A Green and Pleasant Land
Page 35
Jellicoe, Sir Geoffrey, ‘Ronald Tree and the gardens of Ditchley Park: The human face of history’ in Garden History vol. 10, no.1
Stamper, Anne, Countrywomen in war time – Women’s Institutes 1938–1945, paper delivered to the Second International Conference on the History of Voluntary Action, held at Roehampton Institute, University of Surrey, September 2003 (www.thewi.org.uk)
Thorpe, Andrew, in The Civilian at War: The Home Front in Europe, Japan and the USA in World War II (ed. Jeremy Noakes) (University of Exeter Press, 1992)
Websites
www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar
www.bbc.co.uk/historyatthebbc
www.carrotmuseum.co.uk
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com
www.iwm.org.uk
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
www.oxforddnb.com
www.thewi.org.uk
NOTES AND REFERENCES
Introduction
1 NSALG, Annual report of the National Allotments Society for year ending 31 May 1939, p.6.
Chapter One: The Scene is Set
1 TNA: PRO RG 23/26
2 In the nineteenth century, the expanding petit bourgeoisie in towns took pleasure in renting ‘guinea gardens’ in suburbs, for productive gardening and leisure. Many of these had become allotments by 1900.
3 The Times, 1 January 1940.
4 A. G. Hellyer, Your New Garden, Collingridge, 1937 edn, pp.11–12.
5 Arthur Hellyer became a highly respected and influential post-war writer, contributing for many years to the Financial Times, as well as editing Amateur Gardening.
6 VMH stands for Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest accolade awarded by the Royal Horticultural Society.
7 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, March 1940, p.89.
8 Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape, Architectural Press, 1938, p.79.
9 This described a man who had served his apprenticeship but still had some way to go to get to the top. Literally, it meant someone paid by the day, or journée.
10 Percy Thrower, My Lifetime of Gardening, Hamlyn, 1977, pp.39–40.
11 Page was one of the great post-war landscape gardeners. He worked mainly on the Continent, but is known to thoughtful gardeners in Britain because of his seminal work, The Education of a Gardener.
12 According to Robert Becker, Nancy Lancaster: Her Life, Her World, Her Art, Knopf, 1996, p. 231.
13 Hazel Conway, ‘Everyday landscapes: public parks from 1930–2000’, Garden History, vol. 28, no. 1, p.122.
14 Coincidentally the month that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.
15 There were 242,000 allotments officially recorded in England in 1873. Twigs Way, Allotments, Shire, 2010, p. 12.
16 These calculations should be treated with the utmost caution; since most allotment holders would not have weighed or recorded their crops, it is impossible to extrapolate accurately.
17 Under the Allotments Act of 1925.
18 The Munich crisis was precipitated by German troops marching into the Sudetenland, a border region of Czechoslovakia mainly peopled by ethnic Germans. On 30 September 1938, Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom signed the Munich Agreement, thus letting down Czechoslovakia but averting the immediate threat of European war.
19 NSALG, Annual report of the National Allotments Society for year ending 31 May 1939, p.4.
20 Ibid.
21 The Society of Friends, otherwise known as the Quakers.
22 A prominent member of the Society of Friends, and also a Vice-President of the NAS.
23 Figures from Statistical Digest of the War, first published by the Central Statistical Office, 1951; published with amendments by HMSO and Kraus, 1975.
24 Jennifer Davies, The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, BBC Books, 1993, p.13.
25 Wooden glazed frames placed over young plants, either to protect them from the cold weather or, as in this case, to force vegetables into early growth, to achieve higher prices.
26 Chris McCooey (ed.), Despatches from the Home Front: The War Diaries of Joan Strange 1939–1945, JAK Books, 1994, p.12.
27 F1 hybrids are created by controlled cross-pollination. As the seedlings all have the same parents, they are much more uniform than those varieties which are the result of ‘open pollination’, and in the case of vegetables they tend to mature at the same time. F1 hybrids became widely used in commercial horticulture after the war, because of these obvious advantages.
