64 TNA: PRO RG23/26, 8.3.
65 TNA: PRO RG23/26, 8.1.
66 Daily Express, 24 September 1942.
67 TNA: PRO MAF 156/375.
68 TNA: PRO MAF 156/375, table 1.
69 Ibid.
70 TNA: PRO MAF 156/375, table 4.
71 TNA: PRO MAF 156/375.
72 Certainly the success of the campaign to get people to lend the government money to pursue the war effort by buying National Savings and Defence Bonds can be accurately measured, and it was impressive. In 1943, small savings stood at £719 million, up from £62 million in 1939, while public issues reached £1,176 million in 1945, up from £10 million in 1939.
73 TNA: PRO MAF 156/375.
74 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 11 October 1941, p.126.
75 Peter Ender, Up the Garden Path, Herbert Jenkins, 1944, p.7.
76 Ibid., p.25.
77 Mary Dunn, The World of Lady Addle, Robin Clark, 1985, pp.229–30.
Chapter Four: Women and Children Go to It
1 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 30 December 1939, p.394.
2 Quoted in Twigs Way and Mike Brown, Digging for Victory: Gardens and Gardening in Wartime Britain, Sabrestorm, 2010, p.161.
3 Ibid.
4 In the same year, the Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes came into being; although the SWRI always remained separate from the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, it had well-nigh identical aims and organisation.
5 Quoted in Gervas Huxley, Lady Denman GBE, Chatto and Windus, 1961, p.67.
6 Mont Abbott of Enstone, Oxfordshire, recalled how much his mother and her female neighbours of all classes benefited from the founding of the Women’s Institute in the village just after the First World War. Sheila Stewart, Lifting the Latch: A Life on the Land, Day Books, 2002, pp.82–3.
7 There were 318,000 members at the time of the organisation’s twenty-first birthday in 1937, and 331,612 enrolled in 5,720 local Institutes in 1939. The annual subscription was two shillings.
8 The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to women over thirty who owned property.
9 Founded in 1938 and headed by the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, the WVS was 843,000 strong by February 1941, and the largest women’s organisation in the country. As well as ARP duties, WVS volunteers ran day nurseries, canteens and rest centres for those bombed out of their homes as well as organising salvage collections and ‘rural pie schemes’ for agricultural workers.
10 The Women’s Institute magazine, Home and Country, July 1938, p.283. Some small Institutes did fold or cease their activities in wartime.
11 WL, 5FWI/A/3/73, 1 September 1939.
12 WL, ibid., 5 June 1940.
13 Ibid.
14 A speaker, presumably, on the RHS list.
15 IWM, the papers of Miss Elizabeth Hess, 14035.
16 Ibid.
17 The collections contained two kinds of pea, broad beans, runner beans, long or globe beet, Brussels sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli, Savoy cabbage, summer cabbage, carrot, leek, lettuce, perpetual spinach, onion, turnip and parsnip.
18 BBC WW2 People’s War, A4304125, 29 June 2005.
19 TNA: PRO RG 23/26.
20 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 3 June 1944, pp.223–4.
21 Chris McCooey (ed.), Despatches From the Home Front: The War Diaries of Joan Strange 1939–1945, JAK Books, 1994, pp.61–2.
22 Quoted in Way and Brown, Digging for Victory, op. cit., pp. 164.
23 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
24 The WLA had a forerunner: the Women’s National Land Service Corps, founded in 1916.
25 Vita Sackville-West, The Women’s Land Army, Imperial War Museum, 1993, p.10.
26 Ibid., p.14. Vita Sackville-West was not above finding a lady gardener for a friend, even though he was not engaged in food production. Joan Chapman recalled of her work for an elderly general that ‘Nothing we grew was ever sold or went to help the war effort. At the time it worried me terribly. I spent my days picking raspberries for dinner parties, pruning espalier fruit trees – instead of growing food for a country at war.’ Quoted in Nicola Tyrer, They Fought in the Fields, Tempus, 2007, p.94.
