One of the last remaining Women’s Land Army (WLA) hostels has been given Grade II listed status for being “vitally important” in recognising women’s wartime efforts.
The humble hut, in Smallwood, Cheshire, is one of the few surviving WLA hostels, and has been listed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the advice of Historic England.
The WLA, also known as the land girls, was established in 1917 and re-formed in 1939. It helped to feed Britain during the second world war, when Britain imported the majority of its food.
Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, said the land girls “supplied the needs of this island and sustained the life of the nation”.
Some of the hostels were set up in a range of existing buildings, from country houses to stables, to allow the land girls to eat, sleep and socialise.
From 1942 hostels like the one in Smallwood were purpose-built and housed up to 48 women. Nora Wright, a 14-year-old orderly in 1942 who later joined the WLA, described the building’s “cold concrete floors. Coke stoves and a coke boiler” that “provided heating but there was none in the dormitories”.
About 200 hostels are thought to have been purpose-built and of those many have been lost over the past 75 years, making the one in Smallwood a rare survival. There is a listed, purpose-built land girls hostel in Flintshire, north Wales.
All hostels were staffed by orderlies and a warden or matron, and the layout usually consisted of a dormitory, dining and common room, kitchen, matron’s room, sick room, bathroom and showers.
Throughout its history about 250,000 women, mostly in their teens or early 20s, left their families and friends in their towns and cities to serve as land girls. Life in the hostels often consisted of backbreaking work such as forestry, digging trenches for planting or drainage, or felling trees.
Their willingness to endure the hardships of hard work also demonstrated the capability of women, which helped the feminist cause in the postwar years.
Although they were young and many had little experience of farming or the countryside, they made a major contribution to reducing annual food imports, ultimately producing about 70% of all the food the country needed.
Catherine Dewar, the north-west regional director of Historic England, said: “Many of us will have had land girls in our own families – they were normal young women determined to do their bit for the war effort.
“Many will have stayed in simple hostels like this one, enduring often difficult and unpleasant working conditions with little complaint. Listing recognises the rarity of this building but also how important the women who used it are to our national story.”
