George has gone to the war, cheerfully, but in his heart (I know) unwillingly. I was strangely moved as he walked down the road, for I know something of war,7 and my imagination refused to visualize this boy, who tries not to tread on the worms when he digs, stabbing another man with a bayonet. It would be easier to imagine St Francis wringing the neck of a nightingale. Poor George. He doesn’t even know what it’s all about. He never will know, not even if he survives, for there is no hate in his heart and his thoughts run only in the drills and furrows that he makes in the soil. The fate of kings, of nations or empires means less to him than the well-being of his cabbages. Why should it? He has nothing to gain and all to lose in this senseless slaughter. Yet he has gone, gone with no more emotion than if he were going home from work – as he may be. For my conscience sake I must keep his garden tidy while he is away.8
Marjorie Williams ran a two-acre wartime market garden in Cornwall, selling her produce to a greengrocer in St Austell. She felt much like Johns when she finally said goodbye to her gardener, Ray Hawkridge, in May 1941. She had made a point of taking notes of all the jobs that they had done together, as well as how to maintain the Petter tractor engine.
Nevertheless my heart sank as the day drew near, and he became sadder and sadder. We shook hands in the evening outside the lower garage, and he walked away slowly, turning once before he rounded the bend. I confess I did then feel desolate, and as if, broad as my shoulders are, they were not broad enough for what they would now have to bear. I went into the empty garage, sat down with my head on the trestle table and wept.9
Fortunately, professional gardeners were accustomed to being shouted at, obeying orders without question, working in bad weather and filthy conditions, and living cheek by jowl with other young men. All of which must have made their transition to service life rather easier than for many an office-bred young man, straight from home.10
Meanwhile, the life they left behind in the mansion gardens, public parks and botanic gardens of Britain changed radically and almost instantaneously. The remaining gardeners had to parcel out the work in new ways, and a number of teenagers found themselves allocated tasks they would never have been allowed to do before the war. Percy Thrower’s father, head gardener at Horwood House in Buckinghamshire, saw his labour force fall immediately from nineteen to three. On the last day of 1939, he died from a haemorrhage of the lungs, but his son believed that his death was caused as much by the heartbreak of seeing the gardens deteriorate rapidly in wartime.
The head gardener or parks superintendent had to hope that men who had recently retired would come back to offer their services, which in many instances they did. But practical horticulture takes its toll over a working lifetime, and a man of sixty-five or more could not be expected to have the strength or stamina of a young man of nineteen.
Some head gardeners were left to make their own decisions, if their employers went to live elsewhere. Those owners who stayed had to consider, together with their head gardeners, whether to register for food production. Deciding on this course meant that gardeners were obliged to devote 90 per cent of their time to the cultivation of foodstuffs, in particular high-value vegetables like lettuces and tomatoes, but it also meant a fuel allowance, and the materials to maintain and repair glasshouses. Professional men in private service, who had looked down on commercial operations all their working lives, believing their kind of gardening to be superior, soon found themselves planting out hundreds of tomato plants, where once there were orchids, and packing up produce once a week to be picked up by the lorries belonging to market gardening co-operatives.
In their mild distaste for commercialism, these gardeners found kindred spirits in their employers. When Muriel Green was undergoing her initial gardening training at Woodyates Manor in Wiltshire, she and the other girls were told to turn a rose garden into an onion plantation. ‘We call it the “the onion bed”,’ she wrote, ‘but Lady L[ucas] says it’s to be known as “the old rose garden” to show what she has sacrificed I suppose.’11
Ann Gimson was aged seventeen in 1942 when she joined the Women’s Land Army and went to work in the gardens belonging to the Earl of Radnor at Longford Castle, near Salisbury. The gardens were geared up for food production, but still seemed to exhibit many of the features of old pre-war estate gardening. In an interview long after the war,12 she remembered vividly the uniform with which she was issued: brown breeches, green jersey, heavy brown shoes, an overcoat, dungarees, pale-coloured Aertex shirts, oilskin mackintosh, sou’wester, black Wellington boots and a green WLA armlet and hat, presented to her by the county Representative, Lady Hurd. She lodged with the other Land Girls in the village of Bodenham, and stayed there until the war ended. She felt she was badly paid; in particular she received no pay for overtime, despite long hours worked in the summer. At one point Lady Denman herself was forced to come from Sussex to arbitrate at a meeting between the employer and girls, where overtime rates were agreed.
