‘ALARMS and excursions of being a land girl’ by Heather Ghent – There can’t be many land girls left from the Second World War, but the speaker for the Knutsford Historical Society meeting, Heather Ghent, was very entertaining with slides and her repartee on life as a land girl.

During the First World War, with three million men away fighting, the Ministry of Agriculture recruited women to the land army.

By 1917, there were 20,000 women in the army and many more local girls already working the land. Conservative farmers had to be persuaded or pressurised to cooperate.

In the Second World War, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries assumed the role of recruiting, but as the war progressed, conscription became necessary.

As a young single woman, you had a choice – the forces, munitions or the land army. The majority were country girls, but more than a third came from the cities.

Life was hard, particularly for the city girls, driving and maintaining a tractor, picking potatoes, stabling and working horses in all weather – rain, snow, mud – the work was relentless.

Heather would have experienced all this and, to prove how hardy they were, she is still with us to tell the story of the land girls.

The Knutsford Historical Society will be back in the autumn with another programme of interesting stories to tell.

The next meeting will be on Thursday, September 3