The great British countryside -
setting for one of the most pivotal battles of the Second World War.
Churchill called it the "front line of freedom".
It was fought by the farmers of Britain.
When war broke out, the Nazis attacked British shipping,
attempting to cut off food imports.
The government turned to farmers to double home-grown food production.
The plough had become a weapon of war.
It was the farmers' principal weapon of war.
If they failed, the nation could be starved into surrender.
Now archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn...
...and historian Ruth Goodman...
...are turning back the clock...
...working Manor Farm in Hampshire
as it would have been in the Second World War.
Yes!
By 1942, Britain had endured three years of blockades.
Farmers were struggling to deliver food targets
and raw materials were becoming scarce.
So the team must learn how to cope with shortages of fuel...
...wood...and animal feed.
They must also address the hardship that came with the bombing of our cities
by setting up an emergency feeding centre.
- Gravy, sir? - Yes, please.
This is the untold story of the countryside at war.
(Air-raid siren)
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll
By the third year of war, Britain's food imports had hit a new low.
In 1941, America had entered the war,
which meant they had fewer ships to export food to Britain,
increasing the strain on farmers.
To save the country from starvation,
the Minister of Food demanded that an extra 840,000 tons of wheat be produced.
Even more grassland was ploughed up to meet the demand
but it still wasn't enough.
With all these fields given over to producing cereals,
farmers struggled to find the space for other crops.
The Minister of Agriculture insisted that every spare scrap of land be put to good use.
Even Leicester Square and Regent's Park were dug over to grow vegetables.
We're gonna get rid of all this scrap metal, which can be used in the munitions factories,
to build tanks and planes.
We're gonna free up a patch of land.
It doesn't look like much now but once we get this cleared - if we ever do...
- Want a hand? - Probably.
Once we get it cleared, we will be able to put a crop in
for harvest later in the year.
But we've got to work quickly.
Alex and Peter are going to grow a bean crop to supplement the feed for the dairy herd.
But there's a problem.
Small pieces of land like this had never been cultivated,
so we're in need of ploughing.
Wow! This is in good nick.
But their size and awkward shape meant that an ordinary tractor couldn't do the job.
So we're looking for something that can plough that land
and harrow that land.
The government had a solution,
a scheme where farmers could lease specialist equipment
to help maximise output.
And the Ministry of Agriculture are encouraging us to do these things.
They're actually offering these things on hire. So let's take our pick.
Let's see what we've got.
Obviously something like that is too big.
What's that? "The Trusty tractor.
It does the work of two horses.
It ploughs over an acre per day,
using only two gallons of petrol.
A Land Girl can start it and it steers itself."
- Wow. - We're onto a winner.
ALEX: If a Land Girl can start it, maybe even we can start it.
By 1942, there wasn't just a food shortage.
Timber was in short supply, too.
Wood imports declined as shipping lanes were cut off.
At the outbreak of war, Britain was importing almost all her timber.
I think it was only four per cent of that timber that we needed and used in Britain
that could be sourced from Britain.
In fact, once we looked round us,
we realised that the problem was not so much, where was the wood going to come from,
but who the heck was going to get it?
With many male forestry workers being drafted to fight,
the Ministry of Labour called on the nation's women to step in.
They formed the Women's Timber Corps
and female tree fellers soon became known as "lumberjills".
Timber!
Nowadays you might think to yourself, "What's the big deal? Wood?
What's it mostly used for? Paper. Furniture."
But in the wartime, it had a really important function.
For a start, many of our best fighter aircraft were made of wood.
Wartime industry also depended on wood.
The largest consumers of timber were coal mines,
which required wooden pit props to keep them stable.
It looks pretty hard work. I should imagine you'd get pretty fit.
Jo Mason and Tracy Anderson work for the Forestry Commission
and have enlisted the help of Ruth and her daughter Eve.
Basically, if you just pull and don't push.
- Pull, don't push. - Right, this is to you, to me, isn't it?
To you first.
Girls as young as 14 were recruited to work in the forests.
The toughest job was felling the trees -
something the government was initially reluctant to allow women to do.
It's hard work but it's not the full-body thing I was sort of expecting it to be.
When you look at who joined the Timber Corps,
you find it's girls who worked in shops,
secretaries.
I think it must have given a lot of young women a real feeling of self-confidence, self-respect,
that they could be out there,
be doing something truly helpful for the war effort,
something for your country in a really practical way.
Exactly the sorts of things that we're proving.
That girls were just as good as boys.
The Second World War saw a surge in the mechanisation of British farms
as the Ministry of Agriculture encouraged farmers to use machines
to increase efficiency.
With animal feed in short supply,
Alex and Peter are using their cleared patch of land
to grow beans for the cattle -
with the help of a trio of tractor enthusiasts,
Richard Louden, Geoff Ravenhall and Shane Parry.
- Hello. Peter, what have we got here? - Oh, a little beast, isn't it?
