Screen Archive South East is a public sector moving image archive serving the South East of England. The archive's collections of magic lantern slides, films, videos and associated materials capture the many varied aspects of life, work and creativity from the early days of screen history to the present day and serve as a rich and invaluable historical resource.
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Start a Land Club
The wartime potato shortage is addressed in this marvellous film from 1942 - exhorting workers and school children to lend a hand on local farms by joining Land Clubs.
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Overview
A Ministry of Information film which exhorted audiences to start Land Clubs in their local area, using the Surrey Land Club as an example, in order to address food shortages. We see school children, in their uniforms, tilling and harvesting, while young women plant potatoes. City workers work the land while a girl drives a tractor. We also see a committee organising teams of weekend workers to help a potato farmer get his valuable crop sown in time.
In the run up to World War 2 and for the duration of the conflict, new voluntary groups were set up alongside established organisations to provide assistance in emergency health care, welfare, civil defence and farm labouring, as seen in this film from 1942. Civilian men, women, and even children, were encouraged to ‘do their bit’ by joining voluntary organisations like Land Clubs which had been set up to provide assistance for farmers in need of help with working the land. Land Clubs relied on local volunteer participation unlike the Women’s Land Army, whose members were conscripted when, by 1941, it was realised that voluntary service could not fulfil the demand for labour in a time of total war. This government film is a public record, preserved and presented by the BFI National Archive on behalf of The National Archives, home to more than 1,000 years of British history.
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