Singling Turnips (1943)

   Singling Turnips 1943 Private collection Photo © Christopher Campbell-Howes

There's a curious anomaly (and, later, a little surprise) about Singling Turnips.  In the summer of 1940, Evelyn met Michael Greenhill, chief instructor at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester in Hampshire, where many Land Girls went for their training, and where Evelyn spent several wartime periods recording their activities. This first encounter resulted in A Book of Farmcraft, written by Greenhill, illustrated by Evelyn and published by Longmans the following year.

Below is Evelyn's drawing from A Book of Farmcraft showing the right way and the wrong way to single, or thin out, plants, that is to hoe out surplus seedlings in order to leave space for those left to grow to their full size without being crowded, and for ease of weeding.

 

Evelyn Dunbar: Illustration from A Book of Farmcraft (Longmans, London, 1942)

If the correct method of singling, of team hoeing, is on the left in Evelyn's drawing, and the incorrect method is on the right, Evelyn has got it wrong and Singling Turnips (another candidate, by the way, for the most bizarre title for an Evelyn Dunbar painting) is the wrong way round. Michael Greenhill's recommendations in A Book of Farmcraft read:

In the diagram we show you the position which should be taken up by a gang of hoers. Notice how the first hoer in the RIGHT [i.e. correct] picture is working behind the second and the second behind the third. In this way Number One's weeds and discarded plants are not being thrown back on to the row which Number Two is singling, and so on. If the hoers work in a reverse position, as in the WRONG picture, each hoer is confused by the throw-outs of the man preceding him.

It's most improbable that Evelyn could have made such a technical mistake in Singling Turnips after having been so decided about the process in A Book of Farmcraft. Could there be other reasons for her to have painted it as she did?

I think there are, and I think it's to do with impact. Evelyn has come up with, yet again, a stunning design, one that seems to me to be trying to burst out of its frame. This is an immense field of turnips, the ridges disappear to a vanishing point somewhere over the horizon, as though to suggest, as Evelyn so often reminds us, that there are no limits to the earth's abundance if mankind, here significantly represented by womankind, keeps the bargain of the Covenant. The central ridges sweep forward out of the far distance to frame, define and emphasise these Land Girls and their extraordinarily intensive labour. They could hardly be more closely involved with the soil than if they went on hands and knees thinning manually.

When fully grown the turnips will be harvested, stored in clamps and used for animal feed over the winter. (Turnips for human consumption, smaller and tastier, will have a much shorter growing season.) Turnip seed is minute. It's practically impossible to sow the seeds individually, so they're sown in ridges by seed-drill. So far, so mechanical. A few weeks after sowing the seedlings will have grown in profusion, and so will the weeds. Left to themselves, the turnip seedlings, already overcrowded, will be choked with weeds. At this point they have to be thinned - 'singled' in Evelyn's title - leaving one seedling every 9 inches (23cm) or so.

There's no mechanical way of singling, or at least there wasn't in the 1940s, so it has to be done by hand, a task at least as unpopular as the back-breaking picking of Brussels sprouts featured in Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire. The turnips here, grown for winter animal feed on the limitless scale Evelyn's painting suggests, will have been sown in early spring. They have 7-8 weeks' growth on them, indicating that these Land Girls are working in early May, which ties in with what we know of Evelyn's movements in 1943. The women have their sleeves rolled up, maybe a suggestion of determination to get on with the job and stick at it until it's finished. There's possibly a stiffish breeze blowing. They've all got some form of headgear: the foremost is wearing a snood of the type popular in the earlier 1940s, thought by some to be a symbol of commitment to the war effort; the other three are wearing headscarves, one with the end of the tie blowing in the wind, like the flap of the coat which the foremost Land Girl has knotted by the sleeves round her waist. 

 

A little surprise? As frequently happens with Evelyn's war paintings, there's an obscure secondary commentary: what does she mean by the line of ten people at least - the line appears to extend over and beyond the right-hand horizon - all apparently singling? Who are they? Are they as limitless as the field itself? They seem to be men: where on earth were farm labour gangs available from in 1943, at a time of universal male conscription?

 

And of course there was an ever-growing source of such labour, an apparently never-ending supply of fit young men available for employment for such hands-on tasks as singling. Is this Evelyn's comment on the progress of the war that is slowly being won? The men in her line are far from home, they've come from North Africa, they're prisoners of war, they're Germans from Rommel's Afrika Korps or their Italian allies, captured by Montgomery's Eighth Army and transferred to prisoner-of-war camps in Britain. There were several prisoner-of-war camps in the Borders. We don't know where Singling Turnips is situated. Perhaps it doesn't matter very much: anywhere in the Borders maybe where the fields are as broad as the skies. There were prisoner of war camps both sides of the Tweed, at Nine Wells near Chirnside and, mainly for Italian prisoners-of-war, at Wooler, a small town in Northumberland a few miles south of the Tweed. 

Their inclusion is surely a matter of balance in an picture with which I think Evelyn had problems, or she wouldn't have played fast and loose with the accepted singling practice: the prisoners of war - all trustworthy volunteers, incidentally, who were paid a small amount by the day - define the depth of the canvas and the sense of vastness of the field. But that's not all. Evelyn has another point to make, and a bold one, especially in wartime: according to her beliefs, the land and its produce is guaranteed to anyone, friend, foe, woman, man, Briton, German, Italian, who engages to look after it with industry, intelligence and love; nature is indiscriminate in such matters. 

 

Singling Turnips is the fourth of a set of paintings set in the Borders, either Northumberland or Berwickshire, which Evelyn completed after her 1943 stay in a rented cottage near Greenlaw, close to RAF Charter Hall, where her husband Roger Folley was undergoing the final stages of his night-fighter navigation training. (The others in this group are Potato Sorting, Berwick, Women's Land Army Hostel and Land Army Girls Going to Bed.)

The back of Singling Turnips shows, very faintly, Evelyn's name and address in her own handwriting on the frame. The title has been added by another hand. The upper canvas overlap seems of very indifferent quality: at some time earlier she had complained of the difficulty of obtaining good materials. 

Back of Evelyn Dunbar Singling Turnips (1944?) Photo © Christopher Campbell-Howes

After 1945, in a general distribution of its war art following the dissolution of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, Singling Turnips was acquired by the Government of Australia. After many years of exhibition in Castlemaine and Bendigo Art Galleries it was decommissioned and sold. I wonder if Castlemaine and Bendigo Art Galleries really knew what Singling Turnips was about?

I am very grateful to Jane England for help with this commentary and to Carol Whinnom, of Berwick Museum and Art Gallery, for her contribution.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012 and 2022. All rights reserved.)

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30