When volunteers helped to stock Ulster larders during the Second World War
During the Second World War, Northern Ireland’s larders were kept well stocked thanks not only to the efforts of the farmers but also to the willing help given by an army of volunteers, many of them drawn from outside the immediate confines of the rural community.
They were the ordinary men and women - and in some cases children - of the Province who made up the Voluntary Land Service which played such an important part in helping to keep the wheels of the farming industry turning smoothly in difficult times.
The VLS was set up to co-ordinate volunteer groups across the country to help particularly with harvest operations. As one newspaper advertisement of 1942 stated: “It may happen that in some areas those who enrol may not be called upon to work in the fields where the labour position is not quite so acute. The point is that the necessary labour must be organised and available if and when it is wanted.”
The appeal did not fall on deaf ears. In Belfast and other centres throughout the Province, it was reported that many people had been enrolling steadily to help the farmers.
“The example,” noted the writer of an editorial in a leading farming journal of the day, “must be followed in every town and village in Northern Ireland before we can regard the position with anything like satisfaction. No farmer must call for help in vain.”
There are many interesting stories of how the call was answered in various parts of the Province.
In Limavady, for example, one farmer was at his wit's end when he received an unexpected order for 26 tons of potatoes which had to be got ready for shipping at short notice - and they were still in the ground.
A reporter told later how he overcame the problem: “Contact was made with the Voluntary Land Service local branch at Limavady Academy, where pupils were on holiday. On the following morning a 'gang' of pupils presented themselves in the farmyard at 6.55am and, after receiving their instructions from the farm manager, went straight to the potato field. The farmer tells with pride how those 26 tons of potatoes were dug, picked and bagged, all waiting in readiness when the Transport Board lorries called to carry them to the waiting steamer at the docks at Londonderry.”
Another farmer near Cookstown found himself in a somewhat similar plight - he had two fields, one of timothy and one of ryegrass, but he had searched in vain for labour to harvest them.
As a last resort he called at the Ministry of Agriculture offices at Loughry House, Cookstown, where staff had already put in something like 700 hours of their spare time working on the land. The story goes on: “That evening after office hours, five members of the staff cycled out to the farm. Soon the mower was clattering round the field, the timothy falling before it and being quickly bound in sheaves by the tiers who followed in its wake. Before a halt was called, almost at dark, the greater part of the first field had been cut and lifted. A few days later the second field was also tackled and completed.”
Many people gave up their annual holiday leave to work in the fields and they soon became proficient in a wide variety of jobs, even in some cases learning how to use a scythe sometimes, according to one observer, “with the skill and precision of an old-timer”.
The same gentleman added: “It had been truly said that the country is a place to which everyone must go to learn some facts of life which towns can never teach. We venture to predict with confidence that the new land volunteers will be very willing learners.”
Anyone who thought that spending a couple of weeks in the country might be a nice way of getting free board and lodgings, was advised to think again. A directive issued by the Ministry of Agriculture stated: “To the townspeople who we hope will form the greater part of this great new land army, we would say that they are wanted for a job of real work. It would be a mistake to imagine that farmers can provide them with holiday accommodation in return for a little casual and intermittent help. The farm in wartime is no place for the holidaymaker unless he or she is prepared to work. The call for help will come from the farms at the right moment. It can be answered efficiently only by a properly organised body of volunteers. We must be ready to answer the call when it comes.”
Even when the harvest had been safely gathered, the volunteers were urged not to abandon the cause. Wrote one agricultural journalist: “When the fields are cleared, the stack-yards and the barns and granaries full, can we then go home complacently and tell ourselves that it is over for another year?
“Let us, as we lay aside our overalls or the old or worn clothes that we donned to work on the land, pause and ask if we can afford to say we have finished: let us realise that it is our duty to stay with the farmer, to help him when and how we can to lay the foundation for next year's harvest.
“The Voluntary Land Service is not and must not be just a thing of the moment. It makes an immediate call upon us but when we have answered that call let us keep that old coat, those faded overalls where we can get them at short notice. They are as honourable as any uniform. They are symbols of a service which, as the farmer himself is wont to say of his work, is never done." Appropriately enough, the volunteers had their own stirring battle cry in the words of a song, penned especially for them by the late Sam Henry, the well-known Ulster folklorist. Here is the opening verse:
Now rally round the farmer,
Help him all you can;
Old Mother Earth is bountiful,
If man be true to man.