Aunt Betty’s Wartime Service

The Farm Service Force

I’ve been spending some time lately learning about the time my mother, Lorraine Parker, spent working in the Farmerette Brigade of the Farm Service Force. It was wartime, and the program recruited girls and young women, aged sixteen and up, to work on Ontario farms at a time when most young farm workers were overseas fighting the enemy.

In return for their service, the participants were typically allowed to graduate (they called it junior or senior matriculation then) without attending the last month of classes or writing their final exams.

My mother served during the summer of 1945. I’ll tell you about that in another post very soon. But what I’m excited about right now is my very recent discovery that my Aunt Betty, my father’s sister, also served.

Two Letters

Betty Warner, my father’s older sister, served in 1943. She was eighteen and stationed in Grimsby, staying in a dormitory at a majestic old house known as “Nixon Hall”.

[You can enlarge any image in this post by clicking on it]

Here’s how I know.

I was going through some family records earlier this week, and came across two envelopes that I hadn’t noticed before. I recognized the Farm Services Force logo on them and decided to take a closer look. They turned out to contain letters that Betty had written in June and July 1943.

I’ve scanned and transcribed both of them and the results are below. Both letters were two pages, written on the front and back of a single sheet of the branded stationery that the Farm Service Force provided. Each bore four cents in postage stamps bearing the face of King George VI, and each was postmarked at Grimsby the day after it was written.

From the tone of both letters, it’s clear that Betty and Marg were very best friends. For each letter, a transcription follows the scanned pages.

The First Letter — Friday, June 11, 1943

The first letter was addressed to Miss Margaret Dowe at her home in Toronto, and was dated exactly eighty-three years ago today. Coincidences do happen!

Betty talks about the trip from Toronto on Monday (June 7), the hot running water at Nixon Hall, the “gee-gorgeous” food, the sunburn, the hard labour, and the terrible hayfever she suffered while weeding strawberries the first day in the field.

Despite the hardships, she wraps up by saying, “it really is super fun on the farm and I can hardly wait to see you down here.”

Page One

Page Two

Transcription

Serving King and Country at
Nixon Hall
Grimsby
June 11, 1943

My address is:
B. Warner
Farm Service Camp
Nixon Hall
Grimsby
Ont.

Dear Marg,

Well kiddo here I am on a farm at last and I was beginning to think I would never get there. Gosh what a time, and what hard work no foolin. We left Monday morning after a mess of confusion from the bus terminal on Dundas, in Hamilton we had lunch in Hunt’s and gave the town a quick glance we arrived at Grimsby about an hour later. Nixon Hall is really a super place we have hot running water and ten girls in each dormitory and the food is gee-gorgeous. All the girls in our room are from Lawrence Park Collegiate and they are really super.

When we arrived the camp director grabbed our ration books and then we scrammed to the dormitories and spent the rest of the day unpacking and fooling around. The following day we were sent out to weed strawberries and I just about died, my hayfever bothered me so badly that my left eye swelled so that I could hardly see, and so the following day they sent me to a new farm where there would be no weeding and it was much better. The farm is a gorgeous house and is owned by a retired english man and he is swell, only two of us were sent to that farm, and myself and a girl from North Toronto Collegiate, Elizabeth, was a little bit peeved but we are going to try to get together on that or another farm. We planted 25 hundred tomatoe plants today and I am just about dead. No kidding. If you have never worked this will make up for it. As soon as we finish working all day we just get washed and get into our pyjamas, eat dinner and drop into bed. But of course this is only the first week and we will probably get used to it later on. Talk about tanned I am as brown and red as a gooseberry. We get more sun burn every day and I hate to think what we are all going to look like by the end of the summer. Tomorrow is Saturday and the farmer I work for doesn’t work on Sat. so it is going to be a much needed rest, we are going into Grimsby to buy some wool because they say there is a marvellous wool shop.

Well Marg Honey I’m just about all done out for today and it is getting dark and so I must close. Will you please write me ’cause I am very lonesome for word from home and I would love to hear from you. It is really super fun on the farm and I can hardly wait to see you down here. The kids hitch hike all over and so we could see each other often. Don’t forget to write soon.

Love,
Betty

Coverage in the Star — Saturday, June 12, 1943

It looks like the Toronto Star sent a photographer to cover the arrival at Nixon Hall. The day after Betty’s first letter, the two photographs below appeared on page eight.

