A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  This discontent came to the ears of Lord Woolton, who roundly ticked countrywomen off in a radio broadcast in June, reminding them somewhat tactlessly of the rather greater sacrifices made by their urban sisters. Miss Walker was summoned by Sir Henry French, Woolton’s Permanent Secretary, to explain, but she told him that whatever was being said, the WIs were getting on with the work and producing the jam.

  The editor of the WI magazine, Home and Country, wrote that autumn that the ‘momentary confusion’ had resulted from the fact that the centres were worried about their solvency if they could not sell their produce immediately, as they had done the year before. The incident was all rather embarrassing. However, this was the only time that the countrywomen’s patriotism was ever remotely called into question.

  Despite the rumblings of discontent, more than 1,100 tons of fruit made 1,630 tons of preserves that year. The Queen – who was a member of the Sandringham Women’s Institute – made ‘surprise’ visits to a number of fruit preservation centres in Buckinghamshire in July, and Mrs Roosevelt, the American President’s wife, also visited a centre.37 ‘The Women’s Institutes help to make the wheels go round,’ she is reported as saying afterwards.38 As evidence that the quarrel between the NFWI and the Ministry had been patched up, Miss Walker received an OBE in recognition of her achievements.

  The grants from the Ministry of Food and Ministry of Agriculture – £5,125 for the fruit preservation scheme and £3,800 for the produce guilds in 1942 – increased steadily during the war, a firm indicator that the Ministry continued to think the work useful. In 1944, there were 1,174 fruit preservation centres open, even though there were four consecutive nights of sharp frost in May, which damaged every kind of fruit crop in many parts of the country. It was only in 1945, when a late spring frost again damaged blossom, and war weariness overtook even the spirited women of the WI, that the numbers of centres dropped very sharply and the Ministries of Agriculture and Food were refunded some of their grants. The scheme, as overseen by the Ministry of Food, came to an end that year.

  Between 1940 and 1945, more than 5,300 tons (about 12 million lb) of fruit was preserved, which was the equivalent, according to Sir Henry French, of a year’s jam ration39 for more than half a million people.40 When he announced this to an audience of 300 WI delegates, I have no doubt that his speech was met with hearty applause, since that sounds a great deal. However, in fact, all that hard work achieved less than half of one per cent of the national requirement for (rationed) jam in wartime, so the effort was largely symbolic. It was probably just as well that those five stout-hearted women of Hawkinge, hot and flustered from making jam in the boiling-hot weather of September 1940, with the Battle of Britain raging over their heads, did not know that.

  In popular mythology, jam has threatened to obscure the true value of the Women’s Institutes during the war, which was their equally strong attachment to building ‘Jerusalem’ in England’s green and pleasant land. The making of jam was only one of many activities in which countrywomen used their organisational skills and their appetite for selfless hard work to further the war effort. It was the Institute member’s determination not to let her sword sleep in her hand that earned her the nation’s gratitude and respect.

  Inevitably, the jam-making campaign was gently satirised in the pages of Punch, most notably by Mary Dunn, through her fictional creation, Lady Addle.

  Nowadays people seem too apprehensive about wasting sugar to experiment, and hence some splendid ingredients wither in the fields and hedgerows for want of plucking. The common burr for instance, soaked overnight and well stewed, makes an unusual jelly with a sweetish taste not unlike plate41 powder. Acorns, boiled to a pulp, will help to eke out your quinces if they are scarce. Then potato jam, with a little cochineal and some very fine grass seed for pips, with a raspberry jam label on the jar, does splendidly for people who have, either temporarily or permanently, lost their taste. I find my evacuees always demand raspberry or strawberry jam, so I have been reduced to innocent little ruses such as I quote above, or sometimes to boiling up a pound jar of one of them with a pint of conker stock, which sets into two or three jars of a kind of jelly-ish jam, or perhaps more accurately, a jam-ish jelly.

