Andrew Barrow

Carrying on regardless | 25 June 2015

The British beat second world war shortages at home by adapting inventively, and in some cases carrying on much as before, according to Duff Hart-Davis’s Our Land at War

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  • Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain, 1939–45

    Duff Hart-Davis

    William Collins, pp. 458

This big, bristling, deeply-furrowed book kicks off with a picture of the British countryside just before the second world war. Apparently we then grew only 30 per cent of our food, horses did most of the work and a lot of the land, criss-crossed by empty roads featuring the occasional pony trap, had been abandoned to weeds and brambles.

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