A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  The BBC broadcast one regular and high-quality schools programme, Science and Gardening. It was aimed at children of about thirteen years old and was hosted by two horticultural scientists called Keen and Lawrence. The programme mixed botany, plant physiology and practical horticulture. Since most schools cultivated gardens during the war, the audience was no doubt substantial, especially as it presented an opportunity to bunk off formal lessons.

  Of course, broadcasters and gardening writers were no more free agents during the Second World War than anyone else, and their output was both dictated and circumscribed by the fact that at least three Ministries were extremely interested in conveying particular messages to the population. For reasons of circulation and ratings figures as well as for fear of censorship, they were also keen to accentuate the positive, or at least steer clear of the negative. It is small wonder, therefore, that worthy stories concerning blind people taking on allotments, children winning prizes at flower shows, or old age pensioners bicycling twenty miles to their allotment three times a week were often used as a counterbalance to dismal or downright alarming stories from home and abroad. The business of public relations was less sophisticated than it is now, but at least the Ministries could confidently expect the contents of their press releases to find their way into print and on to the wireless.

  Nothing gives modern gardeners a keener sense of the gulf between then and now than reading gardening books and periodicals from this period. The advice on offer was severely practical and often couched in a homespun yet, at the same time, curiously pretentious style. Irony, which runs through modern journalism like a name through a stick of rock, is almost absent from these doggedly high-minded publications. That said, the information was clear and unequivocal and, most importantly, accurate, for almost all the writers had started life as professional gardeners, having trained at Kew or another horticultural establishment before becoming full-time writers.

  Magazines included Garden Work for Amateurs, which was firmly aimed at beginners, The Smallholder (‘The war food-growing weekly’), the very popular Amateur Gardening and My Garden. My Garden was the most upmarket publication, appealing especially to those garden owners who had employed gardening staff before the war. It was owned and edited by a well-known journalist, Theo A. Stephens, and was a small-format magazine with excellent black and white illustrations and sometimes even colour pictures. A number of first-rate amateur gardeners contributed to it, including Beverley Nichols, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde,37 and even Captain W. E. Johns, author of the ‘Biggles’ books. Stephens recalled that the My Garden offices were next to those of Popular Flying, a magazine of which Johns was editor. When asked by Stephens whether he had ever written about his gardening experiences, Johns told him that he was tired of writing about flying and that it would be a pleasant recreation.38 He wrote for My Garden from 1937 until the magazine folded in 1951, under the title ‘The Passing Show’. My Garden could be rather whimsical and overwritten at times, but it supplied an otherwise unsatisfied need, since it catered for an educated readership of garden owners who had no intention of giving up their entire gardens to vegetables; indeed, the kitchen garden scarcely ever got a mention. Considering how bombarded on the subject gardeners generally were, this must have been something of a relief.

  Expert amateurs as well as many professionals read the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society and The Gardeners’ Chronicle. However, these publications had a very small impact on ordinary gardeners, especially novices, who gleaned almost all their information either from listening to wireless programmes or from reading gardening columns in the popular press.39 Of these, the most popular were those delivered or written by C. H. Middleton. According to a Ministry of Agriculture inquiry in 1942, 72 per cent of the sampled owners of wireless sets listened to gardening radio programmes; of these, 79 per cent tuned in to Middleton’s programme In Your Garden, while 13 per cent listened to Radio Allotment, but only 4 per cent to Roy Hay’s other programmes.40

  What is more, of the 77 per cent of the sample who derived knowledge from newspaper columns, 21 per cent read Middleton in the Daily Express, which made him the most popular newspaper columnist as well. This is not at all surprising, since he was undoubtedly the best at it. He wrote as he spoke, naturally and without affectation, deploying a fund of hard-won knowledge and an attractive, self-deprecating humour. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he never assumed that he was always right, nor did everything go smoothly for him. He plainly did not mind being thought of as a ‘character’ – what man of head gardener stock would? – shown by the fact that a line drawing caricature of him, with his trademark curly-brimmed felt hat, detachable round collar and round spectacles, appeared on the page, together with a facsimile signature. Here are two examples of his approach:

