Despite the apparent potential of Reginald Dorman-Smith and William Morrison, neither man had led their respective ministries with the energy and efficiency that they might have done, especially in respect of Dig for Victory. Dorman-Smith should be credited with having overseen a successful ploughing-up campaign and instigating other vital initiatives, such as building up a reserve of 3,000 tractors. However his department had simply not managed to capture the imaginations of enough back-garden and allotment planters. As the next couple of years would prove, they were out there but Dorman-Smith was not the man to entice them. Meanwhile, Morrison had tied himself up in knots as he attempted to calm fears over food shortages at a time of immense social upheaval.
When Winston Churchill formed his wartime cabinet in 1940, he moved both men on; Dorman-Smith would become Governor General of Burma and Morrison Postmaster-General. They were replaced by Robert Hudson and Frederick, Lord Woolton, respectively, who proved to be a far more dynamic duo. Under their joint guidance, the Dig for Victory campaign really ignited.
Hudson was a Londoner born in 1886 who had won for himself a reputation for hard work and competence during stints at the Ministry of Shipping and the Department of Overseas Trade. With his urban background and distinctly non-agricultural government experience, Hudson could not claim like his predecessor to be a ‘farming man’. Yet of the two, it is he who is regarded as the greater success. His energy, eloquence and hunger for work proved irresistible, particularly when united with the gifts possessed by Lord Woolton.
Woolton may have received his knighthood in 1935 and made a personal fortune as a businessman but he also possessed an unerring common touch. Born Frederick James Marquis in Salford in 1883 to staunchly ambitious, middle-class parents, he qualified as a maths teacher and taught at Burnley Grammar School while undertaking further academic studies into labour mobility and poverty. He was appointed as an economics research fellow at Manchester University in 1910, receiving his MA two years later and participating in a range of social projects. Declared unfit for active service in the First World War, he joined the War Office’s Requisition Department and, later, the Leather Control Board. His social work had previously brought him into contact with the Lewis family, owners of a famous Liverpool department store. In 1920, Woolton joined the firm, becoming a well-known commercial figure, firstly in the region and eventually throughout the nation. Invited to serve on a range of influential government committees during the 1920s and 1930s, he remained non-partisan at the time of his knighthood.
He was a vociferous critic of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, and the two had a fierce run-in when Woolton pulled German products from Lewis’s after the annexation of Austria in 1938. Nonetheless, in 1939 he was brought in as an advisor to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, and asked to focus on the practicalities of how to keep the armed forces clothed in the event of hostilities. Chamberlain then granted Woolton a peerage so that he would be able to assume high office. Woolton was geared up to become Lord Windermere until his wife vetoed the choice because of its Wildean connotations and persuaded him to settle on Woolton instead.
On taking over at the Ministry of Food, Woolton was well known among the political and mercantile classes but recognition of him in the country at large was not widespread. However, he was to become a regular and familiar voice on the airwaves, dispensing timely advice on food and nutrition throughout the Second World War so that by its end, only Churchill could claim greater popularity with the public among members of the government. Woolton came to the Ministry of Food with an agenda. Having witnessed the poverty that prevailed among large parts of the population, and having undertaken academic studies in the areas of poverty and ill health, he was determined to use his position to improve the lot of the poor. As he would later write in his memoirs, he fixed on using ‘the powers of a wartime Ministry of Food to make provision for the health of children … [and] stamp out the diseases that arose from malnutrition’.
Both Hudson and Woolton had the sense to surround themselves with highly capable personnel, benefitting them personally and the nation as a whole. At the Ministry of Agriculture, Hudson could turn to his deputy, Tom Williams (later Baron Williams of Barnburgh). Born in Blackwell, Derbyshire, in 1888, he was the tenth of fourteen children, though three of his siblings did not survive beyond infancy. The son of a miner, Williams finished his formal education at the age of eleven and found employment at the local colliery. A lifelong trade unionist, his difficult upbringing naturally put him on the side of the poor and deprived, a stance that put him in harmony with Woolton despite their own class divide. Williams realised that the war offered a great opportunity to revitalise the agricultural industry and bring it out of the moribund state that had dominated for most of the 1930s. Furthermore, while his own background was in mining, he was a working man to whom farmers (so often distrusting of the posh nobs who mostly ran government) were able to relate. While the Ministry wielded significant wartime statutory powers, Williams sought to work by compromise and negotiation, doing much to soften and popularise Hudson’s tenure. Williams ultimately succeeded Hudson as Minister at the end of the war and played a pivotal role in the creation of the 1947 Agricultural Act. When Williams published his autobiography Digging for Britain in 1965, it included a foreword by Clement Atlee. The great post-war Labour Prime Minister wrote that Williams had ‘effected nothing less than a revolution in British agriculture,’ and that ‘his place in history is assured as the greatest British Minister of Agriculture of all time’.
