Orchards and cider in the two world wars

Cider fruit is gathered in the autumn by hand, in quantity, at exactly the moment other farm work is heaviest. Both wars removed the men who did that work, and both replaced them incompletely with women, older workers, schoolchildren, and in the second war with prisoners of war and the Women’s Land Army.

Orchards degrade quietly under labour shortage. Pruning is deferred, grazing management lapses, and fruit is left where it falls. The damage does not show in one season and is expensive to reverse, so the effect of six years of neglect persists for a decade afterwards.

Standard orchards were particularly exposed, because everything about them — picking from tall trees, managing a grazed sward beneath — assumes plentiful hands.

The commercial trade ran on things the war economy controlled. Sugar, used for sweetening and for raising strength, was rationed and directed to food uses. Glass and metal closures were scarce, and bottle production was cut. Rail capacity was requisitioned for military movement, which struck at the distribution model the industry had been built on.

The response, on both occasions, was retrenchment towards cask and towards local sale. Products became simpler, drier and weaker, and much of the branded bottled trade of the interwar years had to be rebuilt afterwards.

Farm making, by contrast, needed almost nothing that was rationed. Fruit, casks and time were all on the farm, which is one reason the traditional practice survived the wars better than the commercial trade did.

Governments in both wars restricted alcohol production and consumption, chiefly to conserve grain and to keep war industry working, and beer bore much of that restriction. Cider’s position was different: it used no grain, it was made largely on farms, and it was drunk by a rural workforce whose output the state urgently wanted.

The result was a relative tolerance rather than an exemption. Cider was not promoted, but the pressures applied to brewing were not applied to it with the same force, and the customary supply of drink to farm workers continued in the counties where it had always been the practice.

How far this was deliberate policy and how far it was simply the state having larger problems is not clear from the general accounts, and CiderHQ does not treat it as a settled question.

The Second World War campaign to convert grassland to arable is the point at which the orchards took direct and lasting damage. A traditional orchard is grassland with trees on it, and to a war agricultural committee counting ploughable acres it looked like an inefficient use of land at a moment when the country was short of food.

Orchards were cleared for arable, and others were kept but ploughed or cropped between the trees in ways that damaged root systems and ended the grazing that had maintained them. The scale is not something the sources here allow to be quantified, but the direction is not in doubt.

This mattered most because of what followed. Orchards weakened by war neglect and wartime cropping met, within a decade or two, a policy environment that paid to remove them — and by then the case for grubbing rather than restoring an ageing standard orchard had largely made itself.