6.  The Home Front 2

Feeding the Nation

Food is at the heart of any war. It’s not just that an army marches on its stomach. No country can last five minutes if it can’t feed the home population. With food imports under threat from the German navy, food production was at the top of the agenda. 

         War Agricultural Committees were set up by the government, their role to increase food production as much as possible. There was a proposal to plough up the golf course at Shelford Bottom (The Gog Magog golf club) in order to grow wheat. The course was owned by Gonville & Caius College, who expressed great concern. All their investment would be thrown away. The Bursar pointed out that the land was poor heath land, unsuited to arable cultivation, and was currently being used as sheep grazing.

         In fact the military were already using part of the site, and had created a network of trenches which they used for training soldiers. The college also pointed out that most of those now using the course were convalescent soldiers or soldiers on leave. The golf course was close to the hospital at Mount Blow. The bursar obviously gained his point, as the golf links remain to this day. (CC Jan 19 1917).

         I have already discussed the issue of men from farms being called up. Many farmworkers had  joined up of their own accord, and many Shelford farmers were working under very difficult  conditions. Almost all their younger employees had left, leaving predominantly the men over 40, some of them verging on, or past, retirement age.

         Mr Giddings, who farmed up Hinton Way appealed to the Tribunal to save his only remaining man, horsekeeper George Willis, who was 35. He had already lost four men to the war and was struggling to farm 100a (CIP 9 Jun 1916). Mr Duke appealed for his ploughman, drillman and only horsekeeper, Frederick Walker, who was 30 (CIP 9 Jun 1916).

         Peter Grain, who was both a Shelford farmer and an auctioneer at Cambridge cattle market, appealed to keep Harold Turner, age 26. He was a stockman and went to Cambridge cattle market. He was employed at Grain’s Station Farm, and his work included marking sheep, and feeding cattle (CIP 5 May 1916). Frederick Speed, horsekeeper on Grain’s 200-acre farm, had responsibility for 5 to 7 horses. There were currently two men and a boy and one pensioner working on the farm. Speed was given conditional exemption (CIP 16 Jun 1916).

         Farmers appealing to keep their men were frequently told to find themselves “a strong lady”. Most farmers, men or women, would splutter in disbelief at the suggestion. Partly prejudice, but partly also realistic. Not everyone could do farm work, whether man or woman. You needed strength, and the capacity to withstand the weather. It was a thing you became inured to through starting young. Farm workers were not necessarily big and muscular, indeed often they were small and wiry, but they were very strong. Derek Matthews, who worked on Rectory Farm from the 1960s onwards, told me about the weight of the sacks that the men were expected to shift:

The lightest one was a sack of potatoes – that was 1 cwt. Oats was 12 stone a sack. Barley 16 stone. Wheat 18 stone. Beans 20 stone. How they did it, I don’t know. I can remember old men putting a sack on their back, and walking up steps. They thought nothing of it. They’d done it all their lives. When I was 17, I was carrying 18 stone sacks of wheat.

Bales had to be carried, and pitched up onto trailers, with two men – two forks – to a bale. Then they had to be carted off to the stack. No wonder the farmers spluttered when told to find a strong lady.

         By May 1916 boys of 11 were to be released from school to work on farms, a true measure of desperation (CIP 19 May 1916). So, yes, men and women could be used to do farm work, but they didn’t replace the life-long agricultural labourer, whatever the tribunal said.

         Nevertheless many women did answer the call to work on the land. Rose Macaulay was one. The Macaulay family had come to Great Shelford, living at Southernwood on Woollards Lane, when George Macaulay took up a post as an English don at Cambridge University. As the daughter of an upper middle-class family, daughter Rose was not expected to work. She did, however, have literary ambitions and went on to become a not-very-famous writer. She was part of the smart set which included the much more famous Rupert Brooke.

         In 1914 she was 33, and it was very much part of the ethic of her class that unmarried women should contribute to the war effort, in an appropriate way. So, after an unsuccessful spell as a nursing orderly at Mount Blow (more of this later), she became a land girl. As conscription was brought in, in early 1916, so women were to be mobilized to take the men’s places on the land. She worked on Peter Grain’s Station Farm for about 9 months. By 1917 she had gone to work as a clerk in the War Office in London. She wrote a poem about her experience on the land, called “Spreading Manure”. It feels a rather self-indulgent piece:

I think no soldier is so cold as we,

Sitting in the Flanders mud.

I wish I was out there, for it might be

A shell would burst to heat my blood…

I’m sure that any one of the men in France would willingly have returned home to spread manure. But it does express the frustration that many women of Macaulay’s class and age-group felt. The men were being sent off to fight, and at the beginning some undoubtedly felt they were being excluded from the adventure. That soon wore off in the face of the reality of the war. Nevertheless many women were genuinely frustrated at the social restrictions that limited their capacity to serve.

         There were, of course, other forms of war work for women apart from farming and nursing. Women replaced the postmen who were serving abroad. Women started to appear on the railways, particularly as crossing-keepers and clerks. But they were rapidly elbowed out of the workplace and back into the home when the war ended. This wasn’t to be a feminist revolution.

Rationing

         Rationing was introduced at the end of 1917. Meat was rationed. Sugar and butter, too, and continued so until 1920.

Sources

Derek Matthews, from “All is safely gathered in”, p21, published by Great Shelford Oral History Group, 2009.

Rose Macaulay’s war experiences: “Rose Macaulay”, by Constance Babington-Smith.

The series of poems about working at Station Farm is “On The Land”, published in “Three Days”, 1919.

Newspapers, Cambridge Chronicle (CC), Cambridge Independent Press (CIP).

v1 © Helen Harwood, uploaded February 2025