One of the findings that overtly surprised the civil servants was that garden and allotment cultivation did not have the marked effect on the purchases of commercial fruit and vegetables by working-class households that they had either expected or hoped.70 The surveyors measured the number of ounces of various vegetables eaten by each person in a week. With the exception of potatoes, cabbages and rhubarb, there was no very great difference in the amount that gardeners and non-gardeners bought in the shops. Even in the summer months, when garden produce formed the largest proportion of consumption, it only represented 20–30 per cent in value. Working-class households in towns, in particular, were nowhere near becoming self-sufficient in vegetables.
Much of the propaganda about the importance of growing vegetables at home in order to release agricultural land for growing other crops, like wheat, must therefore have fallen on deaf ears. You can sense the disappointment behind the carefully worded official report, which pronounced that ‘the difference in purchases between those with and those without gardens and allotments was not always of significant dimensions’.71
When considering these results, it is important to set them against the backdrop of a generally public-spirited population who, though they might have grumbled, were in no doubt of the importance of ‘doing their bit’.72 So it was not lack of a desire to contribute that led to the unimpressive figures.
There are a number of factors that may help to explain the lack of enthusiasm. Most able-bodied adults under sixty-five had many other burdens imposed on them; the men were either in the services or had Home Guard, ARP or fire-watching duties. Women were conscripted for the first time from late 1941, when single women and childless widows between the ages of twenty and thirty became liable for national service of some kind. By 1943, the lower limit was nineteen and the upper limit forty.
Another possible explanation might be that emergency provision of spare land for allotments did not satisfy demand in the large, densely populated conurbations in the north-west and north-east. However, the fact that many local councils at different times reported that not all their available allotments had been taken up seems to suggest apathy rather than lack of provision.
Certainly, climatic differences between the north and the south meant that kitchen gardening was likely to be more rewarding in the south; that is what the Ministry officials concluded at least. They also assumed, probably rightly, that ownership of a garden tended to mean a higher economic status, and therefore increased consumption, especially of the more expensive vegetables, such as peas and lettuces, which was why garden owners still bought quantities of vegetables in the shops.73
However, it is impossible to avoid the general conclusion that many town-dwellers – for reasons of old age, infirmity, lack of time or even inclination – were impervious to the blandishments of Ministry propaganda throughout the entire war. In mitigation, much of the gardening that they were being encouraged to take up was of the dreariest and least rewarding kind. Picking sun-warm greenhouse tomatoes to add to a salad is a pleasure; weeding round shot-holed brassicas on a windswept allotment is not. It is surely permissible to infer that at least some civilians hated that kind of gardening so much that no higher authority could persuade them that it was worth their while, when there was so much else to occupy their scarce leisure hours. However, it would have been distinctly unpatriotic to say so out loud.
Keen gardeners certainly noticed their contemporaries’ lack of enthusiasm, and reported it to the gardening papers. In October 1941, a correspondent to The Gardeners’ Chronicle opined: ‘There is reluctance on the part of many to do anything towards the conversion of even a part of their garden . . . but they should realize the issue at stake justifiably demands that a portion at least should be made productive . . . There seems no way of getting at these people, unfortunately . . .’74 And nor indeed was there, however hard the government tried.
It can be no surprise that the Dig for Victory campaign came in for a fair bit of gentle ribbing, both from ordinary citizens and from journalists – although not gardening writers, who appear to have been generally ‘on side’ and to whom levity was foreign. The earnestness with which the Ministry of Agriculture approached a matter that, for many private citizens, was peripheral to their wartime experience was bound to find expression in humorous scepticism. There were always some people, especially amongst the educated classes, who mocked the publicity campaigns for the humourless piety of their tone, their confected enthusiasm, their naked appeals to blind patriotism, or even their futility. And the professional humorists joined in.
