Jean McCredie Forster, the rural studies organiser for Wiltshire Education Committee, spent her time advising children and schools how to increase food production, how to make compost and how to look after livestock. She made a demonstration garden in Palmer Gardens in Trowbridge, a plot of land owned by the council, and ran courses for teachers there; it also served as a seedling nursery for the school gardens, especially for ‘onions galore’.23
Preston in Lancashire boasted a children’s allotment association, inspired and encouraged by Mr A. Walmsley, the town’s allotments supervisor, and his wife. The local council gave the association a field to rent, and the children, aged from eleven to eighteen, worked in pairs, each sharing a five-rod plot. They formed a committee and kept proper accounts, and their parents bought the vegetables from them at prices that were slightly lower than those in the shops, giving the children a very useful source of pocket money. They even made their own paths, with hardcore dumped for them by the council. Roy Hay, who visited this model enterprise, noted that there was not a weed to be seen anywhere.
The boys of Westcliff High School, near Southend-on-Sea in Essex, showed themselves particularly stalwart. By June 1940 they were already cultivating an acre of playing field, only to find themselves evacuated to the Midlands, leaving the fruits of their labours to be enjoyed by the army. By the autumn of 1941 they had double-dug, sown, then harvested two hundredweight each of carrots, parsnips, beetroot and runner beans for themselves and their foster families. The following year they had to leave 1,200 Savoy cabbage plants behind when they were precipitately sent back to Westcliff. However, during their time in the Midlands, they had earned £20 for their ‘seeds fund’ so could begin once more growing vegetables in their old school playing fields.
Although the authorities believed that all this activity was a good in itself, they were also hopeful that the children’s interest would have a salutary effect on their parents, particularly those who were resisting all appeals to take up an allotment. For example, in 1941 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 700 new allotments were made available by the city council, but remained empty and so had to be offered to schools in the area instead.
Children were generally so amenable that a number spent their holidays working outdoors for the war effort. Helping with the potato harvest was familiar to country children, but they were called on in wartime also to pick fruit and collect medicinal herbs and nettles (see Chapter Twelve). The local education authority often co-ordinated these activities. For example, Devon County Education Committee planned a ‘children’s holiday campaign’ for the summer of 1940, which involved children helping with harvesting, trench digging on golf courses and commons, allotment work, hedge cleaning, the clearing of nettles and docks, bracken pulling, leaf mould collecting, wood collecting and chipping, cone collecting, fruit picking, salvage of all kinds, mending, sewing, knitting for the Red Cross, collecting for hospitals and looking after small children. The idea was that the work should be made as pleasant as possible by breaking it up with games, singing and picnics, as well as by a combined treat at the end of the week. The Committee considered that some of the work was not very attractive, but they anticipated that if the children could sense that they were voluntarily co-operating in a big scheme and doing their bit, there would be a good response. No child can ever have been bored in Devon in the summer holidays, but they must have sometimes felt a little put upon.
Of course, the country needed professional gardeners rather more than amateurs or children, and the war was to provide novel opportunities for young women to become trained in food production, and also to be promoted swiftly – at least while it lasted. For girls of conscription age, in particular, gardening offered an attractive alternative to factory work, nursing or the women’s services. Factory work, especially engineering or the making of munitions, was comparatively well-paid but could be hard and unpleasant, while nursing was seen by many as a vocation rather than a temporary wartime job. The women’s services were thought to be very strict and disciplinarian, although they did have the advantage to girls of throwing them into the path of eligible young men.
Most aspirant women gardeners joined the Women’s Land Army, which had been founded in 1917 under the auspices of the Board of Agriculture. This had been a crisis measure, prompted by the fact that there was only three weeks’ food supply in the country, as a result of the German submarine blockade.24 The first Director was Miss (later Dame) Meriel Talbot, with Lady Denman honorary Assistant Director, and by the end of the 1914–18 war, 23,000 women had signed up to work on farms and in gardens.
