THE HARVEST SHALL COME [Main Title]

A film that calls upon the British people to maintain their wartime commitment to agriculture and the prosperity and well-being of everyone who works on the land after the war by telling the story of Tom Grimwood, an ordinary Suffolk farm labourer married with three children.

START 10:00:00 British Board of Film Censors certificate and opening titles.

10:01:00 Dramatised scenes showing Tom Grimwood, aged 13, leaving his family home, a ramshackle farm labourer's cottage in the Suffolk countryside, to look for work at a nearby farm in 1900. The farmer's wife, although unimpressed by his youth and lack of farming experience, nevertheless agrees to hire him. An old ploughman shows Tom how to operate a plough drawn by two horses. Tom acquires first-hand experience of other jobs on the farm such as using a harrow, a cultivator and a roller, scything grass and trimming a hedge with a sickle.

10:05:33 Eight years later, Tom, now aged 21, is interviewed by a new employer who offers him a job as farmhand at 14 shillings a week, an adult farm labourer's wage. Tom also gets the key to a tied cottage. He takes his fiance Lil around to see the property; despite its delapidated, rat-infested condition, she does her best to look pleased and they agree to get married. Several years later, with three children running around the garden, Tom returns home from a day's work to find Lil, now looking careworn, complaining about their poverty. Their place at the bottom of the economic ladder is further emphasised when two young upper-class ladies who have got lost ask him for directions. "He's only a farm labourer", one whispers to the other as she gives him a small tip for his trouble.

10:10:34 The First World War has begun and many ships heading for Britain with food fall victim to German U-Boats. Down on the farm, Tom and Bill, a young farmhand, leading a waggon into the yard and removing the yoke from the draught horse after putting him back in the stable. In 1917, Tom finds out he won't be called up for military service because of the government drive to increase food production and a corresponding rise in his weekly wage. In 1919, with the war won, Tom joins other farm hands celebrating victory over pints of beer whilst the local squire praises their wartime contribution and looks forward to a period of peace and plenty.

10:14:08 It's 1921 and the local agricultural board is in session: news has come through that the government has got rid of wartime legislation promoting agricultural production and the Wages Board, allowing the market to set commodity prices and wages. The weekly wage for a farm labourer is set to fall from forty three to thirty shillings. Down on the farm, Bill and Tom discover how badly their pay has been cut. Bill decides to quit and look for a job in town but Tom is told by his boss that if he leaves, he stands to lose his cottage. Tom agrees to stay on but for him, Lil and their children, it means the return of hard times.

10:19:09 An auctioneer's sign at the Suffolk farm where Tom was employed since he was 21 and images showing stock market speculation, the import of cheap grain from abroad and derelict farms illustrate the collapse of agriculture in Britain in the inter-war period. The government tries to stem the ruin by investing in new cheap housing, bus services, schools and the introduction of electricity in rural areas but the only work for Tom and other farm labourers like him is digging ditches as part of poor relief. A chance roadside meeting with Bill who has a new motorcycle and is earning forty five shillings a week in town still doesn't convince Tom that he should quit working on the land. However, his son Jack announces his intention to look for work in town as he is now 21 and next day, Tom and Lil wave him a sad farewell. Tom finds work harvesting sugar beet, a crop supported by a government subsidy, and on road construction but leaves the local Ministry of Labour office empty handed as until 1936 there is no unemployment benefit for farm labourers.

10:25:35 It's 1939 and as Britain is at war again, abandoned farm land is once more brought under the plough. 1940 sees Tom back working on the land as the driver of a tractor with his old employer as his boss once more. In the evening, he accompanies Lil to the village shop, gives her her housekeeping money and goes off to the local pub to sup a pint of beer with two regulars, Fred and Ben. For two shillings, the pub landlord serves him a pint, an ounce of 'shag' (tobacco) and a box of matches. Tom remarks that the cost of these three items has almost doubled since 1939. At the same time, two million more acres are under cultivation and the average wage for a farm labourer has risen to forty eight shillings a week.

10:29:12 The work on the land continues with Tom and other farm workers busy feeding harvested wheat into a mechanical threshing machine and loading full sacks of grain into a farm cart. At the end of the day, Tom, his father and two other workmates head for home. He finds Lil cooking him supper in the kitchen. As he sits down to eat his haddock, she turns on the wireless to listen to a talk on the BBC Home Service about farming in wartime Britain. In it, the speaker announces a rise in farm labourer's pay to sixty shillings a week and observes that war has once more made the people of Britain realise the importance of the work done by farm labourers. Over quickly cut shots showing labourers feeding wheat into a threshing machine, a rural council house, children arriving at a new school, boys being taught how to shear sheep and a combined harvester and tractor at work in a wheat field, he looks forward to major improvements in the living standards of people living in rural districts once the war is over - "these things are the responsibility of the British people and we must see that they are done". Over images showing 'Okies' leaving their semi-derelict farming shack in one of the 1930s 'dustbowl' prairie states in the USA, Russian, Asian and African women working in fields and the speaker urges that farmers throughout the world must be helped to make the land more fertile because all human life on the planet depends on the soil and its produce - "never again must we neglect our land and the men and women who live by it". Lil comments, "They said all that in the last war". Tom replies, "Ah well, this time, it's got to be different", and in the uniform of the Home Guard and shouldering a US-manufactured P.14 .303 rifle, he bids goodnight to his wife and leaves, leaving Lil to clear up the supper plates. End credits.

END 10:33:26

16mm