A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  Although estate gardens were mainly staffed by adolescents, women and middle-aged or elderly men, conscientious objectors (otherwise known as ‘pacifists’ or, sneeringly, ‘conchies’) also sometimes filled the gaps made by conscription, since it was war work with which they could not possibly disagree. It is also likely that the authorities thought that they could not infect many others with their views if they were stuck in lonely, unpopulated places. A conscientious objector who responded to the Mass-Observation Directive on Rationing in 1943, wrote: ‘My job as a market gardener is tolerable but I shall be glad when I can change to something quite different. It is healthy and interesting up to a point, but there is a lot of monotonous drudgery.’31

  The Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley did not escape the changes. Most men, both gardeners and scientific advisers, were called up, and, as elsewhere, the shortfall was addressed by recruiting women and older men. The flower trials work, which had been a feature of the gardens at Wisley ever since they were given to the Society, was abandoned – apart from the long-term trials of shrubs – in favour of vegetables. The area known as Battleston Hill had been bought to extend the gardens in 1938 and was intended as a trial ground for rhododendrons, but potatoes also grew there throughout the war. The gardeners at Wisley also carried out seed germination tests on the seed imported from the US under the Lend-Lease agreement, on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture.

  Although the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew closed its gates on the outbreak of war in order to construct air raid shelters and arrange for evacuating the most valuable of the botanical collections, they were opened again by the end of September, and remained open during the rest of the war, even after garden buildings sustained bomb damage. The entry fee was only 1d, so the Gardens’ 300 acres were a particularly valued recreational space for hard-pressed Londoners. Indeed, visitor numbers went up during these years.

  Mrs Waller, a Swanley-trained gardener who went to work at Kew early in 1941, recalled that the salary was 45s. a week, out of which she paid 25s. for her board and lodging. When she arrived, she was issued with a navy blue apron and leather clogs. ‘These were very cumbersome as they had wooden soles and horseshoe-like metal attached to the soles.’32 The stores at Kew were still issuing these clogs when I arrived as a student in 1976, and, like Mrs Waller, I found them invaluable in the hothouses, when ‘damping down’ with a hose, because they did not slip in the wet like Wellington boots. What is more, because they were wooden, they were warmer when one stood on a concrete floor to pot up plants.

  These clogs received a mention in the Journal of the Kew Guild:

  Women gardeners have come to Kew once more after an interval of nearly a quarter of a century, and though the costume has changed considerably, the fashion in clogs remains the same . . . They [women] are employed in the Propagating Pits, Decorative Department, Flower and Rock Gardens, and in certain sections of the Tropical Department, where they can each apply their own particular experience, and by endeavouring to set up a high standard of work, disprove the saying for all time that Nepeta Mussinii[catmint] is the only plant a woman can’t kill.33

  Presumably to take the sting out of his words, the correspondent went on magnanimously to concede: ‘In fact, the Kew women gardeners are now part of the Kew landscape.’34

  By 1942, many of the flower beds and hothouses were producing ‘hundreds of tons’35 of hardy and tender vegetables and fruit, and were mainly tended by female gardeners.

  Because of Kew’s vulnerable position in the south-west suburbs of London, bombs fell on the gardens from time to time. During the night of 24/25 September 1940, windows were shattered in the Herbarium and Library, and in 1941 a stick of bombs fell near the Pagoda but did no damage. By a rich irony, holes had already been drilled in each of the ten floors of the 163-foot-tall Pagoda so that designers from the Royal Aircraft Establishment nearby could study the flight of bombs that they dropped. One night, thirty high-explosive bombs broke a lot of glass in the Temperate House and Palm House. The Tropical Water Lily House was badly damaged, as was the stableman’s house, although there were no serious injuries. ‘. . . one of the stokers . . . was stoking under the Palm House [where the heating boilers were] when bombs fell nearby and the crashing of broken glass was a horrendous noise above him’.36 There are 700 panes of glass in the Palm House, and they are curved; it must have been the devil of a job to replace them.

  In late 1940, Sir Arthur Hill, the Director of the Gardens, had taken the precaution of overseeing the evacuation of many of the valuable books in Kew’s library to a store in the basement of the New Bodleian Library in Oxford. One third of the irreplaceable herbarium collection – dried specimens of plants from all over the world – also went to Oxford. Professor Osborn, the Sherardian Professor of Botany at the university, saw to it that Kew botanists could use rooms at Yardley Lodge, and one of these botanists, Dr Turrill, took care of the material. In January 1941, another third of the collection went to two houses in Gloucestershire – Colesbourne Park and Cliffordine House – but some specimens moved from Colesbourne to the rectory at nearby Daglingworth later in the year. The Wallich Herbarium and other collections were lodged for the duration in Tring Museum.

  Meanwhile, the Director and his depleted staff in the Jodrell Laboratory, led by Dr Metcalfe, were busy on a variety of war-related research projects, most particularly focusing on nettles (see Chapter Twelve).

