A Land Girl and the Bail Bull (1945)

Evelyn Dunbar A Land Girl and the Bail Bull 1945 (3' x  6': 91 x 183cm) Tate Gallery, London

In 1956, 9 years after its completion, Evelyn wrote a short description of The Land Girl and the Bail Bull:

It is an imaginative painting of a Land Girl's work with an outdoor dairy herd on the Hampshire Downs. The bail is the movable shed where the milking is done. Soon after dawn in the early summer the girl has to catch and tether the bull: she entices him with a bucket of fodder and hides the chain behind her, ready to snap on the ring in his nose as soon as it is within her reach - a delicate and dangerous job.¹

With this magnificent canvas Evelyn takes her leave of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, the Women's Land Army and indeed of World War 2. Having 'defied completion', in Evelyn's words, it was finished in September 1945, in time for exhibition at the Royal Academy the following October.

A Land Girl and the Bail Bull had its genesis in a much simpler idea, that of recording the morning milking, and especially the pristine, almost secret atmosphere of a very early summer morning, probably some time in 1942, the year of Evelyn's marriage to Roger Folley, at the time a Royal Air Force officer. They had no married home. When not following, as far as she was able to, Roger's various postings about the United Kingdom, Evelyn was based at The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Strood, Kent. Despite spending little time together during the first three years of their marriage, I think Roger's influence on A Land Girl and the Bail Bull was crucial.

Several months before he died, in August 2008, at the age of 95, Roger wrote what he called Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative. He had to dictate this 3500-word account, or at any rate pass his own chaotic typescript to a friend to edit, because towards the end of his life he had grown very blind. There are two versions, dated May and October 2007. The later version, with some significant additions, is shown below in italics.

May, 2007: When we both travelled, or with an occasional passenger, we used our recently acquired car: a red, open four-seater Jowett touring car. [...] This was the car in which we drove overnight to Sparsholt so that Evelyn could make drawings of the 5 a.m. milking at the bail. (p.5)²

October, 2007: When we both travelled, or with an occasional passenger, we used our recently acquired car: a red, open four-seater Jowett touring car. [...] This was the car in which we drove overnight to Sparsholt, so that Evelyn could make drawings of the 5 a.m. milking at the bail. (p.4)²

and:

May, 2007: Not significant in itself, the trip marks the start of a 3-year gestation for the flagship War Artist painting of The Land Girl and the Bail Bull. Evelyn's colour sense was as sharp as at the first sighting. (p.6)²

October, 2007: Not significant in itself, this journey was noteworthy as the inception to a three-year period during which Evelyn worked, at intervals, on her concept of The Land Girl and the Bail Bull, now her best-known work. From the drawings and notes she made at the time she was able to convey the atmosphere of the occasion in the finished product. (p.4)²

Evelyn gave a short account of the inception of A Land Girl and the Bail Bull in a September 1945 letter to the Secretary of the War Artists' Advisory Committee:

[...] All the observation had to be done before 5am and once we did an all night journey of about 100 miles to the farm where the idea came into being, arriving at 4 o'clock in the morning and came back the next day!¹

No date is given for this overnight drive from Strood to Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester in Hampshire, where A Land Girl and the Bail Bull is set. Taking into account both an open-top car and pre-5am dawn, cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) in flower and teazels (Dipsacus fullonum) past their spring flowering, it is fairly safe to conclude that this happened in midsummer 1942, in the rich and heady - to use a frequent expression of Evelyn's - days of Roger's leaves shortly before their marriage.

Why they needed to go all the way to Sparsholt, with wartime driving restrictions, blackout and severe petrol rationing, when there were dairy farms much closer to Strood is easily explained. They were both welcome there: before the war Roger had worked at Sparsholt, indeed he and Evelyn had met there. As Costings Officer, with a brief to train agriculture students and established farmers in the keeping of their accounts, he was familiar with the farms in that upland area of Hampshire. Evelyn was well known and popular at Sparsholt, from her frequent visits in 1940 and 1941.

