Once it had got the wind in its sails, Dig for Victory became a truly modern multi-media campaign, making use of all the mass-media platforms available to it: radio, films, newspapers and magazines, books, posters, songs and public events. Crucially, it made full use of the power of celebrity to cajole and persuade a sometimes uncertain public, whether through Churchill, Hudson and Woolton in the political sphere or via the great broadcasting names of the day like Freddy Grisewood and, most importantly for the amateur grower, Mr Middleton. If the technology had then been available, you can be sure that this would have been a campaign you could have befriended on Facebook, followed religiously on Twitter and downloaded highlights of on YouTube.
Hudson and his department realised that the success of the campaign hinged on communicating what could be intimidating volumes of practical advice in as simple and non-threatening a way as possible. Their chief method of doing so was through the provision of official pamphlets and guides, though things had not get off to a confident start with the ill-starred ‘Grow More Food’ pamphlet published in the autumn of 1939. However, the pamphlet series was relaunched in 1941, devoid of basic errors and now rebranded under the ‘Dig for Victory’ banner – complete with the famous foot-on-spade image. By 1942, over 10 million of the leaflets were in circulation. Another triumph was Garden Plot to Kitchen Pot, a small booklet that included gardening tips from the Ministry of Agriculture and food tips from the Ministry of Food.
A total of twenty-six Ministry of Agriculture Dig for Victory pamphlets were published, which attempted to cover virtually every major question the new wave of growers might ask, whether tending a large allotment plot or the smallest window box. From the basics of digging to the intricacies of fruit and vegetable preservation, the pamphlets formed a comprehensive guide that served as a veritable horticultural encyclopedia for a generation. There are gardeners still active today who refer to the publications as their principle source of reference. Below they are detailed in the order in which they appeared:
1. Grow for Winter as well as Summer – Guide to All-Year-Round Planting
2. Onions/Leeks/Shallots/Garlic – Great for Winter
3. Storing Vegetables for Winter Use
4. Peas and Beans
5. Cabbages and Related Crops
6. How to Grow Root Vegetables for Winter
7. Manure from Garden Rubbish
8. Tomato Growing
9. How to Make Bordeaux and Burgundy Mixture in Small Quantities
10. Jam and Jelly Making
11. Bottling Fruit and Vegetables
13. Storing Potatoes
14. Drying, Salting, Pickles, Chutneys
15. Potato Growing in Allotments and Gardens
16. Pests and How to Deal with Them
17. Potato Blight
18. Better Fruit – Disease Control in Private Gardens
19. How to Sow Seeds
20. How to Dig
21. Sowing Your Own Seed
22. How to Grow Small Fruits
23. Cropping Plan (5-Rod Plot)
24. Roof and Window-box Gardening
25. How to Prune Fruit Trees and Bushes
26. How to Use Cloches
The Ministry, however, did not rely on the written word alone, and also looked to deliver its message face-to-face. This was achieved most effectively through Dig for Victory events, including talks, demonstrations, shows and festivals that could last up to a week. They were an excellent way to foster relations between the government, local organising bodies and the public. An impressive roll-call of experts and popular personalities were persuaded to attend these occasions, while growers had a chance to socialise, learn and, of course, show off. Among those signed up by the government to spread the word was Godfrey Baseley, a former butcher who had carved out a career at the BBC in the 1930s. When his contract there was not renewed, he entered the civil service and throughout the first half of the war could be seen travelling around the Midlands in a van with a loudspeaker, offering advice on how to grow. He resumed his career at the BBC in 1943 and in 1950, no doubt influenced by his horticultural and agricultural experiences, devised a new radio drama called The Archers (now the world’s longest-running soap opera).
A selection of the questions and answers from meetings in support of Dig for Victory were published in a booklet called Gardeners Are Asking …, which described itself as a ‘fount of Information on Home Food Growing’. They give a taste of the many and varied posers that growers faced:
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How can I stop cats roaming over my allotment?
With garden pepper dust – or catapult!
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Will the Ministry of Agriculture buy our surplus vegetables?
I don’t know, but doubt it very much and don’t see why they should. How about giving away the surplus to someone who hasn’t a garden?
An incendiary bomb fell through the roof of my shed and vegetables stored there are now covered with fine grey powder. Will they be fit to eat?
