The Dig for Victory campaign was but a small part of the story of the Second World War. It lacked the obvious heroism of the Battle of Britain, the drama of D-Day, or the unadulterated joy of VE Day. Had it not been so well executed, it might have faded from memory altogether. Yet it speaks of the experiences of ordinary people caught up in a world gone mad, of civilians living during a war that physically encroached on their domestic lives like no other since the English Civil War three hundred years earlier.
Largely because of the dreadful threat of aerial bombing (around 62,000 civilians were killed in attacks between 1939 and 1945), never before had the civilian population felt so directly involved in a war effort. However, if the Home Front was to maintain its good spirits, it was essential that it stayed well fed.
The nation had quickly come to terms with the deprivations the war brought. They donated their pots, pans and garden railings so that they might be turned into aircraft, they recycled paper for rifle cartridges and maps, and even saved animal bones to be made into explosives. It was said that at Buckingham Palace, the Queen herself had lines painted around the baths to ensure that the household didn’t use too much hot water. But a cold bath is one thing, a permanently rumbling belly quite another.
Marguerite Patten, a giant of British food in the twentieth century who did much to mould the tastes and culinary skills of the wartime generation, said:
I think the majority of people realised that what we were doing at home was absolutely vital. You can imagine if you were a young man serving abroad and you had a letter from your wife or mother saying, ‘Oh it’s so difficult. We haven’t enough to eat. We can’t get this or that.’ You wouldn’t be feeling very happy. We were so anxious that the message could go that we were managing. ‘Yes, the food is dreary but we are well fed. We are thrilled to have our allotment!’
Rarely – perhaps never – has an attempt by a British government to substantially influence the behaviour of the public been so warmly received or fondly remembered as Dig for Victory. It grabbed the imagination of the ordinary man, woman and child in an extraordinary way. At a time when the nation’s fit and healthy young men were leaving in their masses to fight in the forces, those remaining at home – those too old to be called up, the infirm, members of the reserved occupations, youngsters and most women – were desperate to ‘do their bit’ too. The campaign succeeded, albeit briefly, in uniting people of all ages, classes and genders in a common cause. From the old man at the allotment, to the child on the school fields and the housewife in the back garden, even the King and Queen – all had the chance to contribute, for themselves, for their country and for each other.
In addition, Dig for Victory appealed to that part of the national consciousness which harked back to an age when the best part of the population was unbreakably connected to the land, reliant upon the soil for daily sustenance. Until the Industrial Revolution, the country had been fully self-supporting in food. The utter reliance on foreign food imports was in reality but a recent development. As W.J. Gibson noted in his 1951 masterpiece, The Right to Dig: ‘… in most of us there is a latent knowledge of horticulture which can readily be awakened by circumstances bringing us once again into contact with the land.’ The Dig for Victory campaign offered the post-Industrial Revolution United Kingdom the chance to reconnect at some primitive level with its pre-Industrial Revolution agricultural and horticultural heritage. People were ready to seize that opportunity in droves.
In 1942 there were in the United Kingdom as a whole, according to government statistics, 1,451,888 plots covering 142,808 acres, of which 1,134,215 were urban (90,000 acres) and 242,801 rural (48,561 acres). Such a disparity was to be expected when one considers that the average rural household was likely to have more available land of its own on which to grow. With somewhere between 55 and 60 per cent of families growing their own veg across the country as a whole, the figure for city populations hovered around 50 per cent but rose to over 90 per cent in many rural districts.
Something like half of the nation’s manual workers either had an allotment or were tending a vegetable patch. The railway companies provided a further 74,872 plots covering 4,247 acres (the London and North Eastern Railway sacrificing the most land). In 1943 the growers in gardens and allotments combined were producing in excess of one million tons of vegetables. That’s a lot of dinners. In July 1943, Hudson said that Dig for Victory ‘has definitely made an invaluable – I use that word advisedly – contribution to our total war effort’.