That's the sort of tractor I could probably work with.
- This is your Trusty tractor for the next week. - Right.
- "Trusty tractor"? - Yeah.
Best-selling small tractor of its type at the moment.
The Trusty tractor, once confined to market gardens,
was ideal for answering the wartime need to cultivate awkward patches of land.
You've got it for a week, with a range of attachments.
I've got a book here with all the attachments in.
You've got a plough with it and disc harrows and all sorts.
- So I should think that will do you. - Excellent.
A bit of privy reading for you there, Peter.
Originally designed in 1933,
the Trusty was modified during the war
to reduce the amount of steel it required as supplies ran short.
But this is the kind of thing, that for our patch of land, would be ideal.
Small patches like this were exactly what was needed
to be put into production.
Well, let's hope so.
And we've got something here that's sort of half way in between me and a spade...
...and the tractor and the plough.
- This is kind of... - Exactly.
The first job is to prepare the tractor for ploughing.
Rather than being towed, the ploughing attachment forms one unit with the tractor.
- It should be a one-man operation, this, so... - Right.
You only need five people when you put it in that hedge.
- Do you want to start this? - Yeah. You'd better show me how to start it.
OK, fuel's on.
So this is like starting the old lawnmower.
Here we go.
(Engine chugs)
Oh!
That's a dream.
Your field awaits.
Over half a billion cubic feet of wood was needed during the war,
for everything from aircraft to ships and rifles.
Ruth and Eve have hit a common stumbling block.
The weight of the tree is causing the saw to jam.
I think we definitely need to...
- Tree's pinching, isn't it? - Yeah.
We need a wedge.
Might be the safest option at this point.
- Can we just have a little look? - We're starting to pinch. (Laughs)
Well, it's got quite a big crown on it, this one, so it's gonna catch the wind.
You can see it rocking, and when it rocks, it'll come back and jam the saw
and you won't be able to do anything.
So the best thing we can do to help you is put a wedge in the back.
That'll keep the cut open and the saw will move freely through.
Bang the wedge in at the back here, taking care not to bang it into the saw.
That is so much freer with that wedge in.
(Groaning)
Whoa, that's moving.
I think we're nearly there. She's beginning to really wobble.
You can see the gap opening and closing and the wedge bobbing up and down.
When she goes, we need to get out of the way.
And shout "timber" when it goes cos they worked in groups.
You'd want everybody else to know that the tree's about to go.
Yes!
She's going.
She's going! Going!
Timber!
(Laughter)
Well done.
Yeah.
OK.
The Trusty tractor is ready to go.
It's now time to start ploughing.
The depth of the plough could be easily controlled by a crank handle.
Experienced farmers could even set the tractor running on its own,
only needing to turn it around at each end of the plot.
At first appearance, this is a pretty heavy-looking piece of kit,
but actually...
with it set right...
...you can let the engine do all of the work.
And I'm actually now just guiding it, you know.
But it's still quite cumbersome
and I'm terrified of hitting a stone.
The Trusty tractor was entirely British-made until 1943,
when wartime shortages resulted in the use of American engines.
With the land ploughed, the final job is to smooth out the soil ready for sowing.
The plough could be easily replaced with a harrow attachment,
one of over 20 accessories that came with the Trusty tractor.
So that's the field done.
Time to get the beans in while the sun's still shining.
Right. Here we go.
The next stage for Ruth and Eve is to remove all the smaller branches from the tree,
a process known as snedding.
When you joined the Timber Corps, you went off on four weeks' training.
The first couple of weeks you did a little of absolutely everything.
Then you were allowed to choose which things you were best at
and for the second two weeks of training, you concentrated on them.
Whether it be the measuring, the surveying, the felling itself, the snedding
or indeed bark peeling.
This is the wrong species for that
but if you were interested in making explosives,
a really useful thing was the bark of an old buckthorn tree.
So anything like that was carefully peeled and debarked.
The bark to be made into charcoal, that was then part of the explosives industry.
Girls could be sent anywhere in the country to be billeted with locals
or to stay in hostels or camps.
One person who knows first-hand the trials of being in the Women's Timber Corps
is Irene Howell who became a lumberjill in 1943.
What were you doing beforehand, Irene?
- Upstairs, downstairs. - Really?
So a complete change from what you'd been doing before.
That must have been quite nice, actually.
- Out in the... - Out doing something different.
Rather than upstairs and downstairs. Yes.
Not a very nice job, I'm afraid.
Yeah, so the Women's Timber Corps was, in a sense, sort of a step up?
Yes.
But conditions were tough.
Rheumatism was a common ailment amongst lumberjills,
resulting from long periods working in the forest in damp conditions.
- Oh, is this you? - Yes.
What did you like best about being a member of the Timber Corps?
Being with the other girls, really. I wasn't used to being with a lot of girls.
We used to have a good time. We used to enjoy it.
Did you feel you were part of the war effort when you were out in the woods?