Over at the Ministry of Food, Lord Woolton (who as a non-partisan was a highly effective mediator between Labour and Conservative colleagues) had not only the ear of Sir John Boyd Orr to bend but also that of Professor Jack Drummond, who was instrumental in the successful roll-out of the rationing system. Drummond had spent much of the 1930s undertaking an intensive study of 500 years of domestic eating habits that was published in 1939 as The Englishman’s Food. He was brought into the Ministry of Food at the onset of war to advise on the implications of wide-scale gas contamination of food supplies. By February 1941, Drummond was the Ministry’s leading scientific adviser and had developed a strong relationship with Woolton, devising a programme of rationing that was acceptable to the public once the gravity of Britain’s food situation had been grasped by the proverbial man (and housewife) on the street.
Churchill and Woolton also shared the view that the development of a canteen culture would help guarantee access to nutritionally balanced meals for ever-greater numbers of people. Restaurants were deemed ‘off ration’ at the outset of the war, so those who were rich enough and used to eating out continued to do so, dining much as they ever did to the chagrin of many, until restrictions were finally put in place some way into the war. However, the vast majority of the country was, historically, outside of restaurant culture and had always dined within the domestic setting. Woolton was determined to change that. Robert Boothby, who served as Woolton’s Permanent Secretary, said, ‘It is cheaper – and better – to eat together … Lord Woolton had expressed interest in the development of communal feeding not only as a wartime measure, but also as a long-term policy – a permanent and beneficial feature of national life in Britain.’
Companies employing over certain numbers of people were required to provide economical and healthy meals for their employees, and canteens became an increasingly common feature of life. Meanwhile, between 1939 and 1945, schools registered a 700 per cent increase in the provision of free meals to pupils. In 1940, as the Blitz took hold, the London County Council set up a number of both permanent and temporary sites to provide food to people whose homes had been bombed. These formed the basis of what became a national network of not-for-profit ‘British Restaurants’, run by the Ministry of Food for anyone to eat in. The name ‘British Restaurants’ was put forward by Churchill in favour of the original suggestion, ‘Communal Feeding Centres’, which he considered ‘an odious expression, suggestive of communism and the workhouse’.
The restaurants served wholesome food at eminently affordable prices. You could get a tea or coffee for 1½d., soup for 2d., a plate of meat and two veg for 8d., and a pudding for 3d., none of which came off the ration. By September 1943, there were some 2,160 British Restaurants, providing upwards of 600,000 meals each day, at locations as various as the Victora & Albert Museum in London and Bath’s grand Pump Room to local Scout huts and abandoned warehouses. By the end of the war, over half the population had dined in one of these eateries at least once, and though the food may not have been Michelin star standard, it was decent enough and set a benchmark for cheap, mass catering. Between 1939 and 1945, the total number of work canteens increased from around 1,500 to 18,500, and 10 per cent of all meals were being taken in public settings. Britain had become a nation that ate out.
Along with Wilson Jameson at the Ministry of Health, Woolton, Drummond and Boyd Orr were credited with ensuring huge leaps in the nation’s nutritional health during the war, delivering hard-hitting messages that emphasised the value of well-prepared home-grown produce and which were vital in putting wind into the sails of the Dig for Victory movement. Indeed, in 1947, the Lasker Awards committee of the American Public Health Association would cite the combined wartime efforts of the Ministries of Food and Health as ‘one of the greatest demonstrations in public health administration that the world has ever seen’. It is a sad footnote that the considerable achievements of Professor Drummond’s life were to be overshadowed by the sad circumstances surrounding his murder, along with his wife and ten-year-old daughter, while they were on a camping holiday in Provence in 1952. A mystery that was never solved.
