Why do we call our show WARAG?
Our show is dedicated to the people who served on and around Westonzoyland Airfield during its operational era. But why Warag exactly, I hear you say? The land that the Airfield sits upon has had two significant historical uses, military and over a greater period of time, agricultural. Those two uses came together quite dramatically between 1939 and 1945 when the War Agricultural Executive Committee was set up and known colloquially as the "WARAG". The purpose of this committee was to oversee food production in Great Britain against the spectre of U boats cutting us off from our vast empire. The committee had the power to impose new cropping regimes and even to confiscate inefficient farms.
The "Warag" encouraged farmers to grow a wider variety of crops. No longer could we rely on the Empires breadbasket, Canada to supply our wheat and we became only too aware of how far we were from the sugar plantations of the West Indies.
Here is Somerset, farmers faced particular challenges. With such varying types of land, including inhospitable moorland and the sometimes deceptive Somerset levels, arable production was a challenge. Marginal land was turned over to wheat and barley rotated with potatoes and root crops for livestock. It is still possible to identify fields of moor ground that were turned over as "plough ground" during the conflict.
On Westonzoyland Airfield we saw military use and agriculture co exist. As the former "Weston Field" was turned over to war use the large areas of grass that cover the airfield were conserved as fodder for livestock, either by traditional haymaking or later via a grass dryer that made animal grass nuts.
The Warag event is an opportunity for enthusiasts and the public alike to understand the airfields former land use and the lives of the people that lived and worked there.
Our aim as a group is to try to preserve the elements of the airfield that still exist and to enhance visitors understanding of its previous life. We try to do this with the acquisition of historically correct artefacts and assets that might be in danger of being lost forever. Our ultimate aim is to be able to educate and to inform people that might not be aware of the lands former life or may have forgotten its importance at a critical time in our history.
Current projects include the renovation of a Green Goddess fire engine to complement our Gloster Meteor T7 exhibit, the recovery and renovation of an Allen-Williams gun turret and the acquisition and safeguarding of a highly original Fordson Model N tractor from 1937 that saw part of its working life on our airfield with our own local WarAg committee.
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