Often the short films were linked to published Ministry leaflets. One such was a cartoon entitled ‘Blitz on Bugs’, which featured a voiceover by C. H. Middleton: ‘Tackle the pest, tackle him early. Dig for Victory leaflet no. 16 tells you how.’
One short film, entitled ‘The Compost Heap’, was made by a New Zealander, Margaret Thomson, who was the first female film director to work in Britain and who also made a number of educational films concerning children. ‘The Compost Heap’ was released in 1942, and showed very clearly how to make a four foot by three foot heap in the vegetable garden, as well as what to put on it and how to turn it.
Although cinemas were almost always urban places of entertainment, the regional offices of the Ministry of Information also arranged film showings in rural village halls and schoolrooms; where no electricity was available, a projector van could be hired, free of charge. What is more, a commercial concern, Plant Protection Ltd, which was owned by ICI and sold fertilisers and pesticides, commissioned a series of five silent, colour films on vegetable gardening which were offered free of charge to clubs, factories and offices, and came complete with screen, projector and someone to operate it. The series was entitled A Garden Goes to War with individual titles such as ‘Spadework’ and ‘Odd Jobs in the Garden’. According to The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1,200 people – of what must have been a particularly captive audience – watched these films in an Ilford air-raid shelter at Christmas 1940.52
The National Allotments Society’s annual report for 1941 congratulated the Ministry of Agriculture on their Dig for Victory campaign, which admittedly was nothing startling, since the Society did so without fail each year.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries have conducted this very successful campaign on ‘two fronts’ so to speak, firstly, that of publicity, and, secondly, that of practical advice.
Both branches of activity have been remarkably well done, so much so, that it has confounded the critics of Government methods.
The coloured posters and charts displayed have been so original and arresting as to arouse the interest of nearly every member of the community. The simplicity of their design, and the message and helpful advice which they convey, has struck the popular imagination and set the nation digging.53
The information poster certainly came into its own during the Second World War, becoming a powerful tool for disseminating advice, for motivating the population and for changing established habits of mind and action quickly and radically. A wartime poster’s impact was immediate but fleeting, which meant it had to be clear, concise and unambiguous. On the other hand, by its nature, it lacked the wearisome verbosity of many of the information leaflets thought necessary by Ministries. And, particularly where subtle pictorial humour was deployed, as with Fougasse’s seminal ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ posters, the results were images that lived on in the memory.
The Ministries of Agriculture, Food and Information, as well as the War Office, all engaged artists and graphic designers to design posters. Many of these turned out to be works of enduring quality and appeal. For artists, this war work was a life-saver. In late 1939, most were facing a crisis. Almost overnight people stopped buying paintings, since war conditions breed uncertainty and a loss of confidence on the part of those with the money to spend on art. Exhibitions became more difficult to stage and commercial art studios also suffered and were forced to lay off staff. Fortunately, artists found a champion in Sir Kenneth Clark,54 who was Director of the National Gallery at the outbreak of war – as well as Director of the Film Division of the Ministry of Information. Gathering together old friends and colleagues, such as Paul Nash, Dame Laura Knight and Henry Moore, into a committee, Clark persuaded the Ministry of Information to fund the modest administration of what became known as the Central Institute of Art and Design, based at the National Gallery, whose task was to introduce potential artists to the appropriate ministry departments. The idea was that CIAD would ‘act as a centre of information and as a clearing house on all matters relating to art and design and to diffuse such information in the interests of artists and designers’.55 CIAD liaised with government committees, in particular the Ministry of Information’s War Artists’ Advisory Committee, also chaired by Clark. As it turned out, only a very few well-known artists, such as Edward Ardizzone and Sir Muirhead Bone, were given contracts and paid a salary. Most artists and cartoonists were only commissioned for specific projects.56
Without doubt, Abram Games was one of the most talented and successful of wartime poster artists. Of Polish-Jewish descent, he was born in the East End of London. After a brief period at art school, in 1932 he went to work for Askew Younge, a commercial art studio, but was sacked four years later for being unruly. He was told by his boss that he would never make a poster designer as he was not humble enough, to which Games replied: ‘I am humble only before God.’57 He became a freelance designer, eventually finding work from London Transport and the Co-operative Building Society. By the time he was conscripted in June 1940, at the age of twenty-six, twenty-four of his posters had been published.
Initially, Games was a private in the 54th Division, detailed to draw maps. However, in early 1941, his fortunes improved when the army decided it needed a professional designer to draw posters, and his name came first, alphabetically, on their list. He was interviewed by the public relations department at the War Office and made up to a corporal, and once he had retrieved his drawing instruments from the cellar of his bombed-out home in the East End, he set to work in an attic room at the War Office. By the end of the war he had designed one hundred information posters concerning many aspects of army life, from cleanliness to handling ordnance safely.
In 1942, he designed two posters with a horticultural theme, the aim being to inspire troops to grow vegetables in their camps. One shows a plot of cultivated land, with young green plants in rows, and a garden fork and spade standing upright holding up a table, above which they transform into a kitchen fork and knife. In between the cutlery is a plate of vegetables, a mug and an army cap. The caption reads: ‘Every piece of available land must be cultivated. GROW YOUR OWN FOOD And supply your own cookhouse’. The other – ‘Use Spades Not Ships – Grow Your Own Food’ – depicts a gigantic oval garden spade above rows of greens on the left, joined with a ship’s bow and funnel on the right, above a blue sea.
