A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  A number of smaller shows were held at Vincent Square whenever there was a cessation in the bombing campaign. For example, in 1943 there were two fruit and vegetable shows, one in July and the other in October. There were also four other meetings; these were usually half a day long and included, as a draw to visitors, a lecture given by an eminent horticulturist. Constance Spry talked on ‘Flower Decoration in War-Time’ in April, and Miss K. Noble from the Ministry of Food on ‘Fruit Bottling and Vegetable Cooking’ in July. The Fellowship were encouraged to bring along plants from their gardens to these shows and to enter them in competitive classes. The shows were poor things by pre-war standards, but they showed the Fellows that there was some point in continuing to pay their four guineas to the Society.

  The Journal was at its slimmest, and without proper covers, from May 1942 and through 1943, but it still included notices of events, awards given to plants, enthusiastic descriptions of plants flowering that month at Wisley, as well as learned scientific articles, descriptions of large gardens, especially those containing rare trees and shrubs, short accounts of parts of the Society’s history and practical information on growing vegetables. Despite the obvious limitations, the continuing quality of the Journal in wartime owed much to the care and hard work of Sir Daniel Hall and Roy Hay, as well as the enthusiasm of knowledgeable Fellows.

  What was true of newspapers and journals was equally true of the wireless. Right at the beginning of the war, on 5 September 1939, C. H. Middleton wrote to George Barnes, Director of Talks at the BBC, requesting permission to mention flowers from time to time. As a lover of flowers himself, Middleton was obviously anxious on his own account, but he was also under pressure particularly from nurserymen and gardeners – even such grand ones as Lionel de Rothschild, who owned a much-admired ‘woodland’ garden at Exbury in Hampshire – not to abandon flowers entirely. Barnes was content, provided that flower gardening did not interfere with information about food production.

  Middleton also did what he could to encourage towns and villages to found or revive gardening societies. He was an enthusiastic public advocate of the local gardening group, not only because it gave its members the chance to buy cheap seed and fertilisers, bought in bulk at a discount, and often brought local land into allotment cultivation, but also for the community and charitable spirit it fostered at monthly meetings and annual flower shows. These shows, sometimes called ‘Victory Shows’, reminded people of the homely way of life before the war and gave them the potentially morale-boosting benefits of collective effort. Middleton was not content simply to talk about it; in 1940 he helped to found the Weston and Weedon Horticultural Society in his old home village. This society held monthly meetings in the village hall ‘which included talks, discussion, coffee and biscuits, and sometimes even a song or two . . .’ 26 In December 1941, Middleton devoted a broadcast to an account of the flower show organised by the society that September, the first one in the village for more than forty years.

  Some thought it wrong and a waste of time to hold a show in war-time. I wonder how you feel about it? Personally, I think that so long as a show is run on sensible lines in the right spirit, and at the right time, there is everything to be said for it. Gardeners as a class are good wholesome people, they love to get together and discuss their triumphs and their failures . . . They like to brag and show each other what they can do, and go one better than somebody else. The show is a great occasion for a gathering of the clans, a day of reminiscences. It brings a bit of light and pleasure to what otherwise is rather a drab routine.’27

  The show was held in the grounds of ‘the local mansion’, presumably Weston Hall, where Middleton’s father had worked. It was obviously a rip-roaring success, helped by the presence of the BBC, who broadcast an interview with Middleton by Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. The Home Guard provided the band, the WI made the teas, there was a souvenir programme, and at the end of an exhausting but thoroughly enjoyable day, the society sent £12028 to the Red Cross Agricultural Fund and a lorryload of vegetables to a local army base. Rather sweetly Middleton said: ‘I was merely one of the helpers who hung around and did as he was told.’29 Perhaps, but he was the reason that they sold 1,000 programmes and the enormous marquee was packed with produce.

  Despite energetic efforts by many people to retain something of the pre-war atmosphere in their gardens and horticultural societies, it was inevitable that the changed conditions that war brought should obtrude in unlooked-for ways, even for those trying very hard to forget it. For example, gardens surrounded by iron gates and fences found that the authorities came and removed them, unless the owners could persuade them that they were of particular historical importance. In 1943, Lt Col. R. R. B. Orlebar of Hinwick House in Northamptonshire wrote indignantly to his newspaper to complain about the threatened removal of his garden gates, which would make the flower gardens ‘practically unchanged since 1710’ ‘prey to any invaders’, by which he meant straying cattle. Apparently the lady from the Ministry was quite unmoved when he told her that for the past three years some of the flower beds had been turned over to vegetables.30

  A protective insularity is a great boon in bad times, but that exhibited by Lt Col. Orlebar, and indeed many other very keen gardeners, did not always go down well in the wider world, particularly when there was also more than a frisson of class envy in the mix. In January 1941, the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest and most powerful landowners in the country, brought a libel suit against the left-leaning workers’ newspaper the Daily Mirror, and its famous columnist ‘Cassandra’. In an article, Cassandra had juxtaposed the information that 643 children had been killed during October 1940 as a result of air raids with the fact that, just at that time, the Duke’s collection of orchids had arrived in Florida in fifteen packing cases, to be cared for by an expert gardener until the end of hostilities. The clear implication was that the Duke was spending money sending luxury hothouse plants to America while poor parents could not afford to evacuate their children across the Atlantic to escape the bombs. The particular mischief of these statements was that Lord Haw-Haw31 repeated them for German propaganda purposes.

