A Green and Pleasant Land
Page 38
12 Which was very important in 1943 when bread flour became particularly scarce.
13 Originally called Food Talk.
14 A prolific journalist and author, who wrote more than 200 books, many of them about the countryside.
15 Their brother was Jack Warner, famous for his portrayal of the eponymous hero of Dixon of Dock Green, a long-running post-war police drama set in the East End of London.
16 Quoted in Jennifer Davies, The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, BBC Books, 1993, p.46.
17 Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War, Manchester University Press, 1996, p.81.
18 Memoirs, op. cit., p.248.
19 In this regard, The Kitchen Front was no different from a number of other wireless programmes that had a public information role.
20 Nicholas, The Echo of War, op. cit., p.82.
21 19 million people went to the cinema each week, many of them more than once.
22 Food Flashes were also broadcast on the wireless.
23 Memoirs, op. cit., p.248.
24 TNA: PRO RG 23/9A.
25 Reported in The Times, 9 February 1943.
26 Constance Spry, Come into the Garden, Cook, J. M. Dent, 1942, p.15.
27 Peter Donnelly (ed.), Mrs Milburn’s Diary: An Englishwoman’s Everyday Reflections 1939–45, Abacus, 1995, p. 149.
28 The Ministry of Food provided quite generous grants to pay for the organisation and running costs, as well as loans for capital outlay.
29 So much so that ‘Jam and Jerusalem’ is inevitably the strapline for any article written about the Women’s Institute, even now. ‘Jerusalem’ (words by William Blake, tune by Sir Hubert Parry) was, and is, the hymn that WI members sing before the start of every monthly meeting.
30 Quoted in Piers Dudgeon, Village Voices: A Portrait of Change in England’s Green and Pleasant Land 1915–1990, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1989, p.91.
31 Quoted in ibid., pp.91–2.
32 Only acid fruits were canned, because of the risk of the spread of botulism.
33 Quoted in Penny Kitchen (ed.), For Home and Country: War, Peace and Rural Life as Seen Through the Pages of the WI Magazine 1919–1959, Ebury Press, 1990, p.57.
34 WL, 5/FWI/A/3/73, interview with Miss Edith Walker by V. Royds, 15 July 1977.
35 NRO, NFWI/69 Blisworth Women’s Institute record book 1938–43. Mrs Clinch lived at Blisworth House, where she hosted many WI activities, including an annual garden party.
36 Marguerite Patten, Victory Cookbook: Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1940–1954, Chancellor Press, 2002, p.2.
37 WL, 5/FWI/A/3/73, interview with Miss Edith Walker by V. Royds, 15 July 1977. Miss Walker left the NFWI in late 1943, recruited by Lord Woolton to be head of the Food Advice Division of the Ministry of Food.
38 WL, 5/FWI/A/3/73, Annual Report of NFWI for 1942.
39 Each adult was rationed to one pound of preserves every two months.
40 Anne Stamper, ‘Countrywomen in War-time – Women’s Institutes 1938–1945, Home and Country, June 1945’, p.84.
41 Nasty-smelling silver polish.
42 Dunn, The World of Lady Addle, op. cit., p.246.
43 Spry, Come into the Garden, Cook, op. cit., p.244.
44 Daily Telegraph, Fanny Cradock obituary, 29 December 1994.
45 Vicomte de Mauduit, They Can’t Ration These, Michael Joseph, 1940, p.7.
46 Reported in The Times, 22 November 1945.
47 RBGK, 1/MUS/25/3.
48 H. W. Carter was later taken over by Beechams, who then became part of GlaxoSmithKline. Ribena is still produced in the factory at Coleford to which H. W. Carter moved soon after the war.
49 The Committee came under the auspices of the Ministry of Supply in early 1942.
50 RBGK, 1/MUS/28/6. Rose hips were three to four times richer in ascorbic acid than blackcurrants.
51 After the war, Dr Magnus Pyke became a popular television personality, capable of explaining complex scientific facts to a broad audience and famous for waving his hands about in an excited manner while doing so.