The work was strenuous, and Miss Gimson was often wet and cold, but she enjoyed the variety unique to estate gardens.
Sometimes [there were] days confined to the potting shed pricking out plants, potting and re-potting mature ones, wreath making, washing pots or in the greenhouses tending tomato plants, disbudding chrysanthemums, pollinating peach trees, tying and thinning grape vines. And outside hoeing, layering strawberries, weeding and sorting onions, fruit picking with interminable hours of watering hundreds of potted plants both in the hot houses and outside . . .
We would often enjoy a luscious peach and nectarine and many an apple whilst gathering fruit for the Markets or for the Earl and Countess at The Castle, who, we felt sure, would forgive this naughtiness for they genuinely appeared to respect the work we Land Girls were doing in place of the menfolk. We were only once invited into the Castle, apart from our visits to present fruit and vegetables to the Butler in the kitchens, and this was to a Reception for all the workers after the second marriage of Lord Radnor . . .
It was strange to have Maize (Sweet Corn) growing in front of the Castle instead of the previous lawn and Italian Rose Garden. The Maize at this time was mainly to keep the American Troops happy who were stationed in the grounds before the English Boys.13
In September 1942, The Gardeners’ Chronicle reported on the female gardeners’ endeavours at the castle: ‘Cabbages and Brussels sprouts are now growing in the centuries-old lawns and extensive herbaceous borders at Longford Castle, the Earl of Radnor’s seat; five or six tons is the estimated yield of Onions planted in the famous sunken Italian garden near the Avon.’14
Apart from the move to food production, the other reason why the gardens changed so markedly and quickly was that, far more than was the case in the First World War, country houses were requisitioned by the authorities as bases for the services, as well as hospitals and convalescent homes. More than 3,000 establishments were taken over by the Ministry of Health alone. To avoid that fate, some owners invited evacuated boarding schools, or even businesses such as insurance companies, to occupy their premises. Rightly, it was thought that these would be less trouble. Boughton House in Northamptonshire hid treasures that belonged to the British Museum; part of the house at Ditchley Park became a nursery school for evacuees’ children.
If a house was requisitioned by the government for use by the services, the professional gardeners that remained saw their precious lawns disappear under Nissen huts, conservatories shaded by temporary buildings, flower borders trampled and parkland trees cut down. They also had to put up with plenty of low-grade pilfering by the house’s guests. On the other hand, they also sometimes acquired help from garden-minded soldiers or sailors, as well as a ready market for their produce. What is more, as many large gardens had been in all but name market garden operations before the war – because the houses had had large staffs and many visitors – the changeover to food production methods was not as dramatic as it might have been. And the gardeners did not lack for the skills required.
But it wasn’t the same. How could it be? Harry Dodson, after he had been discharged from the army as medically unfit, worked at Leigh Park in Hampshire, which was a land naval base named HMS Vernon. He was ‘second of six’15 there, and his job was to produce fresh fruit and vegetables for the mess canteen. Because naval engineers tested mines in the pleasure grounds, these had to be kept in good condition, in case German spotter planes flew over; the garden needed to look like an ordinary private one, with bedding-out in front of the mansion, rose beds and mown lawns. In fact, a sharp-eyed German pilot might have found the manicured grounds suspicious. At other houses, gardeners grassed over the parterres, once colourful with annual flowers, so that enemy aircraft could not use them as markers. However, since they couldn’t grass over the Big House, this seems more a symbolic than a useful gesture.