Well, yes.
Yes, you were certainly part of the war effort.
We had to do something.
After 18, you all had to do something, so you just got on with it.
Yeah.
Just as important as felling a tree, was measuring it.
- So this is to work out how everybody gets paid. - Yes.
The Women's Timber Corps got paid by results. Okey-doke.
So let's measure us off a ten-foot length and see how much we get, shall we?
Calculating the amount of wood in a tree was the most intellectually demanding job.
It was vital to ensure that nothing was wasted.
- There we go. Ten foot. - Ten foot.
It normally went to well-educated girls who excelled at maths.
OK?
We'll take the circumference of the tree now.
Not all the timber in the tree is usable.
The curved sides must be removed, leaving just a central portion.
To calculate the amount of usable timber,
a Hoppus conversion table was used.
So that's nine... something nine...
I can't see what. Four foot, nine.
Four foot, nine.
So ten foot lengths, we're looking at a girth of four foot, nine.
Ten foot log.
- You just read across there to the number... 14.1.
14.1 square feet in that piece of timber.
Now the tree is ready to be sent to the sawmill for final processing.
Before the war, only four per cent of the timber used in Britain was home-grown.
By the end, it was 60 per cent -
over 18 million tons.
(Bicycle bell)
Throughout the war, milk was seen by the government
as essential for the nation's health,
a much-needed source of nutrition, especially for children.
To produce enough for the population,
calves were removed from their mothers very soon after birth
and fed with artificial milk, leaving the fresh milk for human consumption.
It's up to you.
Manor Farm's calves have been taught to feed from bottles
but bottle-feeding is time consuming,
so Alex and Peter must train them to drink from a bucket.
Ooh, this one's got teeth, Peter.
Nearly.
Ooh!
(Chuckles)
Not stupid, that one.
What we'll do is remove these from the equation entirely.
Yeah.
Come on, there we go. You're so close.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nearly. Nearly.
- He's still sucking from my fingers. - Yeah.
It needs to learn to lap.
Here we are. Here we are.
It's like a milk bonanza.
This is where the good stuff is.
And there we go.
There we go.
It's one of those moments on a farm - on any farm -
when you get that moment of independence in an animal.
You know it's got just a much better chance in life.
Improved methods of dairy farming paid off.
In 1942, sales of milk hit over a billion gallons,
40 per cent above pre-war levels.
But with imported feed scarce and less milk for the calves,
they needed an additional source of protein in their diet.
One solution was beans.
Alex and Peter have ordered a new seed drill to sow the beans more quickly.
But their efforts have been thwarted by the weather.
Well, here we are.
Not as dry as it could be.
It's not. And the problem is the rain isn't letting up.
We've got clouds in the sky. We're expecting more rain on top of what we've had.
You can see there's water sitting on the ground but we've got an afternoon of dry
and we've just got to get these beans in the ground.
- You ready for it, Peter? - I am.
But the main thing is, in the context of the war, this was bonus ground.
This was turning every inch of your farm into something that could produce a crop.
- That's enough in there? - That's enough.
OK. That's the hopper full. It's a fantastic piece of kit, this.
This is really versatile. You can sow virtually any type of seed.
At the moment, we've got it set up so that it's for beans.
There's a regulator on the back which determines how often
it drops the beans out at.
- We've got it set up for six inches? - Yeah.
The only problem is, Peter,
is as you're pushing this through this claggy, filthy clay,
you'll struggle to get traction with this wheel.
My only concern.
So you're going to walk in front, throwing sawdust down?
No, I'm going to stand here on the dry and watch you.
As the wheel rotates, it turns two chambers.
One removes the bean from the hopper and sends it into the second chamber,
which drops the bean into the ground, producing a clicking sound.
That is... going, going. It's good. But we're sowing quite thin to start with.
So we know we've got enough beans to do the whole patch,
then we can come over and sow again.
But this should... Oh.
(Laughs) Oh, no.
Oops.
That hopper's not fixed shut.
What are you doing?
Shall I just put them on the road?
Yeah, put them on the road, Peter.
Oops.
We're in for a long afternoon, I think.
The waterlogged soil is making the job difficult,
but the boys need to persevere.
- All done? - All done.
Bit of a struggle but we got there. How's it looking?
Well, it's looking like they're evenly drilled here.
Let's just hope they're evenly drilled across the whole patch.
But the main problem we'll have here is that we don't have very good drainage
and this clay soil is holding the water.
So it's gonna be a tough call.
The wartime reduction in imported animal feed
was especially tough on pigs.
Without enough food to sustain them, the government ordered a massive cull
and pig meat became scarce.
One solution from the Ministry of Food
was to establish pig clubs
where communities collected their kitchen leftovers
to feed a shared animal,
turning waste into meat.
Six months ago, Ruth started a club with a piglet called Shorty.
Now Ruth and stockwoman Debbie Underwood
have come to check whether Shorty has grown large enough for slaughter.
