A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  The experience of Brighton stands as a representative example of how the Dig for Victory campaign played out in practice. Just before the war started, there were 2,600 allotments in Brighton and 150 smallholdings. In the summer of 1939, MAF had sent out a circular to all town clerks in England and Wales explaining the benefits of allotments, in case they needed to be told, and making clear the powers that local councils now possessed to requisition land for wartime allotments. After the September circular from MAF, advising that town councils should form a horticultural committee and appoint full-time technical instructors, the Brighton Allotment Subcommittee compiled a survey to discover just how many allotments existed, which ones were neglected or had tenants in arrears, and where there might be suitable land that could be requisitioned. Demand was strong and the council took over parcels of land in many parts of the town. By the end of February 1940, land amounting to 157 ten-rod allotments had been found, together with 129 rods that had not been used for many years. Schoolchildren became involved in allotment cultivation as well.

  The Allotment Subcommittee bought bulk fertilisers and seed and sold them at cost price to gardeners. In 1941, a model allotment was laid out in the grounds of the eighteenth-century Brighton Pavilion – which considering that its builder had been the sybaritic Prince Regent is a delicious collision of ideas – and overseen by the parks superintendent. It remained there until October 1944.

  At nearby Hove, however, there was opposition to an alderman’s suggestion that part of the town’s parks be ploughed up; since the beaches were off limits to civilians, parks were vital for leisure. People were allowed to sunbathe in the parks, with the deckchairs provided, and beach huts were moved and became allotment sheds.

  However, the civic organisation did not always run smoothly. On 22 February 1942, the Brighton and Hove Herald reported a spat in the Brighton council chamber over allegations from the Allotment Subcommittee about the efficiency of the volunteer Horticultural Committee. ‘It was further marked by the threat of a painful scene when Mr Ingram, having made some remark about Alderman Galliers which elicited a swift retort, crossed the council chamber, squared his shoulders, threw out his fists and adopted a fighting attitude. Alderman Galliers, undaunted, stood ready for anything – but fortunately restraining hands prevented “anything” happening.’54 The upshot of this contretemps was that a Food Production Committee was formed to take over the functions and responsibilities of the two committees. In March the following year, this committee was merged with the Wartime Meals Committee and the Kitchen Waste Committee and reconstituted as the Wartime Food Committee. It would seem that bureaucratic impulses and vain self-regard were features of the campaign quite as much as selfless patriotic action.

  Security of tenure, especially into the post-war world, seems always to have been a lively issue for those who took up wartime allotments in Brighton. Another was the lack of piped water in many allotment gardens; this mattered particularly for the cultivation of the many leafy vegetables that gardeners were urged to grow. Where water was available, 2d was added to the general rent of a shilling a rod. In late 1941, Brighton applied for a loan from the Ministry of Health to get water piped to allotments, and the improvements were made in due course.

  Brighton and Hove had problems with pilfering and wilful damage; so bad was it that volunteer special constables patrolled the worst-affected allotments. At one point, the Brighton magistrates warned that theft and damage would be severely dealt with, after two teenage girls were fined 2s.6d for taking fruit to the value of £2, with additional damages and costs.

  The two council nurseries produced vegetable seedlings for sale but the local traders muttered that they undercut them by selling seedlings to allotmenteers at just about cost price (two shillings per hundred); to which the answer came that there were so many new gardeners that the trade could not possibly have supplied them all. After all, by March 1941 the number of allotments in Brighton and Hove had more than doubled, from the pre-war figure of 2,750 to 6,000. As well as council allotments, another thousand plots were either privately owned and rented out, or leased from the Southern Railway.55 In December 1941, it was estimated that altogether these allotments had produced 10,000 tons of food, although that is a figure that would have been impossible to verify. As late as 1942, the council was still pegging out new allotments: in October, the Food Production Committee reported that there were 3,634 permanent allotments and 2,250 wartime allotments.

  Flower shows, such as the Brighton Police Horticultural Society Annual Show in August 1942, and the Brighton Horticultural Show in October of that year, showed the gardeners’ mettle. The latter included a Brains Trust in the evening, starring – inevitably – C.H. Middleton and Freddie Grisewood. The money raised at the show went to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton. The show was opened by no less a personage than Lord Woolton, who spoke of his ‘fearful responsibility’ and how he had to ‘run the risk of sacrificing the nation’s appetite in order to preserve the nation’s health’. Replying, Dr Donald Hall, JP, claimed that ‘apart from our peerless Prime Minister’ he did not know of any Minister of the Crown to whom so much was owed as Lord Woolton.56

  In February 1943, at the national launch of that year’s Dig for Victory campaign, Robert Hudson told his audience that the number of allotments now stood at 1,750,000 and four million families were growing their own vegetables, but that more were needed since the farmers were finding labour very difficult to get and needed to be able to concentrate on producing grain, potatoes, milk and sugar. Schools and hospitals in particular were urged to make themselves self-supporting in vegetables. A new slogan was coined: ‘Better Planning – Better Cropping’, because the authorities continued to be concerned that the quality of garden planning was not good enough for maximum production.

