He was so cheerful and philosophical about the whole business that I came away feeling much better about things in general and rather virtuous in having made a start by uprooting my own flowers.3
If the nurseryman was cheerful, he was probably in a minority, for few can have had illusions about what was to come.
In many counties, the War Ags established horticultural subcommittees to oversee the transfer from growing ornamental stock to food production. Initially, the government allowed nurseries to retain up to 75 per cent of their pre-war area under glass for non-bulb flowers and 50 per cent outside, but there was to be no new planting of perennials or nursery stock,4 and what nursery stock there was should only take up 10 per cent of the acreage. For those nurseries which boasted a list of thousands of different species and cultivars, such as Woods of Woodbridge in Suffolk,5 that was a disaster. Five of the seven glasshouses, which once contained a range of indoor decorative plants, were converted to tomato houses.6 Only two glasshouses were retained for the propagation of decorative plants, and the cold frames were used to grow cucumbers. Those employees that remained would have to be retrained to grow vegetables. True, there was some help available in this changeover: at the beginning of the war, the distance-learning specialists at the Horticultural Correspondence College in Winchester prepared a non-examination course in commercial fruit and vegetable production, which was suitable for nursery workers. The college also produced a leaflet entitled ‘The Professional Gardener at War’.
A number of nurseries specialised entirely in roses, the most popular of all shrubs grown in the garden. Harry Wheatcroft, the rose-grower and breeder from Nottinghamshire, famous for his handlebar moustaches and loud-checked suits, expressed the nurseryman’s predicament very well:
We put the plough through a field of some hundred thousand [rose] trees – a heartbreaking job.7 We tore from the greenhouses the bushes that were to give us blooms for the spring flower shows, and so made room for the more urgent bodily needs of the nation.
Pigs now wander about where our Polyantha roses bloomed. There’s wheat and barley where acres of Hybrid Teas coloured the land – even the humble cabbage stands where standard roses once held majestic sway. The odour of our glasshouses has changed too. Here half a million onion plants have taken the place of the roses. They, in turn, will be succeeded by tomato plants and fruit; then lettuce, while the light still holds, and afterwards the humble mustard and cress . . .
All nurserymen in every county are making these drastic changes; much beauty has been destroyed and there’s no need to pretend that it hasn’t meant a heavy financial loss. Carnations, roses, flowering plants, trees and shrubs yield a good deal more in cash per acre than the crops and vegetables I’ve mentioned. However, our actions today can’t be measured by money, and perhaps we should be proud that our business has found us in charge of a small piece of British soil that we can now use for the country’s good.8
This destruction, he wrote after the war, had cost the business over £100,000.9
Cheals of Crawley was a large, family-run nursery concern that had been founded in the 1860s at Lowfields, close to where Gatwick Airport now sprawls. It had a varied clientele, including some of the largest country estate owners in the south of England, and even had a thriving garden design service department, which laid out the Italian Garden at Hever Castle, amongst others. The nursery staff worked with the greatest of the pre-war landscape architects: Thomas Mawson, Sylvia Crowe10, Brenda Colvin and Geoffrey Jellicoe. The Cheal family were Quakers and their business practices were predicated on a strong community ethic.
The war caused a considerable interruption to their business, especially in the garden design department. Cheals no longer had the opportunities to advertise their wares and speak to potential customers at the big flower shows like Chelsea, which was where they had wooed the pre-war amateur gardener. Perhaps influenced by their Quaker ideals, the company refused to allow the quality to decline: there was ‘still a Cheals way of doing things’.11 But maintaining standards was well-nigh impossible with staff numbers so much reduced. The company switched to food production, but was permitted to keep its large stock of fruit trees, which were gradually sold during the five years of war. The staff also lifted, and presumably destroyed, many trees and shrubs from the fields, to free up land to grow cereals, including oats to feed the five horses that were retained for carting, since petrol was so hard to come by.
