A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  A letter received by the RHS in April 1943 is typical of the prisoners’ response to these parcels, and bears reproducing in full:

  Central Library,

  Stalag XXA

  14th April, 1943

  On behalf of the men of this Stalag I would like to offer our sincere thanks for the many parcels of seeds we have received from you for this season.

  They are in great demand by our central and isolated detachments and you have enabled us to satisfy all demands. The men have been amazed at the large variety we have been able to offer them; their praise of the work that is being done for we [sic] prisoners of war, and the amount of hard work they put into the proposed garden sites, is proof that they are appreciative.

  All are primarily interested in the vegetable seeds, but the flower seeds have also been in great demand, particularly by our hospital, which has quite a large flower garden. It is not hard to imagine the comfort and solace which your efforts bring to our sick who have so many idle hours in which their thoughts naturally turn to home.

  Once again this year I am organising a Gardening Competition and I will be pleased to forward you an account of it in due course.

  You may find satisfaction in knowing that whenever we see fresh flowers on the table or we are eating our vegetable garden produce, each of us thinks again of the good work done by the Royal Horticultural Society.

  Yours sincerely,

  (Sgt) W. O. Wright,

  Head Librarian.5

  The RHS made sure that horticultural textbooks were among those books sent out by the Red Cross Society’s Educational Books Section to prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Italy.6 As a result, prisoners began to study for RHS examinations. The first nine ‘other rank’ candidates sat them in July 1942, invigilated by their sergeants. In 1943, a Sergeant A. W. J. Souster gained a medal, being equal first with a candidate in Britain in the first class of the RHS National Certificate in Elementary Horticultural Practice. Another successful candidate in the National Diploma of Horticulture ‘will take the practical examination on returning to this country’.7 These exams continued to be taken in camps until the war ended, and those who had studied for them but not yet sat the exams were given two years in which to do so after the war, without any charge being made. Fifty candidates took the opportunity to do so.

  2nd Lieutenant Alan Milburn, of the 7th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who was wounded and captured at Dunkirk, undoubtedly benefited from Red Cross parcels of seed. As we have seen, his mother, Clara, wrote a diary throughout the war, and she included snippets from his letters in them. Here is a typical entry, dated 16 July 1942: ‘A letter from Alan, dated 19.6.42, telling of the first results of their gardening efforts – a dish of fresh greens, turnip tops, for their evening meal. He also says horses are very popular in the camp now! Their hut is beside the road and they get first pick!’8 By January 1944, he was in Oflag VIIB near Eichstätt in Bavaria: ‘Gardening is occupying a lot of his time and for serious reading he has studied The Beveridge Report9 – Alan! Gosh!!’10

  Alan Milburn had plainly become very involved in gardening, for on 10 July that year, he wrote to his parents: ‘My news is, of course, all onions – 6,000 planted so far and about 19,000 to plant . . . one morning last week I had a trip to the nursery in town where the tomato plants and onion seedlings are being raised.’11 A letter written in October 1944 shows how hopeful he was of release in the near future: ‘Next month we shall start digging, and so it will go on until we are told “You can go home now”.’12 Clara Milburn continued: ‘He tells of progress of the onions, tomatoes and beetroot, the runner beans – with black fly, which were then disposed of by ladybirds . . .’ By January 1945, he had been detailed to work as a gardener in the town each day. He finally arrived back in England on 10 May, two days after VE Day.

  The soils in some camps were atrocious, but that did not necessarily put off the committed. The going was particularly hard at Stalag Luft III, as the camp had been built in a recently felled pine forest, and the soil was extremely acidic and infertile as a result. While imprisoned there, Squadron Leader C. I. Rolfe kept a garden diary, and in 1944 he described the garden, even including a plan. It ‘consisted of small strips of “home made” soil dug in and amongst the typical pine needle strewn sand on which the camp was built. In 1942 Polish officers occupied this room13, and they it appears dug into the sand every available scrap of refuse. In 1943 this decayed matter enabled the room to reap quite a good crop of onions, tomatoes, marrows, radishes etc.’14 The problem was that the gardens suffered from the depredations of hares, which must somehow have got through the wire. The prisoners set a trap for these but only succeeded in catching the Padré’s cat.

