By 1941, Dig for Victory had become a mass movement and a brilliant example of social cohesion. While the individual working away in the back garden undoubtedly had a role to play and could carry on his enterprise in relative seclusion, there was a growing realisation that still more could be achieved by gardeners combining their efforts in cooperative enterprises. Two notable case studies pay ample testament to the advantages of working together.
Ann Sadler, mentioned in the previous chapter, was the daughter of Walter Millard, the Honorary Secretary of the Home Food Production Club in Ebley, Gloucestershire. He was instrumental in establishing a potato cooperative in Gloucestershire, something of a landmark project that offered a blueprint for similar schemes, particularly in rural areas.
After some discussion, club members decided that it was wasteful and uneconomic for each of them to plant potatoes crops in their own gardens. Additionally, it was pointed out that if they combined their efforts to plant at least a full acre’s worth between them, they would qualify for a £10 government subsidy entitlement (worth almost £300 today). The motion was passed to establish a cooperative planting scheme, with a sub-committee set up to find a suitable area of wasteland. Despite Gloucestershire’s not inconsiderable area, this task proved among the most difficult aspects of the whole enterprise but eventually a plot of unused ground was identified. Millard discussed the project in a broadcast of the BBC’s Back to the Land in October 1942. He explained: ‘… a piece of land which might seem an impossible one for a farmer to work with his limited labour and many acres of land, is quite a different proposition for a group of householders working in cooperation. Here the labour is almost unlimited and although individually we are busy people – I’m a schoolmaster, for example – we found the whole scheme, apart from harvesting the crop, only demanded a total of eight to ten hours from each of us during the whole season.’
Indeed, the planting of a ton of potatoes took only just over two hours when shared among the group. Membership of the project was initially open to forty members, each of whom was required to put down 5s. at the outset for their ‘share’ of the project. In the event, the scheme quickly became over-subscribed to the point that several people had to be turned away. There was much hard work to be done but still there was time for good humour. Millard recalled:
The earthing up was not without its humorous side. One man, finding himself with the morning off, went down to the plot to earth up his row. He took off his jacket and set to work. When the job was finished he put on his jacket and lit a pipe and stood up to admire his work. Then he discovered he had hoed up the next man’s rows! However, it so happened that the other was working very long hours, so a packet of cigarettes soon put this right.
By the culmination of the project, each member had paid 14s., although 3s. 6d. of this was covered by subsidy, so final outlay amounted to a not excessive 10s. 6d. per shareholder. In return, they could lay claim to ‘six or seven hundredweights of first-class potatoes’, as well as taking pride in the satisfaction of a job remarkably well done.
But there is perhaps no single story that better encapsulates the power of the Dig for Victory campaign to galvanise a community than that of the Bethnal Green Bombed Sites Association. When in 1941 Cook dedicated Plots Against Hitler, to ‘the people of the South-East who for more than a year have lived and worked under shell-fire’, the population of Bethnal Green were among the most deserving of his recognition. Nestled in the heart of east London, few neighbourhoods suffered more during the course of the war, particularly from the terrors of German aerial bombing. It is estimated that some 80 tons of bombs fell on the area over the course of the war, leaving at least 550 of its residents dead and a further 400 seriously injured. Around 22,000 homes were damaged, over 2,200 of which were completely destroyed and a further 1,000 rendered unlivable.
And yet, for all the extreme suffering it had to endure in those years, Bethnal Green did not buckle but instead came to epitomise the ‘Blitz spirit’. Drawing on a collective will that refused to be daunted, the community instead sought ways to cope with its hardships and make life as bearable as possible. So on the afternoon of Friday 24 April 1942, there was a meeting held at Bethnal Green Town Hall of ‘persons interested in the development of Bombed Sites in Bethnal Green’. Chaired by Councillor Brig. Gen. Sir Wyndham Deedes, it was ‘for the purpose of considering as to what steps could be taken for the development of bombed sites in the Borough, which had been cleared or mainly cleared of buildings, for the purpose of providing amenities, and also for the production of food’. This was something the residents of the area had already got to grips with on a rather more ad hoc basis some while earlier, with a BBC broadcast talk by the Ministry of Agriculture in September 1941 describing how ‘Bethnal Green people have dug up the concrete playground of a bombed school to get land to grow vegetables …’
The April 1942 gathering drew sufficient interest for a Bombed Sites Association to be established, which met for its inaugural meeting on 1 June 1942. Sir Wyndham was appointed as chairman of the governing committee. In his opening address he talked of the large numbers of local people keen to grow their own vegetables but who had little chance of obtaining a suitable site, since nearby Victoria Park had already been turned over to allotment plots and was virtually at capacity.
At the initial April meeting, nine sites had been identified as fit for development (including Nos. 279 to 289, Globe Road, which one Miss Monckton had earmarked for the rearing of pigs). By the June meeting, the number had risen to eighteen, and by the end of the month the Association was in active negotiations over thirty-two sites. In addition, the committee had secured a promise from the Metropolitan Gardens Association that they would send one of their horticultural advisers to provide them with the benefit of his experience. There was also the donation of some basic tools from Oxford House, a local charitable organisation set up in 1884 at the behest of Keble College, Oxford to give its staff and graduates some understanding of the difficulties faced by the urban poor. The Women’s Voluntary Service made an additional early gift of gardening equipment.
