A Green and Pleasant Land Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ursula Buchan

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Weights, Measures and Money

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Scene is Set

  Chapter 2: What Happens Now?

  Chapter 3: Dig for Victory!

  Chapter 4: Women and Children Go to It

  Chapter 5: Groundwork

  Chapter 6: Talking of Scarlet-Veinèd Beet

  Chapter 7: The Old Order Changeth

  Chapter 8: Far Messier and Different

  Chapter 9: A Refreshment of the Spirit of Man

  Chapter 10: Gardening Behind the Wire

  Chapter 11: Animals in the Back Garden

  Chapter 12: Fiercely Stirring Cauldrons

  Chapter 13: Keeping On Keeping On

  Picture Section

  Select Bibliography

  Notes and References

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘War is the normal occupation of man – war and gardening’, said Winston Churchill, Britain’s great wartime Prime Minister. And so it was that during the Second World War these two strands of national life – war and gardening – became tightly intertwined.

  In A Green and Pleasant Land, Ursula Buchan tells the intriguing and inspiring story of how the British government encouraged and cajoled its citizens to contribute to the war effort by growing their own fruit and vegetables. As a whole nation listened to wireless broadcasts, dug holes for Anderson shelters, counted their coupons and made do and mended, so too were they instructed to ‘Dig for Victory’. Ordinary people, as well as gardening experts, rose to the challenge: gardens, scrubland, allotments and even public parks were soon helping to feed a nation deprived of fresh produce.

  As Ursula Buchan reveals, the British people tackled wartime gardening and its practical contribution to the Home Front with thrifty ingenuity, grumbling humour and extraordinary fortitude. However, this simple act of turning over soil and tending new plants was potentially just as important in mitigating the psychological and physical shocks endured by a population under threat of bombing and even invasion. Gardening reminded Britons that their country, and its more innocent and insular pursuits, were worth fighting for. Gardening in wartime Britain was a part of the fight for freedom.

  About the Author

  Ursula Buchan studied modern history at Cambridge University, before training as a horticulturist at the RHS Gardens, Wisley and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She wrote a gardening column for a succession of national newspapers, including the Observer, Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph, as well as The Spectator, for more than twenty-five years. She has published fifteen books and won two major writing awards from the Garden Media Guild. She was recently awarded the Garden Media Guild’s Gardening Columnist of the Year 2011.

  ALSO BY URSULA BUCHAN

  An Anthology of Garden Writing

  The Pleasures of Gardening

  The Classic Horticulturist

  The Garden Book

  Wall Plants and Climbers

  Village Show

  Gardening for Pleasure

  Foliage Plants

  Planting Your Garden

  Plants for All Seasons

  Good in a Bed

  Better Against a Wall

  The English Garden

  Garden People

  Back to the Garden

  A Green and Pleasant Land

  How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War

  Ursula Buchan

  TO H.W.E.T.,

  WITH LOVE

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Ministry of Agriculture onion advertisement. Topham Picturepoint.

  2. Carrot lollies. Fox Photos, Hulton Archive.

  3. Schoolboys arrive at their allotment. Harry Todd, Hulton Archive.

  4. ‘Dig for Victory’ poster. SSPL via Getty Images.

  5. C. H. Middleton. Getty Images.

  6. The team from ‘Radio Allotment’. Popperfoto/Getty Images.

  7. ‘Grow Your Own Food’ poster, Hans Schleger. SSPL via Getty Images.

  8. Blitzed Bank underground station and Royal Exchange. Getty Images.

  9. ‘Grow Your Own Food’ poster, Abram Games. © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy.

  10. Allotment at Kensington Gardens. Getty Images.

  11. Allotment within sight of St Paul’s Cathedral. Getty Images.

  13. ‘Food for your garden from your garden’ poster. SSPL via Getty Images.

  14. Ministry of Agriculture cropping plan. SSPL via Getty Images.

  15. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. Getty Images.

  16. RAF vegetable show. Getty Images.

  17. ‘A Canning Demonstration’, Evelyn Dunbar. Topfoto.

  18. Making jam. Getty Images.

  19. Milling rose hips. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.

  20. Land Army girls. SSPL via Getty Images.

  21. Female students at Waterperry School of Horticulture for Women. IWM via Getty Images.

  22. Miss Beatrix Havergal at Waterperry. IWM via Getty Images.

  WEIGHTS, MEASURES AND MONEY

  Imperial weights

  1 ounce (oz) is the equivalent of approximately 28 grams

  16 ounces in a pound (lb)

  2 lbs 3 ounces in a kilo

  14 lbs in a stone

  112 lbs in a hundredweight (cwt)

  20 cwt in a ton

  Imperial volumes

  1 pint is the equivalent of 568 ml

  2 pints in a quart

  4 quarts in a gallon

  Imperial measures of length

  One inch (˝) is the equivalent of 2.5 centimetres

  12 inches in a foot (ft)

  3 feet in a yard (yd)

  1760 yds in a mile, the equivalent of 1.6 kilometres

  The rod (syns. perch and pole) is equivalent to 5.5 yards. In the case of allotments, a rod usually denotes a square measurement.