If you wash the vegetables very thoroughly they should be alright, but there is no experience to guide us on this point.
Dig for Victory events often involved the awarding of prizes to growers (typically consisting of gardening supplies, small cash sums or War Savings Certificates). Growers could also qualify for Ministry of Agriculture Certificates of Commendation from August 1940. They became much-prized possessions, being reserved for those ‘who cultivated a plot of land to the best advantage and so made a valuable contribution towards the Nation’s effort to grow more food in time of war’. In October 1940, Hudson championed another scheme, providing patriotic householders with a sign to hang on their gates, reading ‘This is a Victory Garden.’
A Ministry of Agriculture inquiry into the effects of the Dig for Victory campaign from August and September 1942 revealed that the Ministry’s efforts had real impact. Fifteen per cent of post-1939 allotment holders attributed their taking of an allotment directly to the publicity drive, and 34.4 per cent recalled having seen specific Dig for Victory posters (a respectable figure considering that, as modern advertisers know so well, we often see and absorb information from advertising hoardings without consciously realising it). Forty-four per cent had obtained Dig for Victory leaflets, and of those who had received publicity, about a fifth had made the effort to note down particular pieces of advice that caught their eye. An impressive 27 per cent had visited a demonstration plot and, perhaps most tellingly of all, a whopping 91 per cent said they had no difficulty in getting advice, an irrefutable triumph for the Ministry.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Food undertook other publicity campaigns that did not come under the Dig for Victory banner but which were vital in bolstering support for it. Among its most important contributions was to educate people in preparing produce so that eating it was a pleasure and not a chore – not that everyone necessarily appreciated their work in this area, though. R.J. Hammond wrote in his landmark study Food:
Gastronomically speaking, nothing could be more pathetic than the efforts of the Ministry of Food to devise, out of potatoes, dried egg, salt cod and the like, ‘Victory Dishes’ whose delights were extolled in terms to make a commercial advertiser blush. The monotony of British wartime diet was partly due to the retention of the form of pre-war dishes without their substance, much as a food crank will eat ‘nut roasts’ or drink ‘dandelion coffee’.
This was to overstate the case, however. There were certainly some curious creations (anyone for ‘murkey’ – mutton formed into mock turkey – or Firefighter’s Pie, Skinflint Pudding, and Tripe and no onions?). In addition, publications such as How to Use Stale Crusts seemed hardly designed to inspire, but other recipes represented the triumph of creativity in the face of adversity. On the front line were the food advisors, such as Marguerite Patten, who joined the Ministry in 1942 and a year later found herself in charge of the Food Advice Bureau at Harrods. She remembers:
We didn’t wait for people to come to us. We went out to find people. I started quite early on in my career with the Ministry on a stall in Cambridge market, showing people. We also went into canteens to talk to people over their lunchtimes – I don’t think we were very popular interfering with lunch! We went to hospital outpatients units, into allotments and parks. Anywhere where there were people to talk to. I think the attitude of the Ministry was really very clever. They didn’t dictate but they tempted people, lured them, talked to them as if they understood their problems. ‘Do you want to hold a children’s party? Let us help you.’ ‘Entertaining friends? Well, here’s a splendid menu you could make.’ The attitude was to be helpful as possible. The man to praise for that was Lord Woolton. He was not only a wonderful manager but he also had this gift of communication. He was a cross between Father Christmas and your favourite uncle.
That said, tact was not always the watchword of the Ministry’s officials. We might wonder what Miss Patten made of the words of the Parliamentary Undersecretary William Mabane, delivered in 1942 with a flamboyant disregard for gender equality: ‘Fundamentally, men are better cooks than women, but this is no reason why some women should cook as badly as they do. Many people in this country have never really tasted vegetables. All they know is the sodden pap produced by overboiling unprotesting vegetables in a bath of water.’