The organisation was disbanded after the war, but in the spring of 1938, the Ministry of Agriculture approached Lady Denman to take charge of its Women’s Branch, which would oversee the remobilisation of the Women’s Land Army. Lady Denman took up her post on 1 June; by the time war broke out, 1,000 women had already volunteered, and this grew to 4,500 by the end of the year. Most were girls in their late teens or early twenties from London or the industrial cities of the north.
Although the WLA was called an ‘Army’ and the women had to promise to go wherever they were sent, they were not under military discipline, and were paid by their employers, not by the state. Lady Denman ran the entire organisation with consummate skill and good sense from her home, Balcombe Place. ‘Imagine a baronial hall thus transformed,’ wrote Vita Sackville-West in 1944. ‘The red velvet curtains still hang heavily in their place, the oak panelling still makes a rich and sombre background, but the splendid rooms are now filled with office-desks and trestle tables, piled with card-indexes and stationery, typewriters and telephones, pots and paste and Stickphast . . .’25 The reception-rooms became offices, the staff slept in dormitory bedrooms, and the girls’ new uniforms were warehoused in the stables and squash court. Almost everyone employed was female, so there was much of an earnest girls’ boarding school atmosphere about the place. Lady Denman’s assistant was Mrs Inez Jenkins, whom she had recruited from NFWI headquarters. The office staff members were salaried, as were those who manned each county office, but everyone else, from the Director to the local Representatives, gave their time voluntarily. Many were already WI stalwarts.
The regional organisers, or Representatives, were often upper-class contemporaries or friends of Lady Denman. The County Rep kept an eye on the girls placed locally, and tried to ensure that they were not mistreated, lonely, bored or overworked, or suffering unduly from the shortage of suitable uniform, especially rubber boots and mackintoshes. In 1944, when Vita Sackville-West published a history of the Women’s Land Army up to that date, she not surprisingly dwelled on the difficulties faced by Representatives like herself. But she also wrote admiringly of the young women from towns who laboured so hard to prevent the country running short of food, almost always well out of any limelight and often in filthy weather and uncomfortable conditions. She was moved to write, when describing one of the periodic London conferences, at which Lady Denman and senior officials of the WLA met county Representatives, ‘I felt how much, how very much, I liked the English; how much, how very much, how painfully much, I loved England.’26
By December 1943, the Women’s Land Army numbered some 80,300, the highest figure it would attain during the war. The majority worked on farms, but there were also some rat-catchers, excavation digger drivers and ‘lumber Jills’ in the Timber Corps. A sizeable minority worked in market gardens and smallholdings, as well as in mansion gardens geared up for food production.
It took a while before a regular and reliable supply of women gardeners could be found for this work. Would-be horticulturists often turned to another organisation, the Women’s Farm and Garden Association, which acted as an employment bureau. Formerly the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural Union, it had been founded in 1899 by philanthropic women, mainly farmers or landowners, who were interested in promoting gardening and farming as an occupation for well-bred ladies. The organisation had played a part in the recruiting of women for land wor
k during the latter half of the First World War. At the end of that war, it had combined with the Women’s National Land Service Corps to become the Women’s Farm and Garden Association. The WFGA was also a conduit for information about training and a source of good-quality work clothing. It produced a journal, kept up a lending library and even owned a hostel in London, run on club lines. The women’s horticultural schools, like Swanley and Waterperry, were affiliated to it.
