27 Quoted in Robert Becker, Nancy Lancaster: Her Life, Her World, Her Art, Knopf, 1996, p.249.
28 Sir Charles (later Viscount) Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, was a keen gardener.
29 The Trees also played host to important Americans like Averell Harriman and Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s special envoys.
30 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
31 Quoted in Alun Howkins, ‘A Country at War: Mass-Observation and Rural England 1939–45’, Rural History, vol. 9, no. 1, p.91.
32 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
33 Journal of the Kew Guild 1939–1940, p.854.
34 In 1941, a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Glory of the Garden’ appeared in the Journal of the Kew Guild: ‘Now Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees/That half a gardener’s proper work is done upon his knees;/But with Adam gone to fight the foe and only home on leave/The proper one to kneel and plant and grow our food is – EVE!’ Quoted in Catherine Horwood, Gardening Women, Virago, 2010, p.327.
35 Quoted in ibid., p.332.
36 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
37 Hazel Conway, ‘Everyday landscapes: public parks from 1930–2000’, Garden History, vol. 28, no. 1, p.124.
38 Quoted in ibid, p. 123.
39 Quoted in Brent Elliott, ‘Bedding Schemes’, in Jan Woudstra and Ken Fieldhouse (eds.), The Regeneration of Public Parks, Spon, 2001, p.117.
40 TNA:PRO MAF 48/725.
41 Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1917–1984, Leo Cooper in association with Secker and Warburg, 1985, p.161.
42 In the First World War, the entire island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, and Irishmen from what is now Eire, as well as Ulster, fought on the Allied side.
43 After 1960, the John Innes Institute.
44 Fruit varieties that are incompatible cannot cross-fertilise each other’s flowers to produce fruit.
45 i.e. with four sets of chromosomes.
46 Librarian of the Royal Horticultural Society in his retirement, author of a monograph on tulips and one of the architects of post-war agriculture in Britain.
47 W. J. C. Lawrence, Catch the Tide: Adventures in Horticultural Research, Grower Books, 1980, p.56.
48 Later called Fisons.
49 Although soil-less ‘multipurpose’ composts began to replace John Innes composts in the 1980s, gardeners still consider that there is a place for the latter for plants in permanent pots, and where stability is required, since loam-based composts are heavier than soil-less ones. It is highly unlikely, in this author’s opinion, that the garden centre revolution in the 1960s would have been possible without John Innes composts, since retailers needed to have flowering plants growing in neat pots to sell, rather than dormant and messy bare-rooted ones dug up out of the field.
50 There was much emphasis on tomato research at JIHI, since tomatoes were such an important glasshouse crop, in peace and war.
51 A myth, incidentally, which was still popular with professional gardeners when I trained in the 1970s.
52 Lawrence and Newell designed a low-pressure, low-cost steriliser and published the specifications, so that growers could make it themselves.
53 Lawrence, Catch the Tide, op. cit., p.106.
54 JIC, interview by B. J. Harrison in 1979, published on www.jic.ac.uk website.
55 A tantalising comment.
56 Although the Ministry of Agriculture provided a grant to the JIHI from 1935, the latter was still largely a private charitable institution.
57 JIC, annual report of the John Innes Horticultural Institution, 1944, p.1.
58 Embarrassingly, the JIHI’s annual report for 1941 was printed when it was confidently assumed that this negotiation would be successful, and an erratum slip had to be included to say that it was not.
59 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 23 December 1944, p.233.
Chapter Eight: Far Messier and Different
1 The Keeper of the RHS Lindley Library.
2 Personal communication dated 19 January 2001 from Dr William Stearn (Librarian of the Lindley Library) to Edward Wilson, quoted in Edward Wilson (ed.), The Downright Epicure: Essays on Edward Bunyard, Prospect Books, 2007, p.66–7.
On Bunyard’s death, Sir Daniel Hall became Editor and Librarian, and Roy Hay was recruited as Associate Editor. So useful was Hay to the Dig for Victory campaign that both the RHS and MAF made a concerted effort to get him exempted from his special constable duties, and from being called up for military service.
