Wartime Farm Episode 5
With fuel supplies going directly into the war effort, alternatives for tractors and other farm vehicles were needed. Enter the gasifier. Coal was used in Briton as wood was mostly reserved for building planes and firearms. In addition, smaller gasoline engines were used to create miniature walk behind tractors. In order to make gasifiers, the farm blacksmith shop was put into service. Horsepower is also used to drive stationary farm machinery. Alternative energy at it’s finest!
Again, I’m also leaving this series open to all readers, so no membership is required.
Ruth finds out how Britain coped with shortages of the wood vital for the war effort in the building of aircraft, ships and rifles, as well as pit props for crucial coal mining. With her daughter Eve, she travels to the New Forest and discovers how women known as ‘Lumber Jills’ were drafted in to fell trees in the Women’s Timber Corps. Meanwhile, Peter and Alex face up to the wartime petrol crisis. Peter embarks on an ambitious plan to convert a 1930s ambulance to run on coal gas. Alex experiences the conditions faced by the Bevin Boys – conscripts who were sent to coal mines instead of the armed forces because the need for coal was so great. Having converted the ambulance and collected the coal to run it, Peter faces the question: will it work? Also in this episode, the boys revert to a Victorian solution to the shortage of animal feed – using traditional horsepower to operate a root slicer – whilst Ruth sets up an Emergency Feeding Centre. Subsidized by the government to provide cheap food off ration for air raid victims, these ‘British Restaurants’, as Churchill dubbed them, quickly caught on. Eating out had traditionally been the preserve of the upper class and most ordinary people had never eaten in public before – many even felt embarrassed at the prospect. The ‘British Restaurants’, envisaged as a short-term response to food shortages, made a lasting change to the nation – introducing the concept of high street dining for the masses. Wartime Farm was produced by the BBC in partnership with The Open University.