52 RBGK, 1/MUS/28/6.
53 RBGK, QX 95–00161/7, ‘Collection of Drug Plants by Boy Scouts’, April 1941.
54 From which colchicine was derived. Horticultural scientists used colchicine to induce polyploidy in plants. It also had medicinal uses, in particular the treatment of gout.
55 TNA: PRO MH 58/387.
56 IWM, the papers of Miss Elizabeth Hess, 14035/3.
57 Cigarette cards were found in cartons of cigarettes and featured a variety of subjects: they were prized by children, who swapped duplicates to obtain full sets of the various subjects.
58 Elizabeth Hess, ‘Collecting Broom’, The Chemist and Druggist, 18 April 1942.
59 Sir Arthur Hill was killed in a riding accident in November 1941.
60 RBGK, 1/MUS/25/5/4.
61 Each WI county committee was given a list of ten plant species to find, but even that limited amount could be very taxing to collect.
Chapter Thirteen: Keeping On Keeping On
1 Victory over Japan Day, when the Second World War was truly over.
2 This replaced the Ministry of Information in March 1946.
3 BBC WAC, R/34/642.
4 Ibid.
5 TNA: PRO RG 23/26.
6 Representatives from Scotland’s Department of Agriculture, the Horticultural Trades Association, the RHS, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Institute of Park Administration and the Women’s Farm and Garden Association, under the chairmanship of the Ministry’s Horticulture Commissioner, Dr H. V. Taylor.
7 TNA; PRO MAF 33/430.
8 Ibid.
9 Quoted in Gervas Huxley, Lady Denman GBE, Chatto and Windus, 1961, p.177.
10 Ibid., p.179.
11 Quoted in Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris (eds.), The Destruction of the Country House, Thames and Hudson, 1974, p.172.
12 Ibid., p.132.
13 Ibid., p.173.
14 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 3 June 1944, p.231.
15 Ted Humphris, Garden Glory: From Garden Boy to Head Gardener at Aynhoe Park, Collins, 1988, p.164.
16 Ibid.
17 Ditchley Park was sold first to Lord Wilton, from whom it was purchased in 1953 by Sir David Wills. Wills donated it to the Ditchley Foundation in 1958.
18 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, ‘Ronald Tree and the gardens of Ditchley Park: The human face of history’, Garden History, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1982), p.89.
19 Nancy Lancaster lived on, elegantly, in the Coach House until her death in 1994, aged ninety-six.
20 John Martin Robinson, Felling the Ancient Oaks: How England Lost its Great Country Estates, Aurum, 2011, p.36.
21 James Lees-Milne, Caves of Ice, Chatto and Windus, 1983, p.249.
22 Extracts from the Proceedings of the Royal Horticultural Society, 1948, p.xxxiv.
23 Now the National Gardens Scheme of England and Wales. To their credit, some garden owners had even continued to open to the public during the war.
24 He also owned a garden called Serre de la Madone in Menton, southern France, from where he had to escape in a hurry in 1940 when France fell.
25 There was a head gardener and four under-gardeners.
26 A circle the National Trust has never been able satisfactorily to square.
27 The Garden History Society was founded in 1965 and is now consulted in all planning inquiries concerning historic landscapes. English Heritage started to ‘list’ parks and gardens in 1983. The Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England now has more than 1,600 sites of national importance on it.
28 Sir Ernest Gowers is probably best known these days for his Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English.
29 Owners of, respectively, Woburn Abbey, Chatsworth and Longleat.
30 Strong, Binney and Harris (eds.), The Destruction of the Country House, op. cit., p.100.
31 W. J. Turner (ed.), The Englishman’s Country, Collins, 1945, p.202.
32
Almost certainly it was sent to his camp by the Red Cross Society’s Educational Books Section (see Chapter Ten).
33 Alvilde Lees-Milne and Rosemary Verey (eds.), The Englishman’s Garden, Allen Lane, 1982, p.72.
34 Ibid., p.53.
35 Ibid.
36 Quoted in Stephen Lacey, ‘Unforgettable fire’, Daily Telegraph, 31 December 2001.
37 Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming (eds.), Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49, Profile, 2006, p. 286.
