Former Land Girls preview their statue

The £100,000 statue has been created by Stoke on Trent sculptor Denise Dutton, whose great aunt was in the Land Army in Surrey. A clay model of the statue was on show for the first time at a gathering of former Land Girls at the home of Bill and Eunice Finney, at Amerton near Stafford.

A total of £67,000 has already been raised and donations are coming in not only from this country but from abroad.

The fact that the very youngest members of the Land Army are now in their eighties has spurred on the Staffordshire branch of the Womens Food and Farming Union (WFU) who themselves took on this statue project and launched it at the 2012 Staffordshire County Show. They want to get the statue in place whilst there are still a reasonable number of ex- Land Girls and Lumber Jills fit enough to attend its unveiling at The National Memorial Arboretum.

Amongst the former Land Girls looking at the model of the statue was Clare Arnold. Still a sprightly 90-year-old she left the Lotus shoe factory in Stafford aged 18 in 1942 to work for Harry Malpass on his farm at Walton on the Hill.

She worked the horses in the fields and each month, riding one Shire horse bare-back and leading another with a short rope, she took them the three miles to the centre of Stafford to have them shod.

"I loved it all, particularly the smell of the horses, the cows and the pigs," she said.

Ninety year old Jean Johnson was also at the gathering. She left W H Durose, corn merchants, Derby, in 1941, to join 40 other girls at the Alveston Field Hostel, Bolton Lane, Derby, to work for the War Agricultural Committee. She helped drain unproductive land and cleaning out ditches.

Taught to drive she took lorry loads of potatoes to the local army camps, sugar beet to the Nottingham factory, and took harvested grain to the corn mills dressed in her uniform of bib and braces dungarees, green jumper, a great coat, hat and boots.

"We worked hard, but we were young and strong then," she said. "We got paid 11 shillings a week (55p today), out of which we had to pay for our toiletries and underwear."

Every Friday night they went dancing: "We had to run to be in by 10pm, just like Cinderella." She married a 'War Ag' pest control officer in 1948 and left the Land Army in 1952 to have their eldest daughter.

Anita Millington, now 89, and living in Stafford, was a seamstress in Manchester when she joined in 1943 and was sent to work with the Mayall family at Harmer Hill, Shrewsbury. It was an arable farm so there were acres of crops to hoe and grass to make into hay, and cart.

All of it loose hay then. At corn harvest she was kept busy gathering up the sheaves of corn into stooks of six or eight behind the binder. When they had dried out about two weeks later, they were loaded onto a cart with a pikle. The German prisoners of war did that, her job on the cart was to neatly place them as the load grew higher. At thrashing time she was on top of the thrashing box cutting the bands, so the sheaf could drop into the drum. "I did enjoy it," she said.

In 1947, she married Alfred Millington who had come to work on the farm in 1946 after he was demobbed. They lived for some years in a tied cottage.

Estate

Mary Wright aged 83, was the youngest former Land Girl at the gathering. She joined from school at Walsall in 1947 going to work for Colonel Meynell on the home farm of his estate at Hoar Cross Hall, at Newborough near Burton on Trent.

"This was a forward looking farm," she said, "with a milking machine for the cows, and use of tractors. As well as milking I learnt to drive the green Fordson tractor, ploughing and sowing. "you never said I don't know how to do that, or that sack of corn is too heavy, you just got on with it, including lifting the 17 gallon churns onto the milk lorry. The worst job was cutting kale for the cows with a bill hook in the ice and snow."

The Land Army was disbanded in 1950, and she went back to Walsall. But two years later she was back farming herself at Fourcrosses, near Cannock. Starting with just four acres, she and her son Andrew and family now farm 600 acres at Fourcrosses and at Tixall, near Stafford, and their famous Fourcrosses pedigree Jersey herd has won many show championships, including Stafford.

Mary has from the start been involved with the tribute statue project. She said: "Though I thought raising nearly £100,000 would be a near impossible task, but we shall manage it, they have worked hard. It is essential that future generations realise and remember what we achieved."

Her 23-year-old grand-daughter Isobel who works on the farm and is the expert at showing the cattle, was chosen as the Land Girl model for the statue. Sarah, the daughter of Angela Martin the chairman of the Tribute organising committee, was the model for the Timber Jill. "We're very honoured to be asked", said Issy.

Make a donation, to learn more about it, or seek a place at the official opening go to www.womenslandarmytribute.co.uk or call 01889272777.