The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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131377 Vera Margaret Cecilia "Vee" Byng Land Army My mother sadly passed away earlier this year, leaving few clues as to when she joined up or when she left the LA. I was born in April 1943, so it is reasonable to assume that she would have ceased working some months before! She married my father in 1939, and lived with him in Deal, Kent. He was in a Reserved Occupation throughout the war as a Chief Sanitary Inspector/ Acting Borough Surveyor for the local council, as well as being a captain in the Home Guard responsible initially for anti-gas precautions. He is occasionally mentioned in passing in a book on Deal at War. The marriage was not a happy one, for various reasons, and Mum hinted that this and a feeling that she should be doing "something" for the war effort contributed to her decision to join up. She worked at Solley's Farm at Ripple, just a couple of miles inland from Deal. Today it is well known for it's diversification into ice-cream making(delicious!) and running a farm shop. The same family still own and run the farm. Sadly, the generation that may have known my Mum have since passed on, and she was,unfortunately, strangely reticent about this chapter in her young life. About a year before she died she did tell me, however, that she always looked forward to the hearty farmhouse-style breakfasts which somehow overlooked the fact that food- rationing existed! On another occasion, for a dare, she sat on back of the farm's prize bull! The marriage finished soon after the War, and she remarried, becoming Vera Royle. Regrettably, she left no photographs,or other ephemera, of her work in the LA. She was widowed in the 1970's and eventually moved to a beautiful cottage in the Cotswolds. I'm hoping to visit the National Archives in the near future to see if I can trace her service record. I'll keep you posted. Ray Ray Woods Add to this record.  Related Content: Womens Land Army Can you help us to add to our records? Add a record to our website. The names and stories on this website have been submitted by their relatives and friends. If your relations are not listed please add their names so that others can read about them Did you or your relatives live through the Second World War? Do you have any photos, newspaper clippings, postcards or letters from that period? Have you researched the names on your local or war memorial? Were you or your relative evacuated? Did an air raid affect your area? If so please let us know. Help us to build a database of information on those who served both at home and abroad so that future generations may learn of their sacrifice. Contact us. Celebrate your own Family History Celebrate by honouring members of your family who served in the Secomd World War both in the forces and at home. We love to hear about the soldiers, but also remember the many who served in support roles, nurses, doctors, land army, muntions workers etc. Please use our Family History resources to find out more about your relatives. Then please send in a short article, with a photo if possible, so that they can be remembered on these pages.

The free section of the Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers. We have been helping people find out more about their relatives wartime experiences since 1999 by recording and preserving recollections, documents, photographs and small items. The website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.