The Call to the Land: British and European Adult Voluntary Farm Labour; 1939–49

Abstract

As the armed forces continued to siphon away labour from the land following the outbreak of the war, the Ministry of Agriculture's County War Agricultural Executive Committees were hard put to meet the demand for labour to sustain the plough-up campaign. While schoolchildren made a major contribution, there were few prisoners-of-war before the North African campaign and volunteers from all walks of life were sought to attend harvest camps, weekend farm clubs and other land-based activities. At the end of the war the Ministry of Agriculture turned to mainland Europe for volunteers to work towards the solution of the British and pan-European food shortages. They were supplemented by members of the Polish Resettlement Corps, German prisoners who had opted to defer repatriation and volunteers from the British zones of Austria and Germany. The article raises the issue of how far the enterprise promoted international understanding as was assumed at the time or, indeed, whether the home volunteer experience narrowed the so-called rural-urban divide as opposed to reinforcing entrenched prejudices.