A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  The experience of the Great War had convinced most people who lived through it that there would be food shortages, and associated rationing, and that growing more food in Great Britain was absolutely vital. They also expected the threat from German submarines to feature prominently once again, preventing or disrupting the import of a great many staples such as coal, but also tropical and subtropical fruits – bananas, pineapples, oranges and lemons – as well as hardy vegetables like carrots and onions, which had mainly been imported into Britain from western Europe during the 1930s. In 1939, at a time when central planning was frequently muddled and incoherent, there was no doubting official determination to feed the embattled nation.

  From 1938 onwards, as war looked increasingly likely, there had been public debate on the morality of rationing food. Many politicians, especially on the Left, maintained that in the last six months of the First World War it had been the fairest means of distributing vital foodstuffs in short supply. There were some dissenting voices: according to the Daily Express, ‘The public should revolt against the food rationing system, that dreadful and terrible iniquity . . . There is no necessity for the trouble and expense of rationing.’22 Nevertheless, by the time war broke out, the population in general seemed to have accepted that rationing was inevitable and were grimly resigned. Indeed, in November a British Institute of Public Opinion poll found that 60 per cent of those questioned thought rationing necessary. Some shopkeepers had already started to conduct their own rationing, keeping back basic supplies for their regular customers.

  After war broke out, there was a flurry of intense activity by the government to ensure that every British citizen was counted. Not only did ration books need to be issued, but an accurate census was necessary for the purpose of conscription and in order to keep tabs on potential enemies of the state. 29 September 1939 was National Registration Day, after which every adult and child received a unique identity card.

  Forthcoming rationing was announced on 1 November 1939, and came into force on 8 January 1940. Each household had to register with a supplier for the rationed items, which initially consisted of bacon, butter and cheese, but later included sugar, tea, eggs, meat and sweets. Vegetarians were issued with a special ration book, which entitled them to more cheese and eggs as substitutes for meat. Unlike other items, meat was rationed by price rather than by weight. (From 23 September 1939, petrol – for the 10 per cent of the population who owned a car – was severely rationed to seven gallons a month, allowing for journeys of no more than 200 miles.)

  Rationing was just one part of the answer to the problem of providing enough nutritious food for everyone; increasing home food production was the other. On 2 September 1939, the first task for Mr W. Gavin – Agricultural Adviser at the Ministry of Agriculture – was to organise the setting-up of War Agricultural Executive Committees for each county in the United Kingdom under the Cultivation of Lands Order, 1939. This order authorised the ‘War Ags’, as they became universally known, to exercise on the Minister of Agriculture’s behalf ‘certain powers conferred on him by the Defence Regulations for the purpose of increasing home food production in time of war’.23 The Minister sent a circular letter to these county committees, outlining their immediate task: to bring into tillage another one and a half million acres of land in England and Wales. In order to achieve this, he promised them as free a hand as possible.

  The War Ags became the main engines for the official dissemination of information and expertise to farmers and commercial gardeners during wartime. Ministry officials, landowners, farmers, gardeners and scientists sat on these committees; their tasks ranged from compelling (often reluctant) farmers to put their grass pasture under the plough to organising lecturers to speak to village Women’s Institutes. In counties where there were a lot of commercial horticultural operations, a horticulture subcommittee was established, which employed paid advisers. By mid April 1940, 10,000 square miles or 1,900,000 acres of pasture had been ploughed up to provide wheat that before the war had mainly been imported from Canada, as well as other foods like potatoes and cabbages.24

  But British agriculture could not produce everything required, especially vitamin-rich lemons and bananas. By 1939, nutritionists were already well aware of the vitamins required for health, both in adults and children. They knew which diseases and conditions were the result of deficiencies, rickets in children being the most common and harmful of these. They also knew that the British were not as healthy as they should have been. In 1938, it was estimated by Sir John Boyd Orr, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on the science of nutrition, that half of the population had a diet deficient in some nutrients, while a third (primarily the urban working classes) had a ‘seriously inadequate diet’.25 Just as the imminent prospect of food rationing naturally increased the collective desire of keen gardeners to grow their own food, by definition unrationed, so the realisation that the population needed both health-giving vitamins and morale-boosting variety in their diets meant that the government was keen to encourage them to do so.