  That must have been frustrating, but gardening in a prisoner-of-war camp could sometimes seem downright pointless. Brian Filliter, a British flying officer, had problems knowing what to say in his letters home: ‘you write, and you don’t want them to worry about you at home, so you say, “we’re busy making a garden”. Gardens! What a farce! Nothing grew, and people walked all over it. But the folks at home are sending you gardening books.’15 That must have been a common experience in those desolate northern European camps.

  Where camp gardens existed and flourished, they proved to be a potent reminder to service personnel of their homes. They probably also gave them back a sense of the seasons passing, and connected them once more with the soil. It is highly likely that being in charge of a garden allowed them to feel a little more in control. The vegetables they grew improved their diet and the flowers convinced them that there was still beauty and homeliness to be found in a distinctly ugly and alien environment. And, crucially, caring for a garden did much simply to pass the time. Prison camp gardens were, in the best sense, ‘defiant’, the word that Kenneth I. Helphand used in the title of his important book on the subject. As he puts it: ‘As a creative, purposeful activity, gardens engaged all aspects of a person, with an aesthetic as well as a practical result.’16

  Of course, gardening was only one of many leisure activities in POW camps,17 but it served another purpose, besides providing something to do and some much-needed variety and vitamins in food. As combatants, many, if not most, young men felt that they had a duty to try to break for freedom and get home to join their units once more, or at the very least harry and occupy the enemy. They spent long hours ingeniously planning and trying to effect their escape, and gardening activities could be a very useful subterfuge while tunnels were dug. Prisoners in Stalag Luft III,18 a camp for those British and American servicemen who had tried to break out from other camps in the past, dug three tunnels simultaneously – named ‘Tom’ ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’. However, they encountered a serious problem in getting rid of the tunnelled soil because it was lighter in colour than the topsoil. Their solution was to mix it up surreptitiously with the soil in the prisoners’ vegetable gardens. This was done by prisoners nicknamed ‘penguins’, who carried bags full of soil hanging down inside their baggy trouser legs and attached to a string round their neck. When they pulled the string, the bag emptied the soil on to the ground and they scuffed it in with feet or tools. An almost unbelievable 100 tons of soil was disposed of in this way.19

  Lieutenant van Kyrke, a naval officer imprisoned in an officers’ camp near Bremen, was also responsible for getting rid of tunnel soil. According to David James, in his book A Prisoner’s Progress, van Kyrke took a great interest in ullage20 pits. ‘A base of sand, covered with tea leaves and potato peelings, may not make the finest garden manure, but it does get rid of a lot of embarrassing soil.’21

  Helphand wrote on the subject of the psychology of prisoners that ‘In defiant situations, humans display a surprising resourcefulness in design and function, in formal arrangement, and in the appropriation of, gathering, and use of materials. Recognition of our own creativity under adverse conditions heightens our satisfaction in being in such a garden.’22 Nowhere was this truer than in the POW camps under Japanese co
ntrol in the Far East. When Japan entered the war, they had no prisoner-of-war camps at all – since they did not expect to imprison anyone – so the first ones were makeshift in the extreme. And since Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention, almost all prisoners were subjected to a very harsh regime of hard labour. Perhaps the worst off were those service personnel who were captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore or during the Burma campaign and forced into slave labour, many of them helping to build the Burma Railway.23 The daily food ration was only 500 to 600 calories in Japanese POW camps (and 1,000 in civilian internment camps), so the inmates slowly starved and were prey to terrible diseases such as beri-beri, which were the result of poor nutrition.24

  Some productive gardens were made in officer camps although rather fewer in those for enlisted men, but they were on nothing like the scale found in European ones.25 The biggest was probably on Changi island, where vegetable gardens were established using POW labour, with as many as 1,000 men employed. It is tragically ironic that the camps where the need for extra vitamins was greatest were the ones least likely to have gardens.