  Watched a man sowing peas the other day, and felt tempted to tell him he was doing it the wrong way, but I didn’t. I did once venture a word of friendly advice to a stranger who was planting gladiolus corms upside down, but he said he preferred them that way and told me to mind my own business, so now I pass by and hold my peace. But about these peas . . .41

  Reproducing a letter he had received, which ran, ‘You tell me to dig up my lawn and grow food, the government shouts “Dig for Victory”, but why should I, if it is only to put fat profits into the pockets of seed merchants? Do you think I am a perfect fool?’ he replied: ‘Well, no, I wouldn’t go as far as that but I do think it is rather foolish to write such piffle without a little knowledge.’42

  The Daily Express gave big money prizes to its readers: £1,000 in 1939 to the best allotment holder, who was then taken on to give tips every Saturday in the newspaper, and £5,200 in 1940 to the winner of the ‘Grow More Food’ competition. That strongly suggests that Lord Beaverbrook considered that Middleton’s column sold newspapers.

  Middleton also published a number of books, some of which were collections of his broadcast talks, such as Mr Middleton Talks About Gardening, which appeared in 1935, Your Garden in War-Time (1941) and Digging for Victory (1942). He also wrote Colour All the Year in my Garden (1938), and an encyclopaedia of gardening, Mr Middleton Suggests (1939).

  Next in popularity for its gardening output was the Sunday Express, which disseminated information via a comic strip, although there was nothing remotely comic in the single-minded dedication with which ‘Adam the Gardener’ went about his tasks. ‘Adam the Gardener’ was written by Morley Adams, a man better known for his books of crosswords. Cyril Cowell, who illustrated the strip, made Adam consciously old-fashioned, even for the 1940s, by giving him a wraparound beard, a felt hat, and corduroy trousers ‘yorked up’ below the knee. This was presumably to reassure readers that he was experienced and knew that what he was doing was the right thing. Morley Adams was a journalist, and must have had some good sources amongst professional gardeners of the old school, for the practical information imparted so tersely by the illustrations and text was accurate, if sometimes dispiritingly perfectionist. On 5 May 1940, as German tanks rolled towards the Low Countries, the strip was entitled ‘Beetroot, Bark-Ringing and Marrow’. In a few frames, Adam dealt with sowing maincrop long beetroot for use in the autumn, checking the rate of sap rise on apple and pear trees if they were growing too vigorously, and planting marrow seedlings on a compost heap.

  Sometimes, the juxtaposition of his comic strip with national events was startling: on 23 June 1940, Adam the Gardener was blanching salad crops; on the same page, the government was appealing to the Empire ‘to fight on to the final victory’, just a few days after Winston Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’ speech.

  Most of the other newspapers carried their own column of practical gardening advice: Albert Gurie in the News Chronicle, Richard Sudell in the Daily Herald and Percy Izzard in the Daily Mail. Although forgotten now, H. H. Thomas, the Daily Telegraph columnist, was a tremendous swell, since he was the son of Queen Victoria’s head gardener, trained at Kew, and wrote thirty-two books, including Making Love to Mot
her Earth (1946), a title which did not immediately encourage the reader to conclude that it was an account of laying out a two-acre garden in Buckinghamshire.

  Raymond Keene used humour in his approach to the subject in the Sunday Pictorial. He took on the persona of an ‘old-timer’ talking over the garden fence to a young neighbour called Robinson, and used excruciating puns to embed practical information in the minds of the readers: ‘It is true he [Robinson] has dug trenches in Britain, planted mines in North Africa, and raised hell in the Ruhr, but back home again phlox to him were what shepherds watched at night; asters were merely millionaires.’43

  There were also a number of unsigned columns in the Sunday national papers and the larger regional ones; these were written by people working in the MAF publicity division, who issued them weekly during the growing season. They were studiedly earnest, practical in content and often highly compressed. This unsigned comment in the News of the World in spring 1940 was almost certainly provided by the Ministry: ‘Soot is fine stimulant for strawberry bed; also deters slugs.’ Deathless prose it was not.