  It was obvious, to the home Ministries at least, that gardeners had an important part to play in providing vitamin-rich green leaf vegetables, salads, onions, carrots and tomatoes, to take the place of imported fruit and vegetables. And the authorities knew this had to get under way quickly, since they had learned important lessons from the experience of the First World War, when shortages were already extremely acute before production by gardeners finally achieved substantial proportions in 1917. They were particularly keen on increasing the number of allotments under cultivation, since this would give the millions of urban dwellers without gardens the opportunity to grow their own vegetables.

  Early on, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries estimated that productive home gardens and allotments together could produce as much as a quarter of non-cereal supplies. This was just one of the many unprovable and often highly optimistic statistics that issued from the Ministry during the war years, but it had a marked influence on policy – and public attitudes.

  Interestingly, MAF officials did not consider the cultivation of allotments as purely for the production of extra fruit and vegetables. In an internal minute dated 8 September 1939, a Mr Sanders is reported as saying: ‘Stress should be laid on the need for as large an increase as possible in the number of allotments, not only on account of the importance of augmenting the quantity of health giving foodstuffs, but also because of the steadying effect [my italics] of work on plots on the large body of persons who will be concerned with allotment work.’26 Three days earlier, G.W. Giles, the Secretary of the National Allotments Society, had told the Minister of Agriculture in a letter that one of the latter’s predecessors, Lord Ernle, had said that during the First World War, allotments did more than anything else to ‘steady the nation’s nerves’.27 Giles also reminded Dorman-Smith that the latter had once said that the ‘recreational and health-giving properties of allotments were probably of more importance than the produce grown upon them’. It was Giles’s opinion that they were of equal value and importance. Whenever the subject of home-grown produce was brought up in Parliament, legislators would line up to praise the advantages – economic, recreational and even spiritual – of kitchen gardening. For example, in the House of Lords, the Marquess of Crewe referred to ‘the moral advantage, which the people derive from their [allotment’s] existence’.28 These assumptions informed what soon became known as the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign (see Chapter Three).

  The period between 3 September 1939 and 10 May 1940, when the Germans invaded the Low Countries, was known as the ‘Phoney War’ or ‘Bore War’ because, despite the dire forecasts, and the presence of a large British Expeditionary Force in France, there was little fighting.29 During this time, although not physically threatened as feared, British civilians had to get used to many unpleasant or dreary restrictions. The restriction they loathed most was the necessity to darken their homes at dusk, using blackout curtain and blind material, boards or shu
tters. Instantly, houses were cast into a Stygian gloom, which depressed their occupants, even though they accepted the necessity of it.30 ARP31 wardens patrolled nightly to see that the blackout was strictly enforced and ‘Put that light out!’ became a common refrain: many perfectly respectable people found themselves summonsed to the magistrates’ court to be fined because of an evening’s carelessness. The headlamps of cars also had to be covered, except for a narrow strip which cast a thin, dim light on the road ahead; small wonder that the blackout was a major contributory factor in the record-breaking numbers of deaths, particularly of pedestrians, on the roads during the war. Torches had to be treated in the same way as headlights, with the result that people bumped into each other or lamp posts in the dark, and women were often frightened to go out at night. And any gardener who had once relied on street lights to provide enough illumination to dig his vegetable plot after tea in the winter would now have to depend on moonlight instead.