Professional gardeners were not slow to complain to the newspapers about the changes forced upon their precious gardens. One correspondent wrote to The Gardeners’ Chronicle in July 1941:
. . . when one sees numbers of tents pitched and occupied by our troops, stretching almost throughout the whole length of some of our cherished herbaceous borders, one wishes that a larger number of our fighting men were plant lovers. Although the area in which these tents were pitched had been requisitioned, no intimation had been given that soldier-men were actually to live and sleep on masses of herbaceous and other plants. Nevertheless, one has to be philosophic and realize that this site was chosen because of the camouflage effect of the many shrubs and climbing Roses that form the background of the borders.16
The worst problems for the conscientious head gardener were undoubtedly the thoughtless damage and the shortage of labour, but there were plenty of other difficulties as well. Having to teach novices, and female novices at that, without extra remuneration for the training work they did was a sore point, as the letters page of The Gardeners’ Chronicle bears witness.17 And there was the problem of wages altogether. During the war, the agricultural labourer’s wage rose by 90 per cent; gardeners were paid on the same scale. An under-gardener earned £1.14s. in 1939 and £3.10s. in 1945.18 Yet head gardeners were often not given a rise but instead allowed by their employer to take commission on the sales of produce. This could be profitable, but it lacked the certainty of an uplift in basic salary.
More nebulous, but no less keenly felt by head gardeners, was the sense that standards were slipping badly. The rigorous and extended on-the-job training that they themselves had undergone could not be kept up in wartime. Gardeners were not slow to articulate their anxieties. As we saw in Chapter Three, they disliked the Ministry’s first ‘Food from the Garden’ bulletin; behind their carefully worded letters to ‘The Chron’ about it was a groan of pain. They were middle-aged men who had learned their craft from self-confident, opinionated Victorians, resplendent in frock coats and top hats. These men had impressed upon their apprentices the importance of constant care and attention to detail. Standards had inevitably declined during and just after the First World War, but on some large country estates at least, ‘the old ways’, particularly in the kitchen garden, had been re-established by the early 1920s. Now, however, these professionals knew that things would change again, and probably this time for ever, but they still could not stop themselves from wanting the country to do ‘a proper job’.
Ted Humphris felt the head gardener’s burdens keenly. He worked at Aynhoe Park on the Northamptonshire/Oxfordshire border for thirty years from 1938, and is one of the few working gardeners to have left a published memoir of the time. The army took over part of the house, together with much of the pleasure grounds and parkland, so from 1 July 1940, at the instigation of his employer, Mr Cartwright, Humphris began to run the greenhouses and kitchen garden as a market garden, on his own account. For the first few months he had no help, except from his wife and his schoolboy son.
In the spring of 1941, Humphris managed to find a strong and willing teenage girl to help him, and ‘during these difficult times she became invaluable to me’.19 However, despite the extra pair of hands, he had to give up growing ‘luxury’ produce like asparagus and strawberries. The motor mower remained idle for lack of petrol, so only the grass immediately next to the house could be cut – with a hand mower. The rest was scythed twice a year. Even more irritating to him, ‘the military were constantly erecting new buildings, and expanding their installations. Fruit trees were felled to make way for Nissen huts, flower borders and box hedges were swept away, and cook houses and petrol dumps took their place.’20 The outer kitchen garden was staffed by military gardeners21 to provide produce for their canteen, which must have been something of a relief to Humphris. On the other hand, the long lean-to greenhouse where he grew glasshouse fruit and tomatoes was constantly being broken into and the fruit stolen. So he removed the peach trees and invited the army personnel to grow their own (guarded) tomatoes.
His situation was not always to be pitied.
I found another market for my produce, supplying fruit and vegetables to the officers’ and sergeants’ messes whenever possible. In addition I often supplied boxes of fruit to soldiers who were going home on leave, and these were made up of grapes, peaches, nectarines, various coloured plums, as well as apples, pears, and tomatoes. I was assured that these parcels were most welcome, and I received many repeat orders.’22
He also sold produce to the general public on two evenings a week.
