⇐ Part 1

I have little doubt that Dorothy Tudge was one of the first Shropshire women to volunteer for the Women’s Land Army. Pinning down exactly when she became a ‘Land Girl’ is tricky though, given that the date is not shown on her WLA index card. Also, that card recorded Dorothy’s age as 29, which if accurate (hint: I’m pretty sure it wasn’t!) would mean that she joined in 1936, well before pre-WW2 recruitment had started.

There’s a little more to be gleaned from that index card. Dorothy’s WLA number was 3872, and her address was her family home: Whittingslow, Marshbrook, Shropshire. Her occupation when she joined was ‘Poultry worker’; her qualifications were “6 years practical experience in poultry work, specializing in laying battery work.” Evidently she had moved on from the dairy work she trained for in the mid-1920s.

Waters Upton

Dorothy expressed a preference for ‘mobile’ rather than local service, and she was duly placed on a farm at the other end of the county; her stint as a poultry worker at Waters Upton was most likely her first ‘posting.’ She was recorded on the National Identity Register on 30 September 1939 at The Grange, where she lived with 70-year-old widow Edith Moore and Edith’s daughter Eileen.

This type of accommodation for Land Girls ⇗ was known as private billets. Treatment of WLA ‘guests’ in such billets varied – I hope Dorothy’s experience was towards the ‘one of the family’ end of the scale. I suspect that her farming background would have counted very much in her favour.

While part of me wonders about the specifics of what her poultry work involved, another part of me wants to know how Dorothy spent her time when she was wasn’t working. Did she explore the local countryside? Take walks into the village to visit the shop or post letters, engaging in cheery exchanges of greetings or conversation along the way? Take part in evening social functions in the old school room (though these seem to have mainly taken the form of whist drives!)? She would almost certainly have accompanied Mrs Moore and her family to church services on Sundays.

I’ll write in more detail about the Moore family at a later date. Suffice to say for now that the 1934 Kelly’s Directory showed Edith’s husband Robert Edward Moore, farmer, at the Grange Farm; he died in 1935 and the 1937 Kelly’s Directory lists his son Robert Henry Moore in his stead. From the 1939 Register we can see that Edith continued living at The Grange, while her son Robert was based, with his wife and children, at The Grange Cottage (a little further down Catsbritch Lane). Robert was described in the Register as a ‘Mixed Farmer.’ I suspect that he did not have a poultry unit himself – I think it more likely that a tenant renting one of his cottages did, on a piece of land that went with the cottage.

There were three cottages, and nearly 190 acres of land, attached to The Grange Farm. All of this property was sold in September 1941 when the Moores moved on from Waters Upton. Perhaps that was when Dorothy departed too.

Much Wenlock, then Whittingslow once more

By July 1942, Dorothy was based on the other side of Wellington from Waters Upton, at Bradley Farm, just North of Much Wenlock. I know this because of a lengthy report in the Shrewsbury Chronicle of 23 October 1942 (page 8) headlined “Petrol Rationing Offences.” Miss Constance Jean Conroy was at the centre of this case, as the person who illegally received and used petrol coupons; she was fined £40 in respect of eight offences. Dorothy Tudge, one of the parties who had transferred coupons to Miss Conroy, was fined a grand total of £1!

Meanwhile, other members of the Tudge family were also involved in the war effort. Dorothy’s father William was a Lieutenant in the Whittingslow Home Guard Platoon (Shrewsbury Chronicle, Fri 21 May 1943, page 4). Her brother Herbert meanwhile had joined the RAF. His active service was sadly short-lived…

While confirmation that Herbert was a prisoner of war was good news considering the alternative, this meant that he spent most of the war in Stalag Luft III. The Shrewsbury Chronicle of 22 December 1944 (page 5) conveyed the news that Herbert’s parents had received a photo showed Herbert and other officers taking part in a play staged at the prison camp, “Blithe Spirit,” in which Herbert played a female part. A copy of the photo appeared in the paper’s edition of 12 January 1945 (page 6).

