My latest book The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917-1918 is published by Palgrave Macmillan at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-58743-6.
It contains chapters on:
- The developing food crisis in the First World War. Why Britain experienced a food crisis and how it compared with other combatant nations.
- Help for farmers; no stone left unturned to help them. How the British government nationalised farming and provided large amounts of help from a wide variety of groups, some of which were inexperienced in farming and of little help initially.
- Horse and mechanical help for farmers. How manual ploughing with horses was the most widely used method, although steam ploughing was the most efficient. The introduction of petrol-driven tractors and the problems of the many types with their untested nature on different types of soil resulted in frequent breakdowns.
- The importance of increased crop production to feed the nation. The diets of the majority of the population and why an increase in crop production was more important than rearing cattle on pastureland.
- Policemen in England helped farmers from March 1917 to the end of the war. Giving the locations and numbers of policemen released.
- Policemen in Scotland helped farmers from March 1917 to the end of the war. Giving the locations and numbers of policemen released.
- Release of policemen in Birmingham and Glasgow: 2 case studies. These examples show the tensions surrounding the release of policemen into agriculture to feed the nation; and
- The outcomes for Britain of the food shortages of 1917. Why it helped the police to release their men into a protected industry and the results of the food production campaign.
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A really good review published in the journal Labour History: A journal of Labour and Social History, Number 129, November 2025 pages 241-242 by Mark Briskey: see https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976122.
Mary Fraser, The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great
War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917–19 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
pp. xvii + 222. €139.99 hardcover.
Dr Mary Fraser is a social scientist who works on the modern history of
police and an academic at the University of Glasgow. Since 2018 she has
been an associate at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, and
in 2023 she was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Historical Society. Fraser
is also a founding member of the Police History Society.
The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police
as Ploughmen, 1917–1919 is a meticulously researched and prodigiously
referenced book containing graphs, tables, and images that assist in
understanding the immensity and problematic nature of the task of
feeding Britain during World War I. Fraser commences with a succinct
statement of the book’s objectives: “introduce[ing] the social and political
background to the release of British policemen from their everyday police
duties to help agriculture during the last two years of the Great War. It
was a time of national crisis not least of which was potential population
starvation” (1).
Fraser emphasises the grave situation Britain found itself in, and
investigates some of the causes – including the impact of unlimited
German submarine warfare on British shipping and poor seasonal
harvests (105). Food shortages during wartime are not unusual. There has
been much written on governmental responses to agricultural production
during wartime, including the role of the UK’s women’s land army during
World War I. Similarly, the role of prisoners of war in different conflicts,
including over 12,000 Italian POWs during World War II undertaking
agricultural labour in Australia, South Africa, and other locations, has
been written on.
What makes Fraser’s book particularly valuable is her examination of
British policy that led to several police services in England and Scotland
providing personnel to boost the farming effort and food production. The
police, already suffering drastically low personnel levels due to wartime
enlistment, provided men with some familiarity of farm work to undertake
various essential rural labour tasks, including the ploughing, planting,
and harvesting of food crops. Fraser’s book adds much-needed scholarship
on this relatively under-reported element of emergency wartime labour.
Over the book’s nine individually referenced chapters, Fraser provides
background to the early days of the war, noting the policy decisions of
successive British governments, eventually leading to the British state taking
control of agriculture in 1917 (59). In chapter 5, Fraser notes the efforts to
increase arable land for crop production: government campaigns praised
crop production as being “patriotic,” while “bad farming” or using arable land for such “unnecessary activities” as playing sport was distinctly
“unpatriotic.” Golf was singled out as being particularly wasteful in its
extravagant use of arable land on which to hit a little ball around (72). These
campaigns resulted in great extensions to arable land and food production.
Over 3,000,000 acres were added.
In chapter 4, Fraser explores additional measures to increase crop
production through the use of tractors and other mechanical aids. Even
spiritual resources were included in the national effort, with the limiting
of religious services on Sundays being approved by clergy so there would
be less praying and more farming (95). Fraser’s inclusion of quantitative
evidence adds to the wealth of sources she draws upon. This includes charts
and lists of the locations of police stations and the numbers of officers who
were released to farming service in England and Scotland (122). Fraser also
includes copies or written artefacts from the Police Review, newspapers, and
other sources, including the following:
'POLICEMEN FOR THE PLOUGH. Details were given to the West Sussex
Farmers’ Union last week … Policemen who had experience as ploughmen
were to be sent with the horses, to be in charge of them and to plough
with them. The first horses were to be sent to the Horsham district – 40
horses, with 16 policemen in charge of them.' (146)
I would recommend this book as an invaluable reference for scholars
of policing as well as criminologists, and those interested in labour
history, emergency powers, and how, during times of crisis, conflict,
and disorder the police have been drawn upon to contribute to societal
welfare. In Fraser’s book we see the police responding to a national crisis
and contributing their labour to plough, plant, and produce food for a
population perilously close to starvation and at risk of food riots. These
risks were very real. Fraser notes the impact of starvation in wartime
Germany, which resulted in deaths and pitched battles between farmers
and roving gangs of starving citizens in many rural and urban areas
including Munich (103). Arguably a modern analogy of this World War I
response to a national crisis when police were released to plough the fields
in the food shortages of 1917 occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic,
when police in many countries including the UK (215) were called upon to
vigorously police the health regulations in our public spaces and respond
to a different national crisis.
MARK BRISKEY: Murdoch University