International Women’s Day 2024: Land Army Girl Enid Mary Barraud

My shadow is ten yards high;

I am as big as the Giant of Cerne Abbas

Or the Long Man of Wilmington.

I march astride golden shocks of cut corn

And between my thighs is all the fruitfulness of the earth.

I am the farm worker going home at evening.

E.M.Barraud

It is always a pleasure to receive donations to the RAU Library’s Collections. It is even more pleasing when a donated item reveals a remarkable and unexpected story. In this particular case the donation was a copy of a memoir Set My Hand Upon the Plough (1946), written by a fascinating woman named Enid Barraud.

Enid Mary Barraud (b. 1904 – d. 1972) was a gifted writer, journalist, academic and poet. In 1939 Enid, disillusioned with her life as an insurance clerk, left London and took up work on a Cambridgeshire farm as a member of the Women’s Land Army. She recorded her experiences of over five years on the land in her two memoirs, of which Set My Hand Upon the Plough was the first (the other being Tail Corn 1948). In them she writes with remarkable detail and honesty about her life on the farm.

The Women’s Land Army was formally established in 1917 during the First World War to help farmers cope with the shortage of male labour. It was brought back into action for the Second World War, at first on a voluntary basis and then by conscription. By 1944 it comprised more than 80.000 women. “Land Girls” like Enid Barraud left behind towns and cities across the country to head out to farms as additional land workers (though many Land Girls already lived in the countryside). While the men went to war the Land Girls did a wide variety of jobs on the land, often finding themselves driving tractors, catching vermin, milking cows and harvesting crops. They worked in all weathers and conditions to help increase the nation’s food production.

The poster above depicts a land girl in uniform and hat, guiding a horse-drawn plough to right (1917). Image courtesy of the Imperial War Museum for non-commercial use under the IWM Non-Commercial Licence (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/10507 )

It is perhaps important to remind ourselves that it was not until 1928 that a law was passed allowing women over the age of 21 to vote, in accordance with male voting rights. Undoubtedly one of the important steps towards their emancipation was their efforts in the Women’s Land Army. “Skeptics did not believe that women would be suited to the hard labour involved in farmwork, but the Army of [thousands of] Land Girls who went on to produce the majority of Britain’s food by 1943, happily proved the critics wrong” (1)

Of course, prior to the 20^th century women were heavily involved in agriculture but their contribution and efforts have largely been forgotten or ignored.

As a Land Girl Enid Barraud explored the positive implications of wartime land work for women while also criticizing working conditions in the Land Army. As Vita Sackville-West states:

Her voice is authentic, as well it should be after her years of close contact with the land, its moods, its workers, the ups and downs, the trials, the moments of despair and the moments of pure pleasure. (2)

Of her first day of training on the farm September 4^th 1939 Enid wrote:

I did learn to extract a modicum of milk from patiently reluctant cows. I learned to pull out straw for thatching ticks. That’s about it all.

In another paragraph she describes being scared of heights when she climbed a ladder to pick purple Monarch plums. “I have a horror of heights and of ladder-heights in particular.”

We also know from her memoirs that she liked village life and she helped to establish a local library service. She was a great supporter of learning and education, and a rural library service was vital in this respect:

I personally derive immense and never diminishing pleasure from reading and am more grateful that I can say to the really excellent service our country library gives out in the wilds…. the library is great fun as well as a very real pleasure. I enjoy my hour down at the school every week, enjoy the chances of meeting and knowing people- and I feel I do know them, knowing the sort of books they like.

In her article From typewriter to ploughshare Dr. Pippa Marland from the University of Bristol examines Barraud’s agricultural writings, emphasising the social and environmental significance of her work. Barraud also supported nature-friendly farming and noted the tremendous negative impact of agricultural intensification on farmland birds, for example. (3) Her passion for and sharp observation of the natural world is shown here: “Thrushes seemed to be singing from every tree in the hedgerow beside which I go to work and great plump blackbirds darted squawking before me as I walked along”. Marland not only speaks about Barraud’s contributions but also encourages people to rediscover her. In this respect it is notable that Set My Hand Upon the Plough is being republished in 2024 by Little Toller Books.

A renascent interest in Enid’s life and writings can also be partly attributed to the growing field of queer rural history. Enid challenges gender norms. She preferred to identify as male, being known to her friends as “John”, and she shared her home with a female partner named in the books as “Bunty”. Barraud’s memoir therefore joins the ranks of LGBT memoirs, casting new light on the lives of the men and women who fought or who worked on the home front and their vital role in the liberation of Europe.

As Hilary Anderson writes (4), “As land girls spent more and more time working for the WLA, their bodies transformed into hardened, muscled, and roughened physiques and thus challenged social notions regarding femininity. While working for the WLA, land girls assumed manual labour jobs, which often required physical strength beyond what they generally experienced during their peacetime lives. Whether the jobs pertained to guiding a team of plough horses back and forth through the fields, hefting hay into the threshing machines, or hauling milk crates, strong muscles were required, and if those muscles did not exist, they soon developed… Just as their muscles were growing, so was their sense of self.”

This is reflected in the following passage from Set My Hand Upon the Plough:

When I have time to look in the glass nowadays I see a figure that is two stone lighter, hair that the sun has bleached, arms that the same sun has tanned, hands rough and horny. Over my shoulder I see dimly the pale fuller face of the insurance clerk I was, and shall never be again because I know now that, having beaten my typewriter into a ploughshare for the duration, I shall never be able to face going back to town life.

In later life Enid worked at the Ornithological Field Station of the Zoology department of Cambridge University and wrote several scientific papers that demonstrate her fascination with non-binary behaviour in certain species (for example, in her study of the sexual habits of the freshwater snail she notes the fluid behaviour of the snails as they alternate taking male and female roles in copulation). She lived at Little Eversden in Cambridgeshire, where she had worked as a ‘Land Girl’, for the rest of her life.

It is also interesting to note that E.M. Barraud was an outstanding poet and published an anthology Poems of the Land Army. The following poem reflects on the significance of the publication for Land Girls around the country.

*To The Land Girl, poem by E.M.Barraud,published in the final edition of The Land Girl in March 1947, p. 10.*

Enid also published articles in the Manchester Guardian (and under the name of Hilary Johns) and The Daily Mirror. She contributed to Agriculture, Britain Today, Country Life, Courier, The Countryman, The Dairy Farmer, Field, Good House-keeping, the Land Girl. She wrote one more memoir, Tail Corn (1948), about East Anglia, and Barraud: The Story of a Family (1967), a history of her own family. Set My Hand Upon the Plough isconsidered the first serious account of work In the Women’s Land Army. Undoubtedly, she deserves to remembered as a respected female writer in the field of agricultural history.