The figure at the Ministry of Food with arguably the greatest direct influence on the Dig for Victory campaign was Professor John Raeburn. Born in Kirkcaldy in 1912, he was schooled at Manchester Grammar before leaving for Edinburgh University. Aged twenty-four, he went to China where he took up the position of Professor of Agricultural Economics at Nanking University. He stayed for barely a year before fleeing back to Britain at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. He found a job at the University of Oxford before signing on as a statistician at the Ministry of Food in 1939. By 1941, Raeburn had been appointed as chief of the Agricultural Plans Branch, which was by then based in North Wales. He was effectively Dig for Victory’s ‘man at the Ministry’ and the main go-between with the Ministry of Agriculture. He stayed in position until the end of the war (outlasting Woolton who left for pastures new in 1943), and won the respect of all those who worked with him for his championing of the campaign. Known to his colleagues as J.R. (his middle name was Ross), he was never one to suffer fools gladly and could be decidedly stern, but was also honest and straightforward and, importantly, lived what he preached: he spent much of his spare time tending his own garden, growing fruit and veg to boost the rations of his own family.
This wholesale change of key personnel after Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940 made an immediate impact on Dig for Victory. In bringing new blood to the ministries, Churchill’s decisive and prompt action (characteristic of his entire wartime tenure) doubtless saved Dig for Victory from an ignominious reputation. Instead of becoming an underfunded, amateurish if well-meaning incidental to the war, Churchill helped propel it towards its status as one of the great Home Front campaigns.
Of course, even under Woolton and Hudson there remained some thorny issues with which to get to grips. One such question was what should be done to keep market gardens and the country’s larger houses still producing at their optimum levels where professional gardening staff had been called up to the services. While this was, by its nature, an issue for a relatively small proportion of the participants in Digging for Victory, it affected those properties which had the potential to be among the most significant contributors to the nation’s stores.
Some landowners needed more encouragement than others to participate. It was an oft-heard complaint that many mansion gardens seemed to carry on as if the war was simply not happening, filling their beds and glasshouses with flowers where vegetables might have flourished. In August 1940, a newspaper article was published praising the efforts of the owner of a grand house in Loughton, Essex. He is spoken of in heroic terms that surely would have left no householder in a similar situation unstirred:
An excellent example of how owners of fairly large gardens may help towards the success of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign is to be found here in a delightful corner of the Prime Minister’s constituency … Here in Essex Mr C.F. Clark, of Ripley Grange, has given a lead that is sure to be followed in other parts of the country. Ripley Grange may be said to rejoice in its beautiful gardens. Until the war came, the cultivation of vegetables had no part in the scheme of this well-planned estate. Then, thinking first of the wives and families of Service men, Mr Clark decided to sacrifice a large part of his garden to vegetable production … The wives of many Service men in the district are greatly indebted to Mr Clark for the fresh produce they have received. He is now sending vegetables to local schools and hospitals and a scheme is being prepared under which the London Hospital may benefit … Perhaps Mr Clark’s greatest reward for his public-spirited endeavour is the receipt of schoolchildren’s letters of thanks.
Some landowners warned against a ‘brain drain’ of professional gardeners that they claimed would have been unthinkable among workers in other essential fields. Throughout the land, they argued, were large gardens long tended by skilled experts to be as productive as possible. And yet, just as the nation most needed their productivity, vital gardening staff were being called up. In a letter to The Times on 25 February 1941, Lieutenant-Colonel J.H. Westley outlined the problem:
My gardener received this morning a week’s notice to join an infantry training centre of a county regiment other than his own. He is a skilled gardener, aged thirty-two, height 5ft 1in, eyesight defective. I know that the needs of private individuals, however large and productive their gardens may be, must give way to all other considerations in wartime, but surely there is no sense in making an infantry soldier of a man whose skill, if properly utilised in the public service, could produce extra food for a large number of the population.