Perhaps the most famous and popular dish to emerge, and one that has stood the test of time, was Woolton Pie, named as a tribute to the Minister of Food. The Ministry was happy to promote the tasty dish, which was reputedly the invention of the head chef at the Savoy. The classic recipe required: 1 lb each of diced potatoes, cauliflower, swedes and carrots; 3 or 4 spring onions; 1 teaspoonful of vegetable extract; and 1 teaspoonful of oatmeal. The method went as follows: ‘Cook all together for ten minutes with just enough water to cover. Stir occasionally to prevent the mixture from sticking. Allow to cool, put into a pie dish, sprinkle with chopped parsley and cover with a crust of potatoes or wholemeal pastry. Bake in a moderate oven until the pastry is nicely brown and serve hot with brown gravy.’
Some Ministry of Food campaigns were directly responsive to the specific requirements of the Dig for Victory drive at any given moment. Never was this more successful than when ‘Potato Pete’ and ‘Dr Carrot’ were unleashed on the world to encourage the consumption of those particular vegetables during gluts. These were the types of vegetables championed among Diggers for Victory because they were relatively easy to grow, offered a proud harvest and could be easily stored. Potatoes, for instance, could be kept either in sacks or clamps (an outdoor facility constructed from soil and straw). It was important, however, for the ongoing good of the campaign that produce was consumed relatively quickly and not left to fester.
The jovial Potato Pete burst on to the scene in 1940 to front the ‘Eat More Potatoes’ campaign, armed with a barrage of slogans: ‘Potatoes keep you fighting fit!’, ‘Potatoes are part of the battle!’ and ‘Step lively with me.’ He even had his own anthem, sung by the music-hall star Betty Driver, an actress destined to spend over four decades playing the character of Betty, the erstwhile barmaid of the Rovers Return in the ITV soap Coronation Street (whose famous hotpot would surely have won the approval of Lord Woolton). The song went:
Here’s the man who ploughs the fields.
Here’s the girl who lifts up the yield.
Here’s the man who deals with the clamp,
So that millions of jaws can chew and champ.
That’s the story and here’s the star,
Potato Pete
Eat up,
Ta ta.
Another ditty also extolled the nutritional value of the spud:
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them potatoes instead of some bread,
And the children were happy and very well fed.
The campaign was a rip-roaring success and by the end of the war, potato consumption was up 60 per cent on pre-war levels.
The use of cartoon characters to promote vegetable consumption had enjoyed a strong recent history. In 1930s America, E.C. Segar’s cartoon creation, Popeye, with his refrain ‘I’m strong to the finish ’cause I eats me spinach!’ was credited with raising the popularity of that particular vegetable. The Ministry of Food came up with Dr Carrot in the early days of the war, and he more than proved his worth, not least in 1942 when there was a 100,000-ton carrot surplus. Many carrots were sold at half price to be used in animal feed (and sprayed purple to ensure their correct usage!) but it was far more desirable that the human population took its fill. They were encouraged to this end by the dapper doctor, who carried a top hat, cane and suitcase, urging ‘Let Dr Carrot protect you.’
In 1941, Hank Porter, an American artist working in the studios of Walt Disney, was employed by the Ministry to design an entire carrot family. This initially featured another Dr Carrot, but the home-grown one was not to be displaced, so in the end Porter came up with Carroty George, Clara Carrot and Pop Carrot. They featured in a series of cartoons and informative publications during 1941 and 1942 but never quite equalled the impact of the good doctor.
Dr Carrot’s greatest campaign revolved around the slogan: ‘Carrots keep you healthy and help you see in the blackout.’ At the time, the Air Ministry was keen to promote the idea that carrots improved eyesight as an explanation for the recent upsurge in the success of RAF pilots bringing down German night bombers. They were, the public was told, simply eating more carrots and so could find the enemy more easily in the night sky. In fact, it was but a cover story to divert attention away from the Air Force’s successful adoption of the Airborne Interception Radar system. Herbert Morrison, the wartime Minister of Supply, wrote in his 1960 autobiography that the scheme was ‘typical of Ministry of Food ingenuity’.
Today the Dig for Victory campaign lives on most vividly in the striking posters that have come down to us. The artwork produced to promote the campaign was remarkably varied. The classic image remains the black and white photo of a boot on a shovel as it slices into the ground. In her BBC Overseas African Service broadcast on 11 March 1942 about her convent allotment, Mrs Cope Morgan explained the power it had to inspire her:
It was the posters that did it – ‘Dig for Victory!’ Just working in an office (however much good work there was to do) and one’s occasional fire-watching didn’t seem enough; there was still some time to spare during the weekends, that sacred institution so beloved of Englishmen! Also, that poster was a challenge. The very large boot pressing in the spade was undoubtedly a man’s – daughter and I felt quite able to prove that two pairs of smaller feet could do the job equally well.