38 WI membership also went up sharply once the war was over and monthly meetings could be held once more in the evenings. For the WI, the spirit of educational betterment, co-operation and purposefulness of the war years continued, exemplified by the opening of Denman College in 1948.
39 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, April 1948, p.xxxiv.
40 Quoted in Earley Local History Group, Suttons Seeds: A History 1806–2006, ELHG, 2006.
41 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 31 January 1948, p.38.
42 Now known as Garden Organic.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book of this nature is impossible without the willing help and advice of the librarians and archivists who look after primary source material in this country. I should particularly like to thank those at the National Archives at Kew; the Imperial War Museum at Kennington; the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading; the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society at Westminster; the John Innes Foundation Historical Collections at Norwich; the Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University; the British Museum’s Newspaper Reading Room at Colindale; the Mass-Observation Archive Reading Room, University of Sussex; the BBC’s Written Archives Centre at Caversham; the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners at Corby, and the Northamptonshire Record Office at Wootton.
For secondary sources, I have been extremely fortunate to have access to books in the University Library, Cambridge, and I am most grateful to the Librarian and staff there.
The individuals who have helped me with invaluable advice, hospitality, the loan of books, the reading of parts of the manuscript, the taking on of other responsibilities so that I could concentrate on the book, or simply by keeping up my morale, include Adam and Anne Begley, Jane Brown, Amanda Buchan, Isabel Buchanan, John Coleman, Pauline Davidson, Dr Brent Elliott, Caroline Knox, Michael Neuberger, Anna Pavord, Cynthia Ogilvie, Tim Richardson, Emily and Will Thomas, Tom Wide, Rosalind Wild and Dr Sarah Wilmot. As ever, my husband, Charlie, has been a model of understanding and cheerful enthusiasm.
I should also like to thank my literary agent, Felicity Bryan, as well as the team at Hutchinson, in particular Sarah Rigby, Caroline Gascoigne, Jocasta Hamilton, Emma Finnigan, Charlie Mundy, Paulette Hearn, Amy Mitchell and Phil Brown, all of whom have helped to make the production of this book an unalloyed pleasure.
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity. The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce material:
Extracts from The Oaken Heart by Margery Allingham reprinted by permission of Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, Drury House, 34–43 Russell Street, London, WC2B 5HA Tel:020 7344 1000 Fax:020 7836 9539; BBC Copyright material and BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden Interviews reproduced courtesy of BBC Written Archives Centre; extracts from Blisworth Women’s Institute record book 1938–43 (NFWI/69) reproduced by permission of the Northamptonshire Record Office; ‘‘Trench Warfare’, a study of ‘Dig for Victory’ in Brighton and Hove during World War Two’, (unpublished dissertation, University of Sussex 2001), reproduced by kind permission of the author, Joanne Chamberlain; Crown Copyright material: contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v1.0; letter from Sir Wyndam Deedes reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Sir Wyndam Deedes; extracts from the Express reproduced courtesy of Express Newspapers; extracts from The Gardeners’ Chronicle reproduced courtesy of Horticulture Week, Haymarket Media Group; material by Roy Hay reproduced by kind permission of the author’s estate; material reproduced from the Imperial War Museum archives: every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and the author and the Imperial War Museum would be grateful for any information which might help to trace those whose identities or addresses are not currently known; material from the John Innes archives reproduced courtesy of the John Innes Foundation; material from the Kew archives reproduced with the kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; material from the Lindley Library and Royal Horticultural Society archives reproduced courtesy of the Royal Horticultural Society; material from the Mass Observation Archive reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive. Copyright © The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive; extracts from Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s Everyday Reflections 1939–45 reproduced by kind permission of the author’s estate; material from the Museum of English Rural Life reproduced courtesy of the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading; material from the National Allotments Society Archive reproduced courtesy of the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners; material by Harold Nicholson copyright of the Harold Nicolson Literary Estate; letter by Lt Col. R. R. B. Orlebar reproduced by kind permission of the author’s estate; material by Marguerite Patten reproduced by kind permission of the author; extracts from Punch reproduced with permission of Punch Limited; material by Vita Sackville-West reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of Vita Sackville-West: The Land © Vita Sackville West 1926; The Garden © Vita Sackville-West 1946; material from Countrywomen in war time – Women’s Institutes 1938–1945 by Anne Stamper reproduced courtesy of the NFWI, as extracted in Home and Country, June 1945; letter from William Stearn reproduced by kind permission of Mrs Ruth Stearn; extracts from Despatches from the Home Front: The War Diaries of Joan Strange 1939–1945 reproduced courtesy of Chris McCooey, JAK Books; material from the Studley College Archive reproduced courtesy of the Trustees of the Studley College Trust; extracts from the Daily Telegraph reproduced courtesy of the Telegraph Media Group Limited (TMG); extracts from The Times reproduced courtesy of The Times/NI Syndication; material from The Women’s Library reproduced courtesy of The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University; extracts from Letters from Lamledra by Marjorie Williams reproduced courtesy of Truran Books.
