At 11:45 on the morning of 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcast to the nation, delivering the news no one wanted to hear: ‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
In her diary entry for 6 September that year, Joan Strange provided her own glimpse of the national mood:
… life has suddenly become very difficult under wartime conditions. Very few people felt this terrible blow would fall and right up to Sunday morning (3 September) there was a glimmer of hope. On Friday the Germans ‘crossed the frontiers to resist the Poles’ and the newspapers immediately declared ‘war begins’. Everyone’s spirits sank but rose again when Mr Chamberlain gave Hitler one more chance in a message sent on Saturday with a time limit up at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning. In the meantime the ‘blackouts’ have started, no one must show a glimmer of light anywhere … Some food especially sugar is very scarce …
If the public had been caught on the hop as Joan suggests, the government was not much better off. With regard to food, the UK’s great Achilles’ heel remained its over-reliance on imports. In 1939, some 55 million tons of food, equivalent to three-quarters of the national total, came from overseas. That encompassed 51 per cent of all meat, 70 per cent of cheese, 73 per cent of sugar, 80 per cent of fruit and 90 per cent of cereals. Spain and France jointly supplied some 90 per cent of Britain’s onions, a staple of British cuisine that could so easily have been produced on UK soil. If the First World War food situation had taught the government and their advisors anything, it was that believing adequate trade inflows could be maintained was folly. Not only was it impossible to know if shipping convoys could be protected as efficiently as they had been at the end of the Great War, it also ignored the fact that those ships would be needed to transport other essential supplies and personnel.
The government had laid out plans to survive a war lasting three years. It was, perhaps, not an unreasonable timetable at that stage, and it is arguable as to whether anyone could have made sensible predictions for a timescale extending much beyond it. But as we now know, it was a significant underestimation of the six years of war that actually transpired, and the United Kingdom entered into conflict with a mere four months’ worth of stockpiled supplies. The Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, Reginald Dorman-Smith, explained to farmers that, in partnership with the government, it was their job ‘to increase, in an orderly fashion, our home production of essential foodstuffs – a task just as vital to the nation as that which has to be carried out by the armed forces’.
The position of the amateur grower was less clear. The home production campaign of the First World War was not sufficiently structured nor had detailed records been kept to be able to give anything like a comprehensive picture of what a similar scheme might achieve in this new war. The hope was that, if implemented earlier, more energetically and more efficiently than two decades previously, it might prove a valuable means of keeping the larder stocked. Dorman-Smith appeared on the BBC on 3 October 1939, a month after Chamberlain had made his grim announcement to the British people, to formally introduce what was to become known as the Dig for Victory campaign, but which was at that stage called Grow More Food:
It is clearly our duty, just as it is a matter of elementary wisdom, to try to make doubly and trebly sure that we will fight and win this war on full stomachs. To do this we want not only the big man with the plough but also the little man with the spade to get busy this autumn. We are launching a nationwide campaign to obtain recruits to the ranks of the food producers. Half a million more allotments properly worked will provide potatoes and vegetables that will feed another million adults and one and a half million children for eight months of the year. The matter is not one that can wait. So let’s get going. Let ‘Dig for Victory’ be the motto of everyone with a garden and of every able-bodied man and woman capable of digging an allotment in their spare time.
The basic aims of the initial phase of the campaign were deceptively simple: to encourage as many men, women and children as possible to use their back gardens or apply to local authorities for an allotment plot (typically covering an area of 10 rods, or 30 by 90 feet) to supply their families (and perhaps a few friends) with enough vegetables to see them through the big part of the year.
But the challenge of administering a campaign as broad-ranging and complex as Dig for Victory was a Herculean one. It was not a case of simply handing round a few forks and spades to willing gardeners and waiting for them to stock the national larder. Instead the government needed to identify exactly what crops to concentrate on in order to save shipping, relieve the commercial agricultural industry and compensate for potential deficiencies in Britain’s nutritional needs. Then it had to provide suitable land for those without their own gardens to work on, match it to appropriate applicants, and establish local infrastructures to oversee the efficient running of plots, and to provide essential supplies and equipment as well as advice and support. Finally, systems had to be put in place to ensure that the fruits (and veg) of the campaign were put to good use. All of this required not only an adept bureaucracy but a public relations campaign that would educate and capture the imagination of millions who had never previously considered themselves as possessors of green fingers.
