A Green and Pleasant Land Page 6

  As with the rest of the gardening press in the days before war broke out, the RHS Journal for September 1939 gave few hints of the trouble ahead, because it was printed in August. But the next monthly edition was very different. In October’s issue, notice was given that future flower shows would be cancelled, although the Society did subsequently hold a special Autumn Show at the end of October. In the December issue, this was pronounced ‘a great success, coming as it did after a stand-still period of several weeks. The support given by the trade exhibitors and by the Fellows themselves showed the advisability of maintaining the usual practice of the Society in holding Fortnightly Shows.’41 And, as was noted in the December Journal, ‘It is perhaps fortunate, if anything about war could be so described, that the outbreak of hostilities happened at the season of preparation; this has made it possible to increase the area available for the cultivation of vegetable crops without the loss, or partial loss, of a growing season.’42 Fortunate indeed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DIG FOR VICTORY!

  ASK ANY BRITISH adult what comes to mind when they hear the words ‘gardening during the war’, and a pound to a penny they will immediately mention the phrase ‘Dig for Victory’. It is a slogan embedded in our national consciousness, which in its terse simplicity embodies an important strand of the story of the Home Front. As such, it is emblematic of our collective sense of satisfaction and pride in the way our forebears conducted themselves in the darkest of days. However, it is right that we should examine the validity of the extravagant claims for its success – both at the time and ever afterwards – both in providing healthy foodstuffs and in fostering cohesion and high morale in the national community. To do this, it is first necessary to understand the origins and development of the campaign.

  The phrase ‘Dig for Victory’ was almost certainly coined by Michael Foot1, later a leader of the Labour Party in the 1980s but at the beginning of the war a young, intellectual socialist journalist working for the London Evening Standard. In two unsigned editorial leaders, one published on 6 September 1939 and the next almost a week later, he proclaimed a patriotic, encouraging message:

  Every spare half acre from the Shetlands to the Scillies must feel the shear of the spade. The Minister of Agriculture has plans to increase the area under cultivation by a million and a half acres before next spring. He aims to do in one year what we did last time in four. A fine idea. But with the aid of individual citizens we can double that figure. Turn up each square foot of turf. Root out bulbs and plant potatoes. Spend your Sunday afternoons with a hoe instead of in the hammock. Take a last look at your tennis lawn and then hand it over to the gardener. And if you meet any poor fool attempting to beat his ploughshare into a sword, tell him that this war may be won in the farms as well as on the battlefields . . .

  You are proud of Britain’s Navy. You sleep safer in your bed at the thought of these proud steel hulls sweeping the seas as surely as they have done in days past. But the allotmenteers, too, are playing their part in keeping our naval power supreme. More food grown here will relieve ships from convoy duty. We have four million more mouths to fill than in 1914 and fewer merchant ships to feed them. More food from our own fields can thwart the Nazi raiders who will search for our food ships beneath the seas. Remember, therefore, that food wins victories as surely as gunpowder.2

  It was stirring stuff, and intended to be.

  The newspaper returned to the subject on 12 September, reminding readers that the military historian, Basil Liddell Hart, had written that ‘The Great War was lost by the letters from home.’ In other words, that tales of food shortages in the German Empire sapped the morale of German fighting men in 1918. It continued:

  The Germans remember 1918. Hence their U Boat campaign, by which they have sunk some 70,000 tons of British shipping in the first week of war. The figure is not alarming, for in April 1917 the weekly toll averaged more than 100,000 tons.3 Our Navy will fight back and reduce the total, just as it did in that earlier contest. But the submarine can be defeated on every square foot of British soil as well as on the high seas. So the order which the Evening Standard gave a week ago must be rammed home. DIG FOR VICTORY.’4

  It is doubtful whether Michael Foot himself had ever done much vegetable gardening, having been born in Plymouth of a middle-class professional family, who almost certainly employed a gardener and owned a tennis lawn. He was educated at Oxford University and became for a short time a shipping clerk in Liverpool, before moving to Fleet Street. As an undergraduate he had developed skills as a politician and orator, and his polemical writings suited the sombre, self-dedicatory mood of the time.

  On 3 October 1939, not long after Foot’s inspiring words were published, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the Minister of Agriculture, introduced the first ‘Grow More Food’ campaign, aimed at the civilian population, with a broadcast on the Home Service. He made some implausible claims about the vigour of the agricultural industry, and how British farms produced nearly half the food the nation required. However, he did go on to warn that, although of course the Navy could be relied upon to keep trade routes open and the Dominions and other countries would still supply food,

  those supplies may not always be unlimited. It is clearly our duty, just as it is a matter of elementary wisdom, to try to make doubly and trebly sure that we will fight and win this war on full stomachs.

  To do this we want not only the big man with the plough but also the little man with the spade to get busy this autumn . . . Half a million more allotments properly worked will provide potatoes and vegetables that will feed another million adults and 1½ million children for eight months out of 12.

