Land Girls: Women Who Kept Britain Fed in WWII

By 1940, Britain was in a fight it could not afford to lose — and the front line was not only in the sky over Kent or on the beaches of Dunkirk. It was in the fields of Somerset, the forests of the Scottish Highlands, and the frost-hardened fenlands of Lincolnshire. The women who worked those fields were not soldiers in any conventional sense. But without them, Britain might well have starved.

The Fields Called — And Britain's Women Answered

Before the war, Britain imported an astonishing 55 million tons of food annually. When German U-boats began their devastating campaign against Allied shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic — ultimately sinking over 1,000 merchant vessels — that dependence became a national emergency almost overnight. Food security was no longer a peacetime consideration. It was a survival question.

The Women's Land Army (WLA) was officially re-formed on 1 June 1939 — months before war was even declared — reflecting just how seriously planners took the threat. The government's Dig for Victory campaign gave the WLA its public face, but the reality was far grimmer and more urgent than any cheerful propaganda poster suggested.

Women from factory floors, typing pools, corner shops and schoolrooms across Britain answered the call. Many had never set foot on a working farm. By 1943, over 80,000 of them were keeping the nation's agriculture alive.

Britain Had Done This Before — A Quick History of the WLA

The Women's Land Army was not a wartime improvisation. It had a proud predecessor: the original WLA, founded in 1917 during the First World War, when mass conscription left British farms desperately short of male labour. Around 23,000 women had served in that earlier iteration — a precedent that government planners remembered clearly when they began preparing for a second global conflict.

The woman chosen to lead the revived WLA was Lady Gertrude Mary Denman, appointed Honorary Director in 1939. Formidable, principled and utterly committed to her volunteers' welfare, Lady Denman became the WLA's fiercest champion — and, as we shall see, its most courageous critic of government injustice.

The WLA came with its own uniform: brown corduroy breeches, a green jumper, khaki overcoat and a brown felt hat. Practical, distinctive and proudly worn — even if the breeches scandalised some conservative farming communities. Remarkably, a number of women who had served in the WWI WLA actively encouraged their own daughters to sign up in 1939, creating quiet family traditions of wartime agricultural service.

Who Were the Land Girls? The Women Behind the Wellies

Women aged 17 to 40 were eligible to volunteer for or be directed into the WLA, and they came from virtually every corner of British society. London secretaries, Welsh schoolteachers, Scottish mill workers and Midlands factory girls all found themselves transplanted into a world of early mornings, heavy machinery and livestock.

The gap between their previous lives and their new ones was sometimes breathtaking. Pattie Richards from Birmingham famously recalled that she had never seen a cow up close before reporting to a Somerset dairy farm in 1941. She was milking a full herd within a fortnight.

The youngest recruits were just 17 years old. Some lied about their age to join earlier, desperate to serve in any capacity available to them. By 1944, over 6,000 women had joined a specialised branch — the Women's Timber Corps — whose members earned themselves the affectionate nickname the "Lumber Jills."

A Hard Day's Work — What Life on the Land Really Looked Like

There was nothing romantic about the daily reality of Land Girl service. A typical day began at 5am with milking, followed by hours of ploughing, harvesting, hedging, pest control and threshing — six days a week, in all weathers, across all seasons. Blisters, aching muscles and chilblained hands were simply part of the job.

Land Girls were billeted with local farming families, in hostel dormitories or converted barns. Conditions varied enormously — some women found warm, welcoming homes; others endured leaking roofs, inadequate heating and meagre rations. The WLA trained its recruits at over 200 county training centres across England, Scotland and Wales, with initial courses lasting just four to six weeks. Whatever gaps that left, the women filled with sheer determination.

They also operated heavy machinery that many had never touched before — tractors, threshing machines, combine harvesters. Starting wages were 28 shillings per week, roughly equivalent to £70 today, and consistently less than male farmworkers doing identical work. The injustice was noted. It was not quickly corrected.

The Timber Corps — Britain's Forgotten Lumber Jills

Formed in April 1942 as a distinct branch of the WLA, the Women's Timber Corps took on some of the hardest physical work of the entire home front effort. Lumber Jills felled timber across England and Scotland to supply railway sleepers, telegraph poles, charcoal and — crucially — pit props for the coal mines that powered British industry and the war effort.

Over 4,000 women served in Scotland alone, working in remote Highland forests in conditions that would have tested seasoned lumberjacks. Agnes Patterson from Glasgow described felling her first mature oak as "the hardest and most thrilling thing I had ever done in my life." That combination of hardship and fierce pride runs through almost every account of Timber Corps service.