Sparsholt Farm Institute may have been responsible for introducing to local farmers the use of bails. 'Bail' in this sense was originally an Australian term meaning a fixed wooden halter in which the cow's head was secured during milking. It took on the meaning of a mobile shed fitted with milking stalls, capable of being towed by tractor from field to field. Much later Roger himself described them thus:

...bails were a wartime alternative to new farm buildings [...] They were four or five stalls under a roof with suction and vacuum hoses and a vacuum pump at one end and the theory was that you kept them in the field and didn't bring the cows in and the cows were attended and then walked out at the back and then you got the milk. They were also made mobile because of the treading effects after a day or two if there was wet weather they became bogged down. So they were moved on. They were particularly peculiar to Hampshire, because of the Hampshire Downs' very light soil [...] There were one or two [...] on the College farm.³

Ar first Evelyn found the bail and the activity round it uninspiring, too busy and not what she had originally envisaged. However she made a quantity of sketches (how many, and of what type, is not known: few survived her death in 1960), presumably in water colour in view of Roger's remark about the sharpness of her colour sense. They did indeed witness the extraordinary scene of a Land Girl capturing the bull, not an easy task and not without risk. Roger again:

She made careful drawings of [the bail] and set it in the landscape and made further sketches of the activity at milking time: there was too much of it for her liking, but after the cows in milk had passed through the bail there were a few dry cows lying and standing about and the more dramatic scene of the young bull, who ran with the cows but was fed separately, confronting the landgirl. Evelyn did not see the possibilities of a composition (as distinct from a pictorial record): in fact, the idea was slow to develop and caused much heart-searching. Negative thoughts prevailed at first.³

These impressions matured over the next three years. In 2003, Roger gave a detailed account of the composition or assemblage of A Land Girl and the Bail Bull to Dr Gill Clarke, Evelyn's earliest biographer:

[Evelyn defined] the precise colour and thickness of paint required on the canvas. In this modus Evelyn was infallible. To apply the rules of composition was not straight forward, there were only three elements to be combined, but they were disparate - one inanimate, one animal, one human - and would only make a whole under the unifying influence of the prevailing light. Of the elements, the landgirl had to show to advantage, the bull was amorphous and not a subject in its own right, and the bail a rectangular shape and potentially interesting to paint, was something of a foreign body. So the landgirl was positioned by Golden Section (and the extent of her dominance decided after experimentation), and the bull was placed centrally with lowered head making a diagonal line to the developing mackerel sky, and the bail was pushed into the background, away from the action.³

The model for the Land Girl was Evelyn's sister Jessie, a neat, tidy and cheerful person who also modelled for the woman crossing the road in The Queue at the Fish Shop. Posing for the Land Girl, in the summer months of 1945, was the last modelling she did. Jessie was usually conveniently available to model, without fee, for Evelyn at home at The Cedars, the Dunbar family house, when she wasn't occupied with running, together with their other sister Marjorie, their two shops in Rochester High Street. Artists' models are all too often forgotten. Towards the end of 1945 Evelyn left Kent and the family home to go and live with Roger in Warwickshire. This may have contributed to something of a breach with the remaining Dunbars, Ronald, Jessie and Marjorie, none of whom married, which was never entirely healed. The roles that both Jessie and Marjorie played as their very talented sister's models should not be underconsidered. They gave her a great deal of help.
 
Jessie as the Land Girl leads us, as ever when Evelyn has something important to say, into the painting from the left. We don't see her full face, not because Jessie had a wall eye, but because her gaze is focussed on the bull. With her right hand she is holding a chain with a snap link, hidden from the bull, but not from the viewer. In her left hand the Land Girl is holding by its rim a bucket, offering it to the bull, enticing him to approach her, allowing her to move closer. We can't see what is in the bucket: Evelyn wrote 'fodder' in her short description at the head of this commentary, but we can guess cattle feed pellets laced with liquorice or molasses. The bull, casting a delectably painted wary eye on her, will lift his head from the grass he is eating, and, lured by the irresistible scent of the pellets, will put his snout into the bucket and at that moment the Land Girl will deftly attach the snap link to the ring in the bull's nose. The bull, throughout history a feared symbol of unprovoked aggression and ferocity, will have been captured, controlled and tethered. By a young woman. For those whose imaginations are nourished by such things, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull is a kind of reversal of the legend of Europa and the bull.

There are two other human figures in The Land Girl and the Bail Bull: a Land Girl working at the bail and the white-overalled dairyman, a curiously ghostly figure because the spars of the hurdle show through him. These two play no part in this drama, although various lines - the painting is rich in geometry - lead directly towards the dairyman. Like the people in The Queue at the Fish Shop disregarding the RAF officer cycling past (who we know is Roger), the bail staff are not even looking in the direction of the bull and the Land Girl.  No immediate help is at hand for her should things go wrong, should the bull decide to revert to type. (The prickly nature of bulls is reflected in one of Evelyn's little visual puns: the scrubby tree to the right of the bull is a hawthorn, and we've already mentioned the needle-sharp teazels.) The viewer may detect certain echos from Pieter Brueghel the Elder, for instance in The Fall of Icarus (attrib.), where a momentous occurrence is taking place, but no one is actually taking any notice.

