Despite the energetic and largely effective leaderships of Hudson and Woolton, precise boundaries of jurisdiction between their two departments were never entirely established. This confusion was neatly exemplified by the case of the Domestic Produce Advisory Council.
The Ministry of Agriculture had incorporated an Allotments Advisory Committee since 1922. It was an influential body that did much to press the cause of allotment holders and vigorously campaigned for better security of tenure both before and during the war. While it was a representative body and included members from leading allotment organisations throughout the land, it was not designed to provide the ‘nuts and bolts’ advice that the civil servants needed to guide Dig for Victory. Therefore, in February 1940 the Ministry began to put together plans to establish a Council of Produce from Allotments and Private Gardens, which was quickly replaced by the Domestic Produce Advisory Council (with a dedicated Allotments and Gardens Committee).
Under the chairmanship of Lord Bingley (with its Scottish branch chaired by Sir Robert Grieg), the Council had a wide-ranging, highly skilled and experienced membership drawn from leading national bodies as disparate as the Accredited Poultry Breeders’ Federation, the National Farmers’ Union and the Society of Friends. Rooted within the Ministry of Agriculture, it was nonetheless run in partnership with the Ministry of Food and reported to both bodies. Where the subject of food production overlapped into food distribution was often vague, so communication channels were regularly unclear. This blurring of responsibilities resulted in a curious situation: while it was Hudson, the Minister of Agriculture, who represented Dig for Victory throughout the war, in the popular collective memory Dig for Victory is eternally associated more with Woolton at the Ministry of Food.
Despite this, the fuzziness concerning the role of each department had little impact on the day-to-day running of Dig for Victory or its overall success. However, there was one vexed question that occupied the minds of growers and administrators alike for the duration of the war and was never resolved to any satisfactory degree. This concerned the disposal of excess produce from non-commercial gardeners and allotment holders. Was excess produce principally a problem of production (that is to say, should growers be encouraged not to grow a surplus) or one of distribution (it being unreasonable to run a food production campaign in which the authorities actively aimed to stifle certain sorts of production)? In other words, was it an issue for the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Food? The implications of the failure to reach a conclusion on this problem were significant, as an unfortunate battle line was drawn between the commercial and the amateur grower. In a further spin off, the Diggers for Victory in the countryside were set against those from the town. In the end, a solution of sorts was found not within the corridors of Whitehall but through the good sense of the ladies of the Women’s Institute.
In line with the Ministry of Agriculture’s pre-war policy, at the start of the conflict Reginald Dorman-Smith had been reluctant to do anything that he considered might put the commercial sector’s noses out of joint. What to do with excess produce was a source of contention for policy makers from the earliest days of the campaign, but Ministry minutes from January 1940 are indicative of where their loyalties lay:
As it would be undesirable to encourage much direct marketing of vegetables as this would only be done at the expense of the small greengrocer, it appears that the cooperation of the retailer should be sought in framing any plan for the organisation of rural growers as is suggested.
Thus the issue was seemingly one to be dealt with at the distribution, as opposed to production, end and so theoretically became the responsibility of the Ministry of Food. Yet the same set of minutes also outlined a suggested solution that highlights the confusion within the Ministries themselves as to who should be responsible for what:
In the Great War, the Food Production Department (which was then responsible for administering the food production campaign in England and Wales) developed a very active and popular movement for preserving at home the produce of allotments and gardens … I am not sure whether, under present conditions, it would properly fall within the scope of the Ministry of Food or of the Agricultural Departments.
At the beginning of February 1940, disposal of excess produce was the subject of a parliamentary question by Colonel Charles Ponsonby. ‘Is the Dig for Victory campaign,’ he asked, ‘designed to encourage the small private grower to cater for his own household requirements or is he to be encouraged to produce a surplus; and, in the latter case, how is he to dispose of it?’ Dorman-Smith’s answer, to all intents and purposes, was a fudge:
The campaign is designed to encourage the small private grower to cater for his own household requirements. It is recognised, however, that the question of securing the effective use of surplus produce must be examined, and I am arranging, in consultation with my Right Honourable. friend the Minister of Food, for this to be done.
A few days later Dorman-Smith addressed the conference of the National Allotment Society, giving a clearer message that amateur producers were there to top up the offerings of the commercial producers but not to encroach on their markets. He told them:
There will be no famine in fresh vegetables but the professional growers’ very efficient production can with advantage be augmented on allotments and in private gardens. The new allotment drive does not aim at competing with the market gardening industry, which must be maintained for the national service. It is not intended that allotments should grow produce for sale.