Notices in the Shropshire press towards the end of 1944 suggest that Dorothy Tudge was by then back on ‘home turf’ and had, along with her cousin Helen Maybery, turned her hand to rearing pigs. Those notices (including one on the front page of the Shrewsbury Chronicle of 13 Oct 1944) related to the annual sale of pedigree and commercial pigs at Shrewsbury, scheduled for 27 October. Those entering animals to the sale included “Misses Tudge and Maybery, Marshbrook (Large Blacks)”. After that, news on Dorothy’s whereabouts and activities is hard to find for a while. Let’s return to her obituary to pick up the latter part of her story.

Wadhurst

Dorothy’s father William Tudge went to Wadhurst too. He was included in the household at Great Durgates Farm on the 1955 electoral register for the East Grinstead Constituency. Sadly, he had died by the time the register came into force in February that year. The Wadhurst burial register shows that he was buried at the parish church on 10 December 1954.

Dorothy, as her obituary shows, became an active member of the local community she had joined. I have not found any information about the ‘other local activities’ she supported, or which charities she worked for. Her involvement with the local Women’s Institute, however, can be tracked – in part – via newspaper reports.

The earliest such report that I’ve discovered dates from June 1965, when Dorothy was one of three WI members who got full marks in the competition “My prettiest piece of china” (Kent & Sussex Courier, 4 June, page 16). Dorothy is recorded as Treasurer in 1969 (same title, 21 February, page 13), and in 1973 her efforts to collect information and photographs relating to the early years of Wadhurst WI were publicised (same title, 1 June, page 2, and Sussex Express, 5 October, page 20). The final snippet that I’ll share appeared in the Sussex Express, 30 December 1976, page 26:

Dorothy’s obituary in The Courier concluded by noting that her funeral took place on 13 December 1976, at Tidewell. Her mother, after dying at the age of 97, joined her there in 1982.

A gravestone in Tidewell churchyard marks the spot where the former Land Girl of Waters Upton and her Mum lie together in eternal and well deserved rest.

Recently I looked again at one of the people recorded at Waters Upton when the National Identity Register was compiled at the end of September 1939. Dorothy M Judge, born 15 January 1907 – why could I find no other records for her? Looking again at an image of the register page, the answer dawned on me: I had misread Dorothy’s surname, the ‘J’ was in fact a ‘T’. Oops. (The transcribers working for Ancestry and Findmypast made the same mistake; I have submitted corrections to both.)

With Dorothy’s true name established I could finally find and link together records relating to her, and piece together what remains of her story. Where better to start than at . . . the end? Well, it struck me that Dorothy’s obituary, the ‘potted history’ of her life shared by way of remembrance just after her death, provides a framework upon which a more detailed account could be constructed – and can now be shared.

Stepaside

As we have seen, Dorothy Mary Tudge was born in January 1907, in Shropshire. I think the exact location was most likely the place where she and her family were enumerated on the 1911 census: Stepaside. This lies on the edge of the parish of Stokesay, then part of the Ludlow Registration District ⇗ in which Dorothy’s birth was duly registered ⇗. It also lies right next to the village and parish of Onibury.

The household at Stepaside recorded on the 1911 census was headed by Dorothy’s father William Bradford Tudge, aged 29, a farmer born at Leominster in the neighbouring county of Herefordshire. William’s wife was Mary Eleanor, 26, a native of nearby Wistanstow. She had been married to William for five years (their wedding took place at Stokesay on 14 March 1906 ⇗) and two children had been born of their union. Dorothy, then 4, we know about of course. The other child was a very new addition to the family: Herbert John Charles Tudge, age “under one month.” Enumerated with the Tudges were a maternity nurse, a ‘lady help,’ a general domestic servant, and a cowman.

Stepaside Farm was still this family’s home in 1913, when William Bradford Tudge, “farmer & prize cattle breeder,” was listed in that year’s Kelly’s Directory of Shropshire ⇗ as part of the entry for Onibury (the snippet from the directory, on the University of Leicester website ⇗, is used under a Creative Commons licence ⇗). His details appeared just below those of his father John, who farmed at Duxmoor. These listings were repeated in the 1917 directory (viewed at Ancestry: Herefordshire and Shropshire Directories, 1917).

