A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  Just before the outbreak of war, the Ministry of Information wrote to the heads of a number of voluntary organisations, including Lady Denman:

  The functions of the Ministry will include . . . the distribution of information concerning the progress of events; and the dissemination of instructions, appeals and advice. A very important function would be that of keeping the public in good heart by insistence on the truth, by prompt countering of enemy propaganda and the many mischievous rumours which are bound to arise, more especially if communications are interrupted.11

  The Ministry wanted to enlist the assistance of voluntary organisations in distributing propaganda material and providing poster sites. Lady Denman replied saying that the WIs were happy to help. A letter later in the month encouraged the WIs to continue their normal activities, and promised that the Ministry would arrange a panel of lecturers so that the women might have the opportunity of understanding the origins and causes of the war. In other words, the MoI felt that morale would be enhanced by appropriately filtered information to the grass roots.

  Interestingly, in June 1940, at the time of maximum peril for the country after the precipitate retreat of the BEF from France, the WI National Secretary, Miss Frances Farrer, received a letter from the Ministry of Information saying that ‘the Women’s Institutes can be more valuable than any other Institutes in the world in creating confidence in Government pronouncements, in the BBC and in our leaders, and in conducting a constant campaign against the chatterbugs who undermine morale’.12 At the lowest point of Britain’s fortunes, the MoI saw both how important countrywomen would be in keeping everyone’s spirits up, and also how compliant they were likely to be.

  At the start of the war, the WIs had a number of other things on their minds besides morale. In 1926, Lady Denman had chaired the Denman Committee on the Practical Education of Women in Rural Life, the report from which emphasised the need for the improvement of skills in home food production and use. As a consequence, the number of WI produce and flower shows increased markedly. During the 1930s, the NFWI trained local cookery demonstrators, and Long Ashton Research Station and the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester provided courses on fruit and vegetable preservation for WI members. In 1939, the WIs were ready to play their part in the optimum production and use of food during the war, as well as in all the others things for which they had an aptitude: knitting for the troops, organising salvage collections, gathering local contributions to National Savings, and collecting native plants for medicines. Indeed, the decision to step away from active civil defence had a paradoxically beneficent effect, since it left the WI movement free to concentrate on those aspects of the Home Front battle for which no one else had much free time. During the course of the war, the Women’s Institutes became known beyond the countryside for their fruit preservation centres (see Chapter Twelve) and market stalls in large villages and small towns, as well as their lectures and demonstrations on cooking and nutrition, the organisation of shows and exhibitions, the promotion of livestock keeping, the making of fur clothing using rabbit skins – and kitchen gardening.

  In 1938, thanks to a Ministry of Agriculture grant of £500 from its Development Fund, a professional horticulturist, Miss Elizabeth Hess, was recruited as an Agricultural Organiser, attached to the NFWI, with the aim of helping to promote food production amongst its members. Her job was to travel all over England and Wales to talk to large WI gatherings and encourage them to grow more of their own food. That year, she helped establish the Produce Guild, for those WI women who were keen gardeners and cooks or anxious to become so, and by the end of 1938 there were forty-eight county branches of the Guild in the two countries. Those who joined paid an annual subscription of one shilling, but that was suspended after the war began. Generally, the level of interest from members was satisfactory.

  The Produce Guild instituted vegetable competitions, and recruited and trained judges and demonstrators. Women learned basic skills, either at meetings with Miss Hess or local experts, or at regional agricultural colleges, if they had the means of travelling there: ‘Please bring your gum boots and a spade’ was the invitation to its members from the Isle of Wight Federation when Miss Hess visited the island on 10 November 1939.13 The same month, the West Suffolk County Federation announced a comprehensive list of talks which included ‘Mother Earth and How to Take Care of Her’ as well as ‘Compost Making’ by Mrs Bond, ‘Preservation without Sugar’ by Mr Grange FRHS14 and ‘Goat Keeping’ by Mrs Jenkins.

  Miss Hess considered herself a pragmatist, and taught members that double-digging was ‘quite good enough’, as opposed to the ‘trenching’ – triple-digging – that she had been taught as a student. This must have come as a relief to the women she was instructing. She also taught them how to store vegetables through the winter in clamps, how to blanch winter salads like chicory, how to harvest their crops most efficiently and how to use derris powder on vegetable pests. ‘I got hold of a new handgun duster [used to puff the powder onto plants],’ she recalled later. ‘You could see insects dying in front of your eyes.’15 She wrote, and oversaw the publication of, a variety of explanatory bulletins, including a fruit tree pruning chart, which cost 1d.