  As we have already seen, parks superintendents had a very busy war: they sat on War Ag committees, created model allotments, liaised with local allotment societies, gave talks and demonstrations, and helped to organise Dig for Victory ‘weeks’ and exhibitions. They also sometimes oversaw cultural events in their parks, such as bandstand concerts, circuses and other summertime entertainments. Urban parks generally were well-used during the war since, for a variety of reasons, most people decided to spend their holidays at home. Open-air entertainments were popular: in Victoria Park in east London, Sadler’s Wells Ballet gave eight performances in 1942 and there was open-air dancing on VE night.37

  At the same time, parks superintendents had to try to ensure, despite a much reduced, often rather elderly labour force, that the open spaces, including golf courses, in their area were maintained properly or, alternatively, ploughed up for growing crops. Many men did sterling work in difficult circumstances, making sure, for example, that model allotments were manned at weekends to give the public expert information. According to the Journal of Park Administration in 1941, ‘In Queen’s Park, Manchester, a 120-foot long, 6 feet wide flower border changed to a salad bed, filled with chives, onions, spinach beet, Swiss chard and endive.’38

  In the parks of large cities, superintendents also had to negotiate the installation of a range of military equipment, from air raid and trench shelters to barrage balloon sites and anti-aircraft batteries. If in the way, mature trees were cut down by park staff. In Victoria Park, the lido swimming pool was used to supply the Fire Service with 65,000 gallons of water.

  Most parks lost their railings in 1943 to the Ministry of Supply, to be melted down for industrial purposes. In Battersea Park, for example, forty tons of railings were removed. This exacerbated the already thorny problem of night-time trespassers and sleepers, which had become an issue in many parks in 1940, after the decision was made that gates should remain unlocked so that parks could be sanctuaries in case of air raids. Damage to park buildings, benches, plantings – even wildlife – had resulted. The superintendent of Victoria Park in Portsmouth, who wrote for The Gardeners’ Chronicle under the pseudonym Pompey, despaired: ‘I sometimes wonder if the death-knell has not been rung on ornamental gardening in public parks . . . unless there is a great improvement in the behaviour of those who visit the parks, and for whom they are provided, it will not be possible to regain the high standard of floral displays to which we are accustomed.’39

  A full year before the war started, the Ministry of Agriculture consulted the Bailiff of the Ro
yal Parks in London, F. E. Carter, about the possibility of cultivating parts of the parks for growing food in the event of war. The Ministry considered that ‘it should prove most valuable from the propaganda point of view, if it were possible for the Office of Works to arrange for tractor ploughs and cultivators to be at work in the parks immediately war is declared . . . It appears that Mr Carter has already drawn up a scheme under which the flower beds in the parks would be planted, say, with potatoes and the glass-houses devoted to tomato growing . . .’40 This was only a continuation of what had happened during the First World War, of course, when food had been grown in large areas of the Royal Parks.

  On 12 September 1939, the Office of Works gave the go-ahead for Bushy Park and Hampton Court Park to be ploughed up. The Ministry of Information film section was alerted, as were five newsreel companies, including Pathé and British Movietone News. Two Land Girls were recruited, and their travel expenses authorised, but in the end, film was only taken of the tractor-driver. History does not relate what happened to the Land Girls. A press release a month later was entitled ‘Ploughing up Bushey [sic] Park. Land that has been Grass since Napoleon’s Day.’ The following summer, 120 acres of Hampton Court Park also went under the plough, for wheat, potatoes and vegetables.

  Two innovations peculiar to wartime made an impact on the general population, and thus also on professional and amateur gardeners. One of these was ‘double summer time’, when the clocks were moved two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. This had the effect of making evenings lighter for longer, achieved by not putting back the clocks an hour in the autumn of 1940. British Double Summer Time remained in place until 1945.

  The other aspect of wartime conditions that affected gardeners and farmers particularly was the complete absence of weather forecasts, either on the radio or in the newspapers. Weather forecasts were cancelled abruptly on 5 September 1939, on the grounds that they might give aid to Britain’s enemies; they were not reinstated until 2 April 1945. Radio gardeners like Mr Middleton had to be very careful what they said about the weather, and ordinary gardeners had to learn once more their forefathers’ skill in reading the cloud formations, or otherwise rely on a number of unreliable folk sayings. It was just one more irritation about which they had to be stoical.

  Whatever the tiresome exigencies under which professional gardeners laboured in wartime, none had such a hard time of it as the 600 British-born gardeners working in the 2,400 or so cemeteries which had been laid out by the Imperial War Graves Commission at the end of the First World War in France and Belgium. Indeed, many of these men had been combatants in the Great War and had stayed on to tend the graves of their comrades, often marrying local girls and settling down to spend, as they thought, their whole working lives on the Continent. Approximately eighty other IWGC staff, mostly office workers, were based in the two countries.