According to Peter Ender, a contributor to the weekly periodical Punch, who wrote and illustrated a slim volume, Up the Garden Path, published in 1944:
There are several types of gardens. There are front gardens, kitchen gardens, bedroom gardens, back gardens, halfback gardens, inside-forward gardens, zoological gardens, hanging gardens and swinging gardens.
But for the purpose of supplementing the government’s Dig-for-Dear-Life campaign, to which this book is dedicated, we shall confine ourselves principally to a discussion directed around back gardens.
The back garden is often situated at the rear of the house, and is easily discerned as facing the door, which has no knocker. It is generally in the open air although, in colder districts, many back gardens are rolled up and taken indoors at night.75
This mildly satirical take-off of the campaign seems tame and innocent nonsense by modern standards. It’s not very funny either: ‘The Ministry of Agriculture has announced that if every citizen begins cultivation of his garden to the fullest possible extent, there will be enough melons alone to keep eleven million garage doors open.’
There is a running gag in the book, consisting of a succession of cartoons in which the author depicts a ship sinking, a condemned man about to be hanged, even a missionary in a cannibal’s cooking pot, with one character saying to another: ‘Grand planting weather.’ You obviously needed to be there. And you have to wonder how the following joke went down, even at a time in England when casual anti-Semitism was endemic: ‘Jerusalem Artichokes are still popular in England although on the Continent they grow mainly in concentration camps.’76
In Punch, Lady Addle, Mary Dunn’s fictional grande dame, had helpful horticultural experience to relate for the good of her readers:
The beautiful clock golf course at Coot’s Balder . . . is now given over to groundsel for the estate canaries, the Duke of Quorn’s fernery is a beetery, while Lord Sealyham’s famous eighteenth century maze was sacrificed to make asparagus beds for his evacuees; an extremely difficult task, involving endless labour digging the beds in all the tortuous twists and turns of the maze. The sad thing is that the labour was in vain, as it transpired afterwards that the evacuees would only eat asparagus if it had first been tinned . . .
As for our garden at Bengers, we have of course tried to do our bit for the garden front, but I fear that it has not been altogether successful. I sacrificed my water garden to aubergines, only to find that they would not grow in a damp place, or in fact in England at all. I installed tomato plants in the weeping willow walk, thinking their gay colour would light up the avenue, which gets practically no sun during the day (nor at night of course), but the tiresome things just would not ripen. I also tried, unsuccessfully, to grow mustard and cress, on old pieces of Addle’s shirts, on the statuary along the terrace. Then we have been very unfortunate with pests. All our radishes have suffered from slut weevil, and an entire crop of early parsley was devoured by the fell sod fly. In fact, so ill-fated did we appear to be in this direction, that at one time I thought it might be best to yield to Dame Nature’s stern decrees, and so made all plans for encouraging the woolly aphis in our orchards, as I felt sure there must be some method of gathering and spinning their product in order to save shipping space for imported wool.77
Even the most committed and cheerful of Victory Diggers will have felt something of Lady Addle’s despair from time to t
ime. Considering the abnormal and difficult circumstances, perhaps the wonder is that half of all households actually did grow their own vegetables, rather than that the other half did not.
CHAPTER FOUR
WOMEN AND CHILDREN GO TO IT
AS YOUNG MEN left home and their retired fathers or grandfathers returned to work in their old occupations, or signed up for onerous civil defence duties, much additional work inevitably fell on the shoulders of the millions of women still at home. The Ministry of Agriculture tried to persuade them that vegetable gardening was one of the important tasks that they could and should do, and that they were perfectly capable of managing a home vegetable plot or an allotment successfully. Unfortunately for MAF, there were very few female role models amongst professional gardeners, and most people of both sexes believed that the kitchen garden was men’s rightful domain. Women would require a substantial shift in mindset if they were to play a useful part both as producers of their own fresh vegetables and as employed market gardeners.
