In order to gain momentum, it was crucial that the Grow More Food campaign got the media onside. Ostensibly, this should not have posed too great a challenge, for what was there to object to? Here was an opportunity to foster camaraderie and give a sense of purpose to those who might otherwise have felt left out of the war effort. Growers got to spend time in the open air, often surrounded by loved ones and close friends, carrying out labours that kept them fit and which produced satisfyingly tangible results – and all in the interests of having more and better to eat.
Sure enough, the papers started to report on the campaign in generally favourable terms, with only the occasional glitch. For instance, the National Garden Club Magazine, which began publication in the spring of 1940, was given a slap on the wrist for its slogan ‘Dig to Eat’, which was considered too downbeat by the powers that be. In the early months of the war, Reginald Dorman-Smith’s pronouncements were, in general, dutifully reproduced in print while column inches were willingly given over to particularly heart-warming or newsworthy titbits born of the campaign.
The problem, though, was that while no one doubted the worthy intentions of ‘Grow More Food’, worthiness alone does not sell papers or stir spirits. Nor did the campaign stand much chance of wrestling off the front page tales of military entanglements on the continent or the latest twists and turns in international relations. Going through the newspaper archives now, it is striking how long the press could go without reporting at all on the campaign. There was simply too much else of more immediate import with which to fill their pages (the number of which were themselves reduced due to wartime constraints).
Nor could journalists rely on the relevant government departments to provide them with particularly sparky copy. Dorman-Smith’s foreword to Grow More Food Bulletin No. 1 was symptomatic of the problem; the task of growing more food sounded like it was all rather hard work:
In war we must make every effort. All the potatoes, all the cabbages and all the other vegetables we can produce will be needed. That is why I appeal to you, lovers of this great country of ours, to dig, to cultivate, to sow and to plant.
Our fellow countrymen in the Forces abroad and at home are playing their part. I am confident that you equally will do yours by producing the maximum food from gardens and allotments.
In the end it fell to Fleet Street, always attuned to a catchy sound bite, to prompt the crucial rebranding of ‘Grow More Food’ as ‘Dig for Victory’. Back then, Dig for Victory was the phrase that captured the public’s attention, driving the campaign on to greater heights. Today, it is redolent with so much of what the popular memory associates with the British people and ‘their finest hour’. Somewhat surprisingly, credit for coining perhaps the most enduring of all wartime slogans should almost certainly rest with a young Michael Foot.
Foot is remembered now for his long-standing relationship with the Labour Party, during which he led it to virtual capitulation against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1983 general election. In 1939, he was the fiery left-wing leader writer for the London Evening Standard. The paper’s original call to horticultural arms was printed in the edition of 6 September 1939, under the bold headline ‘DIG’. It posed a rousing challenge to those on the Home Front, forging an association between seemingly run-of-the-mill domestic labour and the defeat of the abhorred enemy. With the Ministry of Agriculture at that stage dithering over the introduction of rationing and Dorman-Smith a month away from his appeal for new recruits on the ‘Garden Front’, it was the first concerted attempt to use rhetoric to stir the nation’s army of diggers:
Britain must learn to dig … Not only must we dig in the cities. Every spare half acre from the Shetlands to the Scillies must feel the shear of the spade … Turn up each square foot of turf. Root out bulbs and plant potatoes. Spend your Sunday afternoon with a hoe instead of in the hammock. Take a last look at your tennis lawn and then hand it over to the gardener. And if you meet any poor fool attempting to beat the plough share into a sword, tell him that this war may be won in the farms as well as on the battlefield … More food from our own fields can thwart the Nazi raiders who will search for our food ships beneath the seas. Remember, therefore, that food wins victories as surely as gunpowder … By husbanding our food resources, by searching out new soil from which to add to our stores, we may contribute perhaps decisively to the finish of this contest. Tell your neighbour and remember yourself that the order is to dig. The spade may prove as mighty as the sword. DIG.
However, it would be a further six days (on 12 September 1939) before the Standard finally used the famous phrase:
The Germans remember 1918. Hence their U-boat campaign, by which they have sunk some 70,000 tons of British shipping in the first week of war. The figure is not alarming, for in April 1917 the weekly toll averaged more than 100,000 tons. Our Navy will smite back and reduce the total, just as it did in that earlier contest. But the submarine can be defeated on every square foot of British soil as well as on the high seas. So the order which the Evening Standard gave a week ago must be rammed home: Dig for Victory.
Both editorials were printed without bylines, but the obituary of Michael Foot that appeared in the Independent newspaper on 4 March 2010 seems to confirm him as the man responsible. By a quirk of the obituary writer’s profession, the piece commemorating Foot was written by Lord Ardwick, who himself had died in 1994. Presumably the article had been tucked away in a filing cabinet in the intervening years waiting for Foot, as it were, to kick the bucket. Lord Ardwick, a much-respected lifelong newspaper man himself, described how in the spring of 1940, when he was plain old John Beavan, he had joined the staff of the Standard. He was introduced to the 27-year-old Foot by the editor Frank Owen (Foot was to succeed Owen in that role in 1942), who told Beavan that ‘Michael’s a Stalinite.’ We may only muse as to whether Foot at some level saw Dig for Victory as an opportunity to promote the return of the land to the masses. Whatever the motivation, Beavan recalled in an aside that ‘Once, Foot beseeched the readers to dig their vegetable plots, dig them wide and “dig for victory”, thus providing one of the Second World War’s best-remembered slogans.’