  What was entirely missing in wartime was the kind of inspiring and intriguing gardening column by an established writer that was made popular by Vita Sackville-West44 and Beverley Nichols in the decade after the war. And the range of topics covered by wartime writers was also rather narrow: there was little written about the design of gardens, about visiting those that had been designed or indeed about garden history.

  Quite often, a gardening-orientated cartoon would appear in one or another of the newspapers, as for example that by Wyndham Robinson published in the Sunday Express on 19 May 1940, which depicted a little man in Home Guard uniform towered over by an enormous, menacing wife in a dress, next to a spade. The caption read: ‘I’m off to Parashoot dear, YOU can dig for victory’.

  Newspapers and magazines were very good at propagating gardening campaigns of a charitable nature; there was never any shortage of coverage of Red Cross initiatives, for example. In 1943, the Horticultural Committee of the Red Cross Agricultural Fund developed a scheme to increase the supply of onions to the armed services at home, the demand for which the Ministry of Food simply could not meet. The committee proposed that Onion Clubs be set up, and the scheme was well publicised in the RHS Journal and elsewhere.

  It is suggested that each club should consist of 12 to 20 members who should aim at cultivating between them a quarter of an acre of Onions for sale to the NAAFI45 or the contractors to the Admiralty, the proceeds going to the Red Cross. In some cases, instead of taking over new ground, a number of garden-owners may undertake to grow more onions than they need, and arrange for the surplus to be collected at a convenient centre in due course.’46

  The Secretary of the National Allotments Society wrote to The Times, adding the Society’s weight behind the campaign and suggesting that certificates or small prizes should be given by local allotment associations to the person who grew the most. ‘If every allotment-holder in the country gave only 7 lb, 5,000 tons would be available for this worthy cause.’47 These estimates of productivity were always unverifiable, but they were uncritically published and no doubt impressed the readers.

  Like newspapers and magazines, books suffered seriously from paper and ink restrictions during the war, and they contracted in size as a result. Nevertheless, the innovative Practical Gardening and Food Production in Pictures (1940) by Richard Sudell contained a great number of black-and-white photographs as well as line drawings; it sold very well, both during the war and after it. Equally popular was The Vegetable Garden Displayed, which was to prove one of the greatest contributions that the Royal Horticultural Society made to the dissemination of information during the war. Published in 1941 and priced at a modest one shilling, this was the Society’s most successful publication to date. Like Sudell’s book, it had monochrome pictures, providing a step-by-step illustrated account of the tasks a conscientious vegetable gardener should undertake. The murky pictures, shot at the RHS gardens at Wisley, showed a variety of male gardeners, all wearing cloth caps and waistcoats, taking great pains to dig a straight celery trench, make a carrot clamp or sow peas in a drill. The important monthly tasks were enumerated, and there was a copy of the plan from the ‘Growmore’ Bulletin No. 1, to which RHS experts had of course contributed. Emphasis was laid on maximum productivity, using crop rotation, catch crops48 and successional sowings. There were forewords by both Robert Hudson and Lord Woolton, setting the food Ministries’ seal on the project. This publication went through eight impressions in the course of the war.

  What is more, in an admirable and public sign of reconciliation, the book was translated into German and published in September 1947 under the title Frisches Gemüse im ganzen Jahr (Fresh Vegetables All Year Round). The German version contained the same photographs as the original one; the only changes concerned the varieties of vegetable recommended.

  Wartime gardening books often started with a patriotic clarion call to arms, and then returned to their default position – a series of complex disquisitions on exactly how to double-dig, and all the remedies that should be employed in the battle against the garden’s enemies. The prose was didactic and sometimes dour; substance mostly won over style. But at a time when most people acquired knowledge of new skills through the printed word and had little leisure, such books were invaluable.