Such a solution was fine for urban Diggers for Victory who were unlikely to produce anywhere near the volumes that might challenge the trade, but the situation for rural amateurs was rather different; with more space available and an ingrained tradition of agriculture and horticulture, the potential for high crop yields was clear. There was a growing sense that their particular circumstances were given less consideration than those of their city-dwelling compatriots. As Mr Middleton put it in December 1940: ‘I have an uneasy feeling that in this campaign we are concentrating on the towns and neglecting the villages, where there is usually plenty of available land, abundant fresh air, and willing hands to do the work.’
It was a subject Middleton would return to often, particularly in his Daily Express column. Why should rural growers put in the effort to produce decent yields if anything not consumed by their immediate circle of family and friends was destined to go to waste? Referring to the plight of the village grower in September 1942, Middleton suggested the need for a different approach: ‘He can grow vegetables and is inclined to be critical of well-meant technical advice. He is a little tired of propaganda; posters on a barn door portraying a boot and a spade fail to rouse his enthusiasm. What he needs is a direct inducement to grow more … “Dig for Victory!” is an attractive slogan. May I suggest another one to go with it? “Food for the towns – money for the villages.”’
In May 1940, the Ministry of Agriculture had found itself with a get-out clause when responsibility for the disposal of surplus crops from private gardens and allotments was formally handed over to Lord Woolton and the Ministry of Food. It undertook a programme of regular consultations with a variety of bodies including the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and the National Allotment Society. In the summer of 1940, the decision was taken to set up a new group of sub-bodies to look afresh at the question at the local level, and so the County Garden Produce Committees were established.
Around this time, Woolton penned a missive to Hudson. Woolton was clear in his mind that if the nation was to have adequate supplies of the right foods to ensure an overall improvement in nutrition levels, whatever fresh vegetables could be produced needed to remain in the system. He outlined what he considered was a basic flaw with the campaign as it had been run up to that point. It was a thinly veiled slap on the wrist to Hudson personally:
… I gather that the allotment movement has to some extent been checked through consideration of the interests of commercial growers. If this is the case I cannot help feeling that a mistake has been made. The case for increasing consumption of fresh vegetables is so great that vested interests should not be allowed to restrict the Government effort … The policy should be the maximum production on allotments and private gardens and the distribution of surplus produce not required by the cultivator to families which need it.
An article in The Times on 26 September 1940 suggested an alternative market for surplus produce:
The experience of a wartime grower of fruit and vegetables on a large scale in Sussex may encourage others in like case to persevere, as she has done, in efforts to find a market for their produce. A solution to her problem was provided by the arrival in the neighbourhood of more troops, to whom she arranged to supply the large surplus for the production of which she had put under cultivation all the available land on her extensive estate.
However, the article made clear that this was but a partial solution, continuing:
… others who, like her, obeyed official exhortations to ‘Dig for Victory’ have not been so fortunate. They find their produce left on their hands, and some of them do not know where to turn for advice on the likeliest way to seek markets for it.
The problem rolled on into 1941. In March, Hudson was asked in Parliament, ‘whether arrangements are being made for the collection of surplus vegetables, perishable and other, not only from established growers but from the innumerable small growers and allotment holders who have been stimulated by the ‘Grow More Food’ campaign and who are preparing to grow more vegetables than are necessary for their own households?’
The answer the Minister of Agriculture gave seemed now to suggest that the problem should be warded off by stemming production at source. He said:
I have not encouraged the small grower and allotment holder to grow the maximum quantity of vegetables indiscriminately: such a policy would almost certainly lead to the production of a large unconsumable surplus of summer vegetables of the perishable type, and to disappointment and discouragement. The policy I advocate for the amateur grower is one of orderly cropping, with the cropping so planned that a succession of vegetables is obtained all year round, that overproduction of summer vegetables is avoided, and that any production surplus to the grower’s own requirements is of non-perishable vegetables which can be stored for use during the winter months.
That this was now the official policy clearly came as news to at least one chairman of a Garden Produce Committee. A certain Miss Talbot, who operated in Hertfordshire, was driven to write directly to the Ministry. Her letter paints a vivid picture of the problems caused at the local level by the lack of a cogent policy on this question. Indeed, one can feel the palpable panic in her tone as she confronts the spectre of social ostracism for the inconstancy of a government she has tried to serve to the best of her ability:
If it is true that the Ministry of Agriculture has reversed its declared policy, i.e., that villages were to aim at being self-supporting, but that any surplus of root vegetables produced over and above their own requirements would be guaranteed at market, it will have the most devastating effect on the food production campaign. The villages will consider that they have been led on by false promises, and none of us who have passed on the Ministry of Food’s assurances about marketing will ever be able to show our faces again.
