A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  The Ministry of Agriculture was keen that In Your Garden should survive the outbreak of hostilities, and wrote to the BBC asking for assurances on that score. In March 1940 the BBC replied in reasonably enthusiastic fashion: ‘. . . his [Middleton’s] talks are inherently better value than any alternatives that could be found. From the point of view of propaganda or practical advice it is unlikely that we could find speakers who could rise above his level. On the other hand, they might easily fall below it and would not be likely ever to rise to the heights to which he can aspire on occasions.’6

  Certainly, for a specialist broadcast, Middleton’s programme was extremely popular, with an average audience in late 1940 of 2,950,000, which was more than the Daily Service or the Wednesday Symphony Concert, but substantially less, not surprisingly, than The Kitchen Front.7 These talks were sufficiently highly regarded by the BBC to be reproduced in its weekly periodical, The Listener.

  His appeal lay partly in his pleasant manner, rural accent and simple, even homespun language, which proved to be the best way to strike a chord with millions of novice gardeners. At the end of 1939, he declared:

  We are all going to be kitchen gardeners next year, but I hope that doesn’t mean that we are going to neglect the flowers too much. At times like these we need our flowers more than ever: they help to turn our minds to the better side of Nature occasionally. We are all gardeners at heart, and I believe if we were all gardeners in fact there wouldn’t be any wars. But perhaps the fact that most of us are gardeners or garden lovers will help us to live cheerfully through these dark days, and build a sweeter and better world when the nightmare is over. I am sure it will, because the very essence of gardening consists of rooting out and destroying all the evil things,8 and cultivating and developing all that is good and beautiful in life. So let us put forward all our efforts to make 1940 a record gardening year in every way.’9

  In a broadcast later that month, while talking about seed catalogues, he said: ‘I thought this afternoon I would get you to come and look over my shoulder, and that we would go through this catalogue together. Shall we begin with the flowers?’10 To which no doubt many listeners replied to the wireless set: ‘Yes, please.’

  He was plainly a romantic, something which must also have gone down well with many listeners: ‘In these days of strife and anxiety, I often let my mind wander back to the old country village, where the orchards and gardens were humming and buzzing with bees, and our old lime-tree in June sounded like the deep diapason note of a great organ.’11 He was also quietly religious. When talking about gardeners in a broadcast in 1935, he was describing himself:

  Generally speaking they’re very much as other men are – perhaps a little better in many ways: wholesome, decent-living people who love their work – usually straight and often deeply religious people, perhaps without knowing it, and certainly without shouting about it. They work hand in hand with Nature and they know their work is under the direct supervision of the Great Architect.12

  Though mild-mannered, Middleton did not shrink from the kind of controversy which shook up even his gentle world from time to time. For example, in early 1940, when there were comments in the press about how allotmenteers might undermine the profits of market gardeners, he fought back. ‘Allotment holders, at the best, are only a small percentage of the population,13 so let us put forth all our efforts to avoid a shortage, and not listen to unfounded theories about surplus.’14 Nor was he going to be pushed around by tricky correspondents. He answered a few queries in The Listener each week, and when one person questioned his advice to strip ivy off other people’s trees, he replied: ‘I should think it might easily lead to a thick ear if I were foolish enough to give such advice, but I never did.’15

  The BBC realised very early on that they had found a natural radio broadcaster in Middleton. He was so fluent and dependable that, within a short space of time, he was granted the unusual dispensation of no longer having to submit manuscripts of his projected talks, since it was thought that he was more than capable of extemporising from notes, even though the broadcast was ‘live’. Once the war began, however, and broadcasters became extremely careful about what they said,16 Middleton did provide scripts and even submitted to a ‘run-through’.

  This precaution did not always prevent him from ad-libbing. He rounded off one broadcast early in the war with the words: ‘Now a last word about carnations. Some of you find them difficult subjects, but it’s because they like lots of lime, so cheer up, the way things are going at the moment there will soon be plenty of mortar rubble about. Just have another go.’17 Generally, though, the Talks Department was tolerant of his minor departures from the script.

  He was treated reasonably well by the BBC, although it is hard to escape the conclusion that he was patronised, at least behind his back, because his subject was gardening rather than anything they considered more elevated.18 That said, in 1940, BBC Talks producers bemoaned the fact that they couldn’t find the right presenter for a literature programme, someone they said who would be a ‘Middleton of books’.19

  He was paid twelve guineas a programme – and five guineas for the weekly reproduction of his script in The Listener – and if he had to travel, his expenses allowed him to go First Class, which must have been a relief on those overcrowded wartime trains. His duties were a sore trial at times, especially from the autumn of 1940, when he and his wife were bombed out of their house in Surbiton and they had to camp with relatives in Northamptonshire for eighteen months until they could return to Surrey. During that period he no longer recorded In Your Garden in a garden in Cavendish Place, but instead at a BBC station at Wood Norton Hall, outside Evesham, which had been established at the beginning of the war just in case Broadcasting House was bombed.20 His other commitments made these journeys difficult, and his BBC bosses were not very sympathetic when he asked them to arrange extra petrol coupons, calling him ‘grabbing’.21

  However, he was protected by powerful allies in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Agriculture who, right from the start of the war, were keen that he should spread the official message that they were taking such pains to develop.22 And even the BBC considered him sufficiently important to be invited to the Corporation’s twenty-first birthday lunch in December 1943, an event at which Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, spoke.