In 1940, the WFGA helped negotiate and secure a national agricultural minimum rate of pay for women land workers. This was fixed at 28s. a week for women over eighteen, and 22s. 6d for those under eighteen, with board and lodging deducted at 14s. or 12s. 6d respectively. In the same year, it also founded a much-needed Garden Apprenticeship Scheme. The organisation realised that for many girls there was neither the time nor the money for the stately progress of training in the women’s horticultural colleges or universities; gardens needed these women immediately. One of the people involved in shaping this scheme was the highly regarded landscape designer Brenda Colvin. In October 1940 she wrote to a colleague:
I have taken on a job for the Women’s Farm and Garden Association – organising a training scheme for women gardeners in wartime. It is being tried out in this neighbourhood first [she was staying near Salisbury at the time, so she meant Woodyates Manor] but one hopes that it will extend soon to a much wider area, as I think it is really needed . . . the WFGA is flooded with demands for women gardeners to replace men called up.27
Lady Lucas of Woodyates Manor was the driving force behind the Garden Apprenticeship Scheme, which aimed to give girls a six-month grounding in practical work and, in particular, food production. The WFGA managed to persuade twenty county councils to agree to help individual students with grants – since many of the County Farm Institutes had closed their doors to students – provided that the trainees were given a ‘sound training in food production with a view to semi-skilled women replacing men’.28 By the following winter, about a hundred girls were in training and there was no difficulty in finding them suitable jobs at the end of it. Indeed, demand far outstripped supply. In 1942–3, employers requested 1,237 workers, two thirds of them for horticulture, from the WFGA but the employment department could only supply 117 gardeners.
One of these WFGA-trained gardeners was Muriel Green, a rural Norfolk girl, who wrote a diary for Mass-Observation throughout the war years. She made no bones about why she wanted to become a gardener; it was in order to place herself in a reserved occupation, so that she could avoid compulsory conscription after she turned twenty in early 1941. In March that year, she wrote to the Women’s Farm and Garden Association and offered herself as a gardening student. She confessed to her diary that she hated gardening ‘and had never done a stroke before the war, but thought the scheme for 6 months in a garden would be at least a change and play for time. Then the winter will be near and gardening will not suit my constitution I foresee.’29
Muriel Green wrote in her diary of her arrival at Woodyates Manor just after Easter 1941. She had never been so far from Norfolk before.
Met off bus by Lady L, owner of manor house where I am to work and Hon Anne, daughter . . . a charming old house and garden. There are five girls here and head lady gardener quite young and very nice . . . We live in a charming ‘ideal home’ old cottage and sweet bedroom each and bathroom (h & c)30, kitchen where we share washing-up and lounge common room. All delightful. I can see I shall be quite happy for a month here. Food is sent in ready cooked from Manor House and is plentiful. We had high tea when we arrived . . . 6.30–7.30 the lady gardener who lives with us gave a lecture on pests and spraying.
Her diary for Saturday 19 April reads: ‘Spent morning sweeping paths ready for weekend visitors and return of the colonel, the master of the manor. Then we pollinated the peach trees by tickling them with rabbit’s tails on canes. We finish at 12 on Saturdays.’
There was great excitement the following week because the girls were told that they were to be photographed for Picture Post planting onions. ‘We hurried lunch and then were told to do our hair etc and pose ourselves artistically in the sitting room ready for being taken “at leisure”.’ All afternoon the students were photographed ‘in unnatural gardening poses with tools and wheelbarrows, and doing things we never do or [are] ever likely to do and we had a lot of laughing.’31
Despite her early misgivings, Muriel took to the training, since she spent it all in mansion gardens where the work was very varied. She was also taught well by the head gardeners. About her contemporaries at Woodyates she wrote: ‘All the girls here are like me avoiding factories etc. One is a conscientious objector and the others just taking care of themselves like me.’32 A year later, having endured scrubbing down greenhouses and picking Brussels sprouts during frosty January weather (‘the coldest job in the world’), she reflected on whether she would have been better off in the ATS33 after all, and decided that she would not, since the pay as a gardener was higher and the living accommodation better. ‘It is true our working uniform is not shattering and we get no privileges (or not so many) as an ATS girl and have to face the elements more but I think we get more admiration and are just as useful to the war effort.’34
At the beginning, male head gardeners found female workers a novelty, and not a particularly welcome one, but they were forced to get used to them very quickly, since women were the main replacements in gardens that had switched to commercial food production. The anecdotal evidence about the treatment of women gardeners by their male colleagues is mixed. There was certainly some prejudice against them, particularly in the early days and especially in remote country districts. There were men who found the presence of girls unsettling and took it out on them in a myriad mildly bullying ways. When Muriel Green moved to a large estate in Gloucestershire, where the house had been made into a hospital, the adjoining nursery was staffed by Land Girls and their foreman told his men not to lend a hand to these girls when asked. He said the men would lose money if they spent time helping the women. But that kind of approach was not as common as initially feared, and many employers and senior staff were quickly won over by the hardiness, determination and willingness to learn of most Land Girls and female gardeners.