27 Trish Gibson, Brenda Colvin: A Career in Landscape, Frances Lincoln, 2011, pp.115–16.
28 Quoted in Peter King, Women Rule the Plot, Duckworth, 1999, p.118.
29 MOA, D 5324, diary for 23 March 1941.
30 Hot and cold running water; obviously enough of a luxury for Muriel Green to think it deserved a mention.
31 MOA, D5324., diary for 28 April 1941.
32 MOA, ibid., diary for 19 April 1941.
33 Auxiliary Territorial Service, which supported the British army.
34 MOA, D5324., diary for January 1942.
35 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
36 Interview by Elizabeth Grice, Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2012.
37 MERL, FR STU, Studley College Archive.
38 She is reputed to have been the model – in appearance at least – for Miss Trunchbull in Roald Dahl’s Matilda. Dahl certainly visited the gardens from time to time, when living at Great Missenden. Personal communication with Valerie Finnis, c.2000.
39 Quoted in Ursula Maddy, Waterperry: A Dream Fulfilled, Merlin Books, 1990, p.152.
40 From 7 a.m. to 12 noon and 1 p.m. until 5 p.m., and a good half-day on Saturdays.
Chapter Five: Groundwork
1 In all this outpouring of helpful information, the government did not forget completely those would-be gardeners without access to any land at all. The Ministry of Agriculture published a ‘Dig for Victory’ leaflet entitled ‘Roof and Window-box Gardening’, which dealt with difficulties such as wind, drought and the need to choose the right containers in which to grow plants, not to mention the right varieties of dwarf vegetables. It was pretty half-hearted advice, but may well have been useful to the many town-dwellers without the time or strength to rent an allotment.
2 TNA: PRO RG 23/69.The least favoured vegetables (if amounts grown is a guide), according to a survey of gardens carried out in England and Wales in September 1944, were haricot beans, spinach and spinach beet, kale and celery.
3 Even if the fruits did not ripen before the autumn, they could be used in pickles and chutneys.
4 This technology, first developed by the Americans and the Japanese in the 1940s and 50s, revolutionised the growing of vegetable crops in developed countries. F1 hybrid seed has a number of advantages over open-pollinated seed, in particular vigour, uniformity, earliness, long shelf life and resistance to disease. But the offspring of F1 plants do not come ‘true’ from seed, and F1 seed is more expensive than open-pollinated.
5 Parsnips and carrots are biennials and run up to flower the following spring, when the roots become woody and inedible.
6 Peter Donnelly (ed.), Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s Everyday Reflections 1939–45, Harrap, 1979. The answer to Mrs Milburn’s question is ‘no’. As it was June, she had left the potatoes far too long in the clamp, and sunlight filtering through would have encouraged them to sprout. In the process, they would have shrivelled.
7 WL, 5/FWI/A/3/73, WI Wiltshire Supplement, October 1939.
8 Marjorie Williams, Letters from Lamledra (ed. Cassandra Phillips), Truran, 2007, p.146.
9 The Times, 8 March 1940.
10 E. Graham, Gardening in War-time, Peter Davies, 1940, pp.50–1.
11 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
12 Levens Hall is most famous for its 300-year-old yew topiary. It is open to the public.
13 A large proportion of the available chemical fertilisers were manufactured or sold by Plant Protection Ltd of Yalding, Kent, a subsidiary of ICI.
14‘Sixties’ were 3˝ in diameter, ‘fifty-fours’ were 4˝, ‘forty-eights’ were 4½˝ and so on. The most famous pottery for clay pots was Sankey’s of Nottingham, which continued to make them until 1976,
when the firm changed to manufacturing plastic pots.
15 Leaflets advised: ‘Keep the hoe going. What feeds a weed will feed a cabbage to feed you.’
16 The Land by Vita Sackville-West (William Heinemann, 1926), p. 35.
17‘Biological control’ is the phrase used for control of pests or diseases using other living organisms. It was in its infancy in the 1940s but is now very well established, in gardens as well as nurseries.
18 Constance Spry, Come into the Garden, Cook, J. M. Dent, 1942, pp.84–5.
19 W. J. C. Lawrence, Catch the Tide: Adventures in Horticultural Research, Grower Books, 1980, pp.11–12.
20 The dilution rate was one ounce to twelve gallons of water.
21 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 13 January 1940, p.15.
22 Quoted in Adrian Searle, Isle of Wight at War 1939–45, The Dovecote Press, 1990, p.152.
23‘Dig for Victory’ leaflet no. 17.
24 The house in Worcestershire to which the King and Queen were to be evacuated, should London become too dangerous for them.
