Joyce Stonebridge, who was in the Women’s Land Army and is due to receive a badge from the Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. (Picture by Peter Frankland, 0563458)
WORKING on the land in wartime brings back happy memories for Joyce Stonebridge.
Stopped from joining the army by her Guernsey-born father, she joined the Women’s Land Army and was stationed at Lakenheath, Suffolk. The Government has recently decided to recognise members of the Land Army with a badge.
Mrs Stonebridge welcomed the idea. ‘Really it’s an afterthought, but better late than never.’ She recalled her time working on the land: ‘It was an education really, with girls mixed together from all over England,’ she said.
The work was mainly potato and sugar-beet growing and haymaking in the summer. Hay was made into traditional stacks as opposed to bales. Mrs Stonebridge learned to drive a tractor. The sun tanned the girls during summer but it was bitterly cold in winter, so much so that Mrs Stonebridge once fainted.
The accommodation was wooden huts with cubicles for four, divided into two bunks. Mrs Stonebridge shared a bunk with her friend, Hilda, who also came from Sheffield and the two kept in touch after the war.
‘We were lucky to be in the land army as it was much safer than Sheffield, which was being bombed,’ she said.
Some of the girls were from London and Mrs Stonebridge said they were much more streetwise than those from the north.
There was an air base at nearby Mildenhall and girls would be taken to dances there in the back of a lorry.
Mrs Stonebridge said some girls took full advantage of the availability of RAF and USAF airmen and she remembers how the Americans had a lot of money.
The girls would count the aircraft out and count them back in again.
Mrs Stonebridge (nee Audoire) eventually left the land army due to back trouble and returned to Sheffield, where she had been born in 1921. Her father had served in the Great War after which he chose to settle in Yorkshire.
He helped to set up a Guernsey-Sheffield Society through which his daughter met her future husband, Douglas, who was in the Guernsey Militia. The couple married in 1945 and Douglas died in 2005 just short of the couple’s diamond wedding.
Article posted on 16th April, 2008 - 2.29pm
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