  Money

  Decimalisation was not introduced until 1971. In 1939, the smallest unit of coinage was a farthing (a quarter of a penny), followed by a ha’penny, then penny (1 d), threepenny bit, sixpence, shilling (1/- or 12 pence), florin (2/-) and half a crown (2/6d). Ten shillings (10/-), a pound (£1 or 20 shillings) and five pounds (£5) were notes. A guinea was 21 shillings.

  Prices rose substantially during the war, but to get some idea of the value of money during this time, £40 of today’s money would be the rough equivalent of £1 in 1942.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘WAR IS THE normal occupation of man – war and gardening,’ Winston Churchill told the poet Siegfried Sassoon in 1918. This provocative remark contains more truth than you might at first think. War and gardening are what people have done since the earliest times. These occupations are truly antithetical: the one profoundly destructive, disruptive, uncivilised and ugly, the other constructive, orderly, civilised and both useful and capable of promoting beauty. Between 1939 and 1945 in Britain, war and gardening were very different-coloured strands of national life, which surprisingly often became entwined.

  As it turned out, gardening proved to be one way that civilians as well as service personnel and prisoners of war mitigated the shocks and griefs, as well as the food shortages, that they were forced to endure. Gardening also served as a reminder to Britons – at times comforting, at others invigorating – that their green and pleasant land, as well as its more innocent and insular pursuits, was worth fighting and dying for.

  Over time, ‘the soil’ has developed a symbolic meaning
and acquired a resonance far removed from the dirt in garden or field. The soil equates to the country itself; we use the words interchangeably. In the mid twentieth century, people were proud of the fact that there had been no fighting on British soil since the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and no successful foreign invasion since 1066. Despite so many changes and convulsions in the first decades of the twentieth century, they retained their highly romantic view of the countryside and their nostalgia for a past rural innocence, which had been fostered by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Romantic writers, artists and composers. The land, especially the countryside, was sacrosanct, inviolable and infinitely precious.

  The land even had the capacity to make Britons better people, or so G. W. Giles, the secretary of the National Allotments Society – a man who never shrank from the high-flown sentiment – remarked in 1939: ‘it is generally agreed that the closer association of man with Mother Earth the better citizen he becomes. As a nation our roots strike deep into the soil and some of the finest traits of British character derive their origin from it.’1

  Most people might have hesitated to express their indebtedness to their land in quite that way, but the sentiment would have resonated nevertheless. Love of the soil sharpened a sense of nationhood; this was deeply felt, although people were understandably resistant to officialdom articulating that love on their behalf and in a heavy-footed manner.

  Of course patriotic feeling breeds myths, and the wartime generations were certainly inveterate mythmakers. A number of the more potent wartime myths have survived to this day, despite the gallant efforts of social historians to explode them. In our sphere, the most enduring are the enormous ‘success’ of both the Dig for Victory campaign and the jam-making of the Women’s Institute. We shall see whether the facts actually bear out the extravagant claims still made for them.

  Undoubtedly justified was the widely held, if rarely explicitly expressed belief, that gardening was stitched into the tapestries of both national and private life, which could not easily be unpicked even when the nation stood on the edge of catastrophe. For many centuries, Britain’s stupendously rich and varied gardening tradition, a tradition of remarkable endeavour and achievement, had markedly influenced society and culture. British people were notably proud of that fact, and the policymakers were quick to perceive this and to trade upon it when the time came to wake the sleeping behemoth to attend to its wartime duties.

  This book is an attempt to examine the Second World War and its legacy, as refracted through the prism of public and private horticulture. Although care must be taken when drawing conclusions about the general in the light of the particular, a study of gardening in wartime is very revealing. It may be one relatively small area of human activity, yet a close examination of it during the war years casts light on many broader themes and preoccupations: propaganda and the role of the media, women’s changing aspirations and status, the capacity of people to live normal lives in abnormal circumstances, class and hierarchies, the interaction between government and people, the role of voluntary organisations and ‘community’, the march of science and technology, the reach of money, the power of myth.

  In peacetime, gardening is an activity that is pursued by millions of people, more or less willingly, sometimes to the exclusion of much else. It has practical, aesthetic and spiritual dimensions; it is both earthily satisfying and emotionally recuperative. As all keen gardeners know, gardening is a potent consolation in bad times or circumstances; so it is small wonder that in wartime people often strove very hard to tend a garden, sometimes in extremely unpromising circumstances. Small wonder, too, that the way they tackled gardening in all its forms during the war years turned out to be emblematic of the way they dealt with many of the difficulties and constraints imposed on them: with thrifty ingenuity, a keen scepticism and invincible humour.