25 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
26 Spry, Come into the Garden, Cook, op. cit., p.11.
27 Quoted in Twigs Way and Mike Brown, Digging for Victory: Gardens and Gardening in Wartime Britain, Sabrestorm, 2010, p.167.
Chapter Six: Talking of Scarlet-Veinèd Beet
1 Professor Joad, the best-known of the BBC Brains Trust team.
2 Anon, Punch, 17 May 1944, pp.82–3. No apologies, seemingly, to John Keats.
3 The family’s main seat was Renishaw in Derbyshire.
4 Quoted in www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/resources/in-depth/gardening.
5 Catholic Herald, 27 September 1935, p. 13.
6 Quoted in Daniel Smith, The Spade as Mighty as the Sword, Aurum, 2011, p.48.
7 Asa Briggs, The War of Words, OUP, 1970, p.301. The Kitchen Front had an average listenership in 1940 of 5,400,000, while the most popular programme of all was Saturday Night Variety, with 10,700,000 listeners.
8 By which he meant weeds.
9 Broadcast reproduced in The Listener, 4 January 1940, p.33.
10 The Listener, 18 January 1940, p.137.
11 Ibid., 9 May 1940, p.939.
12 Quoted in Smith, The Spade as Mighty as the Sword, op. cit., p.47.
13 How right he was! See Chapter Three.
14 The Listener, 1 February 1940, p.228.
15 Ibid., 9 May 1940, p.940.
16 He was sent a copy of Ministry of Agriculture guidance notes in advance of publication, so that he did not diverge from official policy.
17 Recalled by John Green, of the BBC Talks Department, and quoted in Briggs, The War of Words, op. cit., p.45.
18 At the beginning of the war, the BBC output was largely educational in nature, since it was still very much under the influence of its founder, Sir John Reith. The war inevitably changed that, at least to some extent, when the BBC discovered that variety and dance band programmes, not to mention Tommy Handley’s It’s That Man Again (ITMA), were most popular with listeners.
19 Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill, Millions Like Us?, Liverpool University Press, 1999, p.77.
20 Only the News and Talks departments stayed in London throughout the war.
21 Quoted in Smith, The Spade as Mighty as the Sword, op. cit., p.142.
22 BBC WAC, RCONT1 – Middleton, C H – Talks File 2 – 1939, letter from A. H. Manktelow (MAF) to George Barnes, head of BBC Talks Department, 5 September 1939.
23 BBC WAC, RCONT1 – Middleton, C H – Talks File 3 – 1940, Internal Memo, 5 March 1940.
24 The Brains Trust was a wireless programme broadcast on the Forces service from January 1941. A panel of three men – a philosopher, Cyril Joad, a scientist, Julian Huxley, and a retired naval officer, Commander A. B. Campbell – answered questions put to them by members of the public. They were joined occasionally by guests. The discussion was chaired by Donald McCullough.
25 BBC WAC, RCONT1 - Middleton C H - Talks File 4 - 1941–6.
26 Briggs, The War of Words, op. cit., pp.218–19.
27 On 1 September 1939 he recorded a five-minute talk on ‘The Wartime Garden’, which was transmitted a few days later.
28 BBC WAC, RCONT1 - Middleton C H - Talks File 4 - 1941–6.
29 Roy Hay was away in the British Sector in Germany, teaching food production.
30 Roy Hay, Gardener’s Chance: From War Production to Peace Possibilities, Putnam, 1946, p.55.
31 BBC WAC, R30/2179/1.
32 Hay received six guineas a programme for his pains; this rose to eight guineas in 1944.
33 BBC WAC, R30/2179/1.
34 BBC WAC, R30/2 179/1. On 21 January 1942, Michael Standing wrote to a colleague: ‘We’re treating this little enterprise comparatively seriously, and we don’t want even to hint to listeners that we’re approaching the subject in a frivolous frame of mind.’ Which suggested strongly that they were.
35 Hay, Gardener’s Chance, op. cit., p.56.
36 BBC WAC, R30/2179, Listener Research Bulletin 149.
37 Garden historian and nurserywoman.
38 Gary Dexter, ‘Alternative Reading’, The Spectator, 3 December 2005.
39 TNA: PRO RG/23/26 An inquiry into the effects of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign made for the Ministry of Agriculture in August and September 1942. Of the sample, only 0.6 per cent gathered their information from The Gardeners’ Chronicle, which, if they had known it, would have been galling to those hard-working, public-spirited head gardener contributors.