  After war broke out, there was initially a marked falling-off in Middleton’s audience ratings, but the BBC sensibly assumed that this had more to do with war conditions than disenchantment, although John Green, his boss in the Talks Department, did point out that the decline might have something to do with the fact that gardening was no longer a hobby and so his ‘soporific appeal’ had diminished.23

  Nevertheless, Middleton’s air time was extended during the war. Every so often he broadcast to the forces, and he also spoke on Ack-Ack, Beer-Beer, a Forces Programme series aimed at personnel manning observation posts or working anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. These listeners had many weary hours to kill when nothing was happening, and often made gardens around their installations.

  Each year Middleton took a leave of absence from the programme for several months in the summer and early autumn, and his place was taken by Roy Hay, an able, but less charismatic, gardening journalist who was already working on the Dig for Victory campaign for the Ministry of Agriculture and so was well versed in what was required of him.

  On the back of his undoubted national celebrity, Middleton was much in demand, promoting the Dig for Victory campaign at exhibitions, talking to gardening clubs and at flower shows all over the country, and writing a weekly column in the Saturday edition of the Daily Express. He was the horticultural consultant to Boots the Chemist, which at that time sold fertilisers and pesticides.

  He was the first gardener to become a household name, and was sufficiently famous to be ‘sent up’ by comedians. The music hall trio Vine, More and Nevard wrote and performed a witty comedic song in 1938 with the refrain ‘Mr Middleton
says it’s right’. In 1943, he was Roy Plomley’s guest on Desert Island Discs. He even appeared, as himself (as did Michael Standing, head of Outside Broadcasting), in Arthur Askey’s madcap film of 1940, Band Waggon. Despite the strong discouragement of John Green, he occasionally appeared on non-gardening programmes: for example, he was the ‘Mystery Voice’ on Tonight at Eight in February 1944, and took part in Victory Night at Eight, which was transmitted on 14 May 1945, a few days after VE Day. He also participated in three Brains Trust24 radio broadcasts in 1944, much to Green’s disapproval, since he did not consider that Middleton was a ‘brain’.25 Even more worthy was his contribution about country churches, which was broadcast on Christmas Day 1943, as part of a programme entitled What Else Do They Do?.

  Historian of the BBC, Asa Briggs, paid the radio gardener this compliment: ‘A man like Middleton, who had established his reputation as a broadcaster before the war, was an artist in his own right – easy in manner, on occasion acid in humour, always capable of improvising, always conscious of his vast, if strictly limited, authority.’26 Those who knew the country house gardening system well would have recognised Middleton as a type: a supreme professional, hard-working and conscientious, who had generations of substantial standing behind him. His pleasant, outgoing personality and natural empathy saved him from pomposity but then anyone who, as a boy, played with the Sitwell children must have grown up with a lively sense of the endearing eccentricities of human nature.

  C. H. Middleton died suddenly of a heart attack outside his house in Surbiton on 18 September 1945. He was only fifty-nine. His funeral was filmed for a Pathé newsreel that was shown in cinemas. His coffin was carried in a hearse crammed with the dahlias that he loved so much. It cannot be unreasonable to conclude that his punishing wartime schedule hastened his end. It was a cruel irony that a man who cared for flowers so much more than vegetables should not have lived to enjoy a retirement growing them.

  George Barnes, Director of Talks at the BBC, wrote to Mrs Middleton on the day of her husband’s death:

  We turned to him on many important and critical occasions and he never failed us; I shall long remember, for instance, the talk he recorded in [sic] the first day of September 1939.27 But the two qualities of his which are ineffaceable are his modesty and his integrity: he never allowed the insistent demand for his services which fame brought, to lower the standards he had set or to divert him from his task of inspiring and teaching gardening.28

  In 1940, Middleton had introduced Fred Streeter, the head gardener at Petworth House, to listeners during an episode of In Your Garden, talking about fruit and vegetables. By 1945, Streeter was filling in for him in the summer months,29 and after Middleton died, the BBC decided that he would simply carry on doing so. Despite the criticism that Streeter’s scripts were more suitable for the country house gardener than the suburban housewife, he retained the job and successfully made the switch to television, presenting Television Garden from 1951, the garden in question being one laid out in the grounds of Alexandra Palace in north London.