In 1945, when Harry Dodson left HMS Vernon and moved to Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire, the house there was still occupied by the Forces, and he had to think laterally to secure the maximum produce from the space available:
There was a very long peach house and the trees were planted across the house instead of in borders up the sides. This meant that the peach trees were smaller than conventionally planted ones would have been, but you did get a space of about 9ft between each tree and those spaces took first a crop of radishes, lettuce and carrots and, when these were cleared, tomatoes. You could get three rows of tomatoes, five plants to a row. They were treated as a cold house crop and came into bear in late July with a full crop during August and early September. The peaches were left there undisturbed and there was a ready market for both peaches and tomatoes in Oxford.23
All four of Nuneham’s large vineries lost their vines, and were turned over entirely to tomato crops, but the gardeners somehow also managed to grow 1,000 autumn chrysanthemums, which were bought by Oxford colleges and the smart Randolph Hotel.24
At Lulworth Castle in Dorset, peaches, grapes and rhubarb were grown and ‘almost any price was paid for them. I am afraid that, even here, [the] black market flourished, but has it not been going on since Adam was a gardener?’25 A tantalising comment from Harry Fox, who did not elaborate further.26
Although the vast majority of estates went over to food production, abandoning most of their pre-war decorative work as a result, at Levens Hall in Westmorland, F. C. King was given a special allocation of petrol so that the famous topiary yews could be cut each year with petrol-driven hedge clippers. Since most of these eccentric trees had been in the garden since the very beginning of the eighteenth century, they were considered of national importance. On the other hand, he dug up the bowling green for food production, only to discover that it was so well drained, thanks to clinker at the base, that it did not grow good vegetables.
If one large country house exemplifies the enormous impact the war had on such establishments and their gardeners it is Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire (see Chapter One). Ditchley’s honoured place in our wartime island story came about as the result of the political position of its owner, Ronald Tree, who was by then Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Information. In November 1940, Tree was summoned to meet Winston Churchill in his room in the House of Commons, where the Prime Minister invited himself to stay for weekends at Ditchley. This was to be, as he put it, ‘when the moon is high’, in other words when it was thought too dangerous for him to stay at Chequers in
Buckinghamshire, in case the German bombers knew the whereabouts of his country residence. Three days later, Churchill arrived with a platoon of soldiers as guards, and his staff. In all, he stayed at Ditchley Park on thirteen ‘Fridays-to-Mondays’ between November 1940 and September 1942. As a result, Ditchley Park and the Trees – already politically and socially well connected, with friends like Anthony Eden, Minister of War, and relatives like Nancy Astor, the first female MP in the House of Commons – found themselves right in the centre of the national struggle.
Much later, Nancy Tree recalled those days: ‘Ditchley never skipped a beat with Winston there. He was a very easy guest. We still had our servants in the first year of the war, and the house was run as I always ran it. The schedule never changed.’27 There are some remarkable photographs of that period, notably of Winston Churchill staring at a grass snake on the lawn, with the tripod mount for an ack-ack gun behind him; even more extraordinary is the picture of Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal standing in the Jellicoe parterre wearing a large floppy hat, with a hoe in his hand.28 Truly a Churchillian moment, when affairs of state and gardening collided.29 However, that very particular interlude only delayed at Ditchley what was happening everywhere else. In the later years of the war, the Trees lost their gardening staff to the forces, and had to rely instead on those too old or young to fight.
Youth is the reason why fourteen-year-old Harry Fox secured a job in 1941 as a garden boy in the old walled gardens at Lulworth Castle in Dorset. Years later he recalled:
There were two walled gardens of an acre each and filled with long ranges of Peach Houses and Vineries. . . . The remnants of the past were everywhere . . . Bell cloches of every size, lantern handlights, copper fumigators, brass syringes, massively heavy cold frame lights with scores of little panes of glass in them and the old worm-eaten handles of the implements of torture, the spades worn down and still shiny, the hose worn to a thin piece of sharp steel and that very heavy oak wheelbarrow with no ‘stop’ over the wheel when it would come back over one’s feet when one tipped it up too far . . . During the 2nd World War the old garden regime had passed quietly away, unnoticed, with the gentle dignity that gardening was made of. The lawns, once proud, were dug over and the ‘taties’ and Brassicas replaced them . . . We were not officially supposed to grow flowers where vegetables could be grown but we always managed a few pots of chrysanths for Christmas and in Springtime we raided the woods for bunches of Snowdrops and Lent Lilies.30
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 19