Lord Woolton seems to have become frustrated by the contradictory messages too. The minutes of a meeting at the Ministry of Food on 13 February 1941 report him as saying, ‘It was not good government if two departments were doing the same job,’ and that he ‘wanted to get that difficulty settled’. The notes of one of his civil servants dated March 1941 got to the very heart of the problem: ‘It is also questionable whether the Minister would wish to associate himself with a policy of restricting food production in the interests of the market gardener, even if this, in fact, is the policy of the Ministry of Agriculture.’
Nonetheless, in March 1941 a memo was sent from the Ministry of Agriculture to the Federation of Women’s Institutes explaining that the responsibility for the work of the County Garden Produce Committees was to revert back from the Ministry of Food to Hudson and his team. In July, Hudson said: ‘As the Minister of Agriculture is responsible for production and the Minister of Food for distribution, the obvious good and administrative procedure was to put this matter under the Minister of Agriculture and not under the Minister of Food, because we hope, and I still believe it to be right, that the best way to deal with a surplus is to avoid it.’
As the issue ping-ponged between the two departments, the First Baron Davies questioned the Duke of Norfolk, who was Joint Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, in the House of Lords: ‘In the first place, may I ask the noble Duke why it is that the partnership which apparently existed between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food has apparently now been dissolved?’
Then he posed his single most pertinent question: ‘So I would again ask, what really is the policy of the Ministry? Is it to encourage or to discourage the growing of vegetables?’ It was quite extraordinary that such a question should need to be asked of a spokesman for the Dig for Victory campaign, and yet it was entirely justified. Lord Norfolk responded thus:
It has now been decided that where there is a surplus amount of vegetables which it is possible to keep, and there are not the available storage facilities in the growing area, arrangements will be made for collecting and storing such surplus. But it is quite obvious that it would be impossible to collect all the perishable vegetables which might be produced as surplus production, because of difficulties connected with the supply of petrol and the available means of transport. To do so, it would be necessary to have transport vehicles going round the country continuously. In the case of vegetables which would keep, however, it does not much matter whether they are collected one week or the next. I hope that my noble friend will be satisfied with this explanation.
One suspects the noble friend, along with a great many others, was not. A Times editorial of 5 June 1942 reveals that the mini soap opera rumbled on:
At the present moment the public, after having been exhorted to ‘dig for victory’, are shocked to hear that hundreds of tons of fresh vegetables are allowed to rot or are ploughed back into the ground because the grower cannot obtain a remunerative price, or even sell them at any price, while high prices are being asked for them in the retail shops.
So the argument continued to go in circles, producing a rather curious situation. Woolton and the Ministry of Food, who might have been expected to baulk at the extra burden of establishing distribution channels for surplus produce, were in fact seemingly happy to take on the additional work; while the Ministry of Agriculture, responsible for increasing the country’s food output, attempted to restrict the productivity of the keenest amateur gardeners.
It fell to the Women’s Institute, under the guidance of its agricultural advisor Elizabeth Hess, to rise above the vested interests and political flannel, and implement a sensible, workable scheme for disposing of surplusses. As early as 1938, the WI Agricultural Sub-Committee had received a £500 grant from the Ministry of Agriculture towards its aim of encouraging ‘production and the best use, preservation and marketing of home-grown produce’. In rural areas, the WI – along with the National Allotment Society, rural community councils and county horticultural organisers – worked towards making best estimates of the volume of vegetables in each county that would be available for market. Plans were then put in place to take these stocks to collection centres where they could be graded and, where suitable, redirected to the greengrocery trade, either directly to retailers or through wholesale markets. Local allotment societies were to carry out a similar role in urban areas, although the prospect of large-scale surpluses from the towns was remote. Where there was an urban excess, it was usual practice to find a home for it with the local hospital or another community institution.
There were similar regulations for dealing with fruit, though the quantities in question were on a much smaller scale. Maybe the WI’s greatest achievement was the establishment of a network of over 5,800 Preservation Centres, geared up to preserve and distribute stores of perishable fruit and, to a lesser extent, vegetables. WI members became highly skilled operators of canning machines, many of which were donated by sister organisations in the USA and Canada, and the centres became filled with tins, bottles and Kilner jars ready for market or to be donated to worthy recipients, including hospitals and schools.