  Sir Fabian Ware, the Vice-Chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission, had persuaded the French authorities to give these gardeners special status as civilians, which meant that if war came to France, they would be entitled to French rations and could carry on working. Only one cemetery, close to the Maginot Line, was abandoned in 1939. This situation continued until the Blitzkrieg in May 1940 and the invasion of the Low Countries on 10 May. According to Philip Longworth, the historian of the Imperial War Graves Commission, ‘Within a month the organization in France as well as Belgium had crumbled, the work of a generation abandoned to the enemy.’41

  The Commission in London was slow to see the potential danger to their staff, and it was left to the men at the headquarters at Wimereux, near Boulogne in northern France, to activate what contingency plans were in place. The staff were told to stay where they were unless or until ordered to evacuate by the French civilian authorities. Meanwhile, Captain Haworth, who was in charge in Belgium, was ordered to gather together the men with their families and await transport to take them over the border, so that they could entrain for Cherbourg. On 18 May, about 200 people assembled in the yard of the British School in Ypres, but only one bus turned up, along with some cars, so those men without families were told to ride bicycles, and some of them managed to board a ship at Boulogne. The refugee train to Cherbourg did not materialise, so Haworth borrowed a couple of buses from the British Army, only for his charges to be dumped by the side of the road in St Omer when the army needed the buses back. Eventually, a lorry and some cars transported them to Calais, and on 23 May, now 240 strong, they boarded The City of Christchurch, bound for Southampton, as the port was shelled by German bombers.

  Twice, on 16 and 17 May, Captain Melles at Arras in France had contacted the headquarters at Wimereux to ask for permission to evacuate all his staff, and twice he had been refused. He had been told to await the general order to evacuate, but there was by now so much confusion and panic in northern France that no such order was ever given. It was not until 21 May that the Commission in London thought the situation ‘alarming’. Even on the 29th, they were assuming that ‘a nucleus of staff’ would continue to work in accessible cemeteries. Melles managed to get some men and their dependants away to Fougères, and thence to Cherbourg, and others made their way to a rendezvous in Rouen, and then on trains to the same port. Lone bids for safety were very difficult since the roads were jammed with refugees, there was often no available food and there was widespread rumour-driven panic. Some men left their dependants behind; others stayed at their posts and did not attempt to escape. The last ones arrived at Southampton on 6 June. Of the 540 Commission employees in France and Belgium in May 1940, 334 made it safely back to England.

  The men and their families who arrived in England were exhausted, hungry, demoralised and mostly destitute, and the Commission had swiftly to summon up charitable help for them. In the next three weeks, the staff processed more than 400 men, women and children. The next task was to find the men paid horticultural work. This turned out to be relatively straightforward: the IWGC had a useful contact in Colonel Durham, Secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society, who had previously been Director of Works for the Commission; while the staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, had for many years given expert advice to the Commission’s Horticultural Director. The Commission also wrote to 200 town clerks, the National Farmers’ Union, the Association of Cemetery Superintendents and a variety of landowners. Within two months most men had been offered gardening jobs. Indeed, four of them proved extremely useful in replacing conscripted gardeners at the RHS gardens at Wisley.

  Not for a long time did the Commission discover what had happened to the 206 employees who failed to make it to England, but by March 1942 they had established that eleven men were dead or unaccounted for, 159 had been interned and there were thirty-six at liberty, mainly because they claimed citizenship of Eire, and were therefore neutral.42 One Irishman, Robert Armstrong, a former Irish Guardsman who tended the cemetery in Valenciennes, helped a number of Allied POWs to escape from France, but was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. Although his death sentence was commuted to fifteen years in prison, he died in Waldheim concentration camp in 1944. There is a memorial to him in the British war cemetery at Valenciennes.

  Several gardeners died in European internment camps, and some internees expressed bitterness towards the Commission, which they held responsible for their parlous situation. However, others turned their captivity to good account, taking the opportunity to study for the Royal Horticultural Society’s exams.

  Professional gardeners, in both private establishments and commercial concerns, as well as the millions of amateurs, benefited from the work done in wartime by the horticultural research stations to find ways to increase yields of edible produce. One of the most distinguished of these establishments was the John Innes Horticultural Institution43 (JIHI) in Merton, Surrey. The institution had been set up in this southern suburb of London in 1910 as a result of a legacy bequeathed by John Innes, a wealthy squire and businessman who lived at the Manor House, Merton Park. When he died in 1904, he left hi
s house, land and money to found a public museum, research establishment or a school of horticulture.

  When the Institution opened on 1 January 1910, its first Director was William Bateson, until then Professor of Biology at Cambridge. Bateson introduced Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work on the principles of inheritance to Britain, and was the man who invented the term ‘genetics’. The following year, a student gardener scheme was founded. The board of the JIHI interpreted its benefactor’s wishes quite liberally and the Institution became well known for its pioneering work on both genetics and the study of plant cells (cytology), as well as the breeding of improved fruit varieties and the study of genetically controlled incompatibility mechanisms44 between fruit varieties. A tetraploid45 blackberry called ‘John Innes’ went on sale in 1934, while ‘Merton Thornless’ – which is still widely in cultivation today – was released in 1941. The Institution was led in wartime by a well-regarded cytologist, Cyril Darlington, who undertook pioneering work on cell structure, and became Director on the retirement of the agricultural scientist, Sir Daniel Hall,46 in 1939.