An analysis of the value of stock and crops shows starkly how much ornamental nurseries lost financially when they switched to food production. In 1941, the Cheals nursery stock was worth £15,500, while food crops brought them a mere £400. In 1942, the stock value had fallen to £12,700 while food crops went up to £1,600. The nursery grew potatoes, which netted £6 a ton, sugar beet at £4 a ton, and sweetcorn, which was sold to the Canadian troops stationed around Crawley.
The glasshouse space, as in most nurseries, was filled with tomato plants. Tomatoes were the most profitable food crop by some distance, even though their cultivation required considerable modifications to the dahlia greenhouses. In 1942, Cheals produced – indoors at Lowfields and outdoors on the lighter land at their nursery at Pulborough – ten and a half tons of tomatoes, which sold for £90 a ton.
Early in the war, Cheals was also designated the local ARP headquarters, so time had to be spent filling sandbags and equipping the offices with special telephones and first-aid supplies. In early 1944, the head ARP warden, who was also the Cheals chief clerk, was cycling home after an air raid when a delayed-action incendiary bomb detonated as he rode past and killed him. That summer, substantial damage was sustained when a local ack-ack gunner brought down a V-1 flying bomb, which damaged glasshouses and buildings and narrowly avoided harming some of the workers. These occasional, but very real, dangers were the lot of all nurseries based in the south-east of England.
Sunningdale Nurseries in Berkshire was a smaller concern than Cheals and its wartime problems were proportionately greater. Apart from the rhododendron wood, which did not require much maintenance, the rest of the nursery was ‘a sea of weeds and scrub. The propagating was confined to a few bell jars, the larger beds overgrown and overrun by weeds, and there were no frames or greenhouses.’12 This was a nursery whose infrastructure was already neglected, but the war vastly exacerbated the problem. However, as so often happened at the time, a keen plantsman saved the day: in this case, Louis Gray, the manager, who ‘kept his eye on the numerous special forms and seedlings that amounted to so much of the basic material in rhododendron collections through this long period and indeed is still unsurpassed’.13
As time went on, the restrictions on nurseries grew steadily tighter; so much so that by 1942, only 10 per cent of glasshouse space could be allocated to permanent flower crops, and only a quarter of open land could be used for raising flowers. This order hit bulb nurseries very hard, and therefore particular areas of the country, such as Cornwall and Lincolnshire, where the daffodil growers were clustered together. That year, Mr E. Watts of Devoran, Cornwall, told a radio audience:
Next week I’m hiring in a tractor to plough . . . under daffodil bulbs in fields which will be carrying a corn crop this summer, followed by cabbages next winter. Ploughing under these bulbs means a tremendous loss to me. We flower farmers have been a lifetime building up our stock of daffodils, and the bulbs represent much of our capital. I’ve already ploughed out practically half what I had, and you can quite imagine how I feel towards this utter destruction. The bulbs have to lie out in heaps to rot. But that doesn’t count much in wartime.14
Some nurserymen went further than was strictly required by the War Ags. Angus Wilson, a well-known iris breeder, was one of these. A fellow nursery owner, Olive Murrell of The Orpington Nurseries, wrote to the artist Cedric Morris, who bred irises as well as painting them, bemoaning the fact that Wilson had ploughed in all his irises for potatoes.
In fact I feel so dreadfully upset . . . that I have not replied [
to him] for fear I say too much and get him on the raw and he tells me to mind my own business!!! As he had seven acres surely he could have kept the cream of them in one acre and given the rest to Potatoes. I really think he must have quite lost all proportion. I know how difficult it was to keep quite sane at the beginning of the War, but after all his years of work and the fine collection he had amassed it does seem quite mad to destroy the whole lot for Potatoes.15
For nurserymen specialising in large nursery stock – magnolias, rhododendrons and camellias, which were the staples of woodland gardens, for example – a decade might pass before plants were big enough for sale, so this switch to food production was especially damaging. It really was small wonder that some nurserymen gave up the struggle and preferred to sell their nurseries – usually for a knockdown price. The number of notices advertising the sale of nurseries in the specialist press rose sharply during the war.