By 1921, William Bradford Tudge had taken his family to live with his parents John (71) and Helen (68) at ‘Duxmore’. William’s occupation was given as “Assisting Father.” Dorothy, then aged 14, was not with her family however. She was instead boarding elsewhere in the county.

Wellington

Hiatt Ladies’ College in Wellington was Dorothy Tudge’s home away from home, presumably for several years. This institution was established in 1847 ⇗ by Mrs Elizabeth Hiatt, née Keay (whose Crudgington-born father John, incidentally, was baptised in November 1801 at Waters Upton). Allan Frost, author of a book on the history the college, is quoted by the Shropshire Star in 2019 ⇗ as saying that it was “the first college intended purely for the education of young ladies in the country.”

It appears that the college did an excellent job too. A list of students with top educational attainments published in The Educational Times of 1 February 1906 (pages 91 ⇗ and 92) includes five names from Elizabeth Hiatt’s establishment, and there are other examples to be found.

The census of 1921 shows that in addition to the head, May Margaret Daniels, there were 11 other mistresses, teaching English, French, science, history, music, art, and gymnastics. In addition the college had a matron, an assistant matron, and a nurse. Dorothy Tudge was one of 55 pupils, aged from 10 to 17, most of whom came from Shropshire and the neighbouring counties of Cheshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire.

I would love to know what Dorothy’s educational accomplishments were during her time at the college, not to mention her other experiences and how she adjusted to a very different way of life after her childhood on a farm. Who were her friends? What did they get up to when not in class? Did they break the rules, and if so, were they caught?

Cwm Head, Radbrook, and Whittingslow

As for the length of time Dorothy attended Hiatt Ladies’ College, my guess is that she was there from around 1917 to about 1923. A report in the Wellington Journal of 19 January 1924 (page 5) then places her back in the South of Shropshire, and pursuing an interest in dairy work. The report, covering a meeting of the Salop Agricultural Committee, noted that:

Did Dorothy delay taking up her ten week scholarship? Or did she stay at Radbrook for a lot longer than ten weeks? Some 18 months after the above report, the same newspaper carried (on 25 July 1925, page 5) details of the distribution of prizes at Radbrook Technical School. Amongst those presented with certificates and prizes by Lady Harlech was Miss D Tudge, who received a school certificate for dairy work – first class.

Over nearly all of the following 15 years, Dorothy seems to have ‘flown under the radar’ as far as the press was concerned. In complete contrast, her father and her maternal aunt, Mrs (Katie) Maybery, were regularly in the local newspapers thanks to their prize-winning herd of dairy Shorthorn cattle. From earlier examples of this media coverage (including the Shrewsbury Chronicle, 8 Apr 1932, page 8) it appears that the herd was established at Cwm Head around 1926, before the operation moved (in about 1929 I believe) to nearby Whittingslow Farm, Marshbrook. Though she spent time away from her family, these farms – especially Whittingslow – were home.

Surrey, and back to Shropshire

Dorothy spent at least part of this time living – and presumably working – in Surrey. Electoral registers record her there in 1930 and 1931 living at 75 Langley Park Road, Sutton, with Ada and Caroline Absale (sadly, she probably didn’t make jokes about them descending vertical rock faces or the sides of tall buildings with the aid of ropes). She also appeared in a 1933 electoral register, at Chalklands, Woodland Road, Little Bookham, with Thomas and Edith Weaver.

Those few occasions when Dorothy’s name did appear in the papers during this period were sad ones – the funerals of her grandparents. The last of these events was the interment of Dorothy’s paternal grandmother Helen Tudge, who died in on the 4th, and was buried on the 8th, of February 1937. Reporting on Helen’s death and funeral, the Shrewsbury Chronicle (12 Feb 1937, page 16) noted that she was a member of the local Women’s Institute and the Women’s Conservative Association, as well being a “fervent church woman”. At least one of those things would rub off on Dorothy.

Two years later, Britain was at war, and members of the Tudge family stepped up to play their parts. For Dorothy, this would include working at Waters Upton.

Part 2 ⇒