The Association’s core aims were threefold: to promote the interests of its member allotment holders and gardeners; to provide support and instruction; and to conduct negotiations in respect of land issues. Its motto was simple: ‘Quality and not Quantity.’ The cost of membership was set at an affordable rate that encouraged inclusivity. In the first year it stood at 1s. per annum, remaining at that level until 1943 when it was raised to 2s. Clearly it did the trick, as the Association’s membership had swelled to two hundred by early October 1942, and was double that again by the time of the 1943 annual report. By then the Association was overseeing three hundred individual allotments, which covered some 10½ acres of land. It also boasted an impressive array of specially constructed housing for livestock, which included 4,000 rabbits, 2,000 chickens, 10 pigs, 9 goats, and a handful of ducks and geese. By 1944, the Association had attracted such fame that when it undertook a programme of livestock slaughter in time for the Christmas season, the event garnered coverage in the national press.
As well as media interest, the Association also attracted goodwill from all sorts of quarters, which often translated into financial and other donations. In its early months the Association was able to persuade the local council to make a gift of the manure heap that resided in Bethnal Green’s Ion Square Gardens. Another anonymous donor gave £120 (just short of £3,500 in today’s money), which was ring-fenced for the hiring and payment of a technical adviser. There was even £5 from an unnamed person in Brazil, who had heard a BBC broadcast about the children’s allotment in Russia Lane and who continued to give money for the remainder of the war.
Another great supporter was the theatrical entrepreneur and philanthropist, John Percy (J.P.) Mitchelhill. Born in Holborn in 1879, he had been the man who first put Gracie Fields on the London stage back in 1915 and he had bought the Duchess Theatre on the Strand in 1930. There he had built up a close relationship with J.B. Priestley, the two men united by their deep-rooted social consciences. In 1938, Mitchelhill set up a home for the blind in Kentish Town which he later used as a refuge for victims of the Blitz. Its gardens he had converted into plots for aspiring Diggers for Victory, and the Bethnal Green project naturally appealed to him. Congratulating them on ‘a fine public-spirited job of work’, he presented the Association with: 100 spades, 100 forks, 100 rakes, 30 hand trowels, 10 pickaxes, 50 Dutch hoes, 10 draw hoes, 10 hand barrows and 12 watering cans.
The Mitchelhill Cup was awarded to the tenant of the best allotment and the Association’s membership had an enviable record in qualifying for official Dig for Victory Certificates of Merit. Plots varied significantly in size, from small individual plots to others that covered up to 2,000 square yards. Where ground clearance was beyond the practical capabilities of the organisation, the War Debris Survey Department (under the jurisdiction of the London County Council) was called upon to help with the preparation of sites. An impressive model allotment was set up in Ravenscroft Street and used to educate and enthuse new growers. There was a concerted effort to get young people involved too, with pupils from the Cranbrook and Daniel Street Schools each having their own plots.
The running of the Association was not without the occasional struggle. The appointment of a technical adviser was a long and drawn-out affair, with several candidates refusing the job at the last moment and the Association having to up its remuneration package. They finally employed a Miss King on a salary of £4 10s. per week. However, things clearly did not go as smoothly as either party would have wanted, and in June 1943 an enquiry was underway to investigate members’ complaints about the performance of Miss King and about the use of the Association’s finances. The investigating committee reported that while there was no improper use of funds, there were ‘signs of carelessness’, and Miss King moved on to a new job in September 1943.
However, the successes of the organisation far outweighed any failings and served as a model to other similar enterprises throughout the country. While there were few others on a comparable scale, there were one or two, notably that run by the Manchester Corporation. On 17 June 1943, the Bethnal Green Association received the ultimate honour of a visit by Queen Elizabeth. She had developed a strong affinity with the area during the war, having famously declared in the aftermath of the bombing of Buckingham Palace in 1940 that: ‘I’m glad we have been bombed. Now I can look the East End in the face.’ Two days after the visit to Bethnal Green her Lady-in-Waiting wrote to the chairman, commenting that ‘The Queen will never forget the good work that Her Majesty saw being done …’.
The enterprise was necessarily one designed to thrive amid the hardship of wartime but was unsustainable during peace. When the war was over, it was essential that the area began the process of rebuilding, with housing clearly a far more pressing need than the maintenance of allotments. Although it must have been a wrench for some of those gardeners to see their plots taken from them and destroyed at the war’s end, it was an inevitability that the Association accepted. As early as 1944, it used its official report to predict that once Germany had been defeated, ‘80 per cent of the work of the Association would come to an end’ and only some fifty plots would be kept going.
In August 1944 Woolton’s successor at the Ministry of Food, John Llewellin, acknowledged how much was owed by the capital to its growers: ‘But there is one thing about which little has been said which has helped London to remain staunch and steadfast. Londoners have been fed. Not enough praise has been given to those who played a part in doing this.’ Bethnal Green’s special triumph in building something so thriving, productive and uniting from the rubble of bombed-out neighbourhoods was celebrated in a note from the Duke of Norfolk, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture. On 15 October 1942, he wrote:
The Bethnal Green Bombed Sites (Producers’) Association is one of the most heartening results of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign. Here we have a group of people who have suffered an ordeal more terrible than had ever been endured before by the civilian population in this country. Yet in spite of this you have turned devastation to good account by sheer dint of hard work and determination. This is a story that will live for a very long time.
Within a few short weeks of the Duke’s letter, news came of Montgomery’s victory over the Axis forces at El Alamein in North Africa. In a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon at Mansion House on 10 November 1942, Churchill commented: ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Later, in Volume 4 of The Second World War published in 1951, he recounted: ‘It may almost be said, “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”’
The war was about to enter a decisive new phase. Victory seemed not merely a possibility but a likelihood. The Dig for Victory campaign, meanwhile, was at its very peak of effectiveness.