As Dorman-Smith’s original announcement would suggest, the campaign was the baby of the Ministry of Agriculture. However, elements of Dig for Victory necessarily fell under the jurisdiction of other departments with whom the Ministry of Agriculture needed to establish clear boundaries of responsibility. Though the ministries of Education and Health would sporadically have an interest in its execution over the ensuing years, this principally meant the Ministry of Food. Swinging into life on 8 September 1939, this new ministry had been primed for action in the months prior to the war after emerging out of the Food (Defence Plans) Department. William Morrison was at the helm, charged with the job of running food procurement, distribution and rationing. In simplistic terms, he was responsible for making sure food was shared out equitably.
The two men at the head of these crucially important departments when the war commenced seemed ideally suited to their roles and promised much. Dorman-Smith had been born in County Cavan, Ireland in 1899 into a family with a rich farming heritage. By the age of just thirty-two he was Vice President of the National Farmers’ Union, and three years later had secured himself a seat in parliament as the Conservative MP for Petersfield. In 1936 he was named President of the National Farmers’ Union, and when Neville Chamberlain appointed him Minister of Agriculture in January 1939, few disputed that he was the obvious choice.
William Morrison was, meanwhile, put in charge at the Ministry of Food, having previously ruled the roost at the Ministry of Agriculture from October 1936 until Dorman-Smith replaced him. Morrison had served with honour as a captain during the First World War and had received the Military Cross. A much-loved figure within the Conservative party, known for his imposing stature and silky oratorical skills delivered in a mellifluous Scottish accent, the immediate pre-war years had proved somewhat difficult for him. Though a critic of appeasement, his refusal to resign in the wake of the Munich debacle weakened him in the eyes of many. Furthermore, his belief that war was not a complete inevitability left him hamstrung during his stint at the Ministry of Agriculture, as he refused to oversee a radical (and, retrospectively, much-needed) programme of war preparation for fear of damaging the industry in the case of ongoing peace. Nonetheless, it was hoped that his background at Agriculture would serve him well in the newly created Food Ministry.
Certainly, Dorman-Smith was quick to introduce the necessary administrative structures to get the Dig for Victory campaign or, more accurately, the Grow More Food campaign, up and running. The British agricultural sector was put on to a formal war footing on 1 September 1939, two days before Chamberlain’s declaration of war. On 3 September itself, the County War Agricultural Executive Committees began operating under orders received in telegrams directly from Dorman-Smith. Initially, there were forty-eight English and twelve Welsh CWAECs (or War Ags as they were popularly known) and they were to play an instrumental role in the coming years as a conduit for information exchange between central government and growers, both amateur and professional. Importantly, they also had the power to dispossess owners of any farms that were deemed to be uncooperative or inefficient.
The composition of the committees had been decided before the war, and usually consisted of between eight to twelve representatives who were au fait with the particular agricultural conditions of their local areas and were prepared to work unpaid to ensure the maximum productivity of the land. Each committee was headed by a chairman, supported by an executive officer and a secretary. Most members were farmers and nurserymen but there tended to be at least one landowner too, as well as representatives of farm workers and, often, the Women’s Land Army (WLA).
The War Ags were then subdivided into sub-committees to look at specific agricultural questions and district committees to ensure full geographical coverage. A member of a District Committee might typically cover an area of 5,000 acres and was expected to maintain channels of communication with all the farmers and growers within that area. Latterly, some district committees worked on a system of one representative for every parish.
The principal role of the committees was to make growers aware of what the government needed in order to feed the nation while also keeping central government informed of what was happening on the ground. In addition, the War Ags were responsible for administering various grants and credit schemes, ensuring supplies of equipment, fertiliser and seeds and, in some cases, identifying and preparing derelict land for cultivation. They were also expected to provide expert advice, and to this end employed paid technical officers, who perhaps unsurprisingly tended to be more concerned with the needs of professional farmers than keen gardeners and allotment growers.
As might be imagined, being the bearer of sometimes unpopular tidings from central government did not always make for an easy relationship between growers and the War Ags. The image of War Ag. members as bossy, autocratic and occasionally draconian was a popular one, and from June 1940 the Ministry appointed twelve liaison officers, responsible for around five CWAECs each, to try to improve the flow of information. By the end of the war these wholly voluntary War Ags had dealt with almost 2,000 circulars from Dorman-Smith and his successors.
