A Green and Pleasant Land Read online

  Thus this experiment shows . . . that with hard work and relatively little expense of money, even Bethnal Greeners can make their contribution to food production. It has also shown – and let us remember it when the war is over – that the desire for an allotment is almost universal and, I may add, passionate.38

  The rather more salubrious Hurlingham Polo Ground was turned into allotments, and vegetables grew even in the deep silt of the dry moat around the Tower of London, a most symbolic site of last-ditch national defence. The incendiary-bomb-damaged roof garden of Selfridge’s department store was turned into a plot, which produced vegetables for the restaurant. There were vegetables growing in the Twickenham stadium, appropriately enough since the home of English rugby football was colloquially known as the Cabbage Patch, it having been a market garden until 1907. Tomatoes grew in ornamental pots flanking the doors of gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s as well as in boxes in front of humble high street shops.

  The ancient universities played their part, with the lawns of some Cambridge courts and Oxford quads turned over to vegetables.39 A notable success was Girton College in Cambridge, thanks to its energetic Garden Steward, Chrystabel Proctor, whose motto was: ‘We may be bombed, we must be fed.’40 She introduced pigs and poultry to the college grounds and cut the lawns for hay, which she traded with the university farm across the road for modern fertilisers and manure. Their sheep grazed the college’s tennis lawns.

  Undergraduates were encouraged to lend a hand in their college gardens, as one girl at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford loftily recalled:

  Some of the lawns were sacrificed for the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign. I remember one year when we were invited to volunteer to help bring in the potato harvest. By and large the students did not come from the horny-handed classes, and the response was poor. They were gently prodded in the right direction by two successive dinners featuring boiled rice as a vegetable followed by rice pudding as a dessert. Next day there was a rush of volunteers to wield the garden forks.41

  Digging for Victory was never going to be without its contentious issues and problems. One of these was how to dispose of surpluses by gardeners and allotmenteers, and whether that disposal might compete with commercial retailing of fresh vegetables. The Ministry of Agriculture was ambivalent on the subject, sometimes encouraging amateurs to grow more than their households needed and at other times definitely not. In February 1940, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith told a conference of the NAS: ‘The new allotment drive does not aim at competing with the market gardening industry, which must be maintained for the national service. It is not intended that allotments should grow produce for sale [my italics].’42 This was substantially to underestimate the capacity of those gardeners with large gardens or allotments, especially in the countryside, to grow more than their families required. In the eyes of MAF, there seemed no easy answer to the potential waste involved, if small commercial retailers were not to be threatened financially, and in the light of substantial transport difficulties.

  In May 1940, this hot potato was handed over to Lord Woolton and his Ministry of Food, to try to deal with without burning their fingers. In characteristic manner Woolton made clear in a letter to Robert Hudson at MAF that vested interests should not get in the way of greater consumption of fresh vegetables and that gardeners should be encouraged to grow as much as they could and any surpluses be redistributed. As a result, that summer County Garden Produce Committees43 were set up throughout England and Wales, under the auspices of a central committee chaired by Lord Bingley, since it was thought that surpluses were most likely to occur in the countryside. These committees oversaw local Village Produce Associations, whose members were garden owners, allotmenteers, beekeepers, and keepers of domestic livestock.44 One of the tasks of the VPAs was to deal with the distribution of surpluses, where they occurred, by giving or selling them to local schools, hospitals, army NAAFIs, communal feeding centres, works canteens, market stalls and so on. VPAs were enjoined to work very closely with Women’s Institute Produce Guilds, where these existed; in reality, they often consisted of the same dramatis personae.

  However, people bombarded Hudson with complaints about how difficult it was to get rid of surpluses, which may be the reason why, in March 1941, he pronounced:

  The policy I advocate for the amateur grower is one of orderly cropping, with the cropping so planned that a succession of vegetables is obtained all the year round, that over-production of summer vegetables is avoided, and that any production surplus to the grower’s own requirements is of non-perishable vegetables which can be stored for use during the winter months. I have commended this policy to the organisations concerned in advising amateur growers throughout the country. Should it prove that surpluses of storable vegetables are in fact produced, I am satisfied that the machinery of committees now established is sufficient to carry out any arrangements for collection which may be decided upon.45

  Whatever had been said in 1940, by 1941 the Ministry was only keen to promote surpluses of winter-storage vegetables. The problem was that in the nature of things there was always much less risk of a surplus in these than in perishable summer vegetables.