Meanwhile, Woolton had seen the campaign as a way not only to maintain national nutrition for the duration of the war but to fundamentally re-educate people in their eating habits over the longer term. The wartime diet was not one that many who endured it would argue reached the greatest of culinary heights. It was defined by a ‘make-do and don’t waste anything’ attitude that rarely left the taste buds tingling. Experts spent a good deal of their time devising ‘mock’ dishes – mock turkey, mock fish, mock cream, mock apricot tart, mock bananas, to name but a few – the main feature of which was the absence of the key ingredient. Mock Banana, for instance, was an unlikely combination of mashed roasted parsnip and a dash of banana essence. Yet Woolton and his staff managed to bring the public onside – creating a climate in which they accepted the food shortages and embraced new ideas on how to prepare and cook the little food they did have. Dig for Victory was the best way to get hold of a few extra ingredients that could brighten up any dinner table, with the additional benefit of being advantageous to one’s health too. Marguerite Patten considered the subject with circumspection:
People had better diets by the end of war? That is a comment that makes me smile. Because if you had tapped me on the shoulder, or anyone else living during those days, and said, ‘Do you know, it is proved that you are having a better diet than we will be having in 2010?’ you would have had a rather funny reply! Because it was boring. It went on and on and on. Do I want to go back to a wartime diet? No. I don’t want to be short of tomatoes for six months of the year or go for years without seeing a banana or an orange. But I do believe those war years taught us to eat healthily and not to waste food.
The public gobbled up the advice it was given. Potatoes, cabbages and carrots became the ‘Home Guards of Health’ while the vegetable garden, in the words of Lord Woolton, was ‘our National Medicine Chest’. There were fundamental cultural changes in the way ordinary people saw food and how it should be prepared. Official literature aimed to encourage the population to consider what they ate not in abstraction but in terms of what it offered to the body. For the first time in any significant number, people developed an interest in the nutritional values of what they were consuming and began to think in terms of protein, fat, carbohydrates, calories and vitamins. There was also growing understanding that these values were affected by how food was cooked. The Ministry of Food instructed: ‘Serve a big helping of any green vegetables every day. Greens should be cooked quickly; serve at once; keeping hot or warming up lessens their value.’ There was also a popular song to encourage the consumption of potatoes in their skins:
Those who have the will to win,
Cook potatoes in their skin:
Knowing that the sight of peelings,
Deeply hurts Lord Woolton’s feelings.
In her 1943 book, Recipes of the 1940s, Irene Veal wrote: ‘Never before have the British people been so wisely fed or British women so sensibly interested in cooking.’ By 1943, for instance, people were consuming 30 per cent less sugar and syrups than they had done pre-war, but 30 per cent more milk and vegetables. In December 1944, Sir William Jameson, the government’s Chief Medical Officer, broadcast a speech in which he said: ‘After five years of war we still have a good story to tell. The most sensitive index of a nation’s general health is probably the proportion of infants dying in the first year of life. In the last war it rose steadily. During the last three years it has declined steadily and last year was the lowest ever recorded.’
It was a view supported by the 1946 Ministry of Health report, On the State of Public Health during Six Years of War, which concluded that its results:
… suggest that the nutritional state of the nation was not worse at the end than at the beginning of the war, and as regards children was somewhat better … the child at the end of the war was bigger, more resistant to disease, better nourished and in every way had borne the strain of war better than his predecessor of the last war … Nutrition is the very essence and basis of national health.
A Ministry of Information publication, Civilian Supplies in Wartime Britain, was authored by Monica Felton in 1945. She gave the following succinct summation of the situation:
Food, though not always plentiful, has never been less than adequate. If it has sometimes been lacking in interest and variety, it has been invariably wholesome and well balanced in its content of essential vitamins and minerals. Indeed, wartime organisation of the supply and distribution of food has secured a marked rise in the nutritional standards of the poorest sections of the population – a rise due not only to the virtual abolition of unemployment but also to the adoption of a food policy which has included, in addition to rationing, subsidising of the process for essential foodstuffs, the education of the public in the science of food values, and the distribution of foods with high protective qualities …
Dig for Victory clearly played a considerable role in this record of success, not least in contributing to the cultural shift by which the British public began to reconnect at a fundamental level with the food they put into their bellies. Statistical measures of the campaign’s direct contribution to the nation’s health are harder to come by. The government calculated that in 1942–3 food produced domestically (i.e. by commercial and private growers within the United Kingdom) accounted for 1,200 of the recommended 2,550 daily calorie intake of an average man. That equates to only some 47 per cent of the total but was nonetheless a 33 per cent increase on the pre-war level of 900 calories. Bearing in mind that there had been a massive decline in the home production of high-calorie foods (principally meat), that rise was due almost entirely to increased low-calorie food production (i.e. vegetables) supplemented by an increase in domestic animal husbandry. It gives some indication of the problems that would have confronted the nation without the Dig for Victory campaign.
In his memoirs published in 1981, Dr Magnus Pyke, the exuberant scientist who became a media personality, reflected on his wartime experiences as an up-and-coming nutritional advisor at the Ministry of Food: ‘… figures for infant mortality and, indeed, virtually all the indications of nutritional well-being of the community,’ he wrote, ‘showed an improvement on the previous standards.’ The British people had learned a lesson, perhaps subsequently forgotten, that H.C. Sherman described in the following terms in his 1947 book, Food and Health: ‘To a much more important extent than had been supposed, we build our own life histories by our daily use of food.’