The Land Girl has earned the dairyman's complete faith in her courage and trust in her ability to get things right, even to take it for granted. She, representing the Women's Land Army in general, has come a long way since those first tentative volunteers ventured into agriculture, as shown in Milking Practice with Artificial Udders and Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. The initial reluctance of farmers to take on Land Girls is clearly a thing of the past, too.

Pausing to admire the consummate draughtmanship of the foreground flora and of the cattle - the calf curled up in the centre would grace any Renaissance Nativity - the landscape beyond the bail and its associated sheds is pure Evelyn, the Evelyn of the Covenant: neat, organised, productive farmland as far as the eye can see, Hampshire stretching away eastwards into Berkshire and Surrey, to the horizon and beyond, a landscape worked and loved in equal measure.†

The extraordinary mackerel or peacock tail sky did not feature in Evelyn's original Sparsholt sketches. It was something Evelyn had observed, to her surprise and pleasure, at least ten years earlier, during her student days in the early 1930s: one summer morning she woke early, saw this dramatic dawn sky, hurried into some clothes, snatched up her water-colour equipment and rushed outside to capture it before it disappeared.

So the mackerel sky was pasted, so to speak, into The Land Girl and the Bail Bull. The sun will appear over the eastern horizon, in the centre of the picture, in a few minutes' time: the various cloud formations diffuse and soften its light, something like frosted glass does. The pre-dawn light that so captivated Evelyn is so convincingly rendered that, after the landscape, it becomes a strong unifying factor. The war has been won: the contribution of women has been immense: their societal perception has been improved. Is this the light of the new dawn?

 

 

 

¹ Quoted in Gill Clarke: Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country (Sansom & Co., Bristol 2006) p131

² Roger Folley Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative (unpublished) May 2007, revised October 2007

³ Letter from Roger Folley to Gill Clarke, op. cit. pp 130-131

† 'A landscape worked and loved in equal measure': I came across this amiable expression inscribed on a wall at the Teampull Café at Northton, on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides. Despite the magnificent view over Scarista Bay with which it was associated being almost all seascape and untouched by human hand, I thought how well it crystallised the feeling behind Evelyn's agricultural landscapes. I've tried without success to discover who first wrote these words. Whoever it may have been, thank you, and I hope you have no objection to them being quoted here.
 

(Revised text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2026. All rights reserved.)

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

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Standing by on Train 21 (1942)

 Standing by on Train 21 (1942)

Standing by on Train 21 (1942) oil on canvas, 22 x 30 in. (55.8 x 76.2 cm.) Imperial War Museum, London

 

 

A Tale of Four Remarkable Women and the Green Identity Card

 

At the monthly meetings of the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) in 1939-40 discussion about the role of women artists in wartime appears to have been lively. Chaired by Sir Kenneth Clark (later to become Lord Clark, celebrated for his TV series Civilisation), the WAAC consisted of some ten leading figures in the world of British art, all men, with an average age of 51. They were open to suggestion: in February 1940 the first of our four remarkable women, Lady Florence Norman, a former suffragette who had managed a services hospital in France in World War 1 and who was a founder trustee of the Imperial War Museum, wrote to Ted Dickey, the WAAC secretary:

 

The Imperial War Museum [...] has once more the duty of recording a War. We have no funds for the purpose of paying artists. But much can be done by introducing artists to subjects and providing facilities for this work. [...] The calling up of a million women to substitute the work of men, points to the need of appealing to the patriotic sense of women [...] to serve and make sacrifices for this country. The Women's Services, at my suggestion, have each appointed a historian to collect records and I am asking that artists within their ranks should draw and paint what they see.

 

Dickey subsequently asked the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS) to submit areas of activity which might be depicted if women war artists were to be appointed. Some results appear to have been submitted very near to the time, mid-April 1940, of Evelyn's appointment as a war artist. The suggestions included images of women working on allotments and women supplying fresh vegetables to minesweeper crews. In her application the previous December Evelyn had stated her readiness to record 'women's agricultural or horticultural work, or anything connected with land work' with 'very keen understanding'. 