Betty says in one of the letters that there were “ten girls in each dormitory.” These photos show us fifteen, suggesting that there were probably two dormitories accommodating a total of twenty, but that not everyone had arrived in the first day or two. We shouldn’t forget that the recruits were coming from all over Ontario, and many had a much longer journey than Betty did.

In the photo on the left, you can see Betty in the second row from the front, third from the left. The caption describes “these young farm Commandos, some from Toronto, […] ready to pitch in and help on district fruit farms.”

If you focus on the lower right corner of the group photo, you’ll see a white post on the porch and some latticework under it. If you go back up to the present-day photo of Nixon Hall, you’ll find that the post and latticework, apparently restored and repainted, are still there eighty-three years later.

The Second Letter — Friday, July 9, 1943

The second letter, a month later, is addressed to the same friend, who has now reported for Farm Service Force duty and is staying at Mr. A.W. Smith’s farm in Vineland.

This time Betty talks about the joys of hitchhiking, the “two adorable boys” she and her friend Elizabeth have started hanging around with, and plans to get together with Marg now that the two of them are only about ten miles apart.

She closes out the letter saying that she’s “in one awful miserable painful mess.” I’ll let you read the letter yourself to learn why.

Page One

Page Two

Transcription

Serving King and Country at
Nixon Hall
Grimsby
(Fri.) July 9/43

Dearest Marg,

Well Joe how do you like farm life, don’t worry you will get used to it. At first I thought it was the most gosh darn job in the world but now I think it is super, naturally I don’t mean the picking and weeding BUT the extra social activity, it somepin.

It was a very pleasant surprise to get your letter and guess what hun we (our camp) are trucking down to Vinelands Saturday afternoon which is tomorrow for a play day and I am expecting to bump into you (the ulterior motive to this epistle) notice I got my senior English and am showing it off.

We had a carnival in Grimsby last night and so we are all recuperating from the excitement. There are two adorable boys farming out here to get their senior and they drive Elizabeth and I to work on their “bics” every morning and guess what they took us to the Brant Inn last Saturday night and we had the most super time. Elizabeth was so excited because she had never been there before and I was so glad that we went together it would have been perfect if you had been there maybe we will get around to that soon. There are really a super gang of kids in this district, there are a lot of Toronto boys out farming for their senior and at the carnival there were oodles of them but Elizabeth and I were with the two boys and so we couldn’t do much wolfing — hardly.

Listen bum-shine we should get together and do something, how about hitchhiking to Niagara on Sunday July 18th. Write me toot sweet and let me know if we could do. It is super fun hitch hiking to Niagara we have done it a couple of times and it’s fun. Please write me and I will answer RSVPromptly sweetie. Tell me what the gals are like and maybe I know some of them. I received a letter from Bert and it is a scream. I will save it for you and will hash it up together n’est pas.

I hope to see you tomorrow Marg. At present I have the c – – – – and I am in one awful miserable painful mess cause it hurts. I guess it is the extra exercise. Well I expect a letter from you by Tuesday planning our escapade. Good bye for now. be good and if you can’t be good — you know the rest.

Love Betty

The Tractor Photo

The photograph at the top of this post shows Betty driving a Ford-Ferguson farm tractor. It was among her photo albums and not associated with the two letters, but — from her apparent age — it was probably taken the same summer.

Given the professional quality of the photography and the print, and the fact that Betty had already become a professional fashion model while attending high school, it is very likely that the photo was commissioned by the Farm Service Force for some promotional campaign.

Betty isn’t faking it in the photo. Driving a tractor was a skill she had acquired two years earlier, in training she received in May 1941, sponsored by the same Farm Service Force. The Globe calls it “the Ontario Land Army”, echoing the terminology used in Britain for their equivalent organization, the Women’s Land Army.

Betty appears upper left in the group photo and is driving the tractor in the bottom photo.

Given that Betty did the training in the spring of 1941, it seems very possible that she also served in the Farm Service Force that year, which would make the summer of 1943 her second, or possibly even her third year of service.

She doesn’t mention any prior service in her letters, and I’ve yet to find any evidence one way or the other.

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Note on Sources

The clippings and letters in this post are among the personal effects of the late Helen Elizabeth “Betty” Warner, which she left to her daughter Karen, and which Karen has since passed on to me for safekeeping.

Margaret Dowe kept the letters and postcards that Betty sent her over the years from 1939 to 1944, and returned them to her with a note in 1962. Here’s what she said.

June 13/62

Dear Betty

I’ve been turning out my desk drawers lately and thought you might get a laugh or two out of the enclosed — you can do what you want with them.

I took the photo of Nixon Hall this afternoon, June 11, 2026.