That same month, Lord Bingley – experienced on the front line of politics since becoming an MP in 1906 – raised the issue in the House of Lords:
There is, I believe, a special opportunity of increasing home food production by the cultivation of the gardens of the country, large and small, and I hope that the Ministry of Labour or whichever Government Department is concerned will be very careful not to deplete unduly the supply of trained gardeners. There are, in a good many places, glasshouses of various kinds which at other times are devoted to the growing of flowers and grapes and other luxuries, and the owners of them will be perfectly ready to let them be used for more necessary things. A great deal can be got out of them if they are properly managed, but the ordinary unskilled labourer turned into them for the first time is not going to be of much use in producing real results …
We are told that old men and girls can be employed, but that is not the same thing. I believe that efforts to increase home production of food will be seriously handicapped unless something is done about keeping skilled men who can really do the job … Girls are not going to be so easy to get as some people think. There is a great demand for them for munitions making. A certain element of fashion enters into this. It is rather the fashion for a girl to go into a munitions factory in preference to getting up at any hour of the morning to feed animals in the dark on a dirty, muddy farm. That is not a very attractive job for girls who have been employed in town surroundings. Girls have been doing splendid work, but we must face the fact that there is a shortage.
Inflexible legislation offered little hope of solving this complex question and was never a real option. The calling up of vast numbers of the general population would inevitably throw up anomalies and injustices. While no one wanted to strip the country of its essential skilled labour, any attempts to institute regulations allowing the richest landowners to keep hold of their valued staff while other families watched as their fathers, sons and brothers went off to war would have been damagingly divisive. A much more appealing remedy was for the relevant authorities to take a pragmatic approach on a case-by-case basis. There would still be the odd mistake or questionable decision, but it offered the best chance of alleviating the problem without unnecessarily turning it into a national debate on class privilege.
In early March 1941, J.F. Ramsbotham shared his experiences in a published letter. Confronted by the prospect of losing his experienced head gardener, he had paid a visit to the local labour exchange, where he was informed that there were no suitable replacements on their books and little prospect that there would be at any point in the short to medium term. He thus undertook the administrative task of securing a certificate of reservation, exempting his man from a call-up. ‘I hate the word “influence,” which has been a curse to the country,’ wrote Ramsbotham, ‘and I used none, but I do think that every person should be employed to the best advantage of our truly great country, and it is my opinion that the Westmorland Agricultural Executive Committee used their judgement wisely.’
There were, though, additional complications that faced a great many large houses and impacted on their ability to contribute to the Dig for Victory campaign. Chief among these was the transfer of wartime control of private country houses from their original owners to the military. It was a question that occupied the mind of one F.H. Mitchell of Crowborough, who exercised his thoughts on the subject in what proved to be a coliseum for popular debate, the letters page of The Times. On 25 March 1941, he wrote:
Unfortunately when owners go, gardeners go too. Consequently a very large number of kitchen gardens have been neglected for many months and will very soon become infested with weeds … The remedy seems simple, for surely soldiers who are billeted in these houses would be only too willing to dig for victory in their spare time …
It was indeed a neat solution, and one which found favour with many, though by no means all, of the troops in question. Over the course of the war, the armed services proved highly adept at producing food from the soil, not only in the relative comfort of requisitioned country houses, but in the more mundane settings of permanent military bases too.
Some problems, though, seemed to have no such straight-forward solution. The treatment of aliens in wartime was a particularly fraught issue. On 4 June 1940, Churchill admitted as much to the House of Commons:
We have found it necessary to take measures of increasing stringency, not only against enemy aliens and suspicious characters of other nationalities, but also against British subjects who may become a danger or a nuisance should the war be transported to the United Kingdom. I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot, at the present time and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do.
G.W. Radford shared the details of a particularly sad case with his fellow Times readers in June 1940:
As a reader in the Ruislip-Northwood district, which has recently been declared a protected area, I am at a loss to understand the expulsion of all friendly aliens from that area … To cite my own case, I turned over part of my garden to vegetables, and employed a friendly alien to work on this food production. A Jew of some sixty years of age, he was happy to work with his hands in what he termed the common cause. His son, who could have in the early days of the war proceeded to the United States, considered it his duty to join up in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps. A fine type of young Jew, who has already suffered the tortures of the concentration camp, his one aim in life was to do something to combat Hitlerism and all it stands for. His wife worked as a domestic, and thereby released my wife for very active participation in local defence work. I am a member of the Local Defence Volunteers. Now what is the position? The home must be kept going, so local defence work is minus one. Do I withdraw from the Local DefenceVolunteers in order to dig for victory or let the vegetable plot fade out? … Truly the working of the bureaucratic mind passeth all understanding.