  Meanwhile, the Royal Horticultural Society, like many other voluntary organisations, was preparing itself for the challenges ahead. From July 1939 onwards, the council had been discussing emergency plans, in particular for the evacuation of staff from Wisley, since it might have been in the invasion path to London – although in the event that did not happen. The rarest books in the Lindley Library were moved to a safe haven in Aberystwyth in west Wales. Oddly, once the Blitz began, many other books were taken from the Lindley Library to Wisley, obviously no longer considered in danger. The offices there already housed collections from the John Innes Horticultural Institution, particularly vulnerable to bomb damage at Merton, which was nearer to London. As early as October 1938, E. A. Bunyard, a Kentish fruit and rose nurseryman and stalwart RHS supporter (of whom we shall hear more in Chapter Eight), had produced a report for the RHS on the organisation of emergency food growing for wartime, a report which was to strongly influence government thinking.32 In it he advocated a planned approach, suggested that increased amounts of seed that might become scarce should be obtained, that there should be vegetable trials in various parts of the country, and that those vegetables with high protein levels such as haricot beans should be tested for their suitability. As for fruit, he thought that maximising production was of the essence; this could best be achieved by good pruning and hygiene in orchards. He recommended that instructional information and pamphlets be devised, and to this end he chaired a committee to develop them.

  As a result of Bunyard’s recommendations, in September 1939 the Society initiated a programme of lectures and demonstrations for the general public. It later became a member of the Domestic Food Producers Council and willing expert adviser to the nascent Dig for Victory campaign.

  At the same time, Bunyard stressed in the RHS Journal how important it was that people should not assume that, with the suspension of the flower shows, there remained little point to the Society. In his opinion, Fellows would need the expert advice and encouragement that they received from the Journal, in all branches of horticulture. Receiving the Journal was the principal privilege of being an RHS Fellow, and the best way of keeping in touch with the Society’s work. He suggested to the Council that it continue monthly with a quarter or a third devoted to wartime gardening. As a result, the Journal was published throughout the war, even if, by necessity, it did become a shadow of its pre-war size in the middle years.

  Inevitably, however, the war did clip the wings of the Society. Initially, the fortnightly shows at Vincent Square were cancelled,33 as was the Chelsea Flower Show; no yearbooks were published; the RHS ceased to give money to subsidise plant-hunting expeditions, since these had been thwarted by the uncertainties of the international situation; and the trials at Wisley were truncated, with those remaining being mainly of vegetable varieties. The numbers of Fellows and Associates steadily declined during the war to 26,492 at the end of 1941 and 24,772 in 1942.34 This decline was to prove a headache for the Society, as it needed the revenue from subscriptions and advertising in order to carry out its work on the food production programme and the useful trials at Wisley.

  In the summer of 1939, E. A. Bunyard, in some financial difficulty, resigned from the Council and the other committees on which he had served voluntarily in order to take up a paid position as Keeper of the Library and editor of the RHS publications. The vacancy on the Council was filled by Dr H. V. Taylor. Taylor became an important link between the Society and the Ministry of Agriculture throughout the war, in particular on matters concerning the Dig for Victory campaign.

  The RHS could only influence its own members, in the main. But in September 1939, millions of ordinary people needed to achieve a mental transition from peace to war, in gardening quite as much as other spheres of domestic life. Helping people to change course radically required a concentrated effort by the print and broadcast media. Newspapers were understandably a little slow off the mark; peacetime theorising about war is a very different matter from the fact itself. The Gardeners’ Chronicle, for example, was still concerned with peaceful matters even on the day before war broke out. There were, for example, descriptive reports on the late August Southport Show. However, on the subject of the last RHS show, it commented: ‘In all the circumstances a large show could not be expected at this fortnightly meeting of the RHS . . .’35 And there was an advertisement in the Situations Vacant section for ‘Experienced gardener, good all-round man, in case of War, SINGLE-HANDED. Wife as Laundress . . .’36 These particulars show a clear appreciation that many gardeners, especially the youngsters, would not be able to avoid the imminent call-up.