Altering this mindset would not be straightforward. In the early days of the war, there was undoubtedly a widespread, if mild, prejudice against women as gardeners. They were not thought to be ‘up to it’. This letter to the gardening press was typical:
A photograph of . . . nurses digging up Tavistock Square must have caused some amusement to practical men. What a picture! Dutch hoes were being used, and the nurses wore low shoes. Probably an enthusiastic press photographer tried to score a ‘bull’ but only got an ‘outer’. Another illustration I saw was of a girl demonstrating spring Cabbage planting, also in low shoes – not to mention silk stockings.1
The male correspondent had realised that these were propaganda photographs – probably using models or women called off the street – but he betrayed an attitude about women as gardeners that was common-place. Incidents of prejudice against women allotmenteers might be expressed in nothing worse than a patronising jocularity, but even that must have been thoroughly off-putting to any woman new to the task. True, by February 1940, the gardening magazine Garden Work for Amateurs was commenting: ‘Reports from various sources indicate that women gardeners are making a splendid response to the Minister of Agriculture’s “Dig for Victory” Appeal. Local authorities have already received numerous applications from women for allotments.’ But words like ‘splendid’ and ‘numerous’, which appeared frequently in press accounts, are too nebulous to be trustworthy. The writer went on to say: ‘Provided that the initial digging and trenching is carried out by the sterner sex, I can see no reason at all why a woman cannot run an allotment with the greatest success.’2
The redoubtable members of the Women’s Institute at least had no patience with leaving the heavy work to the sterner sex. The same magazine ran this story the following month:
The National Federation of Women’s Institutes plans to make a survey of all village allotments and derelict gardens with a view to putting them to the best possible use in growing foodstuffs and feeding material for pigs and poultry [with the permission of the owner]. A scheme has also been evolved where Institute members will, where necessary, carry on all the work of cultivation of plots owned by men called to the services.3
This is just one amongst many examples of concerted wartime action by the Women’s Institute, the only organisation in England and Wales that consisted entirely of rural women. The idea of countrywomen joining together for companionship, education and to promote the public good had spread from rural Canada to the British Isles during the First World War, and the first village-based Institute in Britain was founded in Llanfairpwyll on Anglesey in 1915.4 This Institute’s first resolution set the tone for future endeavours: ‘We, the members of the Llanfair Women’s Institute, pledge ourselves to do our utmost to make the Institute the centre of good in our neighbourhood.’5 It is salutary to remember that, until the foundation of Women’s Institutes, there was no community focus for village women, apart from the church or chapel, since they were not welcomed in pubs and usually denied the chance to share masculine leisure pursuits such as cricket and football.6
Many more Institutes came into being during the war. Their formation was in part a response to the dire shortage of food, as a result of the tightening of the German U-boat blockade in 1917. But only in part: there were growing numbers of educated people in England and Wales who considered that countrywomen deserved the kind of opportunities for social interaction and education that many of their urban sisters enjoyed, rather than simply having to bring up large families in cramped, often insanitary conditions. In this regard, countrywomen were the tangential beneficiaries of the (mainly) urban-based suffragette movement.
Of these educated women, the most influential was Lady (Trudie) Denman. The success of the Women’s Institute movement owed a great deal to her drive, vision, humanity, tact and genius for organisation. Her name is only remembered now by those members of the WI who enrol on courses at Denman College in Oxfordshire, which was opened by the National Federation of Women’s Institutes soon after the war; yet she played an exceptionally valuable and significant role in our story, both as Chairman of the NFWI – right from its inception in 1917 until 1946 – and as Director, chief organiser and moving spirit behind the Women’s Land Army from 1938 until the end of the war.
Gertrude Denman was the daughter of Sir Weetman Pearson, a rich and powerful businessman with interests in many enterprises, in particular oil, large-scale construction projects and newspapers. He had been made the first Viscount Cowdray in 1910. He was a prominent Liberal and inculcated his daughter with many of his high-minded beliefs. In 1905 he gave her a country house, Balcombe Place, in Sussex, along with 3,000 acres, for her twenty-first birthday, a gift which was to prove extremely useful for her war work.
