Just last year the government finally recognised the tremendous selfless efforts of thousands of women who worked on the home front to provide food and timber during World War II as part of the Women’s Land Army.

The surviving members – averaging 80 plus years old, were awarded a commemorative badge acknowledging the debt that the country owed to them.

This year, a steering group has been set up in order to raise sufficient funds to establish a permanent memorial to the WLA’s work in Scotland.

NFUS president, Jim McLaren, whose mother was a Land Girl, is leading the effort, along with representatives from NFU Scotland, The Scottish Farmer, The Crown Estate, The National Museum of Rural Life, NFU Mutual, and the Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes, all of whom have a combined target of £60,000 to raise, in order to cover the costs of commissioning, and building, a representative memorial.

Jim McLaren said: “It is vital that we remember the contribution to the war effort by this group of women who both volunteered and were conscripted to work so hard to put food on the nation’s tables at such a difficult time. The work they undertook was laborious; they were often ill equipped, cold and lonely, and regrettably, their work has often been overlooked. I hope that people will come forward with generous contributions soon, so that we can erect and dedicate this memorial as soon as possible.”

The steering group’s first task was to find a suitable site, and the Crown Estate has very kindly offered a site from its portfolio. At the moment, the plan is to site it in the Moray area in the North-east of Scotland.

As the work of the land army covered the whole of Scotland the steering group have decided it would be fair to try to incorporate materials into the memorial which have been sourced from nine different regions in Scotland.

Look out for the campaign being highlighted throughout the Royal Highland Show, where many of the patrons will be familiar with the work of the land army, either through their mothers, grandmothers or land girls may have worked on their family farm during the war. Other fundraising efforts will be highlighted in this paper throughout the year.

What was the Women’s Land Army?

The Women’s Land Army, often referred to as ‘The Forgotten Army’, was formed in 1917 by Roland Prothero, the then Prime Minister for Agriculture.

The First World War had seen food supplies dwindle and saw the creation of the WLA. The WLA was reformed in June 1939, first asking for volunteers and later by conscription with numbers totalling 80,000 across Britain by 1944, and 8500 of them based in Scotland.

When the country went to war for the second time, all able-bodied men were called on to fight, which drained the country of men to work on farms and in other jobs on the land. As it was very difficult to import food from abroad, the importance of home-grown food was paramount to feed the nation. The Land Army provided most of the labour force needed to work the land.

Although some of the ladies would have been convinced with the advertising slogan ‘For a healthy, happy job join the Women’s Land Army’ the reality was quite different. The work was hard and dirty and the hours very long.

The girls found the work hard, and whether they felt appreciated was often down to the personality of the farmer they worked for.

It was the making of some girls, who had never left home previously, providing an independence they had never had before, but it also left a great many very lonely and isolated especially if they were based at a farm on their own, rather than in a hostel which brought the friendship of other girls, who were in the same situation.

As well as working on farms some of the girls were sent to work in the forests as part of the Timber Corps, affectionately known as the Lumber Jills. Many were sent to remote areas of Scotland where they lived in spartan conditions, ensuring that timber supplies were kept steady, felling trees and sawmilling timber. In 2007 a memorial was unveiled, supplied by the Forestry Commission among others, to commemorate the work the Lumber Jills carried out throughout the war.