28 Where it is still held each May.
29 They are now at Brogdale in Kent.
30 Grey squirrels are not native to Britain, and seriously damage the prospects of the smaller, native red squirrel. This was an early, sadly unsuccessful, foray by the RHS into wildlife conservation.
31 Reginald Farrer (1880–1920) wrote the standard work on rock gardening, the two-volume The English Rock Garden, as well as the popular My Rock Garden, amongst others.
32 The National Vegetable Society was not founded until 1960.
33 From 1927 the British Broadcasting Corporation.
34 Marion Cran is forgotten now, but she was a popular author of discursive gardening books such as The Garden of Ignorance and The Garden of Experience.
35 A scientist working at the East Malling research station in Kent, who became the Ministry of Agriculture’s Horticultural Commissioner in wartime.
36 Everybody referred to him thus.
37 Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War, Manchester University Press, 1996, p.14–15.
38 E. R. Chamberlin, Life in Wartime Britain, Batsford, 1972, p.30.
39 Rambling roses.
40 Quoted in Simon Garfield, We Are At War, Ebury Press, 2009, p.112.
Chapter Two: What Happens Now?
1 Margery Allingham, The Oaken Heart, Michael Joseph, 1941, pp.86–7.
2 Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939–45 (ed. Nigel Nicolson), Fontana, 1970, p.25.
3 A gross overestimate. It is unlikely to have been even a tenth of that number.
4 Quoted in Robert Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War, Manchester University Press, 2002, p.20.
5 The Air Ministry came to the same conclusion the following year, estimating that in the first sixty days of the war it was possible that there might be 600,000 dead and 1,200,000 injured by German bombing raids.
6 E. R. Chamberlin, Life in Wartime Britain, Batsford, 1972, p.9.
7 Not everybody initially; gas helmets for babies and masks for young children were not available until 1939.
8 R. M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, HMSO, 1950, p.20.
9 Quoted in Norman Longmate, The Way We Lived Then, Hutchinson, 1971, p.122.
10 Andrew Thorpe, in The Civilian in War: The Home Front in Europe, Japan and the USA in World War II (ed. Jeremy Noakes), University of Exeter Press, 1992, p.21.
11 Mass-Observation was (and is) a social research organisation founded by an anthropologist (Tom Harrisson), a poet (Charles Madge) and a progressive film-maker (Humphrey Jennings) in 1937. The aims of the organisation were to examine aspects of British life using volunteers who answered questions on subjects such as rationing and leisure activities. During the war, some 500 volunteer diarists wrote accounts of their daily lives, constantly or sporadically. Although the contributors were self-selecting (many answered an advertisement in the New Statesman), their testimony is invaluable to the researcher, because it is contemporaneous and thus not distorted by hindsight. For about a year at the beginning of the war, Mass-Observation was commissioned by the Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence Division to monitor civilian morale, amongst other things.
12 MOA, FR 606 Portsmouth, ‘Reaction to the Blitz’, March 1941, quoted in Half the Battle, op. cit. p. 2.
13 MOA, War Begins at Home, ed. Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, Chatto and Windus, 1940, p.413.
14 Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming (eds.), Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 4
9, Profile, 2006, p.127.
15 A child’s toy.
16 Allingham, The Oaken Heart, op. cit., p.137.
17 An Irishman of modest background, Bracken was the most successful wartime Minister of Information, partly because of his energy and partly because he had a much sharper intuition about people’s moods and reactions than his more patrician and high-minded predecessors.
18 Hansard, House of Commons, 10 June 1941, vol. 372, col. 152.
19 Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War, Manchester University Press, 1996, p.70.
20 Robert Hudson replaced Dorman-Smith in May 1940, when Neville Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Lord Woolton had replaced the unpopular Morrison the month before.
21 In fact, the demarcation lines were by no means always clear, and there was much collaborative effort.
22 Daily Express, 21 November 1939.
23 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 9 September 1939, p.189.
24 Farmers were paid £2 an acre for ploughing up grassland before the end of December 1939.
25 Quoted in Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–1945, Headline Review, 2005, p.174.
26 TNA: PRO MAF 48/732.
27 Ibid.
28 Hansard, House of Lords, 28 September 1939, vol. 114, col. 1208.
29 There was some hostile action, notably at sea, as well as limited Luftwaffe raids on Scottish targets, before the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940.