Glasshouses were a particular liability for nurserymen and market gardeners during the war, as they became harder or even impossible to heat, especially after stringent fuel restrictions were introduced. Even when ‘cold’, they still needed to be repaired, and both glass and timber were in progressively shorter supply. There were many acres of glasshouse along the southern coastal strip – where sunshine hours are highest – and these were especially vulnerable to damage from bombs, especially ‘doodlebugs’, which often ran out of fuel and plummeted before they reached their target, London.
Not all nurseries and market gardens were situated in the countryside; a number were near or even in big cities, and here bombers naturally also caused problems, for greenhouses in particular. Gordon Veitch, who owned a market garden in Birmingham, had to contend with forty bombs falling within 400 yards of his property during the war, and much of his time was taken up replacing glass in the greenhouses. One Sunday, his entire family spent the day picking pieces of glass out of a chrysanthemum crop.
Commercial operations were closely overseen by the paid War Ag advisers, whose tasks ranged from detailing every holding and plotting the fields on a map, to discussing with growers the niceties of crop rotation and notifying the authorities of derelict land that could be brought back into cultivation. These advisers also had to enforce the often unpopular regulations. For example, Hubert Taylor, who oversaw 4,000 horticultural growers in one area of Hampshire, had the unenviable job of telling sweet violet nurserymen that all their stock had to be thrown away in favour of a more useful crop.16 Strawberry growers too were to get rid of most or all of their stock and instead grow potatoes, runner beans, ridge cucumbers for pickles, and tomatoes, since the Ministry of Agriculture considered strawberries to be a ‘luxury’. As the operation’s profits would usually decline substantially as a result, the adviser’s job required a good deal of sensitivity. Nor would everybody toe the line: one grower in Somerset was fined £10 plus costs in the magistrates’ court in February 1941 for cultivating strawberries instead of cabbages on a quarter-acre of land.
In the early days, the government did not sufficiently appreciate just how short of imported fruit the nation would become and, at least initially, orchard fruits were no more favoured than strawberries, especially because many commercial orchards were neglected during the 1930s and it would take time, money and skilled labour to bring them back to optimum fruiting. The Ministry ordered that derelict orchards be grubbed up and potatoes grown there instead, and no new fruit trees were to be planted unless authorised by the War Ags. Where existing fruit orchards did survive – as in Kent and Herefordshire particularly – the fruit had often to be picked by city dwellers who heeded the call to ‘Lend a Hand on the Land’ and spent their summer holidays in the country. (They also helped get the harvest in.)
In the case of derelict or abandoned land, advisers, such as Ron Sidwell of Worcestershire, would generally recommend that a local grower take it over after the War Ag had sent its Machinery Unit to clear the trees and scrub, and Land Girls had done the initial manual cultivation. Sidwell’s tasks also included lecturing growers new to vegetable crops on pest control together with other vital cultural information.
Sidwell recalled after the war that nurserymen who had turned to growing vegetables from flowers could be devious. They would cultivate pelargoniums amongst their lettuces and cabbages, so that it was very difficult for him to estimate what acreage there was under flower cultivation, and whether it was more than the 10 per cent allowed.17 This kind of deception was strongly deprecated by the authorities.
These horticultural advisers, especially the younger women ‘straight out of college’, did not always impress the people they went to see, among them Harry Fox at Lulworth Castle. No doubt he took his tone from his superiors: ‘Some days quite unexpectedly a young woman from County Hall in Dorchester would make an unannounced visit to see if all the available ground was cultivated and planted up. These “advisers” were well meaning [but] knew almost nothing about the “land” and its seasons. They had been hurriedly trained, had never used a spade or a pair of secateurs and were thoroughly unpractical.’18 This seems harsh, but such a judgement may have to do with the fact that this adviser wanted Harry’s boss to plant tomatoes in the vinery, when he knew that the vine leaves would make it too shady for them to thrive. When the adviser came again and saw thin, etiolated plants, she accused the head gardener of not feeding them enough. Perhaps in that case, Harry Fox had a point.