Games used unexpected colours and sharp lines to depict strange and memorable collisions of disparate ideas. His motto was ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’, and there is a clean spareness about his work which feels modern but which also harks back to Soviet Realism. He was particularly clever in his use of the mutation of forms, for example drawing a sword that gradually morphed into a paintbrush or indeed a spade turning into a ship’s bow.
Games’s daughter Naomi remembers him saying: ‘I wind the spring and the public, in looking at the poster, will have that spring released in its mind. You have to involve the viewer in your thought processes. There will be an inevitable association between image and advertiser. Lettering, to be kept to the minimum, is never to be added as an afterthought.’58 In 1948, Games wrote in the magazine Art and Industry, ‘I felt strongly that the high purpose of the wartime posters was mainly responsible for their excellence.’59 He continued to produce memorable images after the war, in particular the iconic Festival of Britain emblem.
Another poster artist, Hans Schleger, who worked under the name of Zéro, was also Jewish, but in this case a German refugee who had been naturalised in 1939. Two of his posters have a distinctly contemporary feel to them: one is a picture of potato rows with the word ‘food’ composed of vegetables and a large placard reading ‘Grow Your Own’; the other shows a cabbage with a spoon and fork on top placed on a table, and the words ‘Feed Right to Feel Right’ printed as a heading on a newspaper close by.
More conventional in style, but no less memorable, is a poster devised by Peter Fraser of a smiling, pipe-smoking allotmenteer marching along a path with a garden f
ork over one shoulder, clutching vegetables in one hand and a trug of more vegetables in the other, with allotment sheds in the background. Since this poster was published late in the war, the slogan reads ‘Dig on for Victory’. And who could resist the appeal of John Gilroy’s grinning pig, with the strapline ‘We Want Your Kitchen Waste’, or Lewitt–Him’s60 poster advertising the ‘Off the Ration’ exhibition at London Zoo in October 1941, showing a kangaroo carrying carrots in one paw and a pig, a hen and a rabbit in her capacious pouch?
In April 1940, the artist Duncan Grant, who was a member of Kenneth Clark’s committee, wrote to the Ministry of Information recommending that female artists should also be employed, on the grounds that they would give a different version of wartime life. He was pushing at an open door, because that month Evelyn Dunbar was commissioned to undertake six pictures of women’s work, for a fee of fifty guineas.
Evelyn Dunbar was one of five women chosen by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (there were thirty men), but the only woman to be given six-month-long salaried commissions. She was born in 1906 in Rochester and studied at the Royal College of Art. She had developed an abiding interest in farming and gardening which served her well during the war, and made a modest name for herself in the 1930s, collaborating with others on a series of large-scale murals based on Aesop’s fables at Brockley County School for Boys in Lewisham, London. She also illustrated Gardeners’ Choice, a book describing forty garden plants, as well as the 1938 Country Life Gardeners’ Diary.
From the start Dunbar made it clear to the MoI that she was particularly interested in agriculture and horticulture, so she spent much time recording the work of the Women’s Land Army, in their many and various roles. Her pastoral pictures included Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, Sprout Picking in Monmouthshire, Land Girls Pruning at East Malling and A Canning Demonstration. This last depicted a group of ladies in hats, sitting in rows at one end of a cavernous village hall listening to a demonstrator explaining the finer points of fruit preservation. There is something both tender and wryly humorous in her treatment of the subject. Indeed, her images of a rural Britain at war have something of the neo-romanticism of Eric Ravilious or John Piper.
It was not only artists and graphic designers who were employed in recording and propaganda work; photographers were also considered vital for capturing the evanescent moment, whether it be Tommies making a brew in the Normandy bocage or a woman drinking tea amongst the rubble after a night of air raids. One of these was Cecil Beaton, the fashion and portrait photographer, whom the Ministry of Information employed from July 1940 as an official war photographer. He spent the war capturing images of the Home Front, as well as of troops in the Middle East, China, Burma and India.
In 1943, the MoI asked him to take pictures of the girls at work at the Waterperry School of Horticulture for Women (see Chapter Four). Although Beaton had worked for Vogue magazine before the war, he does not appear to want to make his subjects beautiful, but rather to capture something of their youthful earnestness, as well as a certain shy coquettishness, perhaps inevitable when sheltered young women found themselves under the keen scrutiny of an elegant and well-spoken man. Amongst the extant photographs is one of the Principal, Miss Beatrix Havergal, thinning glasshouse grapes with a forked twig and a pair of fine scissors, and another of her teaching her students to prune pear cordons on a wall. The image of the immaculate and productive kitchen garden, with its straight rows in strong diagonals, is almost painterly in its composition – and must have been the despair of any amateur allotmenteer who saw it. But the grimy hard work and grind is not glossed over: there are pictures of girls bent almost double as they ‘thin’ onions in a field and pick strawberries, or tackle the spraying of fruit trees without any kind of face or hand protection.