Was the million tons a year that was produced at the peak of the campaign the difference between victory and starvation? It is not inconceivable, but that may be too bold a claim. However, it was certainly the difference between a country able to endure the hardships of war, to maintain a reasonably varied (if admittedly somewhat dull) diet and to actually improve levels of nutrition in its people, rather than being one where the Home Front was at breaking point through underfeeding and malnutrition. That is a quite remarkable achievement. That the campaign also served as a source of national pride, an outlet for social interaction, an opportunity for exercise and a massive boost to domestic morale marks it out as among the most successful government campaigns of all time.
Despite all these positives, the post-war decline in the numbers of growers was inevitable. According to Ministry of Agriculture statistics, between the end of April 1943 – almost the very peak of the campaign – and the beginning of April 1948, the number of plots declined from 1,339,935 (covering 136,820 acres) to 1,117,308 (covering 107,282 acres). By 1950 the figure was near enough back to a million.
However, those at the forefront of the allotment movement realised that the moment had come to push the case for better rights for allotment holders, while gratitude and goodwill were still in plentiful supply. As early as December 1939, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association had argued:
There are potential building sites all over London which, if acquired for allotments during wartime, might, when hostilities cease, be kept permanently for the purpose. There is no moment like the present for laying a firm foundation for the future, and, while citizens are now asked to ‘Dig for Victory’, so should they be given the facilities to enable them, when the time arrives, to ‘Dig in peace’.
The government also had its Allotments Advisory Committee pressing hard for increased security of tenure. In 1941 it issued a statement that: ‘For the Ministry to allow allotments to disappear by a gradual process of attrition, as was the case after the last war, would be a national misfortune.’ The allotment movement as a whole, though, was not helped by the general desire to ‘move on’ which, understandably, swept through the population. Trapped in an age of post-war austerity, many people could not disassociate the allotment and its produce from a sense of deprivation and lack. Times were tight but there was a desire to live it up at least a little. Woolton pie, turnip-top salad, ‘economy pudding’ and the like had little part to play in a vision of a brave new world.
Local authorities were keen to resume some sort of normality as well. The need for the mass rebuilding of the nation’s cities saw the cause of allotments fall well down the list of considerations. Where there were shortages of basic housing stock, how could the use of valuable land for vegetable patches be justified? The Ministry of Works, for one, was keen to see an end to the plots that had been set up to such fanfare in the Royal Parks. A memo from December 1947 revealed:‘… it is the Ministry’s policy to ensure the removal from the Royal Parks at the earliest possible date, all war time encroachments …’The vocabulary was hardly flattering.
In 1945, the MP for Rotherham, William Dobbie, told the Allotment Association: ‘The allotment movement will, I am afraid, encounter difficulties in the post-war years, but I hope that your Association will see that the enthusiasm which was shown during the critical war days will continue and that the movement will become a permanent feature, particularly in urban areas.’ His hopes were bolstered thanks to the efforts of Tom Williams at the Ministry of Agriculture. Williams was responsible for the introduction of the 1950 Allotments Act and told the Commons: ‘At the end of the Second World War, we had approximately one million allotment holders in England and Wales. It was thought, therefore, that the time had arrived for amending allotment legislation to bring it into line with present day requirements, and, particularly, in relation to security of tenure.’ Based on the recommendations delivered by the Allotments Advisory Body the previous year, the ‘notice to quit’ period was indeed extended and a scheme was laid out for the provision of four acres of allotments per thousand of the population.
There was no holding back the changing fashions, though. As if to signify that it was a different age, the Ministries of Food and Agriculture amalgamated in 1954 as soon as the last foodstuffs – sugar and sweets – came off the ration. As the 1950s progressed and the promise of the 1960s loomed nearer, the public was increasingly looking to ways of bringing extra convenience into their lives. Where once there had been the National Loaf, the ‘sliced white’ now ruled. Fresh veg was losing out to frozen varieties that could live in your freezer and be used as and when you wanted. Increased leisure time was filled not with chats with the neighbour down at the allotments but through increasing use of the motor car or sitting in front of the television. By 1960, allotment numbers had fallen to 800,000.