While the role of the keen amateur might not have been their prime concern, the committees also oversaw the activities of County Horticultural Advisers who were charged with helping any gardening societies and organisations that requested assistance. They also worked closely with Land Commissioners from the Ministry on how best to execute the legal powers delegated to them by the Minister, just as when, for example, Dorman-Smith sent a circular to each local council on 18 September 1939 authorising additional land to be let for allotments.
The debate over whether to sacrifice playing fields to production proved particularly heated. In the early days of the drive, local councils were largely happy to yield to pressure to give up what were (so the thinking went) mere leisure facilities secondary to the cause of producing essential food stocks. However, the arguments in favour of retaining recreational areas were subtle but potent. A correspondent in The Times took on the subject in March 1940:
Land now being converted into allotments forms in many cases the ‘lungs’ of a city, providing for town-dwellers a valuable open space for recreation and exercise, and fears have been expressed that the creation of allotments may have encroached unduly on the public and private recreation facilities. As the President of the MCC pointed out in a letter published in The Times yesterday, a sufficient area for the conduct of open-air sport is necessary to the welfare of the nation.
In an address to the National Playing Fields Association in May 1940, Lord Cavan also outlined his concerns for the long-term situation:
… there is evidence that too many local authorities are disposed to yield to pressure and find allotment space by sacrificing playing fields. Such grounds are of vital importance for maintaining public health and morale and as recreation grounds for troops under training, and the eventual cost of restoring them for play would involve serious outlay.
A.B. Clements, editor of the Sporting Life, was rather more abrupt:
The virtuous wrath … against the continuance of some forms of sport in wartime is misplaced … There is an enormous number of people in our industrial areas who cannot dig for victory, for they have no plot … For mental relief from the drudgery of the factory they should, no doubt, read the classics, but we have to face up to the fact that some quite good workers are not intellectually equipped for such diversion … I contend that so long as sports meetings do not hinder the war effort their effect on morale is ample justification for continuance.
Involvement in such debates was inevitable for members of the War Ags and most realised that their largely thankless position was unlikely to win them new friends. But Neville Chamberlain was clear about the value of their work when he addressed a meeting of all the county chairmen in February 1940: ‘… in the opinion of the government the issue of this war depends just as much upon what we can do to produce more food at home as it does upon the more conspicuous exploits of our fighting men on the seas or in the air or on the land’.
Local councils also played a crucial role. They established Home Produce Councils and Horticultural Committees in large numbers to look into the matter of food production, with local Parks’ Superintendents normally their focal point. These bodies were key in identifying and preparing land that might be suitable for allotments, not to mention processing applications for plots from the public, setting up demonstration plots, and providing advice and support to often novice gardeners. With the average local authority allotment measuring 30 feet by 90 feet and rents averaging between 3s. and 10s. per annum, ‘growing your own’ became a viable option for vast swathes of the population who could never previously have considered it. Meanwhile, Village Produce Associations were vital in offering additional encouragement, regularly arranging talks or slide shows and promoting the messages of the Ministry of Agriculture.
By and large, growers took well to such efforts. Dorothy Hinchcliffe, a Ministry of Agriculture inspector in Westmorland and North Lancashire, remembered that in general people were responsive to the help on offer and impressively proactive: ‘People knew the urgency of it. They did it really of their own accord … I’d go round saying are you doing so and so and I’d generally find they were well ahead of me.’
Yet not everyone warmed to unsought help, particularly if they deemed they were being patronised by individuals who knew less than they did. Take this account by Eric Hobbis, a popular gardener of the time who went on to broadcast for the BBC. He was a major figure in the Dig for Victory campaign around Bristol, where there were demonstration allotment plots in half-a-dozen districts, and was often to be found travelling around the area on advisory visits. For a relative newcomer to the region, these trips could prove tricky on occasion, especially when local signage had been removed for defence reasons. On one journey Eric asked a local farm hand if the road he was on was the correct one for a particular farm. ‘I dunno,’ came the reply. ‘Does the path across the field go to such-and-such farm?’ ‘I dunno.’ ‘Does this road go to such-and-such village?’ ‘I dunno.’ Exasperated, Eric retorted, ‘You don’t know much, do you?’ The farm hand replied, ‘Enough. I bain’t lost and you be.’