As if to prove that final point, once in office, Winston Churchill decided on a clear-out at the misfiring Ministry of Information, whose effective working would be essential to the success of Dig for Victory. John Reith was unceremoniously removed to the Ministry of Transport, he and Churchill having waged a long-running feud since Reith had resisted Churchill’s attempt to wrest control of the BBC for the government during the General Strike of 1926.
Unfortunately, the Ministry remained as prone as ever to entirely misread the public mood even after Churchill installed Duff Cooper as Reith’s replacement. Tommy Handley, the Liverpudlian superstar of BBC radio’s It’s That Man Again, did a much better job of chiming with popular opinion when he christened it the ‘Ministry of Aggravation’. Cooper, who was Eton and Oxford educated, had first entered the Commons in 1924 and had served variously as Financial Secretary to the War Office, Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Secretary of State for War. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in May 1937 but fell out with Chamberlain over the appeasement policy, leading him into a close alliance with Churchill. Cooper’s attack against the Munich Agreement, which he considered dishonourable, saw him resume his career on the back benches in late 1938 but he had been clever enough to see that the balance of power had turned inexorably in Churchill’s favour.
When Churchill took up residence in Downing Street, he appointed Cooper despite his old ally being reluctant to take up the reins. While the Ministry was undoubtedly starting to find its feet, Cooper brought with him a notably bad relationship with the newspapers. Tensions were not lessened by Cooper’s eagerness to take advantage of the work of the Mass Observation Unit, which used diary reports from citizens to furnish a picture of social attitudes and trends. Officials from that organisation became known as ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’.
Cooper nonetheless held the office until July 1941, when he was replaced by Brendan Bracken, who came through the Ministry like a proverbial breath of fresh air and stayed until May 1945. Born in County Tipperary in 1901, he had a background in both politics and journalism, which immediately marked him out as a suitable man for the job in hand. He was a character for whom the description ‘larger than life’ might have been invented, and was not to everybody’s taste. A blaze of orange hair framed his pale face, a pair of wire spectacles perched on his flat nose and his smile revealed a set of badly preserved gnashers, which were further discoloured by his prodigious smoking habit. He spoke with a strange hybrid accent that seemed to pay homage to his Irish roots with, to some ears, elements of Cockney and Australian thrown in for good measure.
Bracken had a long-standing friendship with Churchill, during both the good times and bad of Churchill’s career. They would drink and talk together long into the night, and Churchill admired his friend’s ability to make things happen. When, in September 1939, Chamberlain brought Churchill back into government as First Lord of the Admiralty, Bracken was installed as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, from which position he did much to pave the way for Churchill’s ascent to the premiership.
On arriving at the Ministry of Information, Bracken set about ridding the department of its tendency towards jingoistic didacticism which he knew did not play well with the public. Instead, it would start to produce straightforward and useful information, while trusting the public to respond to it in the right way. It was a change of attitude that liberated both the Ministry and the public, breaking down the wall of mutual distrust that had inhibited both sides up to that point. He also took the bold decision of adopting a more hands-off approach towards the BBC and its domestic broadcasting. This was grist to the mill for the Dig for Victory campaign. Having revolutionised the Ministry of Information, Bracken soon tired of the minutiae of running the department and from 1943 spent most of his time as a general advisor to Churchill. Day-to-day running of the Ministry fell to Cyril Radcliffe, its Director-General, who effectively maintained its health for the duration of the war.
The Ministries of Agriculture and Food, bursting with ideas that they wanted to communicate, at last had access to an organ with the infrastructures and technical know-how to really do them justice. Hudson and Woolton worked closely with the Ministry of Information’s Home Publicity Division, Campaign Division and the General Production Division, the latter of which became capable of producing posters, exhibition materials and the like far quicker than any of its commercial competitors. It was a bonus for the creatives at the Ministry of Information that they could turn to Hudson, Woolton and, on occasion, Churchill to assist with direct addresses. When the Prime Minister himself declared that, ‘Every endeavour must be made to grow the greatest volume of food of which this fertile land is capable,’ the public was sure to listen.