3 Stephen Cheveley, A Garden Goes to War, John Miles, 1940, p.18.
4‘Nursery stock’ means hardy woody plants, that is, trees and shrubs.
5 This nursery was later to become Notcutts, one of the most famous of the post-war tree and shrub nurseries, which also early became involved with the garden centre movement. It is now John Woods Nurseries.
6 In 1938, 143,000 tons of tomatoes were imported into Britain, and only 60,000 tons grown at home.
7 Elsewhere he wrote: ‘I stayed at home that day. I just couldn’t face the prospect of seeing a life’s work destroyed.’ Harry Wheatcroft, The Root of the Matter, Golden Eagle, 1974, p.109.
8 Quoted in Sadie Ward, War in the Countryside, Cameron Books with David and Charles, 1988, p.13.
9 £4 million in today’s money.
10 Sylvia Crowe advised the Road Beautifying Association. This organisation was founded in the late 1920s by Dr Wilfrid Fox with the aim of giving work to the unemployed and enhancing the landscape by planting trees and shrubs along highways being built to accommodate the increasing numbers of motorised vehicles. Cheals Nurseries planted choice trees on both sides of the Crawley bypass, only to see them badly damaged by tank movements during the war.
11 Alison Benton, Cheals of Crawley: The Family Firm at Lowfield Nurseries 1860s to 1960s, Moira Publications, 2002, p.274.
12 Anon, The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 2 August 1967, p.17.
13 Ibid.
14 Quoted in Ward, War in the Countryside, op. cit, pp. 13–14.
15 Letter dated 28 December 1942. Personal communication to author from Sarah Cook, 27 April 2012.
16 IWM, the papers of Hubert Taylor, 14042/2/1–2.
17 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
18 Ibid.
19 MOA, D 5324, diary for 13 September 1941.
20 This company is still going (2012), having been founded in 1908.
21 Twenty-two yards.
22 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
23 Ursula Maddy, Waterperry: A Dream Fulfilled, Merlin Books, 1990, pp.62–3.
24 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627). In general, cucumbers were not thought by the War Ags nutritious enough to be candidates for wartime food production.
25 Hansard, House of Lords, 15 February 1944, vol. 130, cols. 790–1.
26 Dobbie’s is still in business (2012), but as a chain of garden centres rather than a seed firm.
27 Suttons also produced a catalogue specifically for small gardens, with a more limited choice of generally more compact-growing vegetable varieties.
28 MERL, TR SUT P2/A350.
29 Owen joined the Royal Navy in June 1943, leaving his cousins and father to take on his nursery duties.
30 MERL, TR SUT P2/A350.
31 MERL, TR SUT P2/A458.
32 They were started again after the war, only to be given up as too expensive in the mid 1960s.
33 MERL, TR SUT P2/A458.
34 Figures from Statistical Digest of the War, first published by Central Statistical Office, 1951; published with amendments by HMSO and Kraus, 1975.
Chapter Nine: A Refreshment of the Spirit of Man
1 ‘The Garden’, a poem by Vita Sackville-West, begun in 1939 and published by Michael J
oseph in 1946, pp.14–15. It won the Heinemann Prize that year, and Vita received £100, which she spent on azaleas for the garden.
2 It is now in the care of the National Trust.
3 Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939–45, ed. Nigel Nicolson, Fontana, 1970, p.102.
4 Ibid., p.107.
5 The limes he was pleaching (pruning and training to make a tall, narrow, straight hedge) were in the Lime Walk, which connects the Rose Garden and the Nuttery, and is particularly beautiful in spring, since the trees are thickly underplanted with bulbs.
6 Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, op. cit., p.183.
7 Ibid., p.242. Vita Sackville-West herself did a great deal of the gardening, while Harold Nicolson confined his efforts to the Lime Walk. It is interesting that in 1942 he thought that the war would last at least until 1945.
8 Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939, Hogarth Press, 1967, p.254.
9 Margery Allingham, The Oaken Heart, Michael Joseph, 1941, p.87.
10 Ibid., p.180.
11 Ibid., p.181.
12 Ibid., p.191.
13 Peter Donnelly (ed.), Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s Everyday Reflections 1939–45, Harrap 1979, p.86.