Another gardener, a Mr W.H.J. Fox from Dorchester, struggled to think warmly of the County Hall advisers sent to check that every inch of available land was being wisely used. ‘They had been hurriedly trained,’ he recalled, ‘had never used a spade or a pair of secateurs and were thoroughly unpractical … They knew almost nothing about the land and its seasons.’
Then there was the Ministry of Information, which was the primary organ for spreading the word about the Dig for Victory campaign but which had made a most inauspicious start. On 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared, the Ministry of Information began its operations, producing and distributing publicity and propaganda on behalf of other central government bodies. The British people are historically averse to the idea of its governments filtering and tweaking the information they receive, so such an institution had few forerunners, although there had been a Department of Information and then a Ministry of Information formed in the latter stages of the Great War.
However, the public could hardly be said to have taken those government mouthpieces to their hearts. Rather, the people emerged from the carnage of that war devastated by unprecedented loss and feeling utterly misled by their national leaders. Let it be remembered, the First World War was supposed to have been a little bit of trouble on the continent, with the boys sure to be home by Christmas 1914. No one had expected that four years later there would be almost a million dead (over 2 per cent of the total population) and 1.7 million wounded. The First World War represented a watershed in British history in terms of social ordering. Stung by a sense of betrayal, it was the point at which the masses who had previously maintained a significant level of deference to their supposed social superiors concluded that it was dangerous to believe anything their ‘betters’ told them. This produced an unenviable climate in which to introduce a new propaganda ministry just over two decades later.
While the new Ministry of Information was not activated until the Second World War started, it had been planned by the Committee of Imperial Defence since autumn 1935. Its subsequent four years of evolution occurred in some secrecy, the government believing, no doubt correctly, that should the activities of this department become public knowledge, it would be taken as a sign of the inevitability of conflict. The team responsible for drawing up plans for the Ministry of Information was made up mostly of volunteer experts from within government, other public institutions and private media organisations. A semi-official ‘shadow’ Ministry was instituted in 1936, with Stephen Tallents (then head of public relations at the BBC) as its director, until he was sacked in January 1939 in a dispute over how it should be structured and staffed.
Born in London in 1884, Tallents was a talented career civil servant who had gained a reputation in the post-First World War years as an expert in public relations, notably at the Empire Marketing Board. Indeed, it has been claimed that the phrase ‘public relations’ originated from him. In the early 1930s, he headed up the publicity section of the General Post Office, where he developed the renowned GPO Film Unit (which as the Crown Film Unit would produce some of the most famous films of the Second World War). In 1935, Tallents moved to the BBC and subsequently headed up the BBC’s Overseas Service but fell victim to internal politics and was forced out in September 1941. Bewilderingly, his skills were allowed to go to waste for the remainder of the war. Only afterwards was he given due recognition as a pioneer of public relations, serving as the inaugural President of the Institute of Public Relations in 1948–9 and again in 1952–3.
Even with Stephen Tallents’ skills, the sailing was not always smooth at the shadow Ministry, with many government departments unwilling to cede control to a centralised department as they already had their own public relations sections. There was a general acceptance, though, that propaganda was likely to play a crucial role in any upcoming war. Hitler had already shown himself a master manipulator of information in his own domestic rise to power. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, still reeling from the last war and from economic depression, was hardly at the height of her confidence. It was clear the government would need to be sensitive to this vulnerability and take extreme care in how it communicated with the people.
It is thus somewhat surprising that the Ministry in its early months was so utterly chaotic and ineffective. After Tallents, the Ministry came under the stewardship of Hugh Macmillan. A Scotsman already in his late sixties, he was a judge who had served as Lord Advocate in the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s and was cursed with a propensity to rub people up the wrong way. Heading the Ministry of Information until January 1940, Macmillan’s job was made no easier by the fact that his tenure coincided with the height of the ‘Phoney War’ (a term that broadly covers the period from the declaration of war in September 1939 until May 1940), during which time the government was unwilling to share much at all with the gentlemen of the press. Fleet Street had an in-built resistance anyway to being told what they should be reporting, and were riled by what they perceived as the avalanche of patronising platitudes gushing forth from officials in place of hard information. As the Ministry’s Parliamentary Secretary Harold Nicolson wrote in 1941, it was ‘the most unpopular department in the whole British Commonwealth of nations’.
