大象传媒

THE WAR YEARS AT LONGFORGAN, DUNDEE

This is the story of the war years as it concerned me as a young man. Twenty seven maybe and being a farmer I was self employed and the War Office didn鈥檛 require my services as a soldier, so I was told to plough and rear crops and dig for victory as the saying was at the time. So I suppose it was simply work, eat and sleep really. That was the life and yet a country life in those days was quiet and nothing stirring much except the ordinary day鈥檚 work whatever you were doing, spring, summer, autumn or winter and nothing else to disturb the usual thing except in those days the fear of German invasion which was probably in everybody鈥檚 mind was going to happen.

So, as I say, it was just hard work and the department of Agriculture introduced the double summer time beginning in April to two hours instead of one hour. This was a most unfortunate decision that ever was made as far as farmers were concerned because if you yoked at 7 o鈥檆lock ordinarily it was only 5.am. I can recall getting up in the morning very early and getting everything ready for feeding the horses and things at that unreasonable hour and going to get yoked to the plough at 5 o鈥檆lock in the morning the rime still on the shafts of the plough. I鈥檒l tell you it wisnae very pleasant as far as I can mind. However, that was the rule and we had a long, long working day because it meant that lousing time at half past five it was still broad daylight and you could still go and do another yoking鈥檚 work before it got dark in the summer time at the hay. So it was a long, long day. It was hard work of course; it was aye that depending on the season. However, I was young and fit, married with two children and anxious to get on.

I was appointed to the A.R.P. Service, air raid precaution service, and was fitted out with a tin hat, oil skins and all the equipment you would need for that sort of job going round the village of Longforgan making sure the lights were all kept darkened in the houses for fear of the enemy coming across and you getting bombed. There was gas mask training of course. You carried your gas mask and even the youngest children had to be fitted with a gas mask. It was a very difficult job trying to get a two or three month old bairn into a gas mask. She was totally enclosed in this. That was the bit I didn鈥檛 like very much, I didn鈥檛 like that at all.

However, we had to be prepared and my neighbour and me patrolled the village from end to end every night for a couple of hours and saw that everybody had blacked out their lights. If they didn鈥檛 you had to advise them. Sometimes it caused a wee bit of annoyance. Relations just weren鈥檛 very good sometimes with some of the people. So anyway, that鈥檚 the story of the early years.

I remember one night being on patrol with my friend and we had trudged about to and fro for about two hours and thought that we would go to the storeroom and have a rest. The store room was the staff room of the local school and in this store room hung all the equipment that would be needed in a time of trouble, an air raid, invasion or whatever 鈥� fire extinguishers and a lot of equipment. The walls were covered with equipment and I remember having a look round and wondering about this and that and I remember taking hold of a fire extinguisher to see what sort of a thing it was, the weight and everything and suddenly, the blooming thing went off and if you鈥檇 seen me, I was absolutely panic stricken. I couldn鈥檛 move. I just held on to this thing and it was spewing out a jet of this fire extinguishing liquid all round the walls and all over the equipment that was there. I was absolutely petrified until after about a minute my friend grabbed the thing and rushed through to the toilet with it and put the rest of it down the toilet. I鈥檓 afraid the room was in rather a mess after all this and the schoolmaster was absolutely furious about the whole thing and said we had to have it cleaned up so I had to go and look for a cleaning lady in the village to come and wash down the walls and give it a thorough good clean. It cost me fifteen shillings (75p) but it was a very, very serious moment for me I can tell you, although I have enjoyed a good laugh about it since. I simply couldn鈥檛 do a thing. I was petrified, panic stricken and every time I moved, it moved the jet and oh my goodness me, what a mess.

Anyway, time went on and harvest came along. I was the only young man left in the district and I was in great demand from local farmers to come and help them at harvesting, stacking and threshing. Of course, I was growing mostly soft fruit, strawberries, and raspberries and by that time, August and September, the harvest of them was finished and I was available, so I helped quite a bit round about various farms. I was paid a shilling (5p) an hour for my work which would be stooking, leading and stacking. I built stacks of wheat on a local farm, they were all pretty big farms round about Longforgan and during the depression years, 1925 to 1935, they had laid the farms down in grass. When the war came this grass had to be broken up and arable crops sown. The Carse of Gowrie is usually all that heavy clay that grew excellent crops of wheat, hay, barley and beans. Very important crops. Local farmers simply had to break up their land and sow it and carry on arable farming.

A committee was set up locally of farmers who came round once every season in the springtime and asked what your plans were for cropping. You had to give them an idea of what you would be sowing and if they were happy with it, it was O.K. and if they weren鈥檛 happy with it they told you what to do and if you didn鈥檛 want to do it or didn鈥檛 do it, they sent in their own equipment and if you didn鈥檛 do as instructed, the committee moved in and did it for you and it cost you of course. So that was the rules and it was carried out. I can鈥檛 remember any farmer objecting to his directions because it was quite simply what he was doing before the depression.

That was a terrible time from 1925 to 1935. It was terrible depressive years. You couldn鈥檛 get a price for anything. Not even the humble tattie. There were tons and tons of tatties dumped in quarry holes and wherever you could get a place for them. There wasn鈥檛 any price for stock it was a terrible time and farmers were in dire trouble. They couldn鈥檛 pay their rents some of them. I remember myself that my parents grew 40 acres of rasps and they had quite a good crop and after everything were paid, fertiliser, living and all that there wasn鈥檛 any money left to pay the rent. So it was agreed that they pay as much as they could and that was all. They couldn鈥檛 do any more. This went on for year in year out until things began to improve and then of course the war came and that made a terrific difference. The farmers were paid a very good price for their crops and farms began to be more cheerful and looked more pleasant.