  Servicemen know that there is a risk of being captured and imprisoned when they take part in armed conflict, but civilians do not normally expect such a fate when they take up a job in a foreign country. Yet some found themselves interned simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This happened particularly when Belgium, Holland and France were invaded in May 1940, when Manila was overrun after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and after Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942.

  Internment camps in the Far East – in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Japan itself – housed mainly expatriates who had been working in civil service jobs, medical facilities, universities or Christian missions. These people were often married with children. In all, there were 75,000 internees, mainly British, American and Dutch. There were many camps, but the best-documented as far as gardening is concerned, are probably the old gaol on the small island of Changi, which had been the British army base in Singapore, together with Stanley in Hong Kong, and the campus of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.

  Before the war, a number of these internees had been accustomed to employ servants to do the heavy work in house and garden. Yet many stories have emerged of their courage and resourcefulness; in particular, a number of internees made vegetable patches where it could not be imagined that plants would ever grow. In Stanley camp in Hong Kong, one internee, Jean Gittins, made a hand tool from a piece of wood about six inches long, with half a dozen nails banged through it. She and some friends laid out their garden on a flat roof, so that they could guard it more easily from pilferers. There they grew shallots and mint to improve the taste of the rice on which they mainly lived. Others began to follow their example, and the thieving ceased. In 1943 they also grew tomatoes, lettuce, root crops, peas and celery, adding beans, cucumbers, pumpkins and peanuts the following year. They collected seeds from their rations and from the plants they grew, and stored them in labelled packets. In the autumn of 1944 the Japanese cut the water main, so they had to haul all the water for the gardens from previously disused wells. William Sewell, a Quaker university professor, said that the gardening in the Stanley camp reminded him of subsistence farming on the hills of Chungking. He realised that ‘so many of the things which we had thought of as typically Chinese were merely the normal results of human endeavour in the presence of need and the absence of money and tools’.26

  A distinguished British botanist, Dr G. A. C. Herklots – until the war Reader in Biology at the University of Hong Kong – was also interned at Stanley. According to The Gardeners’ Chronicle, which announced his internment, he was ‘a man of wide interests, being an able botanist, an all-round naturalist and an enthusiastic horticulturist’.27 He was remembered by fellow internees as someone who taught them about the wild fruits and roots that they could, or could not, safely eat. In a book published after the war, he described how ‘In 1941 the first edition of “Vegetable Cultivation in Hong Kong” was written in a hurry under conditions far from ideal. It was inevitably scrappy and full of errors. During 43 months of internment at Stanley, Hong Kong there was ample opportunity to prepare a second edition which was published in 1947. This edition also contained inaccuracies.’28 Twenty years later, he used the information in his book Vegetable Cultivation in South-East Asia, which covered a wider field than simply Hong Kong, and corrected the inaccuracies, though it still contained many of the pen-and-ink drawings that he had done while interned in Stanley.

  Herklots also described what he called the ‘Stanley compost’, which he developed during the war.

  The method of making compost employed by me at the internment camp at Stanley during 1942–1945 is simple and was extremely successful. The only available source of organic nitrogen was human urine; this is perfectly safe to use for this purpose as it is free from the eggs of parasitic worms and is free from harmful bacteria such as those that cause dysentery. (Night soil, which may be contaminated by dangerous parasites should not be so used unless it has matured in a covered tank for at least three weeks.) Narrow trenches were dug in succession along the foot of a barbed wire fence some nine feet high and the excavated laterite-soil wheeled away and discarded. At the bottom of the trench was placed a thick layer of dried rubbish, chiefly grass, and on this was placed a generous layer of ashes from the kitchen fire of grass (occasionally of wood, bark and sawdust). Half a can or a can of fresh urine was poured on top of this and the mixture covered with a thick layer of topsoil carried in from the local hillside; this was well trodden down. The process was repeated once or twice, depending on the depth of the trench, the final level of the soil being three or four inches above the original level. Into this top layer of soil more ashes were raked and the bed well watered. Seeds of Chinese green cucumber and of Yates’ Crystal Apple cucumber were subsequently sown in these beds; the plants grew well and in 1942 yielded 140 cucumbers which were greatly appreciated.29