After a short tenure, Macmillan gave way to John Reith who, as Director-General of the BBC, had once been Tallents’ boss. Another Scot, Reith was a physically imposing figure, measuring 6 foot 6 inches in height, and had his own reputation for being difficult to work with. But his track record as the man who had moulded the BBC was a remarkable one, and he was a logical choice for the ministerial post. Having left the BBC in 1938 for a somewhat unsatisfying spell heading up Imperial Airways, he was keen for a new job to get his teeth into.
Alas, even with such promising credentials, Reith did not vastly improve the Ministry’s functioning. Nor was the job of promoting food production made any easier by having to work with the distinctly lacklustre and uninspiring ‘Grow More Food’ official branding. The first ‘Grow More Food’ bulletin was published in October 1939, having been prepared in cooperation with the Royal Horticultural Society. Entitled ‘Grow for Winter as well as Summer’, in many ways it was an admirable little pamphlet that served as the manifesto for the campaign. Its cheerful front page read:
Vegetables for you and your family every week of the year. Never a week without food from your garden or allotment. Not only fresh peas and lettuce in June, new potatoes in July, but all the health-giving vegetables in Winter, when supplies are scarce … Savoys, Sprouts, Kale, Sprouting Broccoli, Onions, Leeks, Carrots, Parsnips and Beet. Vegetables all the year round if you DIG WELL AND CROP WISELY.
Attached was a colourful fold-out cropping plan, which suggested dividing your vegetable patch into three sections, each sown with one of three categories of crop: miscellaneous crops, such as peas, beans and onions; potatoes and root crops; and winter and spring green crops. This was to be done every year over a three year cycle. It was altogether a sensible and well thought out scheme (crop rotation ‘is the only sound basis for vegetable growing’, claimed the Ministry). However, an unfortunate misprint, substituting feet for inches, resulted in some less-than-helpful planting instructions for marrows. A certain section of the readership was left aghast and immediately took up attitudes against the campaign as a whole, ranging from gentle scepticism to outright sneering.
In addition, there were some fairly spectacular administrative blunders that tested the patience of the public and left the nascent campaign open to ridicule. Take, for instance, a letter published in The Times in December 1939 from a Graham Reid. He wrote:
Sir, – My father, aged eighty-one and confined to his room the past two years, has also been picked out by the Ministry of Agriculture as a fit person to be exhorted to ‘Dig for Victory’. His garden is about one-eighth of an acre. The packet delivered by post ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ contained ninety-four leaflets together with a typed slip informing him where further supplies may be obtained.
This was hardly the image of unwasteful thriftiness that the Ministry was trying to promote. And neither was this an isolated incident. Another correspondent, C.W. Cecil Baker, wrote a few days later that her ninety-year-old and virtually blind grandmother had been ‘exhorted by our amazingly enterprising Ministry of Agriculture to ‘Dig for Victory.’ She, too, received the enormous package of nearly a hundred leaflets. Fortunately the good old lady retains her keen sense of humour.’ At the end of February 1940, even the Home Publicity Department of the Ministry of Information had the good grace to admit that these early mail-outs had not gone quite as well as might have been hoped: ‘… the ‘Dig for Victory’ pamphlets fell into strange hands – the hands of invalid societies, hospital almoners and keepers of goats.’
In a parliamentary debate on 6 February 1940, David Lloyd George (Prime Minister during the previous World War but by 1940 in his late seventies and holding only the more modest position of MP for Caernarvon Boroughs), launched a rather more serious attack on the execution of the campaign, which he believed was being held back by central government meanness:
Then we have to get all the gardeners in the country. There is a great scheme. An appeal is made, through all sorts of institutions, to stir up their energies. The Government say, ‘We will provide fertilisers.’ But the Treasury, in a Memorandum, say that it must not cost more than £1,000. That is real profligacy … it is a case of a snip here, a snip there … You cannot dig for victory with a pair of Treasury scissors.
The Ministries of both Food and Agriculture thus spent the early months of the war to some extent chasing their tails. With their focus necessarily on commercial food production, ‘Grow More Food’ was left to coast along.