Hello, girl.
- She's fatter, isn't she? - She is.
Sorry. Mind me.
Hello, Shorty. How you doing, girl? Yeah.
- So she's about six months old now? - Yeah.
Six months she's been eating our pig club scraps and enjoying herself.
- I don't think she's ready for slaughter yet. - No, she's still on the small side.
- If you feel her back... - Yeah.
That's the way we do things now. In years gone by, they did things differently.
One way they used to feel how much weight they had on them,
they'd put a thumb up the pig's bottom
and you could pinch and see how much meat was there.
- We don't do that nowadays. - That doesn't sound terribly lovely.
No, I'm not offering to do that now, but that is one way of doing it.
So can you feel, if you push down...
- You can feel... - You can feel where the bones are.
And it gives you a good idea of how much covering of fat there is on there.
But they also love a good back scratch as well.
So she's really firm-fleshed, which is good.
That means muscle is building there but there's not a great deal of fat.
Nowadays people don't want too much fat on their pigs,
but during the war we were desperate for any animal fats we could get our hands on.
A nice fat pig gives you lots of lard.
So it wouldn't be a bad thing if she put on a bit.
Interesting that now we're getting close to slaughter,
we're sizing her up.
We've got to share her. Half of her has to go back to the government.
We get the other half. So that's half of a pig between four of us.
It might not seem like very much,
but when you're so extremely short of absolutely everything,
every little bit helps.
As well as bacon,
petrol and diesel had also been rationed since the start of the war.
But in 1942, the shortages grew even more extreme.
Fuel for the armed forces was prioritised,
so those who didn't need their cars for vital work
could no longer buy petrol.
Farmers were allowed small rations of petrol, primarily for their tractors.
But they needed to look for alternative options for other farm vehicles.
The boys have found inspiration from an unlikely contraption.
Are you breaking something?
Have a look at this.
- Massey-Harris... - Massey-Harris tractor but what else?
Well, it's obviously been modified to run off of... some other form of fuel.
Yes, exactly. Solid fuel.
So wood and coal.
Fighting in North Africa severely disrupted petrol imports.
But there was an alternative fuel that was abundant in Britain.
Coal.
So you've got all of your solid fuel burning in here,
but that isn't what's providing the power source.
It's merely providing the gas that you're then gonna burn for the power source.
So coal and wood contains calorific value.
A lot of that calorific value is turning into gas and that's what we're trying to capture.
- This is a filter chamber. - It must be.
So we've got a rough idea of how this works.
You can find us a vehicle and convert it.
I can try.
Well, look, I'll tell you what. Try and get your head around this.
See if you can knock something up.
I'll see if I can get my hands on some wartime fuel with which to power it.
Perfect.
With petrol in short supply,
gas-powered engines grew more popular in the 1940s.
In cities, town gas was available via a mains supply
and was carried in a balloon on the chassis to power the vehicle.
But many areas of the countryside weren't linked up to the mains,
so the boys will have to make their own coal gas.
Peter has enlisted the help of conservation officer Colin Richards,
who has a 1930s ambulance.
He's hoping to convert its engine
so the vehicle can be used for important jobs on the farm.
Well, this is it. This is our vehicle.
Colin's just bringing it in.
It's currently running off petrol and we will convert this to run off coal gas.
This is the machine.
Once the task is done, the ambulance should be able to travel for 30 miles
on one load of coal.
- Have you ever done this before? - No.
I know the theory.
It's not easy but I think, between us, we can sort of...
...have a go at making it work.
The first job is to make a furnace.
Colin is using an old metal container with walls thick enough to survive the heat.
There we go.
We have an engine that's currently running off petrol.
We need to convert it to run off the gas that's coming from coal.
So on the front, I'm going to put essentially a hopper
into which we will put our coal.
And this coal will be on fire.
And this fire will be giving off gas.
Off the coal.
And we're going to...
...collect this gas...
...and feed it down into another container...
This is just gonna take out all those impurities in the smoke...
so what eventually gets fed into our engine...
...is good, clean gas.
When burning coal, only 40 per cent of the energy in the coal goes into heating.
The other 60 per cent escapes as coal gas.
And it's this that will power the engine.
Next, Colin begins work on the hopper.
Made from an old boiler hammered into shape,
it will sit near the top of the furnace and carry the coal.
The reason that we need this dome shape
is so that as the vehicle is moving along and it's sort of shaking around,
it actually shakes the coal down into the fire because of this shape.
- It's very hot. - Yeah, it is.
- I'm going to go for another quench. - Another quench.
During the war, 200 million tons of coal was needed each year
to keep the country running and power the factories involved in the war effort.
Alex has come to a mine in the Forest Of Dean, owned by Robin Morgan.
How far down are we going, Robin?
Um... I would say the cover you've got here is somewhere around 200 foot.
- 200 foot? - Yeah.
- Vertical, that is. - Right.
