Land Girls paid too much, Beatrix Potter told a friend
BEATRIX POTTER complained about “absurdly high” wages paid to women in a letter she wrote 80 years ago.
In the a newly discovered letter, the Peter Rabbit author, who owned thousands of acres of land in the Lake District, told a friend that the young women who helped her manage the farms during the war were overpaid.
Writing in 1942, a year before her death, she said that men would be “upset” to learn how much her female farm labourers earned.
The Land Girls, as the Women’s Land Army were called, worked on Britain’s farms during the Second World War, replacing men who went into the Armed Forces. They worked up to 50 hours a week and were paid a minimum weekly wage of 28 shillings (around £49 today), 10 shillings less than the average wage of their male counterparts.
The author, then 76, had bought 4,000 acres of land and said the sum was “a lot for a small farmer” to pay beginners, adding: “The wages paid to the Forestry Girls are most absurd ... it is upsetting to men to hear of such a wage.”
She wrote that she “wished to help” in the fields but was “old and tired” but “a healthy outdoor life appeals to girls instead of the unfortunate conditions pertaining to factory life”. The letter, sent to a correspondent in Sawrey, near Windermere, Cumbria, in July 1942, was expected to sell for £1,500 at Forum Auctioneers of London today.
Max Hasler, a specialist at the firm, said: “In this letter Beatrix Potter is discussing the use of the Women’s Land Army on farms in the Lake District. Wartime letters by her are always especially interesting as she was getting on by this time and focused on her rural work and her role in the community.
“This [was] clearly something quite close to her heart. She was involved in getting women working and training them up – yet this appears to be at odds with her comments in this letter.”
The author bought her first farm, Hill Top, in 1905 with the proceeds from her books and by the 1940s was an awardwinning breeder of Herdwick sheep.
She bequeathed her 14 farms and all the land to the National Trust on the condition that Hill Top was left unchanged and opened to the public.