30 The blackout was not lifted until September 1944, and then only partially.
31 Air Raid Precautions. ARP wardens were the first line of civil defence.
32‘Vegetable and Fruit Growing in an Emergency’, presented to the Council of the Royal Horticultural Society on 25 October 1938.
33 The New and Old Halls were used by the GPO for sorting Christmas post each December.
34 Extracts from the Proceedings of the Royal Horticultural Society, vol. LXVIII (1943), p.i.
35 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 2 September 1939, p.186.
36 Ibid., p. viii
37 Ibid., 9 September 1939, p.189.
38 Ibid., p.190.
39 Before nurserymen developed the modern practice of ‘containerisation’ – when plants are potted up and can be sold and planted at any time of year, provided the soil conditions are right – most plants were sent out from nurseries during the dormant season between November and March. This required nursery workers to go into the fields and dig up ordered plants, pack them in freezing-cold packing sheds and put them on carrier lorries. It also meant sending out catalogues and brochures in good time, which required forward planning and a clear idea of present and future stock.
40 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 30 September 1939, p. v.
41 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, December 1939, p.546.
42 Ibid., p.549.
Chapter Three: Dig for Victory!
1 Daniel Smith makes a good case for the anonymous leader writer being Michael Foot in The Spade as Mighty as the Sword, Aurum, 2011, pp.43–5.
2 Evening Standard, 6 September 1939.
3 Frankly, it does sound very alarming. But to put it into context, during April 1941, nearly 700,000 tons of shipping was lost.
4 Evening Standard, 12 September 1939.
5 The Times, 4 October 1939.
6 The slogan even turned up from time to time as the answer to a newspaper crossword clue.
7 Cultivation of Lands (Allotments) Order, 1939.
8 Local authorities already had powers under the Land Settlement (Facilities) Act of 1919 to provide seeds and equipment at cost price to allotmenteers where there was currently no allotment society or co-operative in place.
9 Hansard, House of Lords, 28 September 1939, vol. 114, col. 1206.
10 TNA: PRO MAF 48/732.
11 The Times, 24 February 1940.
12 Jennifer Purcell, Domestic Soldiers: Six Women’s Lives in the Second World War, Constable, 2010, p.29.
13 Stephen Cheveley, A Garden Goes to War, J. Miles, 1940, Foreword.
14 Ibid., p.17.
15 Lt Col. W. L. Julyan, ‘Tomato production in the army’, The Field, 3 October 1942, p.362.
16 Quoted in The Times, 1 January 1940.
17 Auberon Waugh, son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, recalled that his mother finally procured a banana for each of her three children, with special banana coupons, just after the war ended. ‘… the great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three.’ Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?, Century 1991, p.67.
18 Philip Jeffery, Harvest of the Spade, Longmans, Green, 1944, p.18.
19 Before 1940 this was known as the GPO Film Unit.
20 Scotland was served by a separate Department of Agriculture but it worked very closely with MAF.
21 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 6 January 1940, p.11
22‘Food from the Garden’, ‘Growmore’ Bulletin No. 1, HMSO, 1941, Foreword.
23 BBC WAC, RCONT1 – Middleton C H – Talks File 2, 20 January 1940.
24 Other slogans included ‘An Hour in the Garden Saves One in the Queue’, which was such nonsense that it did not catch the public imagination to anything like the same degree. ‘Dig for Victory and Dig for Dear Life’ fared no better.
25 The London Blitz began on 7 September 1940 and continued for fifty-seven consecutive nights.
26 Roy Hay, Gardener’s Chance: From War Production to Peace Possibilities, Putnam, 1946, p.13.
27 Quoted in Twigs Way and Mike Brown, Digging for Victory: Gardens and Gardening in Wartime Britain, Sabrestorm, 2010, p.63.
28 BBC WAC, R30/2179/1 29 September 1941.
29 The Times, 3 August 1940.
30 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews 171 (2627).