  The matter is not one that can wait. So – let’s get going. Let ‘Dig for Victory’ be the motto of everyone with a garden and of every able-bodied man and woman capable of digging an allotment in their spare time.5

  And so, just a matter of weeks after the war began, Dorman-Smith gave government approval to the exhortatory phrase that would appear on millions of leaflets and thousands of posters and come to embody so much toil, sweat, disappointment and satisfaction through the war years.6 It was deliberately quasi-military, lining up civilians – and the part they could play – alongside the armed forces.

  The Minister’s subordinates had already been very busy. On 18 September, a letter from MAF went out to all the local councils in England and Wales, giving them power, under the Defence Regulations, to take possession of unoccupied land without the owner’s consent, as well as occupied land with the permission of the owner and occupier, for use as allotments. Even common land could be commandeered with the permission of the Minister.7 Councils were also asked to arrange for expert help to be given to gardeners and allotmenteers.8 The following day, a letter was sent to all county councils asking them to set up horticultural committees in towns and cities with populations of more than 20,000 in order to organise the campaign. These committees would be helped by the Ministry’s employed horticultural inspectors.

  On 21 September, the county War Ags received a letter giving them instructions on how to manage the changeover of orchards and large gardens to food production, while retaining essential plant stocks until after the war was over. On the 28th, Lord Denham, the newly appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, spoke in the House of Lords on the subject of allotments and gardens. He declared that the government’s aim was to produce another half a million allotments in order to bring the figure up to 1,330,000, which had been the peak figure in 1920. This would be achieved, he maintained, as with increased agricultural production, through decentralisation and with education. He ended with the words: ‘I do claim that those plans have been well and truly laid and prepared, and I only hope that a successful result will be their reward.’9

  The fact could not be denied that by 1939 many First World War allotments were badly neglected. If such a target was to be reached, these would have to be brought back into production, together with mansion gardens, pr
ospective building sites, wasteland and fields in the suburbs.

  The National Allotments Society should have been the natural expert link between government and allotmenteers in all this, but in truth, it took MAF some time to recognise this, and there were mutterings from the Society throughout the autumn of 1939 and into 1940. Dorman-Smith tried to mend his fences at an NAS conference on 3 February 1940, in a speech in which he praised the Society’s work. He also said that there would be no famine in fresh vegetables, but the professional growers’ very efficient production could with advantage be augmented on allotments and in private gardens. The Minister was in something of a bind: he could not openly say that there could be acute shortages, yet he had to give people a pressing reason for taking up their spades.

  When MAF set up the Domestic Food Producers’ Council in 1940, under Lord Bingley’s chairmanship, Councillor Berry of the NAS was made vice-chairman, as well as chairman of its Allotments and Gardens Committee. However, when Giles and Berry discovered that there was only to be one NAS member on the latter, while there were four from the poultry industry, they nearly asked for a deputation to the Minister himself. Their mood was made darker still because MAF was initially reluctant to give them any money for their work in supporting local associations – on the grounds that the Society received affiliation fees so did not need government help. Berry complained about the ‘total lack of goodwill’10 towards the National Allotments Society shown by the Ministry. Mercifully, a tactful senior civil servant called Dr Wilkins soothed their hurt feelings, and the NAS eventually received a grant of £1,500 a year. After this initial muddle, the Society and the Ministry seem to have worked well. Certainly, in the NAS’s wartime annual reports, G. W. Giles was always fulsome in his praise of the Ministry officials.

  The brief of the Domestic Food Producers’ Council was to co-ordinate the efforts of the various organisations with an interest in the domestic food production campaign, in particular to advise on how to promote production in allotments and private gardens and to organise supplies of seed, fertilisers and equipment, ‘as well as to suggest how to use any surplus produce’.11 The Council would report to the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food, since both had an interest in the results.

  The Ministry of Agriculture was also banking on the owners of the three and a half million private gardens using their million or more acres to provide health-giving vegetables, even at the expense of flowers. Thanks to the between-the-wars housing boom, the suburbs of cities had increased substantially, with houses typically built at twelve to the acre, so that many suburbanites possessed gardens of around allotment size. Older houses might have a quarter of an acre or even more, especially in country districts, and these were often in good heart, as far as fertility was concerned, having been worked for decades or even centuries.

  Despite mutterings from professional gardeners about the pointlessness of doing so, many householders dutifully dug up their lawns to grow potatoes, sowed runner beans to climb pergolas, planted tomato plants in flower beds once brightly cheerful with lobelia, geraniums or dahlias, and made prodigious compost heaps. Nella Last, patriotic housewife that she was, converted her back garden into a vegetable plot and chicken run soon after the war started – as well as cutting her hair short ‘for the duration’.12

  A well-known gardening writer, Stephen Cheveley, wrote a book about his experiences in A Garden Goes to War, published in January 1940. His aim, using a combination of personal experience and straightforward vegetable-and fruit-growing information, was to ‘write something that will really help people who want to help themselves’.13 He told the story of how he and his small son set to work on a Saturday afternoon early in September 1939 to turn much of the two thirds of an acre of terraced flower garden – or all except his much-loved rose beds at least – into a productive vegetable plot. ‘We cut off all the flowers worth taking into the house; whole plants of chrysanthemums were executed, and they made a glorious bunch in a huge bowl in the hall. After the first unhappy twinges of regret we became keen on the job, and once the flowers were out of the way it didn’t seem nearly so bad.’14 At least some amateur gardeners must have followed his lead.