An influential report for the government of Harold Wilson in the mid-1960s, authored by Harry Thorpe from the University of Birmingham, suggested that allotments were, despite best efforts, once again tainted by ‘the stink of charity and economic motive’. The answer, the powers that be hoped, was to somehow persuade the middle classes that allotments fitted into their aspirational lifestyles. Allotments were to become ‘leisure gardens’. The 1970s should have given new energy to the movement with the emergence of the self-sufficiency brigade, whose spiritual leader was John Seymour. It was a concept that entered the popular consciousness primarily through the BBC TV sitcom The Good Life, with a perky Felicity Kendal becoming its poster girl. Yet still the number of allotments fell, to just half a million in the 1970s, back to the level last seen in the 1890s.
Things only got worse through the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996, there were 297,000 registered plots, about the same number as there are today. There seems little hope of a significant increase in supply, especially given the national housing crisis and the ongoing exodus of land from local authority ownership for short-term financial gain. Nonetheless, the twenty-first century has witnessed a revival of interest in allotments and ‘grow your own’ projects to an extent not seen since the glory days of Dig for Victory.
In 1998, the Labour government of Tony Blair commissioned a report, The Future for Allotments, from the House of Commons Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee. It suggested that allotments remained ‘an important feature in the cultural landscape; they combine utility, meaning and beauty with local distinctiveness’. Ten years later, in an echo of the Second World War, it was announced that London’s Royal Parks would turn over some of their flower beds to vegetable growing.
There are several core reasons for this mini-renaissance, and it is almost a matter of personal opinion as to which is most important. For many, it is the growing distrust they have of commercially produced food and a disinclination to consume food of unknown origin, which may have clocked up mind-boggling ‘food miles’ on its journey to the plate. Prince Charles, long a champion of organic production, rallied the troops in July 2008: ‘At a time when food sovereignty is becoming an increasing issue with high fuel prices, there cannot be a better time to encourage people to grow their own food where possible. It doesn’t need an acre of garden; a window box is a very good start.’ Since the global economic meltdown that began in 2007, others have pointed out the financial advantages too, Marguerite Patten among them: ‘We need to look at gardens and allotments again. We have another war on; we are fighting recession rather than Hitler. And therefore, it’s just as important we save money by not bringing produce from the other side of the world.’
Indeed, there have been several attempts in recent years to recreate 1940s-style Dig for Victory gardens for educational purposes, most famously in London’s St James’s Park close to the Cabinet War Rooms. Graham Hartley, the Assistant Park Manager, recalled the project that ran from 2007 until 2009: ‘It brought a smile to my face when we received comments of genuine enthusiasm from people who visited the site.’ A similar project was run at the Watford Museum in 2005 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war. Its co-curator, Sarah Priestly, discovered in the preparation of the demonstration garden that her own grandfather had dug up the flagstones in the backyard of his Manchester terrace in order to grow potatoes during the war. She summed up the enduring appeal of Dig for Victory: ‘People were very emotional about the campaign, especially those who remembered it from their youth. It just struck a chord with such a range of people. That is what hit me most. How much of an impact it had and how resonant it could be for such a wide range of people.’
For many, their interest in the campaign today rests on the question of food security. With the global population expanding by a billion people every ten to fifteen years, never has food been such a scarce and valuable resource. Nor can the effects of climate change on food production be accurately predicted. In 2008, Hillary Benn, the then Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, established the first council since the Second World War dedicated to the investigation of the production, supply and consumption of food. One of its members, Professor Tim Lang of City University, keenly advocated an increasing focus on home-grown food. In 2009, Great Britain was providing only some 61 per cent of its own food, down from 72 per cent in the mid-1990s. In 2008 Lang had suggested:
Whatever amount of space you have in your backyard, it is possible to create a fantastic little garden that will allow you to reconnect with the real value of gardening, which is knowing how to grow food. And once you know how to grow food, it would be very nice to be able to cook it. If you are growing food, then it only makes sense that you know how to cook it as well. And cooking food will introduce you to the basic knowledge of nutrition. So you can see how this can slowly reintroduce food back into our culture.
This all sounds an awful lot like what was going on under the watchful eyes of Hudson and Woolton in the Second World War. Today, waiting lists for allotment plots run into years in many parts of the country, while seed retailers report consistently rising sales of vegetable seed and a corresponding decline in those for flowers. The facilities may be lacking but, it seems, the passion has reignited. In 2010, Monty Don, one of the celebrity gardeners who has followed in the footsteps of Mr Middleton, argued in the Daily Mail:
… if we make the most of our garden, then we have a direct connection to what we eat, our local wildlife, the weather and seasons and a hands-on link to the earth that is healing and nourishing … tap into the spirit of 1940 and Dig, if not for Victory, then for health, happiness and a secure and sustainable supply of the freshest veg and fruit available.