Recruitment

This page shares recruitment posters which the Women’s Land Army used during the First World War to encourage women to join the civilian organisation.

A Women’s Land Army display in a shop window, encouraging women to enrol.
Source: Catherine Procter WLA Collection

Timeline

  • Spring 1917: Recruitment to the Women’s Land Army [WLA] was the responsibility of the government’s National Service Ministry
  • 26 March 1917: WLA training began.
  • August 1917: The Women’s Section of the Food Production Department of the Board of Agriculture took over recruitment.
  • July 1917: 2000 women had been placed on farms. (An initial 30,000 women responded; half were rejected.)
  • September 1917: 247 training centres and 140 ‘practice farms’ had been set up.
  • By the end of the war. 23,000 women successfully passed through training centres. These new full-time WLA land workers were in addition to around 300,000 part-time/ seasonal women who took up agricultural work during the Great War.
Women’s Land Army recruitment poster by the artist J Walter West.
Source: Imperial War Museum

How to get women interested?

Recruitment posters, suggesting that Britain was on the verge of starvation, appealed to “Women of England! Wake up and answer your country’s urgent call for help”. Local WLA rallies raised interest in the WLA and showed members in their working uniform. Would-be recruits were directed to their nearest Employment Exchange to volunteer or to a local Village Registrar.

Recruiting poster [updated. c 1917] “A Landswoman’s Appeal To all Women In The Land…Join The Land Army To-day. Don’t Hesitate.” Courtesy of Stuart Antrobus
Recruiting poster [updated. c 1917] “A Landswoman’s Appeal To all Women In The Land…Join The Land Army To-day. Don’t Hesitate.”
Courtesy of Stuart Antrobus

The Interview

A local Selection Committee or Board, formed of members of the Women’s War Agricultural Committee in each county, questioned female applicants as to:

  • their health
  • physical capabilities
  • reasons for wishing to do land work

They had to be medically examined, free of cost.

Women who had previous experience in agriculture and were not already in work, were given priority. Women over the age of 20 were also preferred.

The committees were also looking for women with a stable temperament, so that they could cope with possible loneliness on isolated farms. ‘A good constitution’ was also an important quality for an applicant – work on the land was hard graft!

Emma Jolly
Land Girl Emma Jolly in her WLA uniform.

After the interview

If recruits were prepared to sign on for 12 months, they could choose whether to work in either the Forage, Agricultural or Timber Cutting sections. But if volunteers were only prepared to sign on for six months, they had to join either the Agricultural or Timber Cutting sections of the WLA. All recruits had to be willing to go to wherever in the country they were required. They were given free railway warrants to get there.

Experienced women went straight into paid work on farms. Inexperienced recruits attended organised training centres or ‘practice farms’ for 4 (later 6) weeks. Successful trainees who passed the ‘efficiency test’ were found work on farms; unsuccessful women were deemed ‘unfit’.

WW1 Land Girl Milker
Two Land Girl milkers.
WW1 Recruitment poster showing a Land Girl, full-length facing figure, in white coat and sun hat, holding a bucket in her left hand. Source: Art.IWM PST 5489, c.1918
WW1 Recruitment poster showing a Land Girl, full-length facing figure, in white coat and sun hat, holding a bucket in her left hand.
Source: Art.IWM PST 5489, c.1918
God Speed the Plough and the Woman Who Drives It. Land Girl, full-length figure, in uniform and hat, guiding a horse-drawn plough to right. Source: Art.IWM PST 5996, 1917
God Speed the Plough and the Woman Who Drives It. Land Girl, full-length figure, in uniform and hat, guiding a horse-drawn plough to right.
Source: Art.IWM PST 5996, 1917

In the archives

Summary adapted by Stuart Antrobus from The Women’s Land Army: a Portrait (Gill Clarke)