Coal was plentiful in Britain.
The problem was how to get it out of the ground.
Before the war, British mining was hugely dependent on manual labour.
Less than ten per cent of coal was cut by machine.
Robin, was this mine open during the Second World War?
This mine was open, actually, 200 years ago. Parts of this mine was.
Right. OK. So some of these workings here were worked during the Second World War?
Definitely. Yes.
But skilled miners were leaving for the battlefield
and there was a real danger that coal, vital to the war effort, would run short.
- OK, so where are we now? - Nearly down to the coalface.
I can hear people working away.
The government appealed for volunteer miners
but conditions in the mines were so notoriously bad that few signed up.
So in 1943, Ernest Bevin, the Minister for Labour,
resorted to conscripting young men to work in the mines.
Ten per cent of all those called up for war went underground.
They became known as the Bevin Boys.
- There's not a lot of room up there. - No, there's not.
But it's surprising how you can adapt yourself to work in places like that.
When I first came into the mines, years ago,
it used to terrify me to look up these coalfaces. "I wouldn't even put my foot in there," I thought.
But you get so used to it after...
It's not so dangerous as you think.
So the Bevin Boys would have come down the mine and felt like you did the first time.
They'd be terrified. Yes.
- Absolutely terrified? - Without a doubt. Yeah.
You want us to go up there and have a go, then?
Yeah, by all means. See what it's like.
You'll find it's a bit awkward to start with, you know.
Mining expert Rick Stewart has come to help Alex extract some coal.
He's really loving this and I'm not so certain.
- OK. - It's quite roomy here.
You're joking, aren't you?
Right.
So, Rick, this is the coalface?
Absolutely. You can see the black coal there.
It's our job to take this out.
So what's the strategy here? Picking it out by hand?
No. We're going to use a pick, but just put a small hole in the face.
Then we're gonna use our air boring machine.
So if you want to crawl in where that dish is,
and just put a hole in... a couple of inches deep, yeah?
The holes made in the wall would be filled with gelignite
to blast away the coalface.
I've just cracked my knuckles on this pit prop here, digging this hole.
This is working in the most extreme conditions, it has to be said.
I think I'm pretty much there.
- That's not bad. - OK.
Not bad for a first-timer.
- So the next thing we do... - You want to get this thing set up?
- That's a pretty mean-looking drill bit. - It is, isn't it?
- So that's now in. - Yeah.
So once we've got the air on, we're more or less ready to drill.
- Robin, could you oblige with the air? - I will.
(Whirring)
- That is a beast! - Whoa.
That is a bit of kit.
And we just put in a two-foot shot hole in 10 to 15 seconds.
Almost 22,000 Bevin Boys were conscripted,
news that many found devastating.
Pre the end of 1943, they would have gone into the army,
the air force, the navy.
After December 1943,
ten per cent of those boys would come down those mines.
And that was done, effectively, on a random ballot.
40 per cent of those called into the mines appealed against their fate...
but their cries fell on deaf ears.
500 men were prosecuted for refusing to work
and many paid a high price for their dissent.
There were many who, rather than coming underground,
actually went to jail instead.
What sort of choice is that?
So we've now drilled the hole, the next thing we'll do is charge it.
- Is this an electric charge? - Yeah, absolutely.
We're using electric detonators here.
So the first thing we do is put the charge into the hole.
Once we've got the charge itself in, we then put the stemming in.
The stemming is a piece of clay which holds the charge in the hole,
directing the blast into the coalface.
The next job is to connect up the firing wires.
When we're satisfied that everything's OK, when we've tested our circuit,
we then fire our charge.
Back at the forge, Peter and Colin have made the furnace for burning the coal.
This will produce coal gas to power the engine of their 1930s ambulance.
The next stage is to make the gas cooler,
a long pipe which will transport the coal gas between the furnace and the filter.
- We've got to bend this pipe, yeah? - Yeah.
- To do this, we're gonna fill it with sand? - Yeah.
Because it's a hollow tube and once we heat it up,
this gets very soft and if we bend it, it'll just kink.
And what we want is the gas to be able to flow evenly through the pipework.
So we have to fill it with something which is flexible but can take the heat in the fire.
And that is kiln-dried sand.
Using sand to bend pipework is a very traditional technique
dating back hundreds of years.
This is the former that we've made to bend the pipe,
to give us a sweeping curve from the top of the furnace...
down into the filter.
Right. OK.
In order to be flexible enough to bend,
the pipe must be heated to 800 degrees Celsius.
That's OK. Keep going. Keep going.
Keep going. OK.
Look at that.
- Good bend? - Yeah.
The pipe will be shaped into a concertina,
increasing the distance the gas has to travel.
As it passes through, the gas cools, becoming denser and more combustible.
Right.
- Job done? - Yeah. Yeah. Well done.
- Right. - OK.
Just work it back.
Politicians can only dream of a U like that.
