Bell, Eddie
From an article by Clive Dalton edited 20/1/24 by Stan Owen.
The WarAg warrior – Eddie Bell of Dunterley
[With the help of the War Agricultural Executive Committees, or "WarAgs", British farmers increased the total productive land in the UK by 1.7 million acres between 1939 and the Spring of 1940.]
If there was ever a deserving case for the Queen to award a medal after WWll ended in 1945, it would have been to Eddie Bell of Dunterley Farm for his services to Britain’s food production. And his blue Fordson Major tractor with red rear wheels should have been mounted on a plinth in the Foundry Yard in Bellingham, to be visited on every VE Day to pay homage. There should have been one to the Bellingham Women’s Land Army too!
Eddie and his tractor played a key role in the War Agricultural Committee (WarAg), set up by the government to grow food and save what was becoming a starving nation, as Hitler’s U-boat wolf packs were sending the millions of tons of food from America, and thousands of brave men with it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
The WarAg had local agents/inspectors whose job it was to visit each farm and direct the farmer on which areas of pasture had to be ploughed up to grow grain. The ‘WarAg Man’ was never a popular visitor as farmers never liked to be told what to do, and they considered these visitors arriving with a fancy stick, usually in a tweed suit and brown boots and leather leggings, to have got the job as they were failed farmers. But everybody knew that the state of the nation was beyond critical in those years before the RAF worked out how to deal with the U-boats.
Many rough pastures had been ploughed before in the days of the Corn Laws in the early-to-mid 1800s, when foreign imports were taxed to favour domestic production. You could see this in the ‘ridge and furrow’ pattern, still visible today on many hills which were ploughed by horses. This practice with the furrows about four yards apart also helped surface drainage of the clay soils.
Most farmers still relied on horse power during the war, so Eddie’s Fordson Major and two-furrow plough was the power source to start and cultivate some very challenging areas. Farmers related many tales of Eddie arriving and when being shown the area to be ‘blacked ower’, would stand hands in pockets, feet in ‘heather-louper’ hob-nailed boots with turned up toes, feet pointing at 10 to two and declaring in his deep vocal tones – ‘Man, Aa canna pluw that’! But then of course he always did, come rocks, stone cundies, tree roots and more, accepting the damage to his gear as part of the war effort.
But ploughing was only the start, and Eddie at his WarAg depot in the foundry yard had all the other necessary gear to ensure a corn crop would end up being harvested. This was done after ploughing first by discs which chopped the furrow, then zig-zag harrows to get a fine tilth for the corn drill to sow the seed. The final grain crop had to be sold to the government and the farmer was only allowed to keep a minimal quantity for stock feed.
For many years after the war, when tractors were slowly replacing horses on farms, all this gear could be hired by farmers from the foundry yard depot. As a Daft Laddie working for Robbie Allen at Reedsmouth Farm before going to Kirkley Hall farm institute in 1951, I well remember trips to the depot and trailing a set of discs moved on small iron jockey wheels making an awful din on the way to Redesmouth, and then later the harrows and then the corn drill.
Memories are a great treasure in old age, and I can still hear Eddie’s dulcet tones and the bark of Robbie Allen’s David Brown tractor on its way along Reedsmouth road trailing a set of disks. It was a much faster trip than taking Robbie’s horse ‘Bob’ to be shod at Burnie’s (John Burn) the blacksmith! Plodding along dragging Bob made me remember the great quote that ‘the ruination of farm Daft Laddies was slow horses and fast women’!
