The Coat They Had to Dye: Britain's Land Girls, 1939–1950

When a Land Girl was discharged, she was given her last week's wages, a letter from the Queen, and twenty clothing coupons in exchange for her uniform. She was allowed to keep the greatcoat on one condition: that she dyed it, blue or green, so nobody could recognise what it had been. More than 200,000 women served in Britain's Women's Land Army between 1939 and 1950 — over 80,000 of them at any one time at its height. They ploughed, milked, threshed, felled timber and killed rats. They worked fifty hours a week in summer and had no paid holiday at all until 1943. And they were paid twenty-eight shillings a week, half of it deducted for board and lodging, while the men beside them in the same field averaged thirty-eight. By the end of 1941 the men's legal minimum was sixty shillings and the Land Army minimum was thirty-eight — about sixty-three per cent, for the same work. The reason was one line on a piece of paper. The Land Army was a civilian organisation under the Ministry of Agriculture. Its members held no rank and were not employed by the state — they were employed by whichever farmer owned the field. In February 1945, when the government set out post-war gratuities and resettlement grants worth £700 million for the services, that distinction was used to exclude the Land Army from all of it. Lady Denman, who had run the organisation for six years from her own house, resigned within days. The badge came in 2008. More than 45,000 women applied for it. Most of them were in their eighties. This film also covers Amelia King, refused by the Essex committee in 1943 because she was Black; Edna Girling, seventeen, killed by a baling machine in 1943 and counted as no kind of war casualty; and the Devon farmers whose recorded response to the Women's Land Army in January 1940 was, simply, "Laughter". Every figure here is checked against Hansard, The National Archives, the Imperial War Museums and county archive collections. Where the sources disagree, the film says so — and where a historical figure's words don't survive in print, it doesn't invent them. SOURCES: Hansard, HC Deb 14 and 22 February 1945 — Women's Land Army Hansard, written answer, 12 October 1943 — insurance and compensation Hansard, HL Deb 14 October 1941 — Agricultural Wages The National Archives — Women's Land Army research guide; MAF 59/22 Imperial War Museums — What was the Women's Land Army? Museum of English Rural Life — Land Girls, and Amelia King Suffolk Archives — Soil Sisters Bedfordshire Archives — Women's Land Army collection ScotlandsPeople — Scottish Women's Land Army records Forestry and Land Scotland — Women's Timber Corps Was there a Land Girl in your family? Which county did she work in, and did she ever talk about it? Tell us in the comments — there is no service record that captures any of that. Subscribe for more of the British home front: the rationing, the queues, the wartime kitchen, and the people who lived through all of it. Archive images are used under public domain / Creative Commons terms. Crown copyright in photographs created before 1 June 1957 expired 50 years after creation. #WW2 #HomeFront #BritishHistory #LandGirls #WomensLandArmy #WW2Women