(Hissing)
Unlike farming, where the women's Land Army and conscientious objectors could provide help,
the mines relied solely on Bevin Boys for extra labour.
Part of the reason that mining was such an unpopular occupation
was the danger involved.
Around a quarter of all wartime miners would suffer a serious injury
during their time underground.
Blasting the coalface was a particularly hazardous task.
- What do we do? - This is the exploder.
So first job... is to connect up the firing wires.
- Bit like a car battery. - Exactly, yeah. Exactly.
- The firing handle's in. - Yeah.
You're waiting for that light to come on,
which tells us that we've got enough charge in there to fire.
OK.
Give that a wind.
There we go. It's building up the charge.
- You've got enough charge there. - Yeah.
- When you're ready, press the fire button. - That one?
- Yeah. - So I can press that now?
Yeah.
(Explosion)
Once the coal was blasted from the face,
the Bevin Boys had the hard task of clearing it away.
So, being an experienced miner, it would be up to you to set the charges,
but the Bevin Boys would be the ones charged with
taking all the coal away from the face and out of the mine?
Yeah. They'd be doing the less-skilled work,
pulling the coal down from the face
and also then tramming it up to surface.
So dangerous work but it wasn't technically difficult.
No. No. And not glamorous either.
Unlike military conscripts, there was no let-up for the Bevin Boys,
even after the war ended in 1945.
Britain still needed coal and the Bevin Boys were not demobilised for another three years.
So a big thank you, if you like, is long overdue
for all of those men that were forced to come down here and mine.
Absolutely. The 20,000 Bevin Boys, many of them are dead now -
most of whom are dead -
they deserve a huge thank you from the nation.
Right.
(Groans) We've made this very heavy.
Peter and Colin are at last ready to assemble their coal-powered creation.
One of the things that this sort of characterises
is the fact that a lot of the sort of blacksmiths and engineers had gone away to war
and it was the farmhands who were having to turn their hand
to engineering and improvisation
using whatever lay around the farm.
And the problems that we've encountered
and the sheer effort involved in making this work,
is exactly what would have happened during the 1940s.
As Colin welds the pieces together,
Peter has one more job to do before they can test the engine.
We need to fill up our filter.
This is gonna take all the particles that are coming through -
essentially just smoke -
it's gonna filter those out so all we're left with is gas.
Now, I've got some heather. We're gonna start putting this in.
The leaves and the flowers are highly absorbent.
And the particles will stick to the very large surface area.
- I haven't pushed it down too much? - No, that's fine.
- It's just sort of... - Just lightly packed.
Lid on. It's been absolutely knackering.
Three-day marathon, Alex.
You look like you've just done a three-day marathon.
Here's your coal.
- This... - I can barely recognise you in there.
Filthy - as usual.
This looks absolutely amazing.
This is Colin's vision come to life.
With the coal in the hopper, a fire is lit in the furnace to start producing gas.
Ruth has arrived, to give the ambulance its first test drive.
Are you gonna talk me through this? (Laughs)
- OK? - OK. I'm in.
There's a starter button underneath.
(Engine turns but fails to start)
Right. Put the choke on.
(Engine starts but stops again)
Nearly! (Laughs)
Partly on.
My grandfather drove lorries throughout the war. I wonder if he had this sort of bother.
It's amazing how many women did the driving during the war.
One of the easiest groups to train up were young women.
So for a brief period in the early history of motoring -
wartime motoring was surprisingly feminine.
Perhaps the most famous wartime ambulance driver
was the future Queen herself.
With everything finally in place, now for the moment of truth.
(Engine starts)
Yay!
Three days and a lot of hard work have paid off. The coal-powered ambulance works.
Now all that's left is to take it for a spin.
This is looking promising.
- Whoa. She's so heavy on the steering. - Steady there. Mind that as well.
We have added a lot of weight, haven't we?
Well, I have to say, Peter, this is an absolute thrill.
It's not the fastest ride in wartime Britain
- but it's certainly one of the most exciting. - I love it!
You have to hold the door shut while you're driving.
This is a vehicle that we can use around the farm for pretty much anything.
Whoa. All aboard.
Vehicles like this were a fuel-saving godsend...
That's right, fella.
...moving livestock...
You'll be all right in the back, Peter, with him?
He's off to a nice flock of ewes, the lucky boy.
...carting animal feed...
The ambulance can do us the good service of running them around for us.
...and even cooking dinner.
Come on, Ruth. Let's get some food.
No heat must be wasted.
(Laughs) I love it. Camp cooking. A whole new way of doing it.
- Camp cooking. - One, two, three.
Whoa.
Pan. Fantastic.
How many cars can you cook your dinner on?
Right. One tin of Spam...
...a couple of eggs and a bit of bread.
- Alex! - Yeah?
- Din-dins! - Wow.
Oh, joy of joys.
Oh, throw us another one into the pan, Ruth.
You know, I used to hate Spam as a kid.
But that is absolutely delicious. I must have been mad.