Two years earlier, she had married Thomas, the 3rd Baron Denman, who was a Liberal peer. As a young married woman, Lady Denman was active in the women’s suffrage movement, serving on the National Executive of the Women’s Liberal Foundation. During the First World War she busied herself with charity work – including organising morale-boosting ‘smokes’ for the Forces and encouraging people to keep poultry – until she was elected Chairman of the NFWI. She also helped to found the Women’s Land Army, and was therefore well known to the Ministry of Agriculture.
From the beginning, the organisation of the Women’s Institutes was purposely decentralised. The individual village Institutes were affiliated to county federations, which themselves looked to the National Federation. The small size and geographical limits of village Institutes meant that they were well placed to foster local community spirit. The fact that few members had transport of their own, beyond a bicycle, did not matter. The women who joined the Institutes in their thousands in the 1920s and 1930s were motivated partly by an urge to improve their skills and widen their outlook, and partly by a desire for a social life outside the home, at least for one evening or afternoon a month.7 The motto of the organisation was ‘For Home and Country’, a rallying cry likely to appeal strongly to women, some of whom had acquired the vote in 1918.8
One of the more interesting features of the WI movement was how many well-to-do and often cultivated women felt moved to help found local Institutes or to join the committees of those already in existence. This was probably the first time that countrywomen had come together socially, without significant class barriers to divide them, and the experience boded well for co-operation in wartime. The fact that ladies of wealth and standing were involved favourably predisposed politicians and Whitehall mandarins towards the organisation. How could it not be so when Queen Mary agreed to be the first President of the Sandringham WI? The story goes that she sent a lady-in-waiting to give the treasurer one pound as her membership fee, and the woman returned with eighteen shillings change, since all members paid the same subscription.
The WI – together with many other voluntary organisations in wartime, such as the Women’s Voluntary Service – could depend particularly on public-spirited women
who were unmarried or childless. In 1939, those approaching middle age were of the generation that had lost husbands, sweethearts or the chance to find one at Passchendaele or on the Somme. Miss Grace Hadow, Vice-Chairman of the NFWI, Miss Frances Farrer, National Secretary, and Miss Edith Walker, Agricultural Secretary, were unencumbered women of energy, enterprise and intellect, with the skills to manage the NFWI in the different, and potentially difficult, conditions of wartime.
From the start, the WI movement was both apolitical and interdenominational, and it was this last feature that influenced the directions that it took during the Second World War. The decision was made very early on that WIs would not become involved in civilian war work, since that might challenge the consciences of those members who were Quakers and ipso facto pacifist. Civil defence was, Lady Denman insisted, more fittingly carried out by local authorities or delegated bodies, which represented both men and women. And, of course, the recently formed Women’s Voluntary Service9 positively embraced Home Front defence activities and so was the obvious organisation for any public-spirited woman to join, whether she lived in town or country.
The WI’s refusal to become involved in anything that actively promoted the prosecution of the war was criticised both inside and outside the organisation, and was one of the reasons why membership dropped to 291,000 in 1940. But Lady Denman stood firm, pointing out that there was nothing to stop WI members actively helping civil defence as individuals. And no one objected to them assisting in the organisation of billets for evacuees, as well as personally providing homes for them, which they did with great promptitude in the early days of the war.
WI members, at both local and national level, were conspicuously whole-hearted, once they decided on a course of action. Tasks were done with determination, thoroughness and good organisational skills, often in the face of considerable difficulties, such as petrol and food rationing, the blackout and other tiresome wartime restrictions. Monthly meetings carried on as normally as possible – although in the day rather than the evening because of the blackout – ‘thus providing for the members a centre of tranquillity and cheerfulness in a sadly troubled world’.10 WIs also held out the hand of friendship to female evacuees and Land Girls, inviting them to join their local groups, or at least attend the meetings at a cost of 2d or 3d a time. In places, this must have taken considerable diplomatic effort, since relations between adult evacuees and countrywomen were often strained.
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 10