  It was at this moment that the responsibility for the work of the County Garden Produce Committees reverted to the Ministry of Agriculture, since Lord Woolton was not keen on being associated with a policy that potentially restricted food production. It is possible to discern a certain squirming by politicians when questioned in Parliament on the issue. For example, in July 1941 Lord Davies put the Duke of Norfolk, Joint Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, thoroughly on the spot when he asked him whether the policy of the Ministry of Agriculture was to encourage or discourage the growing of vegetables. In essence, the Duke replied that only the collection and storage of non-perishable amateur-grown produce would be possible. In other words, parsnips yes, lettuces no. But parsnips were not the problem.46

  Although politicians continued to fret, the situation was sorted out in the end by the good sense of the Women’s Institutes, who combined with the National Allotments Society and the County Garden Produce Committees to estimate the scale of surplus produce and put together plans to collect it, grade it at collection centres and distribute it to wholesalers, retailers or WI market stalls. The National Allotments Society also organised the collection and disposal of surplus food produce in towns and cities, via the local allotment associations. These systems worked better in some places than in others; as with many aspects of Home Front endeavour, success often depended on the calibre and determination of particular individuals on the ground. Certainly the Ministry of Agriculture never completely found the best way to encourage the public to grow just the right amount of their own food.

  A surplus to which no one could object was that of young plants provided by philanthropic garden owners to their local Victory Diggers. Sir Jeremiah Colman, an august figure in the upper echelons of the RHS, who lived at Gatton Park in Surrey, wrote to The Times in late 1941, using a Biblical analogy with which his readers would have been thoroughly familiar:

  The importance of helping those who ‘dig for victory’ to furnish their plots would appear to have received too little attention. A serious shortage of suitable seed is reported, besides which smallholders are at a disadvantage in not having facilities for raising plants before the arrival of spring, and as a consequence their crop reaches maturity two or three months late. In private gardens where plants are raised under glass there is always a waste of surplus plants. A distribution of such crumbs as fall from the rich man’s table proves a great boon to the smallholder.

  I have put the theory to the test. The first distribution from my gardens, which consisted of some 20,000 plants, led to a scramble for participation by some 85 ‘diggers’ and proved such a success that I have given directions for special raisings to be made for distribution next season. Such favourites as onions, tomatoes, marrows &c., can only be brought to early maturity by being started under glass
.47

  In fact a number of parks departments also grew vegetable plants in their greenhouses and nurseries, which they sold to local gardeners and allotmenteers at a competitive price.

  The officers of the National Allotments Society fought hard on the ministerial committees to bring to the attention of the politicians the needs of allotmenteers, in particular for assurances on security of tenure. The politicians were adept at sidestepping the issue, since they knew that, in peace time, wartime allotments would either revert to their pre-war use or, in many instances, be built over. All that the Ministry of Agriculture was prepared to concede was that allotment holders would be compensated if the land were taken away during the cropping season.

  Other persistent problems associated with wartime allotments included widespread thieving and malicious or inadvertent damage. These were difficult to solve when there was usually no spare fencing or wire for making allotment gardens secure against trespassers and stray dogs. It was a matter that exercised allotmenteers, who were not slow to report their grievances to the Ministry. Robert Hudson received many letters from disheartened and disgruntled gardeners. Defence Regulation 62 provided that any unauthorised person on agricultural land would be guilty of trespass, and on 20 May 1943, an Order in Council decreed that trespass notices were not obligatory at allotment sites. One of the reasons for this was that they were often defaced or torn down. Conservative backbenchers opposed this measure, on the ground that it violated civil liberties. But the mood of the House was generally with the Minister of Agriculture, who explained:

  Before the war, in the overwhelming majority of cases, allotments were fenced, and therefore they were to some extent protected, and before the war the police had more leisure than they have to-day. Since the war we have been conducting an intensive ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, and we have been urging everyone who possibly could to make themselves and their families self-supporting in vegetables as a contribution to the war effort in order to save shipping and in order to release farmers for producing other crops. The result of that has been very striking. The number of allotments has risen from 930,000 to 1,675,000. The number of private gardens being cultivated for the growing of vegetables has risen from 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 [an astonishing statement, since there were only 3,500,000 private gardens at the start of the war and there was little house building during it]. Therefore the fact that that has been done has definitely made an invaluable – I use that word advisedly – contribution to our total war effort. But at the same time, as some Hon. Members have said, it is a regrettable fact that pilfering and damage, both malicious and involuntary, have been on the upgrade, and I have been receiving letters from all over the country in increasing numbers.

  After all, as part of this ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, we have taken vacant building plots scattered throughout towns and turned them into allotments. There is no fencing or anything, but everyone must know and recognise when a piece of ground is being cultivated. It may not be easy to define what an allotment is, but it is like an elephant – you recognise it when you see it. We want to make it abundantly clear to the public at large that for the period of the emergency, that ground is the property of the man who works it. The object of this is to serve with a notice all and sundry that an allotment belongs to the person who is working the land and also to his family . . . It is distasteful to us to have to bring in Regulations creating new offences, but we have been extremely patient; we have applied every possible alternative remedy we could think of.48

  It is significant that, in a debate about trespass, Hudson should have taken the opportunity to praise the contribution amateur gardeners made to the war effort and to boast of the success of the Dig for Victory campaign, however dubious the statistics he employed. It is also significant that, despite the many and various assaults on civil liberties that had already occurred since the war began, the Minister should still feel he had to explain to the House why he had added one more, very minor one.

