvesting’. Although the farmer didn’t think much of the ‘lady from London’ who was renting his farmhouse, he later admitted that Enid had been ‘one of the best tractor drivers he had ever had.’ Even the occasional machinegunning from a passing German plane failed to curb Enid’s enthusiasm for the work. ‘All was well,’ she wrote, ‘He missed.’ l

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