  Miss Hess also came to an arrangement with the ‘Sutton boys’16 – the four members of the Sutton family, who owned the pre-eminent seed company, Suttons Seeds of Reading – that they provide bulk orders of discounted vegetable seeds for WI members. Together they devised a list of suitable varieties, the seeds of which were sealed in square brown packets and put in a box, which cost 2s.6d.17 There was also a smaller collection of winter vegetables, priced at a shilling, which contained hardy lettuce, August-sown onion, prickly spinach and stump-rooted carrot. These boxes were distributed via the VCOs – the WI county organisers – at the members’ monthly meetings. The regional organisation of the WIs made it relatively easy to reach them. During the war, 140,000 fruit bushes, as well as 134,000 packets of seed, were bulk-ordered by the NFWI and sold, cheaply, through the Produce Guild to WI members. Women’s Institutes were also encouraged to liaise with local horticultural societies and to arrange educational meetings at a time when their men could also attend.

  Local institutes found innovative ways to involve their members in produce growing. In April 1940, Blisworth Women’s Institute in Northamptonshire issued three potato tubers to each of its members at a cost of 1d each, for a competition to discover which member could grow the most weight of potatoes from them. This was judged the following October, when the potatoes were dug up. In 1941, Miss Stockley won the competition with an impressive 34 lb.

  By 1942, there were thirteen Blisworth WI members – out of seventy – in the Produce Guild. These keen gardeners also planted blackcurrant bushes, since these were considered both the easiest soft fruit to grow (birds don’t eat them) and the best garden fruit source of vitamin C. In that year, Blisworth also received vegetable seeds from the ‘women of America’, as well as from the WI organisation in Ontario, Canada. In January 1943, the Blisworth Produce Guild put on an exhibit of root vegetables grown from ‘Institute’ seed. Unfortunately, however, ‘owing to transport difficulties’, very few members managed to attend the gardening classes held at Moulton Farm School, near Northampton, a common difficulty for country-dwellers throughout the war.

  On a national scale, Miss Hess was helped in her endeavours by the existence of WI market stalls, established in the 1930s and organised by Miss Vera Cox from the London headquarters. These stalls provided opportunities for Women’s Institute members to sell surplus produce from their gardens and kitchens, in the process keeping all but a penny in the shilling for themselves.

  By the end of 1939 there were thirty registered market stalls around the country and the success of the Produce Guilds, coupled with the exigencies of war, meant that many more opened as the years went on. By the end of 1944 there were 319. Care was taken not to undercut local traders; indeed, when interviewed some years later, Miss Hess could not recal
l any overt resentment from retailers, which just shows that the Ministry of Agriculture probably worried too much about the problem of surpluses.

  If Marguerite Patten’s experience was typical, women in the countryside and leafy suburbs who embraced gardening found it a powerful source of contentment and relaxation. This well-known cookery expert lived with her mother in a house in High Barnet while her husband was in the RAF. She recalled for the BBC’s People’s War what it was like to work in a large, fruitful garden:

  Fortunately, I shared her [mother’s] love of gardening, so we worked happily together. Both of us were busy women – my mother was still teaching and I was one of the Food Advisors in the Ministry of Food. In winter we worked at weekends, but in summer we were out in the garden during the light evenings to weed and harvest fruits and the vegetables that were mature.

  The garden was large with green fields at the end of it. A flower garden and lawn adjoined the house but beyond that was an abundance of produce. There were apple and plum trees plus a small pear tree, a long line of black, red and white currants (delicious raw), with gooseberry bushes, raspberries and loganberries. The Royal Sovereign strawberries were our pride and joy. Beans were great favourites so through the months we picked the broad, French and runner varieties, also lots of peas.

  There were plentiful supplies of onions to give flavour to wartime dishes, leeks, potatoes, carrots, turnips (delicious when young and small) and parsnips. For some reason we did not grow swedes. Throughout the months there were various green vegetables – kale and spinach being favourites, plus a good range of herbs. The cos lettuce and tomatoes were so plentiful we could present some to friends. When it got dark we retired to the kitchen to bottle fruits – including tomatoes – and make jam and chutney when we had saved sufficient sugar from our rations. War-time gardening was hard work but very satisfying and productive.18

  That was all well and good for country dwellers or those with large gardens, but the vast majority of women lived in towns, and most had little pre-war experience of kitchen gardening. From 1941 onwards, the government began to aim posters and leaflets specifically at women, particularly urban women, who they referred to, coyly, as the ‘New Victory Diggers’. Even two years into the war, these publications did not avoid entirely a patronising tone, since they usually depicted a woman being shown how to do the job by an experienced male neighbour leaning nonchalantly over the fence while smoking a pipe, accompanied by the caption ‘See that the beginners start right.’ This campaign was renewed in 1942, but by that time, all women aged thirty and under without small children were required to take a job. A year later, as the shortage of labour became really acute, most women of fifty-one and below, unless heavily involved with family responsibilities, were required to work at least part-time. Hours to spend on the allotment, especially when it was a distance from home, were inevitably harder and harder to find.