  I must stress the importance of your jelly cloth. Most cookery books recommend flannel for straining. I go further and say that old flannel is the best, especially some personal belonging such as an old flannel hot-water bottle cover or a beloved dog’s blanket, which seems in some strange way to give the jelly a very poignant flavour.42

  An attachment to the home-made, the thrifty and the honest was admired even by sophisticates like Constance Spry. In Come into the Garden, Cook she wrote,

  It is a good thing to live at the heart of an empire that rules the seas. It has been good to share the luxuries of other countries, but it is not good to neglect what we have ourselves, to lean back in a lazy dependence, or to forget the lore of the past.

  Before the war, when luxury shops might fill their shelves with flavours and spices from the Orient, with rare honeys and exotic jams, tribute was still paid to the home-made. It would seem that the housewife continues to have something up her sleeve, which cannot be quite copied in a wholesale manner. Now we must depend on what is home-made to a degree that would have come perhaps more easily to our grandmothers.43

  Abundant nature certainly provided ingenious cooks with ingredients which would not have been countenanced in kitchens before the war. But necessity was the spur. Fanny Cradock, who made her name as a television cook after the war, usually wearing a Norman Hartnell ballgown, recalled: ‘Our cooking used to amaze our friends. They thought we had black market supplies from Fortnum’s . . . Bracken shoots were asparagus and I used liquid paraffin for my pastry. We caught and cooked sparrows from the garden and often ate baked hedgehogs (rather like frogs’ legs).’44

  A widely travelled Frenchman, le vicomte de Mauduit, was the great expert on this kind of natural scavenging. He had written a number of conventional cookery books before the war but, in 1940, he published a book about what could be harvested in the countryside, with a foreword by no less a personage than Lloyd George himself. ‘During the war,’ de Mauduit wrote, ‘it [searching for food in the countryside] will serve to relieve some of the strain on the nation’s food supply and will teach those of us who will turn to the country-side for immunity from direct war destruction how to maintain life in the case of difficulties with regard to the carriage and distribution of food.’45 Directing his remarks at rural dwellers, campers, caravanners, hikers and what he called ‘the necessitous’, he predicted that, armed with this book, they could live in comfort, plenty and health even if all banks, shops and markets closed for indefinite periods. This book would have been particularly helpful if Britain had been successfully invaded, and guerrilla bands formed, since he instructed his readers which wild birds’ eggs could be eaten, how to prepare a hedgehog, grill a squirrel, stew a starling, find an edible frog, dry fish, and use fennel stalks for fuel. He recommended soapwort as a substitute for soap for washing linens, which must have been very useful, since soap was hard to find in shops; this could be the reason why this rampant nuisance is still to be found in many country gardens. In order to cheer his readers, he also gave recipes for gorse wine, red beet port and hop beer. And if they should suffer from minor ills, there were instructions on how to make a parsley-water eye-bath for a bloodshot eye, or an infusion of dried red roses, violets, borage and anchusa flowers ‘for a sad heart’.

  This story does not have a happy ending. Le vicomte travelled back to his homeland when war broke out, was captured by the Germans after the fall of France and died in Dachau concentration camp on 2 February 1945.46 This was a tragic end for a man with a curious mind, a cultivated palate and an obvious joie de vivre.

  Scavenging for food in the countryside was on the whole a private preoccupation; searching out native drug plants, on the other hand, became institutionalised. Many medicinal drugs and nutritional
supplements had been imported from abroad before the war and had therefore become scarce or even, as in the case of some tropical plant drugs like quinine, unobtainable. However, a surprising number of imported drugs were derived from plants also native to Britain. The obvious solution to any shortage, therefore, was to gather native-grown drug plants or suitable substitutes, and to this end the Ministry of Health assembled a Vegetable Drugs Committee. On it served a number of civil servants and experts, including a pair of scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Dr Metcalfe and Dr Melville.

