1920.] Farewell Rally, Women's Land Army. 1207 



And there was another side to the picture that night, for it 

 touched upon the best of things by which, after all, all hopes 

 of progress must be judged. One felt with all the inevitable 

 jars which had attended the administration, and the acceptance 

 of so unprecedented a scheme, the entrance of the young 

 Land Army girl into the somewhat tired agricultural world, 

 with her Women Organisers behind her backing her for every 

 ounce she was worth, and the girl, herself ignorant as she was 

 full of the eagerness and of the appeal of youth, had really had 

 a remarkably refreshing and humanising effect upon agricultural 

 conditions and upon the British farmer himself. The writer, 

 haiUng from a county where a certain dry kindly humour is 

 often the saving grace of a temperament stifled by hard con- 

 ditions and labour, is convinced that the very troubles of the 

 new worker, the absurd happiness of her, the whimsicality, 

 and, in short, the utter unexpectedness of her, had the most 

 wholesome effect of all from a human point of view upon the 

 older-fashioned men ! 



That the advent of this whimsicahty and this unexpectedness 

 would have caused an outcry indeed in the farming world 

 which has, perforce to take itself very seriously, had it not been 

 accompanied by a steadily growing efficiency, goes without 

 saying ! One shudders to imagine the results of the materiali- 

 sation of the nightmare regularly dreamed by one of the oldest 

 types of farmers : that a bevy of " finnicky, nonsensical ladies, 

 with skirts held up and buttoned up boots," had, by order of 

 the Government, invaded his farm, turning up their noses at 

 his pigstyes, and his muck heap, spoiUng by their dignihed 

 presence his after-dinner nap, smoke and joke. After long 

 persuasion the dream of that farmer did materialise, but to 

 his utter amazement it took the form first of a shy, eager 

 trainee, in a dress which he would not have dared to contemplate 

 before but of which he saw the peculiar suitability, and, after 

 he had used a little patience, of a strapping, commonsense 

 land girl who kept his yard and his pigstyes as he had never 

 kept them, and was quite as ready for her joke and her smoke 

 after supper as he was himself. He took great credit to himself 

 for the result of his patience, but to the end he declared that 

 she was addicted to tantrums quite peculiar to her sex which, 

 together with his pride in her, so tickled his fancy and his 

 sense of humour that he became a wiser and, strange to say, a 

 happier man. The old-fashioned farmer has been blamed for 

 prejudice at the start, and prejudice there undoubtedly was, 

 but it was a natural sequence to old conditions, and to traditions 

 which had more of dignity than is commonly supposed. 