 

The two WVS suggestions found a ready ear in Evelyn, for different reasons. Women working on allotments appealed to her innate horticultural interests, especially as it involved the replacement of men called up to fight, and at a more personal level the notion of delivering fresh vegetables to naval crews called strongly: her brother Alec, or more correctly Lieutenant Alec Dunbar RN, commanded a minesweeper converted from a herring drifter, then stationed in Sheerness, on the Medway estuary and thus not very far away from The Cedars, the Dunbar family home a few miles upstream at Strood. However, in view of the current war situation and the immediate probability of German bombing and gas attacks, Evelyn and her two fellow female appointees were sent on the recommendation of Lady Stella Reading, founder of the WVS two years earlier, to one of the WVS training centres, Bisham Abbey in Berkshire.

 

One senses a ferment in Evelyn's activity, set against the national background: the  Conservative government led by Neville Chamberlain was tottering to its imminent fall, to be replaced by Winston Churchill; the now almost-forgotten war in Norway was going badly; Nazi incursions into the Low Countries and northern France were gathering momentum, with conquered French airfields facilitating bombing raids, later known as the blitz, into England, particularly London. Less than a week after her appointment on April 17th Evelyn was contracted to produce six WVS paintings, starting with Civil Defence operations, then under the WVS wing, at Bisham Abbey. 

 

There was some delay while Dickey arranged and forwarded travel warrants and vouchers for artists' materials. It was a bad time for Evelyn; she was in the middle of what she called her 'crisis years', following the break-up of her relationship with her former Royal College of Art mural tutor Charles Mahoney and subsequent miscarriage. She had very little work, there was some family bitterness, and she had no money. For the previous twelve months she had worked behind the counter in her sisters' haberdashery shop at 168, High Street, Rochester, setting her employment against the family household expenses and for the rent of a studio above the shop. Now, against all expectation, was an opportunity to restart a career as an artist.

 

Anxious to justify her appointment, she managed to submit Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing to the WAAC by mid-June. It was accepted with acclaim. However in early May another posting, overriding her original WVS contract, came from Dickey. In consultation with the Ministry of Agriculture and ever mindful of Evelyn's request for agricultural or horticultural work, he arranged, after some hurried re-arrangement of her placement, for her to report for duty to Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester.

 

Nevertheless Evelyn proposed to fulfil, even exceed, her original WVS contract. In the hiatus between the completion of the sketchwork for Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing and her new Sparsholt contract, she produced - on her own initiative - paintings of two further women's organisation activities. The first of these, A Knitting Party, was a part-actual, part-imagined WVS knitting session in her own home, with her mother Florence in a central placement. The second, A Canning Demonstration, took Evelyn a short bicycle ride up the Gravesend road to the village of Shorne, where the Women's Institute was hosting a demonstration of soft fruit preservation in the village hall. Another possible site for her brush lay a mile or two along the Brompton Farm road towards the village of Wainscott. Here something happened that served to alter the course of her WAAC employment, threatening even to blight it so soon after her appointment. We move on some 70 years...

 

In 2013 a very large collection, some 800 pieces, of Evelyn's work appeared from almost forgotten storage in the cone of a Kentish oast house. This was her residual studio: on Evelyn's death in 1960 her husband, Dr Roger Folley, collected most of it together and passed it on to the only Dunbar sibling with room to accommodate it. We have met him before: Alec Dunbar, no longer in Royal Navy uniform, but an entrepreneur living outside Maidstone in an extensive property called Mullion Court. Eventually the collection was passed on to Alec's son Alasdair, the owner of the oast house. On Alasdair's death I was privileged to be invited to inspect the oast house collection, a huge but fascinating task. One category of Evelyn's residual studio was reserved for work of no outstanding artistic merit, but which she had kept all her life. Evelyn squandered her sketches. Whatever was needing to be sketched, a face, a leaf, a child playing, a profile, a feather, a garden tool and much, much more was studied repeatedly until she felt she had got it right, spreading her subject over any available corner of cartridge paper, whatever else was on it. 

 

And here was a large sheet of cartridge paper, uninvaded by other subjects, carrying a landscape devoted to some allotments, with occasional detail and with - as was her usual habit - written descriptions of the colour, shade and texture, enough information to allow her to proceed when she came home from sketching and started work in her studio. Was this to be the fourth or fifth of her WVS-inspired images? Curiously, the upper quarter is blank, or with vague shapes not suggestive of anything, as though she proposed to add something else, in all probability details of the sky or hills beyond or...but we leave such speculation there. Here it is, with the scenario to follow. 'Allotments near Strood' is my title.