INDEX
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Aberconway, 2nd Baron (Henry McLaren) 22, 219, 287–8, 294
Ack-Ack, Beer-Beer 138
Acland, Sir Francis 15–16
Acton Gazette 158
Adam the Gardener 146–7
Adams, Morley 146–7
‘Admiral Lundy’ 246
Agricultural Testament, An by Sir Albert Howard 120
Agriculture Act (1947) 298
Air Raid Precautions (ARP) 38, 80, 187, 191, 220
pig club 242
Air Raid Wardens’ Service 27
Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens 57
aldrin 126
Alexandra Palace 140
Alfred Dawkins of Chelsea 199
Allen, Ken 246
Allingham, Margery 26, 32, 208, 209, 241
Allotment and Garden guides 75
allotments 5, 14–17, 277–8
Brighton and Hove allotments 70–2
Chesterfield allotments associations 95
children 96–9
Dewsbury Allotments Association 95
Preston Children’s Allotment Association 98
Preston Women’s Allotment Association 95
statutory allotments 14
Tottenham all
otments 59
women and 94–6
wartime allotments 17, 36–7, 47–8, 51, 55–62, 65–73, 78–80
Yiewsley allotments 59–60
Allotments Act (1887) 14
Allotments Co-ordinating Council 39
Alpine Garden Society 6, 22
Amateur Gardening (magazine) 23, 144
‘An Inquiry into the Effects of the “Dig for Victory” Campaign’ 76–7
Anderson, Sir John 28, 29
Anderson shelters 3, 28–9, 278
Andrew, Bridget 119
apples 51, 114, 116
Ardizzone, Edward 154
Armstrong, Jean 271
Armstrong, Robert 178
Art and Industry (magazine)155
artichokes, Jerusalem 201
Arts and Crafts movement 6
Ashburnham Place, Sussex 160
Askew Younge 154
Askey, Arthur 139
Associated Country Women of the World 261
Association of Cemetery Superintendents 177
Attlee, Clement 287
Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) 220
Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) 104
Aynhoe Park, Northamptonshire 167, 284
Backs to the Land (radio programme) 143, 238
Balcombe Place, Sussex 86, 100
Baldwin, Stanley 27–8
Balfour, Lady Eve 120, 299
bananas 51
Band Waggon (film) 139
Barker, Jean, Baroness Trumpington 105
Barker, Willie 196, 197
Barnes, George 139–40, 216–17
Barrow Blitz 31–2, 211
Barrow’s Stores 200
Bateson, William 178
Bath, 6th Marquess of (Henry Thynne) 289
Battersea Park, London 174
Battle of Culloden 1
Beaton, Cecil 157
Bedford, 13th Duke of (John Russell) 289
beetroot
Crimson Globe 113
Egyptian Turnip-rooted 111
Beaverbrook, 1st Baron (William Aitken) 146
Berry, Councillor Henry 15, 48
Bethnal Green Bombed Sites Producers’ Association 60–1, 143, 244
Betjeman, John 287
big bud mite 186
Bingley, 1st Baron (George Lane-Fox) 48, 63