The ‘boot on the spade’ poster, which first appeared in 1941 and was reproduced some four million times up to 1945, could hardly be accused of subtlety yet there is perhaps no more famous advertising image produced by any British government, with the honourable exception of the First World War poster Your Country Needs You featuring Lord Kitchener. The Dig for Victory poster is also at the centre of an intriguing mystery: exactly whose left foot is it in that boot? There are two major claimants to the title, both backed by contemporary sources.
The most widely touted owner of the said extremity (whose champions include the Imperial War Museum) was one Mr W.H. (William Henry) McKie, a senior member of the Acton Gardening Association and an allotment holder in Acton Vale. He was the subject of a story in the Acton Gazette on 7 February 1941, under the headline ‘The Man whose foot all the nation knows.’ With a long interest in horticulture, Mr McKie had originally come upon the joys of vegetable growing at the start of the First World War. However, like Mr Middleton, his real love remained with flowers and he was particularly renowned among his fellow Acton gardeners for his spectacular gladioli, dahlias and zinnias, all of which had won numerous competition awards over the years. Sixty-six years of age at the outbreak of the Second World War, he had listened to the call of civic duty and reverted to nurturing vegetables. Often to be found working away on his plot on both Saturdays and Sundays, he was there one day when official photographers came to the site and, so it was said, took the famous shot.
This tale is perfectly credible and was something of a propaganda coup – the story of an elderly gentleman at the heart of the community doing the right thing and making his contribution to the national effort, just as he had done in the Great War. The story of the rival claimant, Thomas Morgan Jones, may initially lack some of that romanticism but its leading protagonist lived out a remarkable war story of his own.
Tom Jones, a resident of Sunbury-on-Thames in Surrey, was an artist with the Morgan-Wells advertising firm based at 9 Bishops Court, Chancery Lane in London. Six feet tall and of slender build, he had wanted to join the RAF but was turned down and so became eager to ‘do his bit’ in some other way. On 25 February 1941, less than three weeks after the Mr McKie story in the Acton Gazette, the Daily Express reported that Jones had broken his foot in an accident as he descended the steps of Westminster Bridge while on his war duties. To the Daily Express, there seemed no doubt that this was the man whose foot adorned the nation’s billboards. ‘DIG-FOR-VICTORY FOOT CAN DIG NO MORE’ ran the headline above the story describing Jones as an enthusiastic gardener now only able to look on as his wife and children took care of the family vegetable plot.
Jones also detailed his version of the birth of the boot image:
One day about a year ago Mr Charles Wells, principal of the studio at which I worked, asked me to do a drawing for a photograph symbolising the national effort. I did a rough drawing in my lunch hour. That sketch formed the basis of the poster. We brought some soil from London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields into the studio. I brought along my gardening boots and a pair of tweed trousers from home. The photograph, although set against a skyscape, was actually taken in the studio. The soil was spread on a board. I directed the lighting for the picture and it was photographed by Mr John Gill.
Gill apparently used a 35mm camera and the sky background was added later by technical darkroom wizardry. This version of the poster’s genesis has been retold and substantiated several times over the ensuing decades – including in the Guardian in the 1970s, when a junior at Morgan-Wells described witnessing the shoot at first hand. Roy Jones, Tom’s son, was a twelve-year-old when he was named in the Express piece; he corroborated the story in 2010 and said that the spade used in the picture had resided in his father’s garden in Sudbury for many years after the war.
Tom Jones’s own wartime experiences only got more interesting following his unlikely brush with fame. After leaving his advertising agency, he served with the Special Operations Executive and was based at Station XIV at Briggens, near Roydon in Essex. There he forged documents for agents operating in occupied Europe. He also claimed to have landed in a midget submarine in Normandy shortly before the D-Day landings to sketch the defences the Allies would face.
Ultimately, it must fall to the individual to decide which story about the poster they wish to believe but regardless, it remains a potent image and, at the time of writing, was enjoying a new wave of popularity – decorating a range of t-shirts, mugs and other merchandise.