  A typical example was War-time Gardening by John Reed Wade, published in 1940. In the Foreword the author wrote: ‘The effort of each individual gardener may be small; but when you think of the millions of gardens there are all over the country which could be changed over from the production of flowers to the much more practical production of vegetables and fruits, it will be understood how great and magnificent an effort for victory on the home front lies within the hands of those who own a garden.’49 If garden owners felt reluctant or uncertain, it was not from want of expert encouragement.

  Two female writers who added a definite sparkle to garden writing were Constance Spry and Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. Constance Spry had become famous in the 1930s for her innovative, relaxed style of flower arranging. However, her ‘war work’ was a cookery book aimed at garden-minded housewives who wanted to do interesting things with vegetables and make their rations go further; it was called Come into the Garden, Cook. This book had the signal virtues of being witty, well-written and original. It was almost certainly read in the main by middle-class housewives trying to manage without the cooks they had employed in peacetime.

  Eleanour Sinclair Rohde was an Oxford-educated historian, and her interest in kitchen produce was antiquarian as well as practical. She had been trained in the cultivation of medicinal herbs during the First World War, when there was the same shortage of drugs which was to dog the Ministry of Health in the Second World War (see Chapter Twelve). Mrs Rohde set up a nursery in Surrey and, during the war, employed Land Girls and prisoners of war to grow herbs and unusual plants. She was a prolific journalist and had also published a number of books on herbs and vegetables before the war, which were still in print. She continued to write books, including Hay Box Cookery (1939), The Wartime Vegetable Garden (1940), Culinary and Salad Herbs (1940) and Uncommon Vegetables and Fruits (1943). Although there is little evidence to suggest, as her Times obituarist did in 1950, that the mantle of Miss Gertrude Jekyll had fallen upon her, she was certainly influential, in particular reviving the idea of the herb garden, and raising the profile of vegetables and herbs amongst an educated readership. She was more of a practical and practising gardener than Constance Spry, and correspondingly less forthright in her remarks. Like Mrs Spry, she had a very ready appreciation of what foods were good for you.

  The Dig for Victory campaign would not have had much impact without the enthusiastic co-operation of the print and wireless media, but nor would it have reached such a wide audience were it not for the black-and-white Pathé Pictorial newsreels and short educational films made for the Ministry of Information by the Crown Film Unit and shown
in cinemas.50

  These films featured vegetable gardening, often with the message that gardeners should plan ahead if there was not to be ‘want’, especially in winter. There were longer films, too, such as the Ministry of Information’s ‘Dig for Victory’, made in 1941 in conjunction with the RHS and featuring a commentary by Roy Hay, who had a pleasant, neutral speaking voice. ‘Food is just as much a weapon of war as guns,’ he told the audience. This film was most informative on the subject of necessary practical operations, like planting leeks and lifting cabbages. It finished with the familiar refrain: ‘Isn’t an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?’

  The Ministry of Agriculture made ‘How to Dig’ in 1941, again with a commentary by Roy Hay. This stupefyingly dull film was nevertheless extremely clear – and the digger was brilliant at his task. However, it is hard to imagine that it was popular with cinema audiences, who had no choice but to watch these public information films before the big feature was screened. Remarks like ‘Thorough digging is essential to success in gardening’ must have been enough to make their hearts sink.

  However, there were obviously not enough gardeners doing their bit, because in 1942 the Ministry of Information released a perky cartoon entitled ‘Filling the Gap’. It reminded viewers that twelve million hundredweight51 of vegetables was imported before the war that could not now be imported, and continued: ‘There are still too many lawns and flower gardens and vacant plots all over the country, which must be dug and must grow vegetables . . . Every bit of land must play its part or we shall go short . . . So put your garden on war service. If you haven’t got a garden, go to your local council and ask for an allotment.’ The film ended with the words, in block capitals, ‘NEXT WINTER MAY BE A MATTER OF LIFE OR DEATH’. This shows how seriously the authorities viewed the impending food crisis of late 1942 and early 1943.