  There were four main areas of interest to this committee. One was the necessity to find native red seaweeds, which might be suitable for making agar, a jelly used in bacteriological research in the laboratory as well as an emulsifying agent, a food additive and a treatment for constipation. Before the war, it had been almost entirely imported from Japan, around the coasts of which Gelidium amansii and related red seaweeds grow. By 1941, this source was threatening to dry up, and did so entirely after Japan entered the war in early December. Algologists were therefore dispatched around the British coastline to study the various kinds of native seaweeds and discover whether any were suitable alternatives to Japanese seaweeds. Boy Scouts were encouraged to help, in what must have been a rather unenviable task. The scientists working in the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew did much of the research work on potential substitutes, in particular ‘Irish moss’, Chondrus crispus, which was already used as an emulsifier in cod-liver oil. It was thought that, if mixed with another seaweed, Gigartina mamillosa, it might make a suitable alternative to agar jelly. As things turned out, this was not the case, but the scientists did discover that this mixture made an admirable substitute for gelatine in food products like tinned tongue. Meanwhile, algologists at the Scottish Marine Biological Association station at Millport on the river Clyde discovered that there were British species of Gelidium, as well as another red seaweed, Ahnfeldtia, which were good enough to be used as agar substitutes. These were only available in small quantities, but that was better than nothing.47

  The second area of research ‘of national importance’ was aimed at expanding the range of nutritional supplements. At the beginning of the war, there was already in production one syrup which was high in vitamin C. During the 1930s, as a result of a need to do something with periodic commercial fruit gluts, scientists at Long Ashton, led by Dr Vernon Charley, had investigated the possibilities of making syrups and juices for flavouring milk shakes. When the Bristol soda and mineral water manufacturer, H. W. Carter, showed an interest in the blackcurrant syrup, Charley authorised its trialling in the factory, with a Long Ashton technician in attendance. As a result, in 1936 H. W. Carter launched the syrup commercially, under the name ‘Ribena’, a word derived from the botanical name for blackcurrant, Ribes nigrum.48

  Once the war started, the Ministry of Food considered that a palatable and ready source of vitamin C was particularly important for infants and small children, who would not eat enough green vegetables to receive the necessary daily intake of the vitamin. The distribution of Ribena was authorised for children, expectant mothers and others in particular need of vitamin C, although the Ribena trade name was abandoned for the duration. Lord Woolton believed its production to be so important that two ‘shadow factories’ were fitted out elsewhere, since Bristol was a likely target for air raids. Almost the entire national commercial crop of blackcurrants went into the manufacture of this syrup. Indeed, the quantity of fruit needed was so great that it could not all be processed in the short harvest period, so the Campden Research Station arranged for much of it to be canned at various canning centres, for processing later.

  After a meeting of the Vegetable Drugs Committee in June 1941,49 Dr Melville wrote: ‘As the Ministry of Health has found it necessary to arrange for the preparation of a syrup from black currants for use as a Vitamin C concentrate, it may be worth while to consider the possibility of using wild rose hips in a similar manner as they are richer in ascorbic acid than blackcurrants.’50 Rosehips have a good flavour, like a quality plum or a guava, and also contain vitamin A, which children need to help prevent ‘night blindness’. So Dr Melville began to work on research into rose hips in collaboration with Dr Magnus Pyke, chief scientist at the research laboratories of Vitamins Ltd in Hammersmith.51 They soon discovered that there were two major difficulties: palatability and collection.

  In September 1941, the Ministry of Health asked Dr Vernon Charley and his colleagues at Long Ashton to help. Rose hips turned out to be more problematic than blackcurrants, because of the prickly, irritant hairs that surround the seeds in the hip. The call from the Ministry came a mere three weeks before the picking season began; nevertheless, Dr Charley and his team set to work, using a number of unlikely bits of machinery, including domestic laundry mangles and lawn rollers, to extract the juice. They discovered that the best method was to mill the hips quite finely and put the resulting mash into boiling water to stop all enzyme activity immediately.