Life was pretty busy and always the fear of invasion and I remember one night patrolling and listening to the crump, crump, crump incessantly on Clydebank. They got a terrible heavy bombing from the German airforce that night. We could hear quite distinctly the noise of the bombs going off where I was at Longforgan. I would be about 70 miles away.

That鈥檚 all I can think about until victory came which it did. The Social life I may say was rather limited. My stepfather was appointed a sergeant in the Home Guard and he was the only man that had a rifle. He went up into the church tower every night and performed duty up there for two hours just to be ready with one rifle. However, that was all there was. It may be there was other means of defence that we didn鈥檛 know about. I was also asked by the Ministry of Defence to take a class of first aid. This was in 1938. I was asked if I would attend a class of first aid in case it would be needed and so I attended a class twice a week at Longforgan School taught by the local doctor. We were issued with a Red Cross book on how to treat various things 鈥� bones and how to bandage and all that. I did two years of this and passed an examination so I can remember where your acetabulum is. I don鈥檛 think there would be many people who would bother where this bone is in the body. There鈥檚 an awful lot of bones in the body you鈥檒l discover. So that was it and victory came.

Wartime food rations were just the barest minimum of what people needed to survive. Of course the towns people weren鈥檛 well off because they had no means of anything extra, whereas the country people had rabbits, pigeons and game birds and enjoyed a far better life than towns people. I remember at special times of the year, hay or seed time, you got extra rations for the men. The farmer didn鈥檛 get anything though. I remember applying for extra cheese for myself and the War Office said, 鈥淣o. You can鈥檛 get cheese, you鈥檙e the farmer, you don鈥檛 get any extras, it is just your men.鈥� I was working just as hard as any man. But we didn鈥檛 worry about food, we had always enough. I was dealing with the grocers in Dundee who had a special allocation for supplying nursing homes. Nursing homes never took up all the allocations because they just used the barest minimum so there was always plenty of food in this particular shop because there was always plenty left over from the nursing homes, which could be bought. So as I say, we always had plenty. I could never complain about lack of food.

Clothes were the same. We always had plenty of clothing. Never any shortage of that. Folk went about selling their clothing coupons. People from towns especially. When they came out to pick rasps and strawberries they would sell their coupons for money and then went to the rag stores and bought something to wear if they needed it.

I didn鈥檛 have all my acreage in fruit. I remember the call came for sugar. The Government set up a sugar factory at Cupar in Fife to process the crop and I grew two acres of sugar beet. We had no experience of growing sugar beet and the sugar factory had a fieldsman that came round and explained how to grow the crop. Of course, it was always neeps that farmers grew for stock feeding and it was always on a drill but the advisor said it would have to be grown on the flat because the sugar beet had to be topped, that is the shaws taken off below the lowest leaf and if there was any crop sticking above the surface, that was where the leaves sprouted and you would have all that to cut off and sometimes you would find cutting off the tops you near had about half the beet anyway because it was so prominent on the surface. Whereas if it was on the flat, the earth was right up to the neck of the beet and therefore you got more beet and less top. Also you had to remove all the soil from the beet before you put it into the wagons. The railways did all the transport. There were some private contractors with lorries who also carted sugar beet to Cupar.

My beet wasn鈥檛 grown on the flat. You couldn鈥檛 do that on the heavy boulder clay on the Carse of Gowrie. It was alright maybe on light soils having it on the flat because you could thin it on the softer, lighter, sandy soils rather than on the boulder clay of the Carse where I was. So I told the fieldsman it will have to be on a drill. I discovered that furring it up afterwards like tatties helped to get more earth round the neck of the beet. It was a difficult crop to grow. It had to be very carefully handled. It was sown at 15 lbs. of seed to the acre. Swedes were sown at 2 1/2 to 3 lbs. per acre. 15 lb. per acre was an awful lot of seed and each seed sprouted three plants and it was very difficult to single. It just grew up like a hedge and if you didn鈥檛 get it thinned in time it just got impossible to thin. So this was dealt with by the specialists trying to get one seed one plant like neeps which eventually they got and that made a big difference to singling.

Then when precision seeders came on the market that made it even easier. One seed at an inch apart. If you got a wet harvest it was difficult to get the earth off it. You loaded up the beet in a wagon and sent it to Cupar. They sampled it by taking a quantity in a bucket and weighing it, dirt and all and then washed all the earth off and then weighing it and if it hadn鈥檛 been properly topped below the last green leaf they cut off where it should have been topped and weighed that and the result was dirt tare and top tare added together and subtracted from the tonnage. You very often thought the half of your crop was useless because you could only get about half the tonnage that was in the wagon. A lot of the farmers thought they were being cheated but they weren鈥檛, it was perfectly right. The sugar beet factory couldn鈥檛 pay you for earth and tops. It was better when you got a dry lift because more of the earth came off harvesting it. If it was put in a pit and then forked onto a lorry, it lost earth that way.
It was hard work loading 5 ton of sugar beet onto a lorry with high sides. It took two men about an hour to do this. That was the sugar beet crop.

There were German and Italian prisoners to help with the harvest. The Germans were very good workers and worked hard but the Italians weren鈥檛 keen on work at all. It was work, eat and sleep but socially there was the odd whist drive or dance just to break the monotony.

Alex. Ogilvie
29 July 2004

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