  Even the armed services were enlisted to help, and vegetables began to be grown on spare ground in military camps, RAF stations, onshore naval bases and around anti-aircraft batteries. For example, potatoes and carrots grew next to the runway at Manchester Ringway, then a parachute base, now Manchester airport. The services reaped the benefit of having in their ranks called-up professional gardeners, even specialist tomato growers. A ‘soldier-gardener’ scheme was instituted which identified trained gardeners in units who could be detailed to work in the gardens of requisitioned mansion houses to provide food for the canteens; there were several thousand of these gardeners by the end of the war.

  Of course, many personnel who volunteered to help out in their spare time never tasted the fruits of their labours, since they were always subject to sudden mobilisations. This does not seem to have deterred everyone. Perhaps they were influenced by the words of Lt Col. W. L. Julyan, who wrote sternly that ‘a unit leaving a site without passing over a good garden when there has been opportunity to make one ought to feel the disgrace of it just as much as they would in passing over untidy billets’.15

  The necessity for an urgent campaign was brought home to all those civil servants and politicians privy to the information on losses at sea. In 1939, 800 tons of fruit and vegetables were destroyed, but in 1940 the figure had risen exponentially to 22,000 tons. Although 1940 was the worst year by far, 2,000 tons were lost in 1942, when far less was imported overall. Nor were losses on the high seas the only problem, since onion imports for example declined sharply because they had come from territories by then occupied by the Nazis. In 1939, out of every 100 onions eaten, only nine were grown in Britain.16 The imported tonnage slumped year on year until 1943, when only 100 tons made it through. Fortunately, imports rose to 27,900 tons the next year. At times, onions were so scarce that single ones were given as birthday presents or as raffle prizes at community events. They even appeared in cartoons, such as the one depicting a grand lady with a string of onions round her neck and the caption: ‘They’re real, my dear!’

  Tomatoes were, if anything, even more badly affected. In 1939, 142,000 tons came into the country but by 1941 this had dwindled to a mere 1,800 tons. Not one tomato was landed in 1942, 1943 or 1944. Small wonder that mansion gardens and market garden operations were strongly encouraged to grow this vegetable in wartime.

  As for fruit, imports of bananas were in much the same position as tomatoes. In 1939, 287,600 tons were imported; this figure plummeted to 100 tons in 1941 and to nothing in 1942, 1943 and 1944. Unfortunately, unlike the tomato, the banana could not be grown even in glasshouses in Britain. It is not surprising that there should be such an enduring folk memory concerning the first bananas to arrive back in the grocers’ shops in 1945. When they did, the Ministry of Food decided that, as there were so few of them, children should get priority, and they were rationed to just one each.17

  Oranges, on the other hand, continued to be imported throughout the war, although at just one tenth of the pre-war figure in 1943. Apples were also hard hit: 234,200 tons imported in 1939, down to a mere 8,000 tons in 1943 and only 30,300 tons in 1945.

  Clearly there was a pressing need to increase domestic food production; the question was, how to achieve it successfully with a population for whom this was entirely new ground, so to speak. From the beginning, the officials were only too aware that people would have to be taught and guided to become useful, productive kitchen gardeners. Despite the populist nature of the Dig for Victory slogan, the initial campaign by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries was high-mindedly educational. Senior civil servants, many of whom would have themselves employed gardeners, were inclined to take a paternalistic view. They believed that they had to inform and educate, as well as encourage, a vast, amorphous, willing but ignorant
crowd of beginners, many of whom had never held a garden fork before and so would need everything spelled out for them. These people included those living in flats and houses in cities, who mostly had no garden at all and so had to be encouraged to take up the challenge of renting a wartime allotment, as well as the many women, in town and countryside, who had traditionally left this task to their menfolk. In search of expert help, the Ministry of Agriculture turned to those who already earned a living from horticulture – professional gardeners, rural science teachers, commercial nurserymen, county advisers, research scientists – to help the campaign by giving lectures and demonstrations and writing leaflets and instructional books.

  The Ministry’s efforts throughout the war were characterised by a blizzard of information pamphlets and bulletins, as well as Dig for Victory exhibitions – 400 of them around the country in 1942 and 1943 alone.18 The BBC was early enlisted to ensure generous wireless coverage, there was a vigorous poster campaign, and the Ministry of Information Crown Film Unit19 produced instructional films to be shown in cinemas. All essentially carried the same upbeat message: if you cannot fight, you can help your country in another, just as valuable, way.