14 Ibid., p.83.
15 Ibid., p.99.
16 Ibid., p.59.
17 Ammonium carbonate, an old-fashioned remedy for use by those in danger of fainting.
18 Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming (eds.), Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49, Profile, 2006, p.109.
19 Ibid., p.129.
20 Ibid., p.185.
21 Quoted in E. R. Chamberlin, Life in Wartime Britain, Batsford, 1972, p. 95.
22 The Gardener’s Chronicle, 23 September 1939, p.211. There is an echo here of Francis Bacon’s essay Of Gardens: ‘It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man’, which is itself an echo of 1 Corinthians 16:18: ‘For they have refreshed my spirit and yours …’
23 The Times, 18 October 1941.
24 Quoted in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, June 1940, pp. 149–50.
25 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 6 January 1940, p.1.
26 C. H. Middleton, Digging for Victory: Wartime Gardening with Mr Middleton, Aurum, 2008, p.75.
27 Ibid., pp.75–6.
28 About £5,000 in today’s money.
29 Middleton, Digging for Victory, op. cit., p.77.
30 The Times, 17 April 1943.
31 This was the nickname for William Joyce, a Fascist who broadcast from Germany for most of the war and was hanged by the British for treason in 1946.
32 The Times, 28 January 1941.
33 RHS, Council Minutes Book, 1940–3, letter dated 19 December 1942.
34 Spanish broom.
35 Quoted in Twigs Way and Mike Brown, Digging for Victory: Gardens and Gardening in Wartime Britain, Sabrestorm, 2010, p.212.
36 The ‘basic ration’ was abolished altogether in March 1942.
37 Quoted in Digging for Victory, op. cit., p. 209.
Chapter Ten: Gardening Behind the Wire
1 On 8 September 1943 the Italians signed an armistice and effectively laid down their weapons. The camps were usually taken over by German units.
2 It seems that commandants in officers’ camps in Germany, called Oflags, were more inclined to allow, even encourage, gardens than those overseeing camps housing NCOs (non-commissioned officers) and enlisted men, which were called Stalags. Confusingly, a camp housing RAF officers was called a Stalag Luft, as in the famous Stalag Luft III.
3 Quoted in Kenneth I. Helphand, Defiant Gardens, Trinity University Press, 2006, p.130.
4 RHS, Council Minutes, May 1941.
5 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, August 1943, p. 219.
6 This is almost certainly how Peter Healing managed to get hold of a copy of The English Flower Garden by William Robinson: see Chapter Thirteen.
7 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, September 1943, p.287.
8 Peter Donnelly (ed.), Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s Everyday Reflections 1939–45, Harrap 1979, p.146.
9 The Beveridge Report (The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services) was the work of an Oxford economist, William Beveridge. It served as the basis of the welfare state legislation after the war. Its publication in 1942 met with warm approval from the British public.
10 Donnelly, Mrs Milburn’s Diaries, op. cit., p.198.
11 Ibid., p.226.
12 Ibid., p.253.
13 The hut where prisoners lived and slept.
14 Helphand, Defiant Gardens, op. cit., p.132.
15 Ibid., p.133.
16 Ibid., p.148.
17 See Midge Gillies, The Barbed-Wire University, Aurum, 2011.
18 Near Sagan in Poland.
19 Seventy-six prisoners eventually escaped through ‘Harry’ in 1944, but all but three were recaptured and fifty were shot. This event is universally known as ‘The Great Escape’, and a Hollywood film, loosely based on the book by Paul Brickhill, was made in 1963 starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough.
20 A strange word in the context, presumably meaning compost.
21 Quoted in Helphand, Defiant Gardens, op. cit., p.134.
22 Ibid., p.6.
23 By the end of the war, the Germans had 248 camps in Germany, France, Poland, Italy and Austria, and were guarding 225,996 British and North American troops. 132,000 Allied troops were imprisoned in the Far East.