The minute books of the Carlton and Chellington WI, in Bedfordshire, provide an insight into just how much good work was being done. In November 1939, 88 lbs of potatoes were collected from members and sent to the county hospital (there were obviously skilled potato-growers within the ranks; in October 1940, Mrs Wykes won the branch competition for growing 16lb 13oz from a single spud). In May 1940, 153 eggs were sent to Dr Barnardo’s homes, and a members’ trading stall was set up to begin operating the following month, selling volumes of produce that were uneconomical for a commercial dealer but which otherwise would have gone to waste.
The National Federation wrote in July 1940 to request that any surplus fruit be turned into jam, and in September 1940, Carlton and Chellington reported: ‘More than 2,000 lbs of various kinds of jam had already been made and the inspector who came to see it was very pleased and said that if we had any difficulty in selling the jam we could put it on the list for selling to London shopkeepers.’ Bedfordshire as a whole had thirty-five preservation centres by the end of the year, which in 1940 alone used 9 tons of sugar in the production of 44,800 lbs of jam. The WI’s Produce Guild Guide and Handbook of 1943 quoted the Earl of Portsmouth on the organisation’s communal jam-making: ‘It opens a vision of self-help, of returning skill, home craft, and cooperative work.’
A further glimpse of the astounding contribution made by the WI is provided by an interview broadcast on 8 February 1946 on Modern Countryman, a radio programme for the West of England Home Service. It was conducted with Mrs Dorothy Hebditch, a Somerset farmer’s wife and the WI’s ‘Coordinator of Fruiting’ (a venerable job title indeed) for Crewkerne and Ilminster districts:
Our homes were full to overflowing with evacuees, land girls and soldiers stationed in the village. Every moment seemed full up. Yet somehow when fruit came in we made time to deal with it – to make jam and chutney and so on … There wasn’t much time to waste when you got a telephone call saying that someone had 12 lbs of plums they couldn’t sell: ‘Could we deal with them?’ ‘No,’ you’d say, ‘we can’t manage that quantity – but Ilminster with its huge pans and its canner could.’
Imagine our faces when, after straining all our blackberries through sieves to make regulation jam, we heard in one of our village shops: ‘I don’t want none of that there WI jam. I do want something with pips in it.’
Each year over the period 1940–45, the WI membership in Somerset made enough jam to fill the annual ration entitlement of 4,100 people. ‘Even if the men make fun of us sometimes, they always know where to turn when there’s a job of work to be done,’ Mrs Hebditch recalled with pride. There were other organisations too that played their part at various stages of the campaign, providing help with growing, preserving and distributing – among them the Scouting and Guiding movements, the Salvation Army and the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS). The latter, set up in 1938 on the suggestion of the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, and led by the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, was envisaged as a means of giving women the opportunity to contribute to civil defence. Their work encompassed the provision of sustenance and welfare to the victims of aerial bombing. Among many other duties, the women ran mobile kitchens and communal feeding centres. In time they would also supply morale-building snacks to those who volunteered to help with bringing in the harvests. Seventy thousand pies were served up in the autumn 1941 Rural Pie Scheme alone. Additionally, the WVS ran a Food Leaders scheme, in which talks were given on cooking and maintaining good nutrition in a post-air-raid environment. Their work was often dangerous, and the WVS lost 241 members in the course of carrying out their duties during the war.
The efforts of the WI and these other voluntary bodies only served to make the hand-wringing of the political classes seem still sillier. The government’s handling of the question of surplus produce would, in a different age, have provided wonderful material for an episode of the 1980s TV comedy Yes Minister. Dorman-Smith and then Hudson and their teams had, to a large extent, unnecessarily made a rod for their own back. Of course, it was important that no wartime government campaign should undermine the commercial food industry, which would be expected to go on working when peace resumed, but that was simply never on the cards. While Dig for Victory produced impressive results over the course of the war, overproduction was at worst sporadic and never posed a genuine threat to the livelihoods of commercial growers.
The split in the policy direction of the Ministries of Agriculture and Food on this issue was an unfortunate blip, which served only to infuriate and mystify those interested parties following the argument closely and perhaps held back the campaign from even greater achievements. Thankfully, though, most gardeners on the ground simply got on with the serious business of planting and nurturing, enjoying the results of their hard work and perhaps sharing any spare with their friends and neighbours. It is a salutary lesson for politicians in general – then and now – that luckily the general public don’t listen too carefully to what they say.
As a footnote to the episode, a minute from a Ministry of Food meeting after the war, on 7 May 1946, neatly summarised the confusion: ‘As you know, the division of function between ourselves and the Ministry of Agriculture has been a moot point ever since the Ministry of Food was created.’