40 Ibid.
41 Daily Express, 13 April 1940.
42 Ibid., 17 January 1942.
43 Raymond W. B. Keene, Over the Garden Fence: Old-Timer Talks About Flowers, Staples Press, 1946, p.11.
44 She wrote a weekly column in The Observer from 1947 until her death in 1962.
45 Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, which provided canteens and other amenities for the troops.
46 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, February 1943, pp.38–9.
47 The Times, 3 February 1943.
48 Quick-maturing crops like salads sown between rows of slower-growing vegetables.
49 John Reed Wade, War-time Gardening, Pearson, 1940, p.v.
50 In 1945, thirty million cinema tickets were bought every week.
51 There are twenty hundredweight (cwt) in an imperial ton.
52 Quoted in Jennifer Davies, The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, BBC Books, 1993, p.48.
53 NSALG, Annual report of the National Allotments Society for year ending 31 December 1941, p.1.
54 In the 1960s, Lord Clark wrote and presented Civilisation, a ground-breaking television series on art history; the satirical magazine Private Eye forever after referred to him as Lord Clark of Civilisation.
55 TNA: PRO INF 1/232.
56 Cartoonists often earned 10s.6d for a rough drawing and two and a half guineas for a complete cartoon, while an artist might get five guineas for a rough drawing of a poster and twenty-five guineas for the finished product.
57 Quoted in Naomi Games, Catherine Moriarty and June Rose, Abram Games: His Life and Work, Princeton, 2003, p.18.
58 Ibid, p. 15.
59 Abram Games, Art and Industry, vol. 45, July 1948, p.24.
60 Lewitt (Jan Le Witt) and George Him were Polish-born artists who came to England in 1937 and worked for the Ministry of Information designing posters in the early years of the war.
61 The story is told in Smith, The Spade as Mighty as the Sword, op. cit., pp.134–5.
Chapter Seven: The Old Order Changeth
1 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 6 January 1940, p.4.
2 In 1940, a shot-up German plane crashed near Stansted Park and the bombs it was carrying caused damage to both the gardens and the nearby church.
3 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 2 September 1939, p.ix.
4 In later life, Harry Dodson found fame as the expert gardener presenting the BBC series The Victorian Kit
chen Garden (1987), The Victorian Flower Garden (1991) and The Wartime Kitchen and Garden (1993).
5 The Times, 3 March 1941.
6 A case made eloquently by Lord Bingley in the House of Lords in February 1941.
7 During the First World War, Captain Johns fought at Gallipoli, then joined the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and trained as a bomber pilot. He was shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans in September 1918, two months before the Armistice.
8 Captain W. E. Johns, ‘The Passing Show’, My Garden, vol. 18, November 1939, p.301.
9 Marjorie Williams, Letters from Lamledra, (ed. Cassandra Phillips), Truran, 2007, p.152.
10 Some gardeners went on to have very successful military careers, none more so than John Hudson, a trained horticulturalist, who became a celebrated bomb disposal expert, winning the George Medal and bar. He also had a distinguished post-war career as Professor of Horticulture at Nottingham University and then director of Long Ashton Research Station.
11 MOA, D 5324, diary for 25 April 1941.
12 IWM, Papers of Miss A. L. Gimson 86/6/1 (1916).
13 Ibid.
14 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 26 September 1942, p.106.
15 That meant he was the second-highest-ranked gardener of the six employed.
16 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 5 July 1941, p.6.
17 See, for example, ibid., 25 October 1941, p.149.
18 When wages were raised at Madresfield, Dorothy Pembridge and the other Land Girls lost their vegetable allowance.
19 Ted Humphris, Garden Glory: From Garden Boy to Head Gardener at Aynhoe Park, Collins, 1988, p.161.
20 Ibid.
21 Almost certainly under the ‘soldier-gardener’ scheme.
22 Humphris, Garden Glory, op. cit., p.161.
23 Quoted in Jennifer Davies, The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, BBC Books, 1993, p.114.
24 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
25 Ibid.
26 Vegetables and fruit were not rationed, and so were not a target for organised black marketers, but (though the evidence is understandably scant) it seems likely that professional gardeners did sometimes sell their scarce produce above the fixed price or in greater quantity than was allowed to favoured customers.
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 36