24 Beri-beri results from a deficiency of vitamin B1 or thiamine.
25 Red Cross parcels were a rarity in Far Eastern camps.
26 Quoted in Helphand, Defiant Gardens, op. cit., p.139.
27 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 16 May 1942, p.202. In 1975 I met Dr Herklots occasionally when he came to look at plants he had introduced that were growing in the tropical glasshouses at Wisley, where I was working. He was a charming man, but even if I had known of his wartime experiences, I would have hesitated to ask him about them.
28 G. A. C. Herklots, Vegetables in South-East Asia, George Allen and Unwin, 1972, p.xi.
29 Ibid., p.59.
30 Quoted in Alison Benton, Cheals of Crawley – The Family Firm at Lowfield Nurseries, 1860s to 1960s, Moira Publications, 2002, p. 280.
31 It was thought politic to keep the Russians apart from the other ethnic groups, to avoid trouble as a result of the treatment of eastern European countries by the USSR.
32 Quoted in Sadie Ward, War in the Countryside, Cameron Books with David and Charles, 1988, p.47.
33 Quoted in Jennifer Davies, The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, BBC Books, 1993, p.91.
34 Ibid.
35 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
36 She was one of the famous Mitford sisters.
Chapter Eleven: Animals in the Back Garden
1 Poultry had been widely kept in town and country in the last years of the 1914–18, so older people had memories of doing that at least.
2 Lord Arnold raised this anomaly in the House of Lords on 10 June 1941, but to no avail. It was not thought good for morale for the British working man to be denied his pint of beer, even if it was watered down.
3 Powdered egg was made by dehydrating shell eggs in an industrial process. Much of it came from the United States. It had the advantage of storing well for long periods and could be used in a variety of ways. Most people have unhappy memories of it, especially when rehydrated, though it was fine for baking.
4 Claude Goodchild and Alan Thompson, Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps, Penguin 1941, p.1.
5 Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith announced on 4 September 1939: ‘Poultry kept in small numbers in city and suburban gardens or allotments can be fed almost entirely on all forms of household waste’, a statement more likely to confuse than enlighten.
6 Seventy years later, there is no such thing as an ‘unfoxed area’ in country or town,
since fox numbers are no longer controlled to anything like the same extent that they were before and during the war.
7 Margery Allingham, The Oaken Heart, Hutchinson, 1959, p.249.
8 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 13 January 1940, p.24.
9 The Times, 10 December 1940.
10 Mary Dunn, The World of Lady Addle, Robin Clark, 1985, p.163.
11 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
12 Often rabbit-keeping neighbours got round this problem by sharing the care of one buck between them.
13 Quoted in Piers Dudgeon, Village Voices: A Portrait of Change in England’s Green and Pleasant Land 1915–1990, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1989, p.94.
14 Considering the enormous population of Russia, however, this looks more of a symbolic gesture than a really useful initiative. The money will have been much more useful.
15 IWM, BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews, Miscellaneous 171 (2627).
16 MOA, D 5324, diary for 23 October 1939.
17 Ibid., March 1941.
18 These non-profit-making canteens were run by local authorities in halls or schools in towns and cities, providing cheap meals for workers and those bombed out of their homes.
19 Goodchild and Thompson, Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps, op. cit., pp.142–3.
Chapter Twelve: Fiercely Stirring Cauldrons
1 Thrifty particularly in the use of cooking fuels, both gas and electricity.
2 He was made the Earl of Woolton in 1956.
3 Lord Woolton was ably advised by experts like Professor Jack Drummond, a scientific nutritionist, and Professor John Raeburn, an agricultural economist and statistician.
4 He had been profoundly affected as a young man living in Liverpool by the death from starvation of his next-door neighbour in 1908. Memoirs of the Rt Hon. the Earl of Woolton, C.H., P.C., D.L., Ll.D., Cassell, 1959, p.1.
5 Ibid., pp.192–3.
6 Ibid., p.194.
7 Ibid., p.215.
8 The Times, 5 June 1942.
9 Memoirs, op. cit., p.193.
10 TNA: PRO RG 23/9A.
11 Reported in the New York Times, 11 January 1942.
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