A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

To-day I see a great expansion of woman's labours under the sun. The trouble is that the demand outstrips the supply. The public, whose apathy has given only a minimum of stimulus to the progress of the girl agriculturist, has become suddenly clamant. It demands the impossible. The girls' agricultural colleges are to improvise the highly trained, skilled article. It is as though they should demand the finished fruits of the orchard before the budding and flowering time of the trees has been fulfilled. I am hoping that this will not lead to a reaction, and that those whose demand for ready-made service brings inevitably unsatisfactory results will not regard woman's work in the light that their own thoughtlessness must shed upon it. Only those of us who understand the curriculum, and the time required to follow it to the appointed end, know that you must be thorough if you would be successful. All the ordinary problems of the open-air life must be faced in training before they can be overcome in the practice of daily life in farm and garden. To us this is a commonplace; to those who do not know the land and its labor it comes as a surprise and an annoyance.

I established the Hostel at Reading, near the great Agricultural College, in the year 1898, and it remained there for nearly four years, when the Reading premises began to prove inadequate to the purposes I had in view. Even when the ridicule ceased, the girls had not been popular at Reading, where the college students thought that they were intruders if they ventured beyond the dairy. There were certain advantages. For example, the heads of the house of Sutton opened their gardens at stated times, and the girls could see the most skilled work in operation. But I could not help thinking that, if the idea was to grow, it must have room and a congenial atmosphere for its development, and so it happened that the change was made. We moved to Studley Castle, in Warwickshire, sixteen miles from Birmingham, a rather modern place, with forty acres of gardens and pleasure grounds, wonderful out-buildings—built originally for racing stables—and nearly two hundred and fifty acres of farm land, with woodlands and water in addition. In many respects this was the ideal place for the work in hand. There are other institutions of similar kind in England to-day, and I am not claiming any special superiority for Studley. If I write of what is done there, it is merely because I know exactly what work is being carried on, and the full measure of success that attends it. Studley is now run by a limited liability company, in which I have no interest whatever. It differs from other agricultural colleges chiefly in the atmosphere, which is that of Girton or Newnham, and is deliberately preserved on grounds of economic policy.

If our victory in the world-war is to have in it the elements of permanence, it can only be by the thorough equipment of those who go out into the world to contend with the most highly trained nation under the sun, and, as far as woman's education is concerned, in whatever aspect, it has the advantage denied to the education of boys—of being free from old and paralysing conventions. There is nothing that must be done merely because it has been done from time immemorial, and the agricultural colleges have been modern from their inception.

The first thing to be considered is so to train the students that they are able gradually to develop a measure of physical strength, and at the same time to teach them how to obtain a maximum of result from a minimum of effort. Many an untrained man could only accomplish with great exertion what a trained woman can do without difficulty. In a little while not only do the spade and the wheelbarrow lose all their terrors, but the comparatively light modern plough can be handled, even on fairly heavy land, without excessive fatigue. Then the balance must be preserved between practice and theory. You will remember that the method of combining the two is not new. Mr. Wackford Squeers taught it at Dotheboys Hall. "W-I-N-D-E-R, a casement. Now go and clean them." Perhaps this was the germ of the idea—who knows? The lecturer in the college is supplemented by the expert in the field, dairy, and garden, and the student is not limited to the grounds of the institution, ample though they be. On outlying farms, in private gardens, market gardens, at country flower shows and exhibitions, the pupils of this and other colleges are expected to demonstrate their efficiency, thereby learning how the familiar problems may vary in their incidents and application. There is no element of secrecy. All that is taught and all that is learned is open to the inspection of the section of the public that is interested. The college has terms similar to those of school and university—thirty-nine weeks of work and thirteen of holiday—and while girls are admitted as soon as their school education is finished, at the age of sixteen or thereabouts, women can join at any age. If they have the energy and determination, they are never too late to learn. For school-girls over twelve years of age who intend to take up agricultural or garden work when school days are over, there are holiday classes at which the 'prentice work may be studied under the most pleasant conditions possible. Most of the school-girls who take this course regard it as an ideal holiday.

