January Farming Activity of the Month: Milking
As a new initative for 2016, Stuart Antrobus and I will be replacing the ‘Cartoon of the Month’ with ‘Farming Activity of the Month’. We will try to reflect the farming tasks which would have been undertaken by Land Girls at different times throughout the year.
Do you have photos of Land Girls carrying out different farming tasks? If you do, send them across, and we can include them in our monthly collages.
From left to right, top to bottom:
- Joyce Malpass busy with dairy work at Simkins’ Mount Pleasant Farm, Lower Stondon, Bedfordshire in the 1940s. Courtesy of Stuart Antrobus.
- 29 year old Land Girl Rosalind Cox (left) carries milk pails in the dairy on Mr Tupper’s farm at Bignor in Sussex, as her colleague Helen Newmarch sits on a stool to milk ‘Cleopatra’. The cattle here are shorthorn cows. Helen was from Worthing and was a shorthand typist before joining the Land Army. Source: IWM D 18057
- Land Girls were introduced to agricultural practice and ‘nature’ through the use of contemporary technology. Dunbar plays with the obvious visual humour of the surreal situation. At what point does the machine stop pretending to be a cow? The painting is also a comment on how technologically driven modern, urban life has now become the means of access to both agriculture and, by implication, the natural world. Source: IWM ART LD 766
- A member of the Women’s Land Army milks a cow, probably at the WLA training centre at Cannington, Somerset, c 1940. Source: IWM D186
- Ivy Archer (nee Lock) milking a cow with a fellow Land Girl in Exmoor. Source: Unforgotten Exmoor