There were many other posters that were similarly impactful, created by a disparate group of painters, illustrators and cartoonists. What united virtually all of the images was their boldness and simplicity, not only reflecting the many and various artistic styles of the first half of the twentieth century but also the paradoxical unshackling of the artistic spirit that war has regularly engendered throughout history.
The Ministry of Information built up a magnificent register of artists to call upon, including big names such as Henry Moore and Edward Ardizzone. Another, Dame Laura Knight, had become the first woman to be made a full member of Royal Academy in 1936. When the Ministry approached her at the war’s start, she agreed to contribute her skills and produced some of the most distinctive work for the ‘Lend a Hand on the Land’ campaign (though her depiction of ‘Ruby Loftus’, the archetypal female munitions worker, was perhaps her most famous work of the period). Meanwhile, Milner Gray, who had been key to the foundation of the Society of Industrial Artists in 1930, was in 1940 named as head of the Ministry’s Exhibitions Branch, which went on to produce a great deal of work for the Dig for Victory campaign.
John Gilroy was the man responsible for the We Want Your Kitchen Waste poster featuring an exceptionally gleeful-looking pig. Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1898, his career as a graphic and portrait artist took off after he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1919. In the 1930s, he was much in demand by advertisers, with his work for Guinness winning widespread praise. Apart from the Dig for Victory campaign, he also produced posters promoting the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ and ‘Make-Do and Mend’ campaigns.
Abram Games, a largely self-taught modernist, was another highly successful commercial artist during the 1930s, his client list including Shell, London Transport and the General Post Office. Having joined the infantry in 1940, in 1942 he became the official War Office poster designer. He believed his time spent among ordinary soldiers made him better able to produce posters that spoke directly to them. The Ministry of Information adapted several of his designs for their own use, including one advising ‘Grow Your Own Food.’
Still other campaign artists had intriguing back stories. Take, for instance, Eileen Evans, responsible for, amongst others, a poster entitled Lend a Hand with the Potato Harvest. She had joined the Ministry of Information’s photographic division as a filing clerk in 1940, but her artistic gift was soon noticed and she was promoted to working in the design studio under the boss, Reginald Mount.
Another artist, Frederic Henri Kay Henrion, had been born in Nuremberg in 1914, before moving as a young man first to Paris and then to England, where he was one of an influential alliance of German-born designers. When war broke out he was interned but eventually found work with the Ministry, where his strong photomontage images were used to promote Dig for Victory.
Hans Schleger (known professionally as Zero) was also born in Germany, of Jewish heritage. He had left for New York in the 1920s, where he put his talents profitably to work in advertising. He returned to the land of his birth after the Wall Street Crash but decided to escape the growing anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany in 1932, when he came to Britain. He undertook projects for the likes of Shell and London Transport (for whom he worked on the iconic bus-stop sign) and was awarded British citizenship in 1939. His mother remained in Berlin and was transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, then later to the Minsk ghetto. Yet for all the heartache he suffered, Zero’s work (such as his effort entitled ‘Rabbits can be fed on …’) remained jolly and upbeat – ideal for the Dig for Victory audience.
One of the most enduringly popular of the campaign’s images is the painting by Peter Fraser of a smiling, pipe-smoking allotment holder, a fork on his shoulder, a basket of gorgeously fresh produce in his left hand and a bunch of carrots in the crook of his right arm. The slogan ran ‘Dig on for Victory.’ Fraser had been born on the Shetland Islands in 1888 but moved to the southeast of England and first had his work published in Punch in 1912, the start of a long career working for magazines. After serving in the First World War, he started to have his own children’s books published, with titles like Funny Animals, Tufty Tales and Higgledy Piggledy Tales. He had also illustrated the texts of a great many other writers by the time of the Second World War.
Perhaps just as popular was the rather sentimental depiction of a child with his (or perhaps her) back to us, carrying an oversized hoe and dragging a spade. It was adapted from a design by Mary Tunbridge which won a Ministry of Information competition open to members of the public. She is a woman of whom we know virtually nothing, except that she went on to produce other commercially successful work. She is not alone in being lost to history, though. A number of other artists responsible for several memorable images are now all but unknown – Le Bon, Paul Falconer and Xenia to name but a few.