  Hudson was keen that year that gardeners should lay much less emphasis on growing potatoes. How much of a garden or allotment to give over to potatoes was a point for discussion and disagreement throughout the war, since commercial supplies fluctuated so wildly – one year a glut and the next a shortage – and with them fluctuated the advice from the Ministry, much to the exasperation of gardeners. This aspect of the campaign was only one of many examples of micro-management by government during the war, when bossiness had an official imprimatur, under the guise of promoting efficiency and productivity. However, The Gardeners’ Chronicle was inclined to the view that cottage and allotment gardeners would cling tenaciously to their potato patch, and no amount of government assurance about the availability of potatoes in shops would make them give up growing them.

  A Times leader of the time computed that 1,750,000 allotments amounted to 100,000 acres, or the size of Rutland, England’s smallest county, and mused on the power of the spade that it could dig a whole county. It went on to calculate that if private vegetable gardens were taken into account, that would mean Huntingdonshire had been dug as well.

  However, despite all this upbeat rhetoric, there were definite signs of fatigue amongst both gardeners and those whose job it was to help promote amateur food production, in particular the BBC. The Director of the Campaigns Division at the Ministry of Information, E. M. I. Buxton, sent out a preliminary memorandum to interested parties on 14 August 1943, which is very revealing about how government publicity worked:

  As a result of discussion between Campaigns Division and [the Ministry of] Agriculture it is agreed that the problem is to maintain the present number of Victory diggers and to raise the standard of cultivation in order to secure a bigger output with emphasis on winter vegetables. As the problem is one of maintaining existing enthusiasm rather than creating it, Campaigns Division believe that it will be possible to cut down some forms of publicity without detriment to the campaign as a whole.57

  Buxton outlined how the Ministry of Information intended to continue to insert regular weekly gardening items in national Sunday papers, as well as selected provincial papers, but they would omit the coldest weeks
of the year when gardening operations were suspended, so that there would probably be forty-four insertions rather than the fifty-two taken the year before. The technical press, such as The Gardeners’ Chronicle, however, would get the same information as before, as would women’s magazines and the Radio Times, which were targeted in the spring and summer months.

  There would be no sixteen-sheet posters for display on hoardings, but supplies of double-crown posters, blanks and banners for use in local drives would continue as before. The Ministry of Information also intended to print a four-page leaflet in two colours designed to convince waverers that however near the end of the war seemed, food rationing and restrictions would continue for several years afterwards, and that ‘Digging for Victory’ was still necessary. This leaflet was to be distributed at local shows.

  Buxton hoped that the BBC would continue the support that it was already giving to the campaign, and that the Films Division would maintain the supply of trailers and instructional films. As for exhibitions, the Ministry was intending to refurbish the existing displays, which told the Dig for Victory story, to save money: the last initiative had cost about £156,00058, but Buxton was hopeful that this one would be about £100,000. He was trying to avoid saying that things were winding down, but they plainly were.

  Nevertheless, the Dig for Victory campaign lasted throughout the war: there were always more people, it seemed, who needed encouragement to start digging their gardens as well as advice on growing vegetables. And there were plenty of allotment gardeners who had given up after a while, disheartened by the inherent difficulties and – often – lack of very concrete rewards, or just plain exhausted, who needed to be invigorated once more.

  In December 1944, Robert Hudson appealed to gardeners not to rest on their spades, again emphasising that shortages would last beyond the end of the war. And in January 1945, the Ministry issued the first of twelve monthly ‘Allotment and Garden’ guides. These were aimed at new gardeners, were illustrated with line drawings, and were heavily reliant on existing ‘Dig for Victory’ leaflets. Each month’s guide begins with a folksy or poetic quotation, such as: ‘April, April, Laugh thy girlish laughter; Then the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears.’ However, there was plenty of common sense along with the whimsy, such as: ‘Good Friday is the traditional day for potato planting; but the wise gardener knows that it’s risky to stick to traditions: he pays more attention to soil and weather conditions.’59 The last guide was published in December 1945. By then everyone had had quite enough.

  Separating fact from myth when considering the efficacy of the Dig for Victory campaign, both for shoring up morale and for the provision of otherwise scarce nutritious foodstuffs, is not an easy matter. The campaign’s success has become one of the enduring ‘facts’ of the war. The slogan has echoed to us down the years, and is facilely invoked by any modern politician wishing to give themselves ‘green’ credentials, or to inspire in their audience a sense of the value of working for a common purpose and a common good – even if the comparison makes them look ridiculous in the process.

  Wartime newspapers and magazines were certainly full of anecdotal evidence that the campaign was a huge success, as we have seen, but this evidence was naturally selective. After all, editors had to be careful not to print anything that might possibly be construed as unpatriotic if they did not wish to risk drawing down the government’s wrath, or the criticism of their readers. It is certainly possible that they were never told fully the results of the surveys conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture to try to discover how successful the Dig for Victory publicity campaigns had been, to count the number of wartime allotments that were occupied, or to find out how much produce was generated in gardens and allotments.