  The Duke’s legal counsel told the court that he had ‘been at great pains to cut down his expenditure on his hothouses and flower gardens to an absolute minimum, and to use them only in a way which would assist the national effort to produce food. He had sold orchid plants of great value and a number of those had been resold to America, which produced American currency for this country . . .’32 Once these facts were known, the newspaper apologised and agreed to pay costs and a sum in settlement to the Duke, which he promised to give to a charity concerned with children who were air-raid victims.

  The Duke was lucky that he had managed to find a market and place of safety for his orchids. Generally, ordinary gardeners who loved their greenhouse plants, especially orchids and other tropical species, fared badly, especially after the government introduced heating fuel restrictions under the Control of Fuel (No. 3) Order, in force from 15 January 1943. This prohibited the use of fuel in glasshouses in private gardens for ornamental plants or glasshouse fruits without a permit from the Minister or a regional fuel controller. Before the directive was due to come into effect, Lord Aberconway, the stalwart President of the Royal Horticultural Society, exchanged stiff letters with Gwilym Lloyd George, the Minister of Fuel and Power, who asserted rather obviously that ‘private luxuries must give way to national necessities’.33 Aberconway responded that the large anthracite coal that was burned in greenhouse boilers was not used in domestic properties, so there was no conflict, but this cut no ice with the Minister. The RHS fought hard to save a few of the finest collections of glasshouse plants, which they could persuade the authorities were of national importance, but the vast majority of those belonging to amateur enthusiasts perished.

  So ordinary gardeners had to fall back on cultivating hardy species, if they wanted to nurture plants that were not edible, as well as those that were. They did a
s much as they could within the constraints of having little to choose from in nursery and seed catalogues, and less space available in their gardens. Gardeners continued to grow Michaelmas daisies, so that they had something colourful to put round the font in church for Harvest Festival, tended pelargoniums in the cold greenhouse, weeded the rockery, and picked sweet peas grown against the fence for the house. And they looked for brightness and cheering colour in the contents of a 6d packet of hardy annual seed.

  The desire to be cheered up by flowers and to cheer others is encapsulated in this contribution by a gardener from Middlesex in The Gardeners’ Chronicle: ‘Orange Marigolds, Scarlet Pelargoniums, pink and red Impatiens, golden Spartium junceum34 and mauve Heliotrope. What a mixture! I don’t care one little bit so long as the colour and perfume please old ladies, young children and the lassies from the factories and first aid posts, and even the stalwart fellows from the ARP and AFS [Auxiliary Fire Service] posts – so there!’35

  People did not even always need to go to those lengths, since provided there was time to keep the weeds at bay, established gardens still blossomed and flourished each year with peonies and irises, phlox and lupins, indeed all the richness and variety of perennial plants that came up every year without fail, not to mention shrubby cotoneasters, hybrid tea roses, scented philadelphus, climbing Clematis montana and winter jasmine. It is certain that these continued to give pleasure all through the war years, even if they had to rise above a green carpet of ground elder.

  The home garden also played an important part in the holiday plans of Britons. Holidays abroad were obviously impossible, but even those in Britain were difficult to organise, since many seaside hotels had been requisitioned by government departments, taken over by commercial companies or, in the case of the Isle of Man, turned into internment camps. In any event, public transport in wartime could be severely disrupted without warning by enemy action or troop movements.

  How best to spend any holiday on offer was something that exercised everyone on the Home Front. At a time when use of the motor car was severely curtailed by petrol rationing36, spare time almost inevitably had to be spent mostly at home, and very often in the garden, unless civilians heeded the call to spend their free time in agricultural work camps. General interest magazines encouraged their readers to live in the open air wherever possible – walking in the countryside, picnicking with their children, listening to concerts in the park, playing competitive sports or garden games like croquet or clock golf, and gardening. Advertisements reinforced the message. In 1941, Ryders, the seedsmen, produced the following didactic advertisement:

  Flowers can play a far more important part in our lives in war-time than you may first imagine. Not only do they brighten our homes by providing colour and harmony, for table and interior decoration, but they do something more – they stimulate and brighten our mental outlook too!