One WLA recruit, who was sent to work at a traditional private estate garden, was Sibyl van Praet. She joined up in 1940, and after spending a brief month training at Rodbaston Agricultural College, in Staffordshire, found herself working at Broughton Hall. This was a fifty-room Jacobean house, the wartime home for an evacuated preparatory school, which had extensive grounds and a four-acre walled garden. Before the war there had been sixteen gardeners, but now Mr Lowe, the head gardener, together with the elderly under-gardener, Mr Sawyer, and Sibyl had to provide enough vegetables for 120 people, staff and children. Despite the shortage of labour, they dug the entire walled garden by hand, and ‘cultivation was our watch-word . . . in short HOEING . . . we hoed a great deal! The results were quite startling – our cabbages were so large that four were sufficient to supply “greens” for the whole school and staff.’35
Mr Lowe, like most conservative head gardeners of the time, had his own recipe for potting compost. He would send Sibyl to the woods to bring back sacks of leaf mould, and to the disused tennis courts for lime gravel, which he would mix with garden soil and sand to make a ‘wonderful loamy mixture’. She attributed the success of the tomatoes to this special compost – they were ‘magnificent in size and flavour’. So expert were the three gardeners at growing vegetables that, despite the large numbers of people in the house, surpluses of tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuces were sent for sale to Stafford market.
It must be said that not all Land Girls could stand the life. Jean Barker, later Baroness Trumpington and a Minister of State at the Ministry of Agriculture (ironically), was sent to work on former Prime Minister Lloyd George’s fruit farm in Sussex in 1940. Many years later she recalled: ‘I hated being a land girl. There were only old men there. The young one
s had joined up. And it was all apples. No animals, which I love.’36 She soon left the WLA to help break German secret codes at Bletchley Park. All in all, however, it is remarkable what a high percentage of Land Girls stuck it out, and usually retained intensely happy memories of their war work in later life.
Nearly 11,000 Land Girls were involved in horticultural employment during the war. Unlike on farms, where they never quite equalled a man’s work output (except when looking after poultry), gardeners proved that in some instances they could outperform a man: they scored better in cutting, bunching and packing flowers, and pulling peas and runner beans; and they equalled men in their small-fruit-picking capacities (and were paid only two thirds of a man’s wages for doing it). However, in 1943, most Land Girls working in private gardens were withdrawn from work on food production when the need for labourers on farms became too pressing.
More than 600 Land Girls studied horticulture by correspondence course, and some even sat the RHS exams, since the Land Army hierarchy encouraged self-advancement. Moreover, eighteen out of the thirty-nine agricultural and horticultural colleges in England and Wales remained open in wartime, providing everything from university degree courses – at Reading and Nottingham – to short practical ones. Most of the students were women, who were accepted on equal terms with men; demand for places on the courses was high. There was some ‘telescoping’ of training, with Reading University, for example, adding a fourth term during the summer vacation. A few of the county agricultural schools, like Houghall in Durham, also taught some basic horticulture.
There were several horticultural colleges specifically for women, most notably Swanley College in Kent, Studley College in Warwickshire and Waterperry School of Horticulture for Women in Oxfordshire. Unfortunately, Swanley College was bombed in 1943, when one student was killed, so the rest of the girls were evacuated to Wisley for a short time, before moving on to Wye College in Kent in 1946.
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 12