  In August and September 1942, the Ministry of Agriculture carried out ‘An Inquiry into the Effects of the “Dig for Victory” Campaign’. This was a survey of nearly 3,000 gardeners and allotment holders.60 Its results are surprising to us and would perhaps also have surprised wartime gardeners. For example, the proportion of households that were growing vegetables was only just above half, at 55.2 per cent. Although 91 per cent of households in rural areas were growing vegetables (i.e. practically all with gardens), the number barely reached 50 per cent in urban areas. The figures in the north were particularly low: 39 per cent of households in the north of England and 41.4 per cent in Scotland.61 Although, generally speaking, gardeners had increased vegetable production at the expense of flowers, the surveyors also discovered that town dwellers with gardens were more likely to continue to concentrate only or mainly on flowers.

  Depressingly for the Ministry, only 16 per cent of those questioned attributed their lease of an allotment to its publicity campaign. Indeed, the report expressed disappointment at the relative failure of their information, especially about the all-important cropping plan.62 But there was satisfaction that the emphasis on the importance of growing green-leaved vegetables in the winter was having some effect. In 1941, 14 per cent of the sample was not growing brassicas, while the figure had gone down to 4.5 per cent in 1942.

  One of the signal successes of the campaign appeared to be the fact that 75 per cent of the sample had compost heaps, while about two thirds understood that they should not spray for potato blight in polluted industrial districts (because of the risk of cumulative chemical damage to plants).

  The surveyors were, understandably, keen to discover how enthusiastic women were as vegetable gardeners, but had problems finding enough female allotment holders to interview, which in itself is indicative. However, the report concluded that those women who did take allotments seemed to manage about as well as the men, although they could usually call on more assistance, especially with the digging.

  It is likely that the report’s authors may also have been rather surprised by the findings; they were certainly not very pleased. They could not resist criticising new allotment holders for the quality of their cultivations: ‘Almost everywhere local authorities commented to us upon the failure of many gardeners to adopt the best methods for success . . . We had numerous examples shown to us of crop failure through the omission of elementary precautions.’63

  On the subject of publicity, the report concluded that ‘in this respect there remains a very considerable amount to be done before the Ministry of Agriculture really has gardening habits in this country under anything like complete control’.64 It is a wonder that they ever thought they would – or could.

  However upbeat Robert Hudson might have appeared in his public utterances, it is certain that his Ministry officials were not happy with the impact of the Dig for Victory campaign on new gardeners & allotment holders, which they concluded ‘has been fairly satisfactory throughout the war’.65 ‘Fairly satisfactory’ is scarcely a rip-roaring success, although no one was going to tell the public that.

  At just the time when this survey was being collated, C. H. Middleton wrote in his Daily Express column:

  We can turn our gardens into munitions factories, for potatoes and other vegetables are munitions of war as surely as shells and bullets are . . . Do not think of your allotment as an ordeal or wartime sacrifice. Regard it as your pleasant and profitable recreation . . . And what can be said of the campaign so far? We have shouted ‘Dig for Victory!’ from screen, platform and poster. Has it produced the expected results? Broadly speaking, I think so. The country is definitely garden minded, but we still have a long way to go.’66

  In his perspicacious way, Middleton had reached the nub of the matter. The country had become ‘garden minded’, which was a significant result, but that did not mean everyone by any means wanted to put their shoulders to the wheel.

  Similarly telling was the survey on garden and allotment produce, dated 30 December 1944, produced by the Surveys Branch of the Reconstruction Division of MAF.67 This survey would have had modern market researchers scratching their heads, for it excluded rural areas completely, on the dubious grounds that most vegetables and fruits that were co
nsumed in country districts would have come from gardens and allotments, an assumption which should never have been made. Nevertheless, the findings certainly undermine the rosy picture of the urban population continuing to spend its spare time cheerfully acquiring blisters on their hands, and triumphantly carrying home enormous cabbages in string bags.

  By June 1944, less than half of urban households could be persuaded to cultivate vegetables and fruit: when all households were added together, 34.4 per cent grew vegetables and fruit in their gardens, 6.5 per cent grew them in allotments, 4.4 per cent grew them in both gardens and allotments, and 54.7 per cent did not grow them at all. 10.9 per cent of households cultivated an allotment: what a lot of publicity effort had gone into achieving even that modest figure.68

  The regional statistics were even more stark. The north-west of England turned in the worst figures, with 28 per cent of households growing vegetables, which means that nearly three quarters of urban and suburban households in that region had either failed to buy into the campaign, had been unable to satisfy their desire to do so, or had had enough of it and stopped. The north-east fared only a little better with 32 per cent and Scotland 38 per cent, while the most enthusiastic growers were in the south, in particular the south-west (58 per cent) and south-east, with 68 per cent in the latter region cultivating a garden or allotment. Inner London did as badly as the north-west, although the suburbs turned in better figures, not surprisingly, since 50 per cent of households in the suburbs had gardens, while that number dropped to 23 per cent in inner London. The highest take-up of allotments was in the south-west of England, followed by the south-east, then the Midlands.69

  Also remarkable were the statistics concerned with class: 58 per cent of urban or suburban working-class households and 31 per cent of middle-class ones had neither a garden nor an allotment in the summer of 1944.