Undoubtedly the most famous horticultural image of the war was that of the left boot planted on the spade as it is just about to be pushed down into soil. This iconic picture, with its strong suggestion of Everyman, embodied in a tweedy leg ending in turn-ups and a stout and scruffy boot, under the words ‘Dig for Victory’, depends for its impact and appeal on its simplicity and purposefulness.
There are two separate stories concerning the origins of this image. For a long time it was thought that the boot belonged to a highly experienced and hard-working allotmenteer called William McKie, who was lauded in the Acton Gazette of 7 February 1941 under the headline ‘The Man whose foot all the nation knows’.
However, there may be a stronger claimant to the boot, one Thomas Morgan Jones, who worked for Morgan–Wells, an advertising agency in Chancery Lane. He recalled sketching out a drawing for a photograph and then bringing tweed trousers, a pair of boots and a spade from his home in Sunbury-on-Thames, as well as some soil from nearby Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The soil was placed on a board. A photographer called John Gill captured the image in the studio and added the sky later.61 If you look closely at the image, you have a sense that the spade could not go further into the soil, or perhaps that is simply auto-suggestion. Whatever the truth of the origins of this image, it remains the most powerful visual symbol of the involvement of British gardeners in growing their own food in wartime.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
IN THE PAGES of The Gardeners’ Chronicle for 6 January 1940, T. F. Tomalin, head gardener to the Earl of Bessborough at Stansted Park in Sussex, wrote – below a picture of a gent in a stiff collar, tie and a neat moustache – about the difficulties of growing indoor fruits in wartime: ‘nearly all will try to carry on as best they can, and even though war-time crops may not reach peace-time perfection, a work of national importance will have been achieved [my italics] if our Vines and Fig trees, our Peaches and Cherries are maintained in health and vigour until normal conditions are re-established’.1 As history was to show, this was the most wishful of thinking.2
The Gardeners’ Chronicle gives us clues to the state of professional horticulture at the beginning of the war. Established in 1841, this weekly was traditionally where ‘Situations Vacant’ and ‘Wanted’ were advertised. The time-lag between requesting an advertisement and publication meant that in September 1939, readers were greeted with small ads like: ‘G. T. W. Fitzwilliam, Esq., MFH, highly recommends his HEAD GARDENER. Life experience in all branches, glasshouses, flower gardens, kitchen gardens, lawns and pleasure grounds; also reconstructional work. Good controller and capable manager of large staffs . . .’3 In those days, MFH was instantly recognisable as the acronym for Master of Foxhounds, indicating that this employer was a man of substance and respectability. There was nothing that pointed to G. T. W. Fitzwilliam, MFH, thinking that things would not go on much as they had done before.
But it was soon possible to see the impact of wider events both on organisations and on particular individuals. For example, in the 30 September edition, Lady Raphael of Hockley Sole, near Folkestone in Kent, announced that she was closing her estate and therefore recommending her forty-eight-year-old gardener for hire. On the advice of the government, Lady Raphael was leaving an area of the country later known as ‘Bomb Alley’.
By the late September editions, there were classified advertisements from gardeners applying for jobs who were ‘not liable for service in the Forces’. Such men would have been snapped up, since able-bodied gardeners in the Territorial Army and those between eighteen and twenty-one were eligible to be called up immediately, with journeymen, foremen and general hands ‘reserved’ only from the age of twenty-five. At the gardens at Ashburnham Place in Sussex, Harry Dodson,4 a nineteen-year-old journeyman, remembered that several men did not arrive for work on Monday 4 September. He did not have long to wait himself; his own papers arrived in less than a fortnight.
Even those gardeners aged over twenty-five sometimes felt under moral pressure to join up immediately. A head gardener under whom I worked during the 1970s sourly recalled the first day of war when his employer told him that since all her sons had volunteered, she expect
ed her gardeners to do so as well. In April 1940, the rules changed, with men required to register for service if they were aged anywhere between twenty and twenty-seven. Later that summer, even those actively involved in food production were eligible for call-up from the age of twenty-one.
If a gardener engaged in food production was particularly important to his employer, the latter could apply to the county War Ag committee for six months’ postponement of the call-up while a replacement was found, and it was possible to go on applying every six months thereafter. In the case of well-connected employers, there was always the chance that ‘pulling strings’ might work. One correspondent to The Times in 1941 told how he persuaded the Westmorland War Ag that, as he had lifted all his roses and chrysanthemums and was growing vegetables and potatoes instead, together with tomatoes in his hothouses, and selling produce to fund his wife’s knitting parties for the RAF, they should give him a certificate of reservation so that he could retain his gardener. He protested he used no ‘influence’ but the committee duly obliged.5 However, in the end, most men under the age of forty-one, unless medically unfit for duty, were forced to leave their gardens. After all, although there was a good case for keeping home skilled men for efficient food production, especially of the all-important tomatoes,6 making exceptions for them would not have gone down well with the general population.
Saying goodbye to someone who was off to join the services could be wrenching for both employer and employed. Captain W. E. Johns expressed what a lot of middle-aged employers who had been through ‘the last show’ must have felt:
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 18