KAREN welcomed two visitors to the meeting.

The raffle for the afternoon at Buckingham Palace was won by Dot and members were needed to steward at the Malvern Spring Show on May 7 to 10.

A visit was also planned to the Synagogue in Cheltenham.

Two of our teams are through to the second round of the WI Quiz.

Members were reminded of the visit to the new services on the M5 motorway and also that the April meeting will start very promptly at the earlier time of 7.00pm.

The entertainment at the Summer Group meeting at Bisley on July 6 will be by the Glitter and Twisted Theatre group.

Fiona Warin then gave us a very amusing, factual and interesting talk in the guise of a recruiting officer for ladies aged from nineteen to thirty, unmarried or widowed, to join the (Eastcombe) Women’s Land Army in WW2.

She stayed in the part for all of her talk which was very informative and, to several members, brought back memories.

The Land Army had been disbanded after WWI.

At the start of WWII there were 30 per cent fewer agricultural workers and providing food was the most important element.

The three main areas of work were agriculture, pest control and the timber corps.

Agriculture required at least hedging and ditching, cleaving, ploughing and dairying and lambing skills.

A special uniform was worn for pest control and land girls were supplied with arsenic for killing rats.

Forestry work involved planting, cutting and managing timber for a variety of industries.

Their work was crucial to the war effort.

Usually they were well looked after and fed and received extra rations.

They earned 22 shillings and sixpence a week and, depending where they were posted, had varying degrees of social life.

A few members re-enacted being interviewed to join the Land Army who then would have had six weeks training, had to pass an exam and be able to drive a tractor.

Between September 1939 and July 1945, 137,483 Fordson tractors were produced and in this time 5.6 million acres were brought back into use for food production and there was a huge drop in imported food.

The end of the war was not the end of the Land Army which was kept on until 1950.

Land Girls received little or no recognition for all their work and, because they had been treated so badly, Lady Denman resigned as head of The Land Army.

They were officially and very belatedly recognised when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed Fiona’s talk and she was thanked by Dinah.