Yet the Lumber Jills waited a long time for formal acknowledgement. The Timber Corps was only granted a dedicated memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire in 2007 — 62 years after the war ended. It was recognition that came far too late for many who had served.

Prejudice in the Ploughed Fields — The Battles Beyond the Farm

The Land Girls did not just fight the weather and the workload. Many male farmers initially refused to hire WLA volunteers outright, insisting that women were physically incapable of farm labour. That prejudice was dismantled season by season, harvest by harvest, as the women repeatedly proved them wrong.

In some conservative rural communities, women wearing trousers — a practical necessity in the fields — were regarded as scandalous as late as 1942. Social friction was real, and it added an extra layer of difficulty to lives that were already exhausting.

The deepest injustice came at the war's end. Land Girls were explicitly excluded from the post-war gratuity payments granted to women who had served in other services such as the ATS and WRNS. Lady Denman protested publicly and persistently. When the government refused to act, she resigned as WLA Director in 1945 — a principled stand that cost her the role she had devoted years of her life to. The slight against the Land Girls was one she refused to quietly accept.

The WLA was officially disbanded on 30 November 1950 with no formal government recognition ceremony. For an organisation that had helped feed a nation through its darkest years, it was a quietly shameful ending.

What the Land Girls Actually Achieved — The Numbers That Won the War

The statistics tell a story that no amount of prejudice or government neglect can diminish. Between 1939 and 1945, British farmland under cultivation increased by 65% — from approximately 12 million to over 18 million acres. Domestic food production rose from covering roughly 30% of Britain's needs in 1939 to nearly 70% by 1944.

The WLA contributed directly to a 91% increase in potato production and a near-doubling of wheat and vegetable harvests across the war years. By keeping British agriculture functioning at this scale, the WLA freed up critical merchant shipping capacity for military equipment and war materials — a strategic contribution that is easy to overlook but impossible to overstate.

Churchill's War Cabinet credited agricultural output as one of three critical factors — alongside the RAF and the Royal Navy — in preventing British defeat during 1940 and 1941. The Land Girls were part of that equation. Just as the B-17 Flying Fortress crews and Tuskegee Airmen reshaped the air war through individual courage and collective effort, the Land Girls reshaped Britain's capacity to survive through exactly the same qualities — applied to muddy fields instead of open skies.

Personal Stories — Three Land Girls Who Showed Extraordinary Grit

Joan Cowderoy, 18 years old and fresh from London, was posted to a remote Lincolnshire fen farm in 1941. She spent three consecutive winters harvesting sugar beet by hand in sub-zero temperatures. She never once asked to be moved.

Edna Barker from Sheffield mastered tractor driving within two weeks of arrival and was training other women by the end of her third month. Her instructor reportedly said she was the fastest learner he had encountered. In a world that had told women they couldn't manage heavy machinery, Edna quietly made the argument redundant.

Mary Fedden — later a celebrated British artist — served in the WLA before returning to her painting career. She credited her years working in the Somerset landscape with giving her a lifelong, deeply personal connection to the British countryside, a connection that ran through her work for decades afterwards.

Sisters Dorothy and Irene Squires joined together in 1940 and were determined to serve on the same farm. When authorities attempted to post them separately, they threatened to refuse deployment altogether. The arrangement was granted. They worked the same Devonshire farm for the duration of the war.

For those who want to go deeper into the personal experience of WLA service, the diaries of Barbara Beddow — held at the Imperial War Museum — offer some of the most vivid first-hand accounts in existence. They are a remarkable primary source, and freely accessible to researchers.

The Legacy of the Land Girls — Finally Getting the Recognition They Deserved

Recognition came slowly but it came. In 2008, after decades of campaigning by veterans and their families, the British government issued a formal badge of honour to surviving Women's Land Army and Timber Corps veterans. It was not the full parity they had deserved since 1945, but it was an acknowledgement — and one that meant a great deal to women then in their eighties and nineties.

A national memorial to the Women's Land Army was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum on 27 July 2014. The Imperial War Museum holds an extensive archive of WLA photographs, personal diaries, uniforms and oral history recordings, all freely accessible to researchers and history enthusiasts alike.

The BBC drama Land Girls, broadcast between 2009 and 2011, introduced the WLA's story to a new generation of viewers and sparked renewed public and academic interest in what the women had actually endured and achieved. Historians now broadly argue that the WLA represents the single most significant expansion of women's agricultural labour in British history — a legacy whose effects on how rural women's work was valued extended long beyond 1945.

Over 80,000 women swapped their ordinary lives for dawn milking, frozen fields and heavy machinery. They were underpaid, often overlooked and sometimes actively resisted. And they helped feed a nation through its worst years. That is a story that deserves to be told — and remembered.