  This is the story of how the government encouraged and exhorted the nation’s civilians to contribute to the war effort by growing or rearing some of its own fresh food and cooking it properly, and of how ordinary people, as well as gardening experts, responded to the challenge. It is the story of how gardening promoted good morale and later helped reconcile the population to the shabby austerities of peacetime. It is also the story of how, by the end of the war, gardens and gardening had changed profoundly and permanently.

  When reading contemporary archivesfn1, I am often struck by how different from me are those people who read bombastic posters and dour leaflets, laughed at Punch cartoons and ITMA wireless broadcasts, dug holes for Anderson shelters in their lawns, filled pig-swill bins, counted their ‘points’, stood bored in queues, sang in pubs, refrained from swearing in front of a lady, made casual racist comments, wrote weekly letters to their loved ones, wrung the necks of their chickens, risked their lives putting out fires or rescuing their neighbours, looked for their possessions in the ruins of bombed-out houses, deferred to their ‘betters’, and made do and mended. I may have the coffee mug, but I have little experience of what it is to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ when it really matters. I was born only eight years after the war ended, yet I scarcely recognise myself in these forebears of mine, with their quiet courage, dogged stoicism, restraint and impressive reserves of often baseless optimism.

  Only in the gardening sphere can I discern an unbroken thread stretching back to the 1940s, and truly empathise with all the difficulties gardeners experienced in dealing with slugs or providing palatable vegetables for the kitchen in early spring, as well as sharing their fascination with the changing seasons, and pleasure in a blowsy dahlia flower, an apple tree in blossom, a ripe greengage or a larder shelf of bottled tomatoes. Like them, I can appreciate the way that gardening offers the possibility of putting away past failures as one season ends and another beckons – the fact that there is always next year. It is in the garden that I can most closely connect with those who went before me, since the essence of a garden is timeless.

  * * *

  fn1 I have restricted myself to consulting English sources in order to keep the work within reasonable bounds. Of course, the government was concerned with the whole United Kingdom, even if there were some national variations, but the differences on the ground in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland remain a worthwhile subject for future research.

  Numbered references are designed to be helpful to future researchers, but the endnotes are also for the benefit of the general reader: the facts contained in them do not justify a place in the main text but nevertheless add colour and depth to the story.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SCENE IS SET

  ENGLAND IN THE 1930s was a very different place physically from the country we know today. If transported back in time, we might scarcely recognise some parts of it. Agriculture and market gardening were in deep trouble, mainly as a result of freely imported cheap food, and the visible signs of this were many derelict orchards and much neglected scrubland on the less fertile soils. Horses still pulled the ploughs in many arable fields. Great tracts of ‘unimproved pasture’, parcelled into fields by hedges planted in the eighteenth century, were bright with wild flowers, birds and butterflies, and sustained a large livestock population. The biggest gardens were to be found on the large country estates with houses at their heart, of which there were many more than there are now. Villages were well supplied with good-sized gardens although, curiously, a tenth of rural households had no garden at all.1

  Cities were not well provided with gardens, as housing density was high, especially in the slums which disfigured many urban landscapes. In inner London, for example, a quarter of residential buildings were without gardens and the situation was similar in the great industrial centres in the north. Allotment provision in both town and country was patchy.

  There were no motorways, nor many trunk roads, and traffic jams were common in the centre of towns, since there were few bypasses. Unbridled ribbon development had begun to run out from the big cities, especially London. The post-First World War housing boom
had provided four million more dwellings, mainly built on what we now call greenfield sites; many of these were on the outskirts of cities and towns, creating suburbs. It was the age of ‘Metroland’. These houses often had gardens, at least partly as a result of the nineteenth-century ‘leisure garden’2 movement, the ideals of which had heavily influenced post-war planners. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the Second World War, it was estimated that there were only 3,500,000 private gardens in Britain, a comparatively modest figure in a country with a population of about 45 million.3

  For most garden owners in those years, fruit and vegetable growing was not the top priority. The ‘typical’ 1930s back garden encompassed a well-kept lawn of fine grasses, cut by a push cylinder mower, together with colourful flower beds containing a mixture of perennials and hardy annuals, a separate rose bed and shrub borders, a rockery, serpentine ‘crazy paving’ paths, a small vegetable plot and possibly a sunken pond. The flower beds might be circular and cut out of the lawn, but they were more often lined up against the garden wall or fence. The rockery might possibly be made of real stone, leaning back slightly in strata, in approved Alpine Garden Society manner, but was more likely to be composed of a mixture of clinker and concrete, and therefore only home to the most amenable rock plants, such as purple aubretia and rampaging ‘snow in summer’. The 1930s garden was partly influenced by the ‘Gardenesque’, a style that emphasised the individual beauty of plants, so that trees and shrubs were often scattered about, which had been advocated by John Loudon a hundred years earlier. The other influence was the Arts and Crafts movement, and in particular its early twentieth-century exponents, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. The better-off middle-class householder might have paid a general nursery to design and lay out his garden, but only the wealthy employed ‘garden architects’, and there were comparatively few of those.