  Collection was also going to be a problem, with the adult population otherwise occupied, so the Director of Kew, Sir Arthur Hill, led a concerted campaign in September to encourage Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, schoolchildren and WIs (as well as the Scottish Rural Institutes and Scottish WVS) to go out and collect hips. The idea was that the Women’s Institutes’ County Herb Committees would act as local organisers, since collection needed to be orderly and swift, with only a limited time between picking and processing. The advice from Kew was that the hips ‘should be weighed, invoiced and sent to your central depot where payment will be made for weight at the rate of 2/- per stone, with an additional 6d per stone for incidental expenses’.52 Scouts and other youth organisations supplemented their funds in this way, and war charities also benefited.

  By experimentation, Dr Charley later discovered that wild rose hips had the highest concentration of vitamin C when they were just beginning to colour up but were still hard; and that the best hips, from the nutritional point of view, were to be found in hedgerows in the Lake District and county Durham northwards. They were therefore best collected in early August, which fortuitously coincided with the school holidays.

  The Vegetable Drugs Committee wrote to the County Herb Committees, saying that the target figure was 1,500 tons; in other words, an enormous amount. It can have been no surprise that those hard-working children only managed to collect 220 tons in 1941. Nevertheless, rose hip syrup went on sale in chemists on 1 February 1942.

  In 1942, 333 tons of hips were collected and in 1943, 492 tons. It was a great deal, but only a third of what could have been processed. All this highlighted the difficulties in wartime of mobilising a sufficiently large but partly juvenile volunteer force, whose effectiveness was often determined by the enthusiasm, or lack of it, of particular local education authorities. There was no doubting children’s willingness, but the scale of the task was simply beyond them. It is interesting to note that the northern collectors did best, probably because they had both Rosa canina and the later-ripening, downy-leaved Rosa mollis to choose from, so there was a longer season for collection.

  The third area of interest to Sir Arthur Hill and his scientists at Kew was the quest for potential substitutes for rubber, the traditional source of which was cut off completely when the Japanese overran Malaya in 1942. The scientists tested the efficacy of a Russian species of dandelion, bizarrely, but nothing much came of it.

  Kew was much more successful with the humble perennial nettle, which could be used for the industrial extraction of the green pigment, chlorophyll. The value of chlorophyll resided in its use as a colouring in fats and soaps, as well as camouflage paint. The stems of nettles could be made into high-class paper, and experiments were also attempted to see if nettle fabric was useful in the construction of aircraft. Yet again youthful collectors, together with the Women’s Institutes, were involved, gathering nettle leaves and drying them. Guidance to the Boy Scouts included the advice: ‘Unless the collector is more than usua
lly resistant to nettle stings, leather gloves should be worn.’53 ‘Stingers’ were a fact of life to country children, but it would be surprising if many of them could cheerfully do without gloves.

  As far as medicinal drugs were concerned, the most sought after were the leaves and seed of foxglove, belladonna leaves, dandelion roots, stinging nettles, colchicum corms,54 broom flower tops, male fern, valerian and thorn apple. Also valuable were sphagnum moss – a very absorbent material used as a dressing for wounds – and the conkers of horse chestnut trees, which were used for making the glucose-rich pick-me-up Lucozade, as well as a treatment for varicose veins and other inflammatory conditions. Ordinary culinary herbs were also required, but these were mainly grown in gardens and nurseries, for ease of collection.

  In 1941, the wholesale drug company, Brome and Schimmer, published an explanatory booklet entitled ‘Herb Gathering’. Two herbalists, Barbara Keen and Jean Armstrong of the Valeswood Herb Farm, wrote the text. In it were descriptions of all the many and various wild flowers, roots and herbs that were needed by the Ministry of Health, and, crucially, how they should be treated and dried. Fortunately, it included drawings from Illustrations from the British Flora, so it is to be hoped that no one mixed up their belladonna with their broom.

  The booklet was badly needed, because that year the collection of medicinal herbs by amateurs turned out to be rather haphazard and experimental. The minutes of the meeting of the Vegetable Drugs Committee on 17 December 1941 certainly indicate this: ‘It has been found that although enthusiasm was great, and interest widespread, throughout the country, there was serious lack of co-ordination and technical knowledge on the subject of drying the herbs collected. Nevertheless, medicinal herbs to the value of approximately £2,000 were collected, dried and marketed.’55