We might also ponder whether, without Foot’s flash of inspiration, we would remember quite so fondly the more prosaic ‘Grow More Food’ campaign. Despite officialdom lagging some months behind, within weeks of Dorman-Smith’s official announcement of the campaign, the world at large was talking in terms of ‘Dig for Victory’. Though Foot appears to be receiving the credit for his bit of brilliance only in death, it should surely rate highly among the long list of his life’s achievements.
The wireless was of equal importance to Fleet Street in communicating the message at this stage of the campaign, and it was at the BBC that the campaign’s greatest popular figure worked. Now largely forgotten, his name was Cecil Henry (C.H.) Middleton, but he was known affectionately by all simply as Mr Middleton. At the campaign’s outset, when neither energy nor exposure levels were yet up to speed, he was its single most important promoter. In his role as the BBC’s hugely popular chief gardening broadcaster, Middleton’s gentle manner and homely advice made him the perfect character to guide the new army of domestic vegetable growers and allotment holders.
Mr Middleton was born on 22 February 1886 in the tiny hamlet of Weston by Weedon in the south-west of Northamptonshire. A love of gardening was bred into him – his father, John, was employed in the gardens of Weston Hall by Sir George Sitwell (a nobleman whose achievements included the invention of a pistol for shooting wasps, those eternal foes of the gardener!). Young Cecil spent a good deal of his time keeping his father company and in so doing came to know well the three Sitwell children, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell.
In his teenage years, Middleton assisted his father in a professional capacity and at the age of seventeen took up a position with a seed company in London. Keen to expand his knowledge, he spent his free time in private study and eventually secured a position as a student gardener at the Botanical Gardens in Kew. At the onset of the First World War, he found employment in the Horticultural Division of the Board of Agriculture, working in its food production section. He subsequently passed the exams for the National Diploma in Horticulture and went to work as a horticultural instructor at Surrey County Council.
It was in this latter role that he came to the attention of the BBC, which had been experimenting with several gardening formats since its emergence in 1922. It had used a number of notable speakers, including the novelist Marion Cran and the aristocratic garden-lover Vita Sackville-West, whose passionate nature, we now know, was rather more evident in her personal life than in her career on the wireless. There were also short informative programmes made in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society but, in common with much of the BBC’s early output, the pieces tended to be disconcertingly formal. It was hoped that Mr Middleton, bespectacled and neatly presented, might adopt a slightly more relaxed approach while still maintaining the corporation’s high standards. He made his debut over the airwaves on 9 May 1931. His first utterance, informal and amiable, set the tone that marked out the rest of his broadcasting career: ‘Good afternoon. Well, it’s not much of a day for gardening, is it?’
In September 1934, Middleton got his own Friday evening show, In the Garden. In time, it would be renamed In Your Garden and its broadcast slot moved to Sunday afternoons, transmitting all year round except for a few weeks’ break during the summer. With an audience that reached 3.5 million, he was one of the BBC’s biggest draws. His secret was an ability to make each listener feel that they were being personally addressed by a man who treated them as his equal. In 1937, from a specially created plot at Alexandra Palace, he made the first gardening broadcast on British television.
Never forgetting his roots despite his success, Middleton was always on the side of the ‘little gardener’. In a 1935 broadcast, he rallied against the image of amateur horticulturalists as ‘funny old men with battered hats and old moth-eaten trousers and with whiskers and very little intelligence’. ‘Generally speaking,’ he said, ‘they’re very much as other men are – perhaps a little better in many ways: wholesome, decent-living people who love their work – usually straight and often deeply religious people, perhaps without knowing it, and certainly without shouting about it. They work hand in hand with Nature and they know that their work is under the direct supervision of the Great Architect.’
The idea of patronising his listeners was odious to him. One critic, Wilfrid Rooke Ley, appraised his talents in the Catholic Herald of 27 September 1935 like this:
It is the art of Mr Middleton to address himself to the lowest common denominator of horticultural intelligence without the faintest hint of superiority or condescension. He will assume that your soil is poor, and your pocket poor. All he asks is that your hopes are high and your Saturday afternoons at his service … he has the prettiest humour. He stands for common sense and has the gift of consolation.
There can scarcely have been a man alive better suited to making the best out of difficult horticultural circumstances. Another critic of the day, Peter Black, wrote of how Middleton ‘seemed to enlarge the business of cultivating one’s garden into a serene and comforting philosophy’. In 2008, Byron Rogers described him as ‘the first English national working-class hero, apart from footballers and hangmen’.
With the coming of the war, the Ministry of Agriculture wrote to the BBC, seeking an assurance that In Your Garden would not be axed. The BBC, never keen to over-praise its talent, considered the question and in March 1940 concluded:
… his talks are inherently better value than any alternatives that could be found. From the point of view of propaganda or practical advice it is unlikely that we could find speakers who could rise above his level. On the other hand, they might easily fall below it and would not be likely ever to rise to the heights to which he can aspire on occasions.
Nonetheless, in early 1940 there were parties within the Ministry of Agriculture who moved to cut Middleton out of the campaign, only to be forced to keep him on when presented with evidence of his enormous appeal. Later in the year he delivered a reading at a special service conducted at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square for the blessing of allotments.
Dig for Victory had not found its way directly to the heart of Home Front life, but from the unpromising seeds of the Grow More Food campaign, it now at least had a killer slogan and a broadcasting patron with the skills and reach to build momentum.