31 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 16 May 1942, p.203.
32 Ibid., 23 December 1944, p.233.
33 The Listener, 11 June 1942, p.759.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 BBC WAC, RCONT1 – Hay, Roy – Talks File 1 – 1939–1949, 15 September 1941.
37 Bill Deedes, the model for William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, was a journalist who became an MP and editor of the Daily Telegraph.
38 Letter to The Times, 30 June 1943, p.5.
39 Within a few years of being returned to grass after the war, these lawns had given the lie to the old story that it took 300 years to produce such perfect swards. In fact lawns are the better for being dug up and resown from time to time.
40 Jane Brown, A Garden of Our Own: A History of Girton College Garden, Friends of Girton Garden, 1999, p.32.
41 Leigh Verrill-Rhys and Deirdre Beddo (eds.), Parachutes and Petticoats: Welsh Women Writing on the Second World War, Honno, 1992, p.55.
42 Quoted in Smith, The Spade as Mighty as the Sword, op. cit., p.94.
43 Representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food, as well as voluntary organisations like the NAS, National Federation of Women’s Institutes and advisers from the county agricultural education authorities, sat on these committees.
44 Members of the VPAs paid a small affiliation fee to the County Garden Produce Committees and thereby tapped into their bulk-buying capacities, the loan of machinery and the advice of experts. These clubs were open not only to gardeners but also to keepers of domestic livestock and beekeepers, the idea being that gardeners could help provide food for livestock, while livestock keepers could supply local manure.
45 Hansard, House of Commons, 11 March 1941, vol. 369, col. 1158W.
46 Hansard, House of Lords, 1 July 1941, vol. 119, cols. 587–96.
47 The Times, 13 December 1941.
48 Hansard, House of Commons, 14 July 1943, vol. 391, cols. 327–8.
49 A perch is the same as a rod or a pole, about 30 sq yds.
50 MOA, Diari
st 5098, diary for 26 October 1940.
51 Ibid., diary for 11 January 1945.
52 Quoted in Smith, The Spade as Mighty as the Sword, op. cit., p.54.
53 Quoted in Jennifer Davies, The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, BBC Books, 1993, p.111.
54 Quoted in Joanne Chamberlain, Trench Warfare: A Study of ‘Dig for Victory’ in Brighton and Hove During World War Two, unpublished dissertation, University of Sussex, 2001, p.20.
55 TNA: PRO MAF 48/744. In 1943, Southern Railway was estimated to have 13,790 allotments on 606 acres. At the same time, London Transport had 3,300 plots for employees and non-employees on 95 acres; Great Western had 19,307 allotments on 984 acres; while LNER had 24,510 allotments on 1,443 acres. In Scotland LNER had 2,370 plots with an area of 118 acres, so the total for LNER was 26,880 on 1,561 acres. London Midland and Scottish had 20,607 in England and Wales, with an acreage of 1,269, although the company does not seem to have had any allotments in Scotland. In October 1945, the total number of railway-leased allotments was 82,290, with an acreage of 4,417, which was not dissimilar to the 1943 figures.
56 Chamberlain, Trench Warfare, op. cit., p.23.
57 BBC WAC, R34/642, 14 August 1943.
58 About £6,250,000 in today’s money.
59 Ministry of Agriculture, ‘Allotment and Garden Guide’, vol. 1, no. 4, April 1945, reproduced in edition by Twigs Way, Sabrestorm, 2009, p. 67.
60 1,267 allotment holders, 1,240 gardeners and 475 cultivators of both allotments and gardens.
61 Which was included in this particular survey, even though the work was carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture rather than Scotland’s Department of Agriculture.
62 Only 10 per cent of those surveyed said that they used the Ministry cropping plan as their main guide, and only another 15 per cent used it partially.
63 TNA: PRO RG 23/26. In a review of a film in the Dig for Victory series, entitled ‘Garden Tools’, The Gardeners’ Chronicle (5 June 1943, p.223) could not resist joking about New Victory Diggers: ‘Give us the job, and we’ll finish the tools.’