  So serious was the problem of pilfering, however, that many allotment societies recruited ‘plot watchers’ to keep an eye on produce and materials, especially at night. Some were paid and others were public-spirited volunteers. In September 1941, a man from Penryn in Cornwall was sentenced to two months’ hard labour in prison for stealing onions and potatoes from a railway allotment, which shows just how sternly the authorities viewed the matter. In 1942, in St Helen’s in Lancashire, a man who stole 8d worth of onions was saved from a prison sentence only because he was seventy-three years old, while in Hampstead two women were fined £1 each for stealing runner beans.

  Humans were a nuisance to dedicated allotmenteers, but so were a whole range of domesticated and wild stock, from dogs (their owners were fined £5 if they were found running loose on an allotment site), sheep, rats, mice, cats and wild rabbits. In places, would-be growers cited the lack of netting and fencing as a serious deterrent to cultivating an allotment.

  The peaceful nature of allotments could be rudely shattered by far worse than wild or domestic livestock, however. Those allotments situated in or on the outskirts of British cities were no more immune from bomb attack than were houses. The admirably phlegmatic Mass-Observation diarist Herbert Brush, a retired Electricity Board Inspector from Sydenham, put down his thoughts in October 1940 after a particularly bad night of bombing, which he had spent mainly in the dugout in his garden, except when he was extinguishing a fire ignited by an ‘oil bomb’.

  3 p.m. W. and I went round to look at the allotment, but it was a case of looking for the allotment. Four perches49 out of the five are one enormous hole and all my potatoes and cabbages have vanished. Apparently the bomb fell on the footpath between two allotments and when it exploded had preference for mine, although I must say that there is not much left of Hardy’s and the plot on the other side of mine has a huge pile of my earth on it. The result is that all my work there has been wasted, absolutely wasted, and the potatoes at Christmas certainly will not come off my allotment, though if I have sufficient energy for some deep excavations I may find a potato or two somewhere in the mountain on each side of the ten-foot hole. When I went there the other day I noticed that there were several nice cabbages nearly ready to eat, and I meant to dig potatoes this weekend. Now I should have some difficulty in finding the place where they stood.50

  Only in the phrase ‘wasted, absolutely wasted’ can one catch a glimpse of his bitter disappointment.

  Late in the war, when London and its environs were plagued by V-1 and V-2 bombs, the school yard near Brush’s allotment was also hit:

  Thursday, 11th [January, 1945] W. and I went to the plot this afternoon to get some green food if possible. Deep snow lies on the allotments and it was not easy to find anything worth bringing home but I cut a couple of miserable-looking cabbages and managed to dig up a couple of roots of celery. Then we went to look at the bomb-hole [made by an unmanned V-2 rocket launched from northern France], which is about 60 yards away in the school playground.

  Huge boulders of clay are scattered all round the crater, which is the largest hole I have seen for a long time. I don’t like to guess at the size as it’s difficult to estimate with so much snow around, but when standing on the edge, the far side seemed to me more than 20 yards away and looking down the bottom of the hole might be 20 feet below . . .

  I think that if I had been working on the plot I should have stood very little chance of escape, as huge lumps of clay have been scattered far and wide, and I noticed several snow-covered lumps on my plot which I did not investigate, but feel sure they are lumps of clay from the bomb crater. The wooden fence between the plots and the playground has been swept away and some of the large trees have been smashed and twisted about as though they were small branches in the hands of a mischievous boy.’51

  Despite all the difficulties, there is no doubt that renting and working an allotment had a beneficial effect on town and city dwellers. There are countless testimonies to the relaxing and peaceful nature of
many of the tasks, and the satisfaction that could be derived from the exercise, the camaraderie and the healthy produce. It is true that it could be harmful to the health, when overdone. One Mass-Observation diarist wrote of her husband in April 1940: ‘He is all over aches and pains. Every time he gets up he groans and groans something chronic . . . It’s them allotments as gets him.’52 However, provided people did not crock themselves by digging too much in one go, many began to enjoy what the allotment had to offer them.

  That did not necessarily mean that they were good at vegetable gardening, even well into the war. In the summer of 1942, the Ministry of Agriculture was concerned that the average production of vegetables in small gardens and allotments was only half of what it should have been. In particular, the problem of feast and famine – too much in the summer, little or nothing in the winter – was still an issue; hence the continuing poster campaign to get gardeners growing the workaday but vital winter vegetables like cabbages, kale and leeks. After the 1942–3 season, a gardening paper calculated that almost 1,000,000 tons of vegetables53 had been produced on allotments, which is rather more than half a ton per allotment. In the light of the Ministry’s findings, this seems unlikely.