  In all, only about 10,000 allotments were rented specifically by women in the years 1942 to 1944. More, no doubt, will have been listed under a husband’s name but exclusively cultivated by his wife. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the fact that the vast majority of women never became enthusiastic allotmenteers. Nor did they listen very hard to the advice so painstakingly prepared for them. In this matter, women turned out to be more resistant to propaganda appeals. The Ministry inquiry into the effects of the Dig for Victory campaign, in the summer of 1942, revealed that, although a rather higher proportion of women than men had taken up allotments since the war started, female gardeners were less influenced by the publicity. Only 36 per cent had sent away for Dig for Victory leaflets, as opposed to 44 per cent of men. They read fewer gardening articles in newspapers as well.19

  Editors and advertisers will have been disappointed by that, since they certainly did their best to encourage women to spend time gardening. In women’s magazines, advertisements for soap and beauty products were aimed at women who were growing vegetables but who did not want their hands to show the effects of rough work. Dungarees were advertised for sale as being more suitable wear than a sensible skirt for the allotment. Predictably, women’s magazines also carried gardening columns specifically aimed at women, although they often contained as much cooking as gardening information.

  There was at least some anecdotal evidence from around the country that women were actively engaged in allotment gardening. For example, in June 1944, the manager of the shop run by the Dewsbury Allotments Association reported that women were doing more gardening than men that year, with the result that the demand for ‘chemical manures’ had fallen off, although it is hard to see exactly where the connection lay. At the same time, two allotments associations in Chesterfield boasted female secretaries.20 Preston had its own Women’s Allotment Association, which must have been an encouragement for those women fearful of drawing forth the scorn of their male allotment neighbours.

  One woman who definitely took to allotment gardening was Joan Strange, a middle-aged, middle-class physiotherapist living in Worthing. She kept a diary through the war years and in it detailed her positive experience of tending an allotment. As she wrote on 19 March 1941: ‘Help! I’ve not written this old diary for nearly a week. It’s the allotment’s fault! The weather has been so good that I have gone up most evenings and got too tired digging to write this diary. The two oldish men on the next plot have helped me a bit . . . There is a very friendly spirit up there and I hope to learn a lot.’21 It wasn’t always good news: at one point ‘digging for victory’, as she called it, gave her acute neuritis in her arm, and a friend had to plant her potatoes for her. On the other hand, she picked 20 lb of peas that summer, grown from a 6d packet of seed, which gave her enormous satisfaction. By July she had the confidence to plant leeks and thin carrots on her sister’s allotment in Battersea Park in London. And in August she had contributed several kinds of vegetables from her allotment to the ‘bring and buy sale’ in aid of the Mayor’s Rest Centre.

  A letter to Woman magazine from a Miss J. W. of Horsham will also have warmed the hearts of the Ministry publicists.

  We live in the country and have a large rambling garden and orchard, but nobody but my mother ever took much interest in either. Consequently, for years, it looked wild and desolate. You should see it now though! We have all gone back to the land and are now digging for victory with a vengeance. The boys have taken a nice slice off the coal bill by chopping down some old half-dead trees, and we have all dug and weeded and pruned and planted till our backs felt like breaking. But the results have been worth it. Mother laughs and says it takes Hitler to do in a few months what she’s been trying to do for years.22

  Dig for Victory information was not just targeted at adult gardeners. The authorities were also keen to get children involved. The notably garden-minded King and Queen allowed their daughters, the wonderfully photogenic teenage princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, to pose for photographs pushing wheelbarrows and carrying garden tools. In 1942, the Ministry of Information also issued a number of photographs and film newsreels which showed children wielding forks and spades in school grounds, in their own gardens or on bomb sites, in a conscious effort to promote gardening amongst the young. They were often pushing at an open door, since children were notably patriotic and willing to help, especially if gardening got them away from a stuffy classroom. As a result, many were inspired not only to take up gardening but also to look after livestock.

  Gardening had been part of the curriculum in some schools, particularly rural ones, before the war, but it became almost universal in 1940, replacing games on one afternoon a week (which was just as well, since school pitches were often at least partially dug up). If there was no room on school premises for a vegetable plot, local garden owners were asked to provide space, and often willingly did so. The vicar of Oving in West Sussex, for example, invited pupils from the Parochial School to cultivate twelve plots in his garden. A number of city or seaside-town boarding schools were evacuated to country houses where ther
e was usually plenty of space in which to grow vegetables in the walled gardens abandoned by male staff now serving in the Forces. In May 1942, The Gardeners’ Chronicle reported that in the West Riding of Yorkshire elementary schoolchildren were cultivating more than 400 acres of ground, when they had managed only ninety acres before the war. It has to be said, however, that it was almost always the boys who tended the school crops.

  The produce cultivated was often used in the school kitchens and sometimes even sold to local shops. In Knighton-on-Teme, in Worcestershire, for example, 130 meals a day were cooked using vegetables raised by schoolchildren in the village. These children – a mixture of local-born and evacuees – were so successful that they were the subjects of a Ministry of Information official photography session in 1943.

  Sensibly, those who organised these school work parties tended to concentrate on staples such as potatoes, onions and carrots, which required little active cultivation in the summer holidays and would store through the winter. Where there were particularly enthusiastic and committed teachers, it was not uncommon for schoolchildren to rear goats, sheep, pigs and hens as well.