Generally, the changeover to food production was easier for the workers in market gardens and nurseries, used to large-scale growing, than for those who had worked in country houses and suburban mansions before the war. In September 1941, when Muriel Green became an under-gardener on a large estate in Suffolk that had been taken over by the army, she complained that, after what she had experienced in a private garden, ‘the work is far messier and different in a commercial garden. I prefer the neat particular methods I was trained to.’19 Inevitably, most private estates were becoming messy and different, especially if they had turned more or less completely to food production.
Commercial nurseries and market gardens were just as badly hit by the compulsory conscription of young men as farms were, perhaps even more so since it was sometimes possible for a farmer to persuade the county War Ag to reserve one son at least to continue to work at home. So market gardens came to be largely staffed by girls of the Women’s Land Army. On the whole, these girls took to the work since, unlike on many small farms, there were often a number of like-minded, or at least like-aged, girls to befriend, and fun could be found in the strangest places. And the work varied through the year, even if certain jobs were loathed. The most unpopular was undoubtedly the picking of Brussels sprouts, since it had to be done in all weathers in winter, and the girls could not wear gloves since these became wet and then froze. It was all right once the feeling had entirely left the hands, but many a Land Girl could have wept as her hands thawed out at dinner time.
Beryl Robe joined the Women’s Land Army in December 1941, just before her eighteenth birthday, and was sent to a large and well-known market garden in Milford, Surrey, owned by F. A. Secrett,20 who was sufficiently well-regarded to be asked to give advice to the RHS and MAF for their bulletins. The market garden was over 100 acres in size, and Beryl worked in the company of about twenty other girls of a similar age. She recalled later that ‘vanners’ – horses that pulled carts – were still used, although tractors were increasingly replacing them.
The work could be extremely heavy, in particular the lifting and moving of Dutch lights over frames of lettuce seedlings, which would later be planted out in the fields. There were at least a dozen banks of frames, each one over a cricket wicket21 in length, with forty or fifty Dutch lights. Lettuces were one of Secrett’s main crops. ‘I can remember very long, hot summer days spent cutting many hundreds, going down lines of lettuce feeling each heart with the back of my knuckles to make sure it was firm enough and ready to be cut for market.’22 She also cut up rhubarb crowns and left them outdoors
in boxes to catch the frost, before planting them out in rows in the field. This was to force them into precocious growth, so that they would command a higher price in the shops.
The girls picked beans and peas on a piecework basis, paid by each 28 lb box. They would stay at the Land Army hostel at the weekends to gather these crops, earning almost as much in a couple of days as they did in the rest of the week.
For the owners of commercial operations, however, the new workforce could pose problems. Willie Barker, a market gardener from Walton-on-Thames, had to depend on a very motley labour force, about which he complained: Land Girls, Romany gipsy women camped nearby, recuperating Welsh Guardsmen from nearby Sandown Park, and volunteers from the Surrey Land Club, who were mainly office girls who liked to help out at weekends. These girls were very willing but inexperienced, and did not always know the difference between a weed and a young carrot.
Market gardens like Secrett’s and Willie Barker’s sent their produce to Covent Garden. Barker took to driving there in the daylight during the Blitz, rather than before dawn, but the journey was often made very fraught and circuitous by recent bomb damage. Smaller or more remote operations tried to sell their crops locally, if they possibly could, to avoid the difficulties and expense of long journeys. For example, before the war there had been a Waterperry stall at Swindon market; in wartime this was switched to Oxford, because it was much nearer to Waterperry. This stall became famous in the area for the quality of the fresh fruit and vegetables sold there, as well as the cut flowers, plants and certificated virus-free raspberry canes. All this produce had to be dug up, counted, tied and put in the marketing shed the day before, ready to be placed on the van early in the morning. Ursula Maddy, a student at Waterperry during the war, recalled:
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 22