For the benefit of adults who desire a special study, short courses can be arranged at all times, but it is, of course, well understood that such courses do not make the student truly representative of the college tuition. It has long been recognised that you cannot make agriculturists or horticulturists in a hurry. The minimum period of complete study is two years, but the complete course that turns out the finished student is a full three years. It is in view of this hard truth that I have eyed askance the suggestion that a course that is to be practical can be crowded into three months. Such a term would hardly avail a genius. As far as I have been able to see, the not very considerable percentage of failures associated with agricultural colleges is due to the inability of students to distinguish between enthusiasm and staying power. They have not realised that work must be done at every season and in nearly all weather, that the sun is not always shining, and that the novelty of association with Nature will wear away from all who are not Nature-lovers at heart and by instinct. That is why I am afraid of short-term training. Two or three years develop not only aptitude, but character; enthusiasms have time to take a fresh and long lease of life. Training brings confidence too. Girls who wish to be gardeners, agriculturists, poultry-farmers, estate managers, and the rest, will do well to remember that the new or the modern methods they are taught in an up-to-date institution are not necessarily followed in the place where they get their first engagement. If they have to control men, they must expect to find a certain intolerance of change, a certain resentment of direction. Unless they are thoroughly sure of themselves they cannot supervise the work of others.

What the student has to remember is that most of the methods she will find outside her training college are wasteful, obsolete, or second rate. Scientific training is unknown to the average gardener, market gardener, dairy-farmer, and poultry-keeper. Our old countryside is run on amasingly inept lines. Foolishness of any kind that has behind it the sanction of a single generation is sacrosanct. If a father has farmed or gardened foolishly, that special manner of foolishness is sacred to his son. We have always relied upon "the foreigner." He sends us fruit, eggs, honey, vegetables, corn, cattle food; while the seas are open, we need never go hungry. I do not pretend that we can do without him for everything, but we can certainly do very much more in the future than we have done in the past, and we have been warned by our Government to do it. That is why I have so much hope for the future of the woman on the land. I feel that her work is no longer concerned with hobbies and private profit; henceforward it is, in effect, a kind of public service. The Government is avowedly anxious for the future of the land, frankly concerned to check the annual outlay of millions of pounds for foodstuffs that we are well able to raise at home.

Why, for example, should we spend forty thousand pounds a year upon honey, to name what our American friends would call "a side line," when we have a wealth of flowers and fruit blossom that would not only yield all that is required, but would even enable us to substitute honey for much of the sugar that is only sold to us when it has been chemically treated to improve appearance at the expense of quality? Why must we gather eggs from the far ends of the earth, and bacon from countries where pigs are fed as they are said to be fed in China? When I think of the thousands of women who are ready, willing, and, if properly trained, able to take a hand in the great task of feeding the people, it seems to me that the seed I sowed in 1898, to the accompaniment of much amusement, derision, and hostile criticism, has grown into a very sturdy and healthy tree. I even venture to think that the fruits will be more refreshing than those of the Insurance Act itself. As far as the records I have been able to examine teach me, there have been very few failures to achieve success among the women who have taken resolutely and completely to this comparatively new walk in life. The students have done more than merely earn a comfortable living. They have been the disseminators of the new ideas, the modern theories of agriculture, horticulture, and apiculture, the introducers of order and method into realms where chaos ruled amiably and ineffectively. In many cases they have even succeeded so far as to disarm prejudice and to persuade omniscient man that a method is not good merely because it is customary or easy to follow. And what they have done is small by the side of what they may hope to do.

What is needed just now, when the Government is really awake to the importance of woman's work on the land, is an extension of the agricultural colleges and a series of State grants. At present the work is costly. The upkeep of a big institution is expensive, because you cannot treat the land precisely as you would for utility farming. It is there to teach pupils, to carry out demonstrations. So it is with the glass, that is so costly to build and to heat. Then, again, professors—the best in the country—must be asked to lecture; and while agricultural colleges are in the heart of the country, the professors are probably living in distant university towns, so that their lectures are bound to be costly. Let us remember, too, quite frankly, that there is not much money for the girl who is not able to start a little establishment of her own or to go into partnership. There is a happy, healthy, useful life, there is valuable service, quite unrecorded, to the public at large, but the monetary reward is of the slightest and the training is long.

It is necessary, then, in view of the growing demand for the work of woman's hands, that the Government should make grants to the established colleges as they make grants to other educational bodies, and it would be well if every County Council that does not conduct an agricultural college of its own would give a few scholarships annually in the college nearest to its county town. These steps are needed to give an impetus to the work that is now being done. Had they been taken when first I pleaded for them, we should have been in quite a different position to-day. There would, at least, have been enough capable workers to meet the most pressing demands. At present they tell me that at Studley every post brings applications for gardeners and dairy workers, for women competent to train others, but there is not a single disengaged pupil. Doubtless a similar state of things obtains at the other colleges in Kent, Worcestershire, Sussex, and elsewhere.