Reading Events
MERL Seminar: Doing Their Bit
Date : 16 March 2010
Time : 16:30 to 18:00
Location : Museum of English Rural Life
Contact : Museum of English Rural Life
merlevents@reading.ac.uk
0118 378 8660
Doing their bit: English children’s contribution to agricultural production during the Second World War
16 March, 4.30pm
Virginia Morrow, Reader of Childhood Studies, and Professor Berry Mayall, Professor of Childhood Studies, Institute of Education, University of London
During the Second World War, English school children made a significant contribution to agricultural production. This seminar describes and considers their efforts. It is well known that Britain struggled to feed its population and that vast areas of meadowland were ploughed up to create fertile agricultural land. Women and school children became a reserve army of labour drawn upon by government, notably through the Women’s Land Army and School Harvest Camps.
This paper builds on material assembled for a forthcoming book by two sociologists of childhood, Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow, who are aiming to address a neglected topic in English social history of childhood. They draw upon oral history of people’s memories of their wartime childhoods, and on school histories, as well as other archived material, contextualised in debates about children, childhood, work and education in the first half of the 20th Century. They suggest that children’s contributions to the war effort through agricultural work (and through a wide range of other types of work) have not been given due recognition, despite evidence to suggest that their work was valued at the time not only by the children themselves, but also by farmers and the UK government.
Free, Adults