  By the following Saturday, the Chronicle was up to speed, or rather its advertisers were, with insertions such as: ‘Circumstances prevent the holding of our Annual Vegetable Show by seedsmen, Dickson and Robinson’ and ‘Owing to the International Situation, Stokesley Show for September 21st has been cancelled’. The Dahlia Society did not hold its annual exhibition, which must have been a great disappointment to gardeners who had striven all season to get these pampered darlings of the tender flower world to as near unblemished perfection as possible.

  Most interesting is the editorial on wartime gardening, which appeared in that issue, the first of the war:

  Everybody whose whole time is not engaged in other forms of national defence, and who has a garden or garden plot or allotment, can render good service to the community by cultivating it to the fullest possible extent. By that is meant not only getting the largest amount of produce from the soil, but also in keeping the ground in good heart, for the war upon which we have entered may last a long time and therefore next year must be considered as well as this year.37

  No one was deluded into thinking it would all be over by Christmas this time. The editorial went on to advise on the importance of not letting pests spoil produce, ‘as so much is so often damaged and wasted in the kindlier days of peace’.

  As early as this issue, professional gardeners, as represented by the contributors and editor, also put down a marker regarding flowers: ‘Subject always to the great needs of food production imposed by war-time conditions, flowers of all kinds may play their part by brightening parks and gardens and bringing cheerfulness into homes, hospitals and sick rooms.’ And the editor offered the hope that autumn orders for bulbs would not be cancelled, ‘as springtime will come as certainly as summer and winter, and we may need the beauty of flowers when there may be so much that is unbeautiful, pitiful and painful. Moreover, flowers inspire faith, hope, cheerfulness and courage, and these we may need in large measure until brighter and more peaceful conditions are reached.’38 This hope must also have been based on the fact that the Chronicle numbered amongst its readers and advertisers many ornamental plant nurserymen, who were understandably extremely anxious to see that the bottom did not fall precipitately out of their market on the declaration of war.

  The Gardeners’ Chronicle editorial on 16 September, while acknowledging the many very knowledgeable amateurs in the country, opined that there were innumerable gard
ens where neglect was rife and whose vegetable and fruit crops were far smaller than they should be. It was hoped that a garden committee of the older gardeners and skilled amateurs would be formed in every parish, to advise people on how to make their gardens more productive.

  In the same issue, there was also a heartfelt plea from the President of the Horticultural Trades Association – the organisation for the nursery trade, both then and now – for people not to cancel their plant orders, since nurserymen needed to sell their existing stocks of plants – bare-rooted trees, shrubs and fruit bushes, as well as herbaceous plants – before moving over to food production.39

  Nurserymen such as R. Tucker and Sons of Faringdon couched their appeals for custom in patriotic terms: ‘Together with all nurserymen we have offered our entire resources to the government and are doing everything in our power to produce more food. However, unless we can clear large quantities of our stock during the next six months we shall not be able to carry out our obligations. We therefore appeal to our customers to plant as usual.’40 They also played on the gardener’s natural anxiety about shortages, saying that the need to increase acreage for food production would lead to depleted stocks – and inflated prices – in the future.

  The Gardeners’ Chronicle initially advised readers against digging up lawns to grow vegetables, since it was thought they would be needed for grazing small animals, such as rabbits and Indian Runner ducks, which would provide manure to promote soil fertility in vegetable gardens. On 30 September, the editorial leader suggested that gardeners grow ‘the more handsome’ vegetables in herbaceous borders, in a move that anticipated the ‘integrated gardening’ trend of the 1980s. Suggestions included ‘Painted Lady’ runner beans, cardoons, beetroot, even potatoes, as well as immortelles (everlastings), for displaying in the house in winter. The periodical was also beginning to warn against ‘early forcing’ of fruit and vegetables, because of the heating required to do it, and recommended instead the use of glass cloches as a way of extending the growing season at both ends of the year. ‘Cloches against Hitler’ soon became the catchy, if rather fatuously grandiose, slogan for promoting the inexpensive protection and gentle forcing of crops in the garden.