After months of being fattened on scraps,
Shorty has reached the size a wartime pig would have been at slaughter.
This is it, then, Shorty.
Time to say goodbye.
A member of the local constabulary here to make sure we do it all above board. Fair play.
Because meat was so valuable during the war,
a licence was required to slaughter pigs.
Every time a pig club slaughtered a pig, you were supposed to have a police officer present
to ensure that it was all done properly.
Only the one per licence, yes.
The licence. So that we can't be sneaking off any extras.
It would be confiscated if you did.
I think she's done really well, considering what she's been eating.
- She's not in bad shape. - She's looking quite good.
She's really put on weight.
Come on, then. Let's get you gone.
Come on, girl.
Come on, then, girl.
Half of every pig slaughtered from a pig club
was taken by the government to be distributed as part of the war effort.
While much of this went into the rationing system,
some also went to provide emergency relief for the victims of air raids.
Southampton, just six miles from the farm,
was a strategic target for German bombers throughout the war.
Those who survived were often left homeless.
So the Ministry of Food set up emergency feeding centres,
often using meat from sources like pig clubs to feed the victims.
Ruth has come to lend a hand at a local centre.
The prices were cheap and were kept capped
in order to ensure that food really was available to everyone.
So, for example, a starter like soup would be two pence.
And a main course with meat, potatoes and two veg, you're talking about eight pence.
That really was dirt cheap for food.
As with all restaurants during the war,
you didn't need a ration book to eat at the centres.
Here I've got the stock of a local emergency feeding station
and it is really quite grim reading.
They had 13 cases of baked beans, with 24 cans in each case.
They had beef hash, biscuit, cocoa, tea and sugar, condensed milk,
meat roll, rice pudding and soup - and that was it.
For several weeks, the calves have been fed on a diet of artificial milk and oats.
But with imported feed strictly rationed,
farmers often used fodder crops such as swede to supplement their diets.
To save petrol, the boys are resorting to old technology
to prepare the feed.
This is our horse gin, or our horse engine.
Like many a wartime farmer, I haven't used one of these for a long time.
A gin is a geared mechanism which is turned by a horse,
transferring power through a series of shafts to any machine a farmer chooses.
All the machinery would have been driven by one of these during the Victorian period.
But they were phased out and they were replaced by Lister engines.
Obviously, they run on petrol and during the war there was a fuel shortage.
So kit like this was being dug out, put back together to see if it worked
and if it did, it could drive machines like this.
This is just a beet slicer.
It's going to slice up our roots
and hopefully we can wean our cattle onto solid foods.
While Peter fixes the gin, Alex is tacking up the horse.
OK, Ben.
Always the hardest bit of getting a horse tacked up is throwing all of this stuff over his backside.
By the time you get to 1942,
the numbers of tractors have more than doubled
but I'm sure many old-boy farmers, as well,
would have found themselves in this situation.
It must have been lovely for them, I think, to have brought
old, faithful animals back into service
and to have seen them working once again for British agriculture.
Get this belly-band on.
Personally, I relish the opportunity to get a heavy horse in on the farm
because they really are a fantastic form of power.
OK.
With his bridle on now, he's ready to go.
Peter has finished assembling the gin.
I think we're ready to get the horse on this and slice up some roots.
- How are you doing, Peter? - We're looking good. It's all there.
- It's all connected. - You're happy with it?
- As happy as I'll ever be. - Jolly good.
The horse is hooked up to the main drive shaft which will turn the gears.
Well, here we go. Let's see how he gets on.
Walk on.
This is the tricky bit. We're gonna walk over this, Ben.
Come on. Walk on. Walk on.
Steady. Steady. Good lad.
Good lad.
OK, Alex, I'm gonna start introducing some roots.
The use of fodder crops rose by a third during the war.
It's slicing.
He's doing really well.
Really pleased with him. This is the tricky bit.
And step up.
And there we go. Easy.
It just goes to show that horses could still do a job on wartime farms.
Good lad.
And step up.
Emergency feeding centres employed volunteers to make and serve the food,
especially in rural areas.
Gill Dicks has volunteered to help Ruth with the cooking,
but their ingredients are limited.
So the menu today is boiled onions with white sauce.
Gill's making the white sauce. It looks very exciting.
(Laughs) Mostly cornflour.
Erm... pork roll, made with pork, and the beans and the bread to pad it out.
And then the pudding - plum duff and custard.
The meat itself was supplied by the government for such feeding centres off ration.
But where it originally came from
is all that pork that has been collected from the pig clubs up and down the country.
You having fun with that white sauce?
It would be much more fun with a nice dollop of margarine and some proper flour.
But it's thickening.
The next stage is to mix the pork, beans and breadcrumbs together.
I think it's quite interesting that the cheap food of wartime was, in many ways,
exactly the polar opposite of modern cheap food.
Modern fast food.
This is food almost entirely without fat and without sugar.
