Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 269

The idea of the Second World War as ‘The People’s War’, in which a united nation was all in it together, civilians as well as military, was questioned by Sonya Rose in Which people’s war? (2003). She and others have examined questions of community and identity, civilian morale, the impact of austerity, class, gender, fair shares and equality of sacrifice. Their writing has changed the emphasis from the similarity of experiences to differences. Nella Last’s war (1981) was not the war of Mrs Milburn’s diaries (1979). Much depended on individual circumstances, which is perhaps why there continues to be a readership for wartime memoirs. And they continue to appear, as the wartime generation dies out and the post-war generation, on sorting out their papers, realizes that their contents further illustrate the enormous variety of wartime lives. One of the results is Miranda McCormick’s book, which weaves together the experiences of a soldier, a farmer, and his daughter, using family letters, memoirs and diaries as well as public archive material.

The soldier was David McCormick, the author’s father. He was a member of the family that founded the Chicago-based International Harvester company. His father had moved to England and married the daughter of a Yorkshire landowning family, and David led the life of a young man with a private income before the war. In 1940 he enlisted in the artillery, and was subsequently commissioned and sent to join the Royal Horse Artillery in North Africa in 1941. In December of that year he was captured and so began nearly four years as a prisoner of war, initially in Italy and later in Germany. The story of his life in the army and as a prisoner is told through extensive quotations from a memoir that he wrote after the war, from regimental diaries, and from the letters that he wrote to Pamela Street. She was 18 when the war began, a farmer’s daughter living just outside Wilton, to the south of Salisbury Plain, where he was undergoing officer training in the late summer of 1940. They met at a dance in Salisbury, and he was soon a regular visitor to her home. At the time, she was training as a nurse, although she later joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, in which she was eventually commissioned. Her diaries from that time reveal vividly the pressures and difficulties that young women had to deal with. By the time he was captured their letters to each other more or less assumed that they would be married on his return, and that was what happened. After the war, and some time spent in London, he took on a farm a few miles from her old home, helped by his new father-in-law, who was the farmer, writer and broadcaster Arthur (A. G.) Street.

Apart from its intrinsic interest as a good story well told, the book’s main claim to be noticed in this Review is for the extra light it shines on A. G. Street, one of the more prominent public faces of English farming before, during and after World War II. He was a tenant farmer, with a 300-acre farm on the Earl of Pembroke’s Wilton House estate, which he had farmed since 1917. He survived the difficult farming years of the 1920s and 1930s by transforming a mixed farm into a dairy farm with a milk round, but also by becoming a popular writer. He had a critical and commercial success with Farmer’s glory in 1932, and by the beginning of the war had published several novels, one of which, Strawberry roan, was filmed. He had also written a number of books on farming, and had established himself as a broadcaster and journalist, with a regular column in Farmer’s Weekly. The account of his wartime experiences presented here shows how important his writing was to the family income, and gives us a more rounded view of the man than his own writing and the biography that Pamela produced after his death. This book is a reminder, if one is needed, that farmers are people too, and that their farming decisions are affected not only by economic and technical factors, but also by personal and family considerations. It is a welcome, well-produced and sensibly priced addition to the histories of wartime agriculture and the war in general.