  Remember also, that the tending and growing of flowers soothe mind and nerves as nothing else can in times of stress and strain.37

  This theme of how gardens could ease the worst effects of ‘nervous strain’ or illness influenced the requisitioning of ‘rest-break houses’ by the government. In 1944, for example, a large modern house in Walton-on-the-Hill was taken over for the purpose; there is a charming photograph in the Imperial War Museum archives of women sitting on the (unmown) grass and working amongst the the lupins in the border. The Women’s Land Army also had the use of three rest-break houses, which were funded by labour groups in the United States via the British War Relief Society of America. One was in Torquay in Devon, where twenty-five women could be accommodated, another at Llandudno for fifteen, and another in Edinburgh. No doubt they were thoroughly appreciated by anyone lucky enough to be sent there, but the numbers accommodated were necessarily small. Mostly, the only holiday that a Land Girl got was a week a year back at home with Mother and Father, sitting in a deckchair in the garden. But in an era when foreign holidays even in peacetime were only for the rich, this was as good as it got.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GARDENING BEHIND THE WIRE

  IF MANY BRITONS saw their gardens as refuges from the dreary or frightening realities of their daily life, and gardening as one of the principal activities that reassured them that a pleasant, peaceful, hopeful normality was possible, how much more must gardening have meant to the unwillingly incarcerated – those in prisoner-of-war and internment camps, both in Great Britain and abroad. Certainly there is evidence that, wherever imprisoned men and women were allowed to till a bit of garden, they did so, often in circumstances where Nature, as well as Man, was thoroughly against them.

  Incarceration, especially over a long period and when the future is uncertain, takes a heavy toll on human beings, both physically and psychologically. It is almost guaranteed to cause stress, anxiety, even depression. Unlike criminals, service personnel do not deserve punishment, and worse still, their sentence is indeterminate. During the First World War, a German doctor, A. L. Vischer, coined the phrase ‘barbed-wire disease’ for the syndrome from which many prisoners of war suffered. The thorny strands of barbed wire entangled the prisoners; they could see beyond them to the outside world but were forbidden from taking part in it. Moreover, since most prisoner-of-war and internment camps were uncomfortable and overcrowded, had only rudimentary sanitation, afforded little or no privacy, were mostly sited in very dreary, isolated places, and were guarded by a (usually) extremely hostile enemy, it is not surprising that the inmates were prone to bouts of irritability, short temper, lethargy and melancholy.

  The greatest number of British service personnel captured at any one time were taken prisoner in northern France in May and June 1940, and the men were made to kick their heels for five years in north European camps, usually in Germany or Poland. Servicemen were also taken prisoner in north Africa and Italy, in which case they ended up in Italian POW camps.1

  For most British servicemen in European camps intense boredom and frustration were the main enemies, and they tried hard to find any distraction to pass the time. As it turned out, wherever they could, at least some used gardening as a welcome diversion, as well as a means of supplementing their rations and an outlet for their youthful energy and competitive spirit. Adding to the rations was important: prisoners of war and internees in Germany received food to the value of approximately 1,500 calories a day, which meant that, although not actually starved, they were certainly malnourished. Moreover, even where the food was adequate, it was deadly monotonous.

  Of course, in all military camps, of whatever kind, prisoners were at the mercy of the sternness and caprice of their captors. But one or two of the more enlightened German commandants actively promoted gardening, in officers’ camps at least.2 In May 1940, the German OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) granted prisoners permission to make gardens, with the costs of the necessary supplies to be part of the camp budget. As a result, the commandant of Oflag 8B in Silberberg, Poland, published the following camp standing order: ‘For the improvement of the meals and the health of all Ps.o.W. through extra vitamins, gardens inside the camp are placed at the disposal of Ps.o.W. and will be managed by them.’3 The work was to be carried out under the direction of a British officer, and unauthorised gathering of vegetables would be punished as theft. The commandant went on to say that he intended to increase the gardening area substantially, and advised prisoners to send home for seeds without delay.

  That was made possible by a stipulation in the 1929 Geneva Convention (to which Germany was a signatory) that prisoners be allowed to receive post and parcels from their families and from the Red Cross. Not surprisingly, the men treasured these parcels; their arrival was always a red-letter day. During the First World War, the Royal Horticultural Society had organised the sending of flower and vegetable seeds to internees and prisoners of war, especially those in the Ruhleben internment camp in Berlin, so it was not difficult to get such a scheme going once more.

  The firs
t RHS meeting concerned with the dispatch of seeds was held in May 1941, with a Red Cross official present. The committee agreed that plain seed envelopes should be sent, with only the name of the seed, some cultural instructions and the name and address of the Society written on them. This was to ensure that the seeds did not contravene any prison regulations and risk being destroyed as a result. The Red Cross official promised to provide books for instruction if the RHS recommended a list. The Society’s representatives agreed to ask commercial companies to provide seed, and put a notice in the Journal to encourage amateurs to donate small flower bulbs.4

  As a result, during the year 1942–3, the RHS dispatched 793 parcels of seeds to prisoners of war and internees in Germany, Italy and France. These were largely the gift of the leading British commercial seedsmen, but packets of seeds, or the money to purchase them, were also received by the RHS from horticultural organisations and the Red Cross in Canada, Australia and South Africa. Although largely forgotten now, this was one of the most worthwhile contributions that the RHS made to the war effort.