  Dominant as Middleton was, In Your Garden was not the only programme on gardening during the war. Roy Hay explained in a memoir how Radio Allotment came about:

  One day in December, 1941, Michael [Standing, of the Outside Broadcasting Department and later Director of it] became inspired, I like to think, by the Ministry of Agriculture’s suggestion that those who had no time to cultivate an allotment individually might combine with two or three friends and take a plot collectively . . . After consulting one or two members of the Outside Broadcasting Department, he asked me if there was any chance of obtaining an allotment within reasonable distance of the BBC headquarters . . . he hit on the idea of making regular broadcasts from the plot-side to let listeners know how the communal allotment was proceeding, and to share the joys and sorrows common to all gardening tyros.30

  Standing wrote to the then Director of Talks, Sir Richard Maconachie, as well as to John Green about the idea, ending with the words: ‘I’d be glad to have your views without too much mockery!’31 But his bosses did not mock, and Roy Hay soon found a piece of ground, ten rods in size, in Park Crescent, a residential square near to Broadcasting House. He also managed to get some money from the Ministry to pay for tools and seeds, since this endeavour was seen as excellent publicity for the Dig for Victory campaign. Hay became the expert advising a group of people who were novice gardeners but professional broadcasters, amongst them Raymond Glendenning, who commentated on the Derby and other major sporting events, and his secretary Sheilagh Millar, as well as Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, who was to become a well-known commentator and a highly regarded war correspondent, and Gilbert Harding, a very famous radio and television presenter after the war. All learned how to grow vegetables under Hay’s tutelage.32 There were even a few broadcasts from Roy Hay’s kitchen in Baron’s Court, when preserving produce or cooking vegetables was discussed, to the accompanying clatter of saucepans.

  The live programmes went out for ten minutes every other Wednesday lunchtime, starting on 18 February 1942. They boxed and coxed with a feature on salvage or a classical music concert. They were repeated either on Friday evenings or Sunday mornings. Inevitably, the first programme was on the subject of double-digging. It is hard to imagine how the BBC personnel managed to make it sound interesting, but the programme called forth praise from an unlikely quarter, namely R. G. C. Nisbet of the Department of Agriculture for Scotland, who wrote to Roy Hay at the Ministry of Agriculture to congratulate him. The letter was sent on to Michael Standing with the note: ‘The Scottish Department are well known grumblers and critics so you can imagine the receipt of this letter was heralded with cries of amazement from the Department here.’33

  Other broadcasters who became involved in the programme from time to time included Stewart MacPherson, Frank More O’Ferrall and John Wynn Jones. They were always referred to as ‘this amateur team’, and the location was never identified beyond ‘a London residential square’. Every fortnight throughout the growing season, these BBC employees could be found sowing broad beans, staking tomatoes or planting spring cabbages. It was all intensely practical, although there were opportunities for what we would now call banter.34 As the plot was so close to Broadcasting House, it naturally attracted notice from other BBC people: ‘advice, exhortation, criticism, admiration or contemptuous derision were hurled quite unsolicited by passing announcers, programme assistants, engineers and messengers . . . This friendly attention we accepted joyfully as a sign that the allotment was regarded with a degree of proprietary affection that we had never anticipated.’35 It is amusing to think of those clever, ambitious young people – careful not to be too flippant, on air at least – taking pleasure in the germination of the first peas, and developing their powers of description by talking about the taste of a radish or the precision of a well-hoed row; powers that they would later use, in Vaughan-Thomas’s case, to commentate on a Lancaster night bombing raid and Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, and in Michael Standing’s case, to speak from the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

  In 1943, Roy Hay left the Ministry of Agriculture and went to Malta to advise on food production. His place on Radio Allotment was taken by his father, Tom Hay, the retired Superintendent of the Royal Parks. Hay senior seems to have managed quite well, despite having a thick Scots accent and a tendency to mumble. In the summer of 1943, the BBC’s Listener Research Department produced a report on the programme, which concluded that gardeners in Scotland, the north of England and the extreme south-west had such different growing conditions that much of the value of the programme was lost for them. Listeners were more likely to describe Radio Allotment as ‘very helpful’ than ‘very entertaining’, which in the context of vegetable gardening that has to be described rather than seen is scarcely surprising. Listener Research found that the programme was most helpful to novice gardeners, again not surprisingly, and that some people thought that the allotment was ‘phoney’.36 But it would be a remarkable pr
ogramme that won universal praise.

  In 1944, the Radio Allotmenteers even ventured a hook-up with the north of England, talking live to a Yorkshire allotment gardener in Leeds. This temporarily quietened the justifiable criticism that English gardening programmes mostly benefited listeners in the south. The programme was discontinued in 1945 because the BBC personnel became too busy to cultivate the allotment. But it says much for their commitment that they saw through the 1944 season, when there was so much happening in the war to take them away from London.

  Although In Your Garden and Radio Allotment were the most popular gardening programmes, there were others, such as the five-minute Over the Border – which featured panels of experts in both Edinburgh and London – and Backs to the Land, which was broadcast every fortnight at lunchtime on Saturday, alternating with features such as ‘Discussion on Rabbits’, ‘Talk for Beekeepers’ and ‘Pig Clubs’.

  There were also some one-off transmissions: Roy Hay, for example, recorded a Saturday Afternoon programme in January 1942, entitled ‘Digging for Victory in the East End’, which was about Bethnal Green (see Chapter Three). There was even a humorous radio play, entitled Digging for Victory, by Lawrence du Garde Peach, which was scarcely disguised propaganda for government information leaflets and must have made for pretty unexciting listening. The immortal last lines were: ‘Back to the land – and if you are able, contribute a sprout to the national table.’