September Cartoon of the Month

The presence of increasing numbers of young women on the land in the early 1940s in Britain, as more male farm workers left to join the armed forces and members of the Women’s Land Army replaced them, was clearly regarded as a novelty and sometimes as a threat. Certainly, farmer’s wives were likely to be concerned lest the presence of attractive young women might turn the heads of their husbands. This sometimes led to a less than welcoming approach to land girls when they were billeted at farmhouses.  It took time for rural areas to get used to and accept this invasion of ‘townies’. In a minority of cases, land girls did end up marrying the unmarried farmers they worked for, or their sons if they were still around. Other land girls married soldiers or airmen they met locally and they spent the rest of their lives in their new, adopted home, rather than returning to the county they came from. The majority of land girls returned to their home towns after the war, but never forgot their experiences in the countryside.

Source: Laughs Around The Land
Courtesy of Stuart Antrobus.