  Cucumbers the internees were familiar with, but they often had the added difficulty of not knowing how to grow tropical vegetables. However, sheer necessity taught them how to cultivate the staple, sweet potatoes, as well as a number of other exotic vegetables, such as amaranth, kangkong – a semi-aquatic relative of morning glory, which grew very well – tapioca, eggplant (aubergine), chillies, beans and Ceylon (Malabar) spinach.

  If anything, the camp at Santo Tomas in Manila seems to have been the most horticulturally advanced of them all. It was an enormous place, housing perhaps 5,000 civilian internees, of whom 900 were British or Empire citizens. A seven-acre area in the north-east corner was cleared of junk and made into gardens, under the supervision of a committee of experts. The gardeners grew a range of edible plants, both likely and unlikely, including many local staples such as yams and talinum. They grew kangkong, as the internees at Stanley also did, along with pechay, upo, chayotes, gabi, concomas and mongo beans. They planted papaya trees, which grew very quickly, and boiled the unripe fruits to make them edible. They also grew hedges of cassava. In April 1942 they harvested nine baskets of talinum, which was enough for everyone in the camp to eat something. Later that year, they discovered an enormous water tank, and rigged up an irrigation system to the vegetable gardens. This was destroyed in a bad flood in November 1943, but they found the will and strength to remake it. Only once during the war did they receive Red Cross parcels – just before Christmas 1943. As the war wore on, and the Allies began to put pressure on the Japanese, the situation worsened and food rations declined still further. The internees were forced to eat weeds, even lily bulbs. The average weight loss for a male internee over the period of incarceration was 53 lb, or nearly four stone. It is impossible to put a dietary value on the vegetables grown, but their value for raising morale cannot be doubted.

  In the first two years of the war, there were no camps for foreign combatants in Britain, since the threat of invasion m
eant that any captured service personnel were sent across the Atlantic to the United States and Canada instead. Italian prisoners from north Africa were not shipped to England from the Mediterranean until July 1941, because of the continuing conflict there. However, once the threat of invasion by Germany had completely receded that summer, the numbers detained grew rapidly. By the end of the war, there were more than 600 camps or hostels housing POWs in Britain.

  Many prisoners volunteered to work on farms and market gardens rather than spend their days in stupefying idleness. The prisoners were paid a small amount for their work, under the Geneva Convention. They wore a distinctive uniform of British army khaki, which had been dyed a purple-brown colour. There were circular lighter-coloured or red patches on their backs, and diamond-shaped patches on their trousers, so that any man who tried to escape was highly conspicuous. Not that escaping was a realistic option in an island of hostile foreigners. From January 1942, ‘good conduct’ prisoners even lived on farms, rather than returning to camp each night. By the end of the war, there were 58,000 POWs working on farms or in commercial gardening operations.

  Wilfrid Cheal, owner of the large nursery Cheals of Crawley (see Chapter Eight), recalled:

  A prisoner-of-war camp was set up a few miles away at Norwood Hill, and in the early days we had some very lively times with the Italians sent to us, who proved to be extremely volatile and unreliable. Many were the fights that took place with agricultural weapons, so that we had to demand their withdrawal. Later the Germans were much more useful, and finally the eastern European displaced persons proved to be a great asset, and very grateful for the opportunity to work.30