  

'Allotments near Strood' pen and ink, pencil. 1939 (?) Signed 'Evelyn Dunbar' Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn

 

 

In the summer of 1941 Evelyn applied to Dickey for a permit known as a Green Identity Card, which would authorise her to access low security level premises. Her need for a Green Identity Card was made clear by an unfortunate incident the year before, during the height of the invasion scare following the military disaster of Dunkirk. She had been along the road towards Wainscott, where the allotments covered a portion of hillside governing wide views over the river Medway and beyond, an ideal place for the next in her series of WVS-inspired scenes. 

 

She stopped at a suitable point, set up her easel and began to sketch, being careful to include a woman in the foreground. (Perhaps we can note that in such studies figures which would be moving about all the time would be added in later.) The sketch was reasonably advanced, with colours and textures noted when she was approached by a group of allotment gardeners who told her sharply to clear off; they wanted no truck with German spies, making drawings helpful to the enemy. This may not have been quite as fatuous as it sounds: from these allotments there was a view of the Royal Navy dockyard across the Medway at Chatham. If there were threats of summary justice or of calling the police, they have not been recorded, but Evelyn retreated, aghast and shaken. What was she to do? I hope it may not be a conjecture too far to suggest that on returning home she signed her work - something she only did with finished work, and that not invariably - and pre-dated it by two years. Evelyn kept this sketch for the rest of her life, at first perhaps as a measure of self-protection, and later, once the dust had settled, as a souvenir of an amusing incident. In the wake of this she wrote to Dickey:

 

I wondered if they would give me a permit for working in places where I might otherwise be barred? If so, I should be very glad to have a permit of some kind, as, although the subject I am studying at present is nothing more secret than allotments in an area like this one I can hardly move without running into some kind of defence measure and as I have no official permit it is not always too comfortable.

Evelyn was granted her Green Identity Card, but almost at once her own plans for using it were eclipsed by a request, relayed by Dickey, from Edwina, Countess Mountbatten for some nursing pictures; the redoubtable Lady Mountbatten was shortly to be appointed Superintendant-in-Chief of the St John Ambulance Brigade and not to be refused nor postponed. Dickey's letter stated that the WAAC 'recommended that you be asked to paint some pictures of nursing subjects for a fee of thirty five guineas [...] It was particularly requested that a hospital train should be included among the subjects that you should deal with. Train No.21 was suggested as particularly interesting.' 

 

So we arrive (at last) at the subject of this essay. Here is a reminder of it:

 

 

 

Train 21 was a fully equipped hospital train, one of several posted at strategic points round London. Number 21 stood in the extensive sidings, later built over, attached to Goodmayes Station, near Ilford, ready to move into Liverpool Street Station, in central London, to take on bomb and gas casualties, to evacuate them from the danger areas and distribute them to hospitals where there was less risk of bombing. Evelyn's painting shows the staff recreation area, adapted it seems from a pre-war First Class passenger carriage. The woman in the central foreground is the doctor in overall charge of the train; a Dr Gibson, apparently, but none of the figures should be taken as portraits. Beside and behind her are nurses from various nursing organisations: the blue-cloaked nurse on the right belongs to the Civil Nursing Reserve; the woman on the left is a member of one of the religious nursing orders. Most of the others belong to the Red Cross. A lot of knitting is going on, comforters and balaclavas: Evelyn is painting in October, and winter will be coming on. In the far distance a nurse is hanging up washing. There are several male orderlies, apparently in RAF uniform, perhaps seconded from military hospitals. A WVS member, standing in the middle of the corridor, may be asking the nurse looking up at her if she takes milk in her tea. There is an air of calm, of order and assurance. No one is talking much. Indeed one of the male orderlies, fourth from the left, appears to have fallen asleep. The hospital train is ready to move into action.

 

For all this, such hospital trains were rarely used. Perhaps alone of Evelyn's war paintings, Standing by on Train 21 is largely cosmetic. Its partner, Hospital Train, while less attractive as an image, tells a more open and impelling story. In any case, as the intensity of the blitz diminished hospital trains were put to other uses or broken up. By 1944 some had been adapted as military hospital trains for bringing the wounded back from theatres of war in France and Italy.

  

 

Warmest thanks to Paul Liss for his contribution,

 

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2026

 

 

Further reading: 

 

 

 

 

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

 448 pages, 301 illustrations. £30

 

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