Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 180

This fascinating book is an account of one man’s war. John McKendrick Hughes (1882–1967) was a Canadian who enlisted into the 151st Battalion of the Canadian Mounted Rifles. This battalion was broken up in the autumn of 1916 and the lower ranks were attached to other battalions to reinforce fighting units on the Western Front, leaving an embarrassing number of officers surplus to requirements. McKendrick was one such officer, hence the title of the book. He languished in England for some time but in July 1917 responded to the call for officers to devote themselves to communication work, even though that meant reverting from the rank of major to that of staff lieutenant, second class. Fiercely patriotic, farmer McKendrick agreed and rose to the challenge of being an ‘agricultural officer’.

British troops were already working alongside French farmers to produce food for the army since German submarines played havoc with supplies from across the Channel. During the summer of 1916 the Somme offensive liberated a stretch of land from which British troops harvested crops and, with the help of German prisoners of war, planted abandoned patches of farmland to grow cereals, potatoes and other vegetables. Early in 1917 ‘agricultural officers’ – often farmers in civilian life – were appointed to co-ordinate military help to local farming families. In this way, John McKendrick Hughes featured in a little-known aspect of agricultural history that arose from non-combatant men providing catering, clerical, medical and agricultural support. The men who experienced the trenches, stormed enemy sites, or ‘went over the top’ were only part of the British army. As Dr Craig Gibson explains in a twenty-page introduction, the ‘blood and guts’ horror of combat emphasized in military histories and evoked in the mythology of nation building was not the only story. He estimates that of two million British and dominion officers and men in northern France and Flanders in the first week of August 1917, only 700 to 800,000 belonged to combatant units.

Between August 1917 and demobilization in 1919, John McKendrick Hughes used his agricultural – and Canadian – initiative to organize soldiers who were rotated away from the front line or worked under special orders to help local farmers, to produce food items for British soldiers and, in the summer and autumn of 1918, to harvest ground captured from the Germans, some of which had been planted by his own men.

The unwanted tells this remarkable story from the point of view of an energetic Canadian in his middle thirties who had no time for British army rules. His solidly pragmatic approach paid off and he made use of fellow Canadians for essential agricultural tasks, knowing that many shared his ‘down to earth’ qualities and disregard for ‘red tape’. He drafted his book in 1956 from evidence contained in a mass of hastily-written letters sent, often on a daily basis, to his wife Sara between 1916 and 1919. Almost all the original letters were lost subsequently but the manuscript was passed on to a grandson, John Richard Hughes, who edited it for publication, provided copious notes and appendices, and enlisted the help of Dr Gibson to write the introduction. The book presents an often entertaining account of remarkable success in agricultural endeavour under difficult circumstances: bomb craters, whizzing shells, dead horses and human corpses were frequently encountered. Potatoes, vegetables, pigs and cattle figure largely in this farmer’s story, together with entertaining reminiscences about the British office class. After the war, John McKendrick Hughes returned to his farm near Flatbush in northern Alberta, becoming a leading figure in local agricultural co-operatives and a keen author. Characteristically, the family’s farmhouse was known as ‘The Barracks’.

I liked this book greatly for the light it shed on wartime agriculture on the Western Front and for the images it conveyed of parts of northern France that I know well from my own fieldwork on settlement reconstruction in the wake of war. Reproductions of folded sections of maps used by Hughes are especially poignant. The unwanted reminded me of my own family: of distant relatives who went to Canada and Australia before the Great War, of my maternal grandfather who drew detailed plans for laying out narrow-gauge railways to supply the front line, and of my father who fought in that war and whose shrapnel-pitted back reminded me of how he and so many others were scarred for life. Of course, I also have some reservations. The unwanted is a long and personal book reinforced by notes and appendices from grandson John. I wondered whether they needed to be so detailed and whether two long letters needed to transcribed and reproduced in facsimile. Here is a work of family, military and agricultural history combined. The University of Alberta Press are to be congratulated for producing an elegant book with excellent photographs and page design at a very good price.