And that pretty much is exactly what modern fast food is not.
The mixture is wrapped in floured cloth, ready for boiling.
The advantage of boiling everything -
and an awful lot of food in these British Restaurants was boiled -
is that you can do mass catering very easily.
And those who are eating it haven't seen it made.
- That is a good point. - It does look like something the cat...
Don't say it. Don't say it. I know. It does.
The meat roll will be boiled for three hours and then coated in breadcrumbs.
Dessert is plum duff.
Which, of course, is sort of... spotted dick.
The plum duff is made from flour, breadcrumbs, suet,
raisins for sweetness...and powdered eggs.
(Laughs) I was going to mix up the egg powder.
This was something that was new, coming in from America.
Eggs were rationed whether they were in powder form or fresh form.
The powdered eggs are mixed with water.
The equivalent of two eggs made dessert for 12 people.
The war is the sort of height of processed foods in many ways.
Powdered milk - which we're making the sauces out of rather than fresh milk - powdered egg.
Partly because it was a way of concentrating nutritional value into a very tiny space,
for the ships.
If you can get the nutritional value of...
...12 eggs into a packet that size, why would you move fresh eggs around?
However lacking in meat the main course may be,
however tired you're feeling, a stodgy pudding and custard cheers a person up.
Alex and Peter have finished milling the swede and are ready to try it on the calves.
- Smells good. - They don't smell too bad, actually.
- Now, I'm quite confident here because... - Eating everything in sight.
Haven't had my bath today.
OK. Go on, then, Peter.
Hey, what's that?
He's just licking it, is he?
- No, he's not. Listen. - He's eating it.
- (Crunching)
You can hear him putting those molars to work, grinding down the feed.
In wartime, farmers would be looking to balance the diet
so they don't miss out from not having their mother's milk -
they still put on bulk, put on the weight... and will go on and become good dairy cows.
In a wartime situation, you'd have no choice because you don't have the feed
and the Ministry of Food is demanding all of your milk.
You just have to wean them earlier than you would otherwise.
I hadn't really considered how much the Second World War
encroached upon the countryside.
I've always seen it very much in terms of city life and the Blitz,
but it really was being fought in these fields out here in Hampshire.
Emergency feeding centres soon became permanent fixtures
and Churchill renamed them British Restaurants.
Until 1942, most working people only ate at home.
Eating in public was regarded as embarrassing.
But after the government introduced a price cap of five shillings for three courses,
for the first time, ordinary people had the option to eat out.
British Restaurants would become a lasting social phenomenon
and signalled the start of high-street dining.
Righto. Are you going to be needing a lump of bread with that, sir?
Ruth's feeding centre is open for business.
Beans.
The meat roll is being served with baked beans,
which were considered to be such a staple part of the British diet
that they were off ration for the duration of the war.
- What would you like, sir? - A boiled onion, please.
Ruth's father Geoff used to eat in British Restaurants as a child.
He's come to the feeding centre to sample Ruth's efforts.
Dad!
I'm having one of those onions, please.
- Oh, my goodness. - Yes, one of those.
- So you're testing out... - That it's the real thing.
By the end of the war, British Restaurants were serving 600,000 meals a day.
British Restaurants really mark a turning point in British eating culture, too.
This is a time when affordable, basic catering
is suddenly available to a wide number of people.
British Restaurants really sort of opened up the catering industry in many ways.
Oh, yes. Yes, I think that's true.
One or two, like the ones I knew in Oxford,
stayed right up until about the '50s - well into the '50s.
People got used to eating out. They got used to the idea of eating out.
And I think caterers got used to the idea that there was money to be made
out of doing cheap food.
Well, as a kid, I didn't know what the money side of it really was.
That's not as bad as I thought it would be, the meat roll.
It's actually quite edible. It really is quite edible.
- But you still like boiled onions. I'm amazed. - Oh, yeah.
- They're all right. - They're very nice.
- I don't know who's cooked them this time... - Me.
- You. Right, OK. Well, they're very nice. - They're all right.
Lovely.
Ruth's emergency feeding centre also seems to be a hit with the boys.
(She groans)
- Sorry. - You look knackered.
I've been stood up for I don't know how long. You ate it, then?
That, I mean, that was really good. I loved the meatloaf.
- Mm. It was all right, wasn't it. - Delicious.
I mean, it is quite healthy food.
- The fittest we've ever been as a nation. - So they say.
- So they say.
But also we can't relate to it in terms of er...
it's so rare in our lives that we ever see a food shortage in this country.
It really gives you an insight.
It's not just a shortage of one thing. It's a shortage right across the board.
- Of everything. - Every single thing.
- Pub? - I think so.
- Before they rope us into the washing up. - Yeah.
From the need for women to fill new roles in the workplace...
...to the necessity for communal eating...
...the great hardships experienced in 1942
and the way Britain sought to overcome them,
would have an impact stretching far beyond the years of war.
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll