98-year-old land girls honoured

Two 98-year-old Te Kūiti ladies, Mary Lee and June Fagan, have been honoured for serving as land girls during World War II.

The term “land girls” refers to women who signed up to work on farms during the war, when many of the men who had done these jobs were away fighting.

They were required to wear a uniform in public and earned a minimal wage.

The two were presented with certificates – made out in their maiden names – in a ceremony at Hillview earlier this month.

NZ Returned Services Association district support manager Tricia Hague also gave a presentation on the “little known history” of the land girls.

“It’s special because they kept the country going.

“When the men were all away at war, they operated the farms, the factories, everything.”

She said land girls had only been officially classed as veterans since 2011 – belatedly making them eligible for support by RSAs and Veterans’ Affairs.

June Fagan, who lives in Hillview, said frustration with the tragedies of war led to her decision to enlist as a land girl.  

“I’d had enough. We’d all had enough of war. Because all you thought about was those poor soldiers going off to war. Men who would never have children, and things like that.  

“It was something we all wanted to do. We really wanted to win the war.”

She said she received a piece of paper describing different army jobs for women, none of which appealed.

June described herself as “an outside girl”, enjoying mowing the lawns at home, in Lower Hutt, where her family had shifted from Auckland. She had never worked on a farm.

“I adored the garden and I used to grow the vegetables for the house.

“So, I made up my mind to be a land girl.”  She “took potluck”, not knowing where she would end up and how the people would treat her.  

She was sent to the Fantham family dairy farm near Marton, to live in a household with three little girls.

Her employers were “marvellous” bosses, she said.

The mother of the family was bedridden with morning sickness, so she cooked, gardened and helped with the children as well as doing farm work.  

June recalls they had a herd of 80 cows, a smaller number of which were milkers, and a team of draught horses.

“The first job I had was learning to milk a cow, on the teats.”

There was no electric milking machine – cows were milked by hand. Each cow took about 15 minutes to milk.

“We used to run the milk into buckets and put it into cream cans, big steel ones.” Her boss preferred to lift them himself, if possible, rather than letting her do that heavy job.  

“He said, ‘that’s not a job for you’. I was well looked after.”

The domestic work could be heavy.

“The hardest thing to do was wash your clothes. We had to light a copper. Chop the firewood for the copper. Attend to it while the water was getting hot and pump the washing up and down in the copper to bring the dirt out.”

She stayed on the same farm for two years after the war, until the owners sold it. At that time, June met a neighbour, Christopher, who had returned from the army. The two met chatting over the fence – while Chris was chopping a fodder crop.  

“He wasn’t handsome until he came back from the war,” she said.

June returned to Wellington, and the two corresponded before marrying and settling in the Mairoa district, southwest of Piopio.

Fellow land girl Mary – who lives independently in Te Kūiti – also felt an urgency to support the war effort.

“They were crying out for people – there was just no-one else to do the work,”

Mary was placed on her own family farm on the Kahuwera Road outside Piopio. They had 60-80 cattle beasts including milking cows and young stock, plus a few sheep and pigs.

“I was needed. My father was lame – disabled from a horse accident many years earlier. My mother was also unwell and often unable to do much.

“Half the time we got back from milking, and we had to put the porridge on.”

Mary’s brother, Clutha, who also spent the war on the home farm, was near-blind. Another brother, Don, was away at the war, serving in Cassino, Italy among other places. So much of the farm work fell on her.

“You milked the cows and took the cream out to the road,” Mary said. On that farm, they did have an electric milking plant.

The cream was made into butter at the Piopio dairy factory – a winner of a New Zealand championship for the best butter. Skim milk went to the pig barrels.

She also fed calves and cleaned up after milking – including the cream separator which was “always stuck and hard to undo”.

“Then you had to take it all out and clean it. Nearly an hour’s job in the morning.”

She also helped the neighbours on their farms during haymaking season – driving the draught horses.

“I drove what they call a sledge when we picked up the hay.

“The men stacked it high on the dray; I drove the hay rake with the team of horses.”

She didn’t mind working on the farm: “It was all I knew,” Mary said. It was “a plain and ordinary life” with petrol shortages.

“You couldn’t go anywhere anyway, at that time; the King Country was dry.”

After the war, Don returned.

“The men came back very damaged, so very damaged,” she said.

Mary married in 1948 and later had a family. When asked how she met her husband she said: “Probably very slyly.”

It was at the Te Kūiti picture house, where they both worked as young people.