ENGLAND IN THE 1930s was a very different place physically from the country we know today. If transported back in time, we might scarcely recognise some parts of it. Agriculture and market gardening were in deep trouble, mainly as a result of freely imported cheap food, and the visible signs of this were many derelict orchards and much neglected scrubland on the less fertile soils. Horses still pulled the ploughs in many arable fields. Great tracts of ‘unimproved pasture’, parcelled into fields by hedges planted in the eighteenth century, were bright with wild flowers, birds and butterflies, and sustained a large livestock population. The biggest gardens were to be found on the large country estates with houses at their heart, of which there were many more than there are now. Villages were well supplied with good-sized gardens although, curiously, a tenth of rural households had no garden at all.1
Cities were not well provided with gardens, as housing density was high, especially in the slums which disfigured many urban landscapes. In inner London, for example, a quarter of residential buildings were without gardens and the situation was similar in the great industrial centres in the north. Allotment provision in both town and country was patchy.
There were no motorways, nor many trunk roads, and traffic jams were common in the centre of towns, since there were few bypasses. Unbridled ribbon development had begun to run out from the big cities, especially London. The post-First World War housing boom had provided four million more dwellings, mainly built on what we now call greenfield sites; many of these were on the outskirts of cities and towns, creating suburbs. It was the age of ‘Metroland’. These houses often had gardens, at least partly as a result of the nineteenth-century ‘leisure garden’2 movement, the ideals of which had heavily influenced post-war planners. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the Second World War, it was estimated that there were only 3,500,000 private gardens in Britain, a comparatively modest figure in a country with a population of about 45 million.3
For most garden owners in those years, fruit and vegetable growing was not the top priority. The ‘typical’ 1930s back garden encompassed a well-kept lawn of fine grasses, cut by a push cylinder mower, together with colourful flower beds containing a mixture of perennials and hardy annuals, a separate rose bed and shrub borders, a rockery, serpentine ‘crazy paving’ paths, a small vegetable plot and possibly a sunken pond. The flower beds might be circular and cut out of the lawn, but they were more often lined up against the garden wall or fence. The rockery might possibly be made of real stone, leaning back slightly in strata, in approved Alpine Garden Society manner, but was more likely to be composed of a mixture of clinker and concrete, and therefore only home to the most amenable rock plants, such as purple aubretia and rampaging ‘snow in summer’. The 1930s garden was partly influenced by the ‘Gardenesque’, a style that emphasised the individual beauty of plants, so that trees and shrubs were often scattered about, which had been advocated by John Loudon a hundred years earlier. The other influence was the Arts and Crafts movement, and in particular its early twentieth-century exponents, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. The better-off middle-class householder might have paid a general nursery to design and lay out his garden, but only the wealthy employed ‘garden architects’, and there were comparatively few of those.
There was little discussion of garden planning in newspapers or practical gardening books. One exception was A. G. Hellyer’s Your New Garden (1937), which featured a number of designs for the standard British garden, though these were really only refined versions of the kinds of rectilinear plans that most gardeners instinctively adopted anyway. Hellyer wrote that:
Garden planning is another immensely important task that looms large at the outset. No matter how thoroughly you prepare the soil or how cleverly you cultivate plants, your garden will never be thoroughly satisfactory if it is badly designed. It is a little ironical that the trained garden architect is usually left to demonstrate his skill on comparatively large and therefore easy plots of ground, whereas the small town garden, which fairly bristles with problems, is planned by an amateur, or, worse still, a careless and unimaginative jobbing gardener.
All well and good, but he rather spoiled it in the next paragraph by remarking:
You may even need to become quite a proficient carpenter during the first few years in your new surroundings. It is always useful to be able to wield saw, chisel and plane in a workman-like manner, but never more so than when one is starting a new garden and must equip oneself with tools and potting sheds, frames, greenhouses, arches, pergolas and many other items calling for at least an elementary knowledge of woodworking.4
So, early on in the book he seems to be addressing an exclusively male readership, and implying that garden planning has as much to do with carpentry as artistry.5
One contemporary gardening writer, J. Coutts, MBE, VMH,6 broached the design of a new garden in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society early on in the Second World War: ‘When laying out a small garden it is important to keep it as simple as possible, for such gardens are usually rectangular in shape . . . From this it follows that the correct thing to do is to lay out the garden in straight lines.’7
The interwar spirit of Modernism, with its belief that ‘traditional’ forms of art, architecture, literature, even daily life were becoming outdated in the contemporary, fully industrialised world, had made remarkably little impact on garden owners of any kind. Even those who had heard of the garden designer Christopher Tunnard were rarely impressed, since he seemed to advocate dull gardens of grass, trees and concrete, with little emphasis on the flowers that Britons loved so well and which they were so good at growing. On the whole, rationality and functionalism seemed to gardeners poor substitutes for colour and life. Tunnard’s book, Gardens in the Modern Landscape, made an impact in rarefied architectural circles, thanks to his emphasis on design which avoided ‘the extremes of both the sentimental expression of the wild garden and the intellectual classicism of the “formal” garden; it embodies rather a spirit of rationalism’.8 However, with these words he risked offending pretty well everybody who called themselves a garden lover. Tunnard certainly had a valid point in wishing to turn garden designers away from that Jekyllian nostalgia for a more innocent age – which must have seemed particularly inappropriate the far side of the ‘war to end all wars’ – but he probably reckoned without humankind’s inability to bear too much reality.
In any event, when Tunnard departed for the United States in 1939, there were few left to keep the Modernist flame alive. Even those landscape architects with Modernist tendencies, like Geoffrey Jellicoe and Sylvia Crowe, were careful not to frighten away their aristocratic clients with over-adventurous schemes.
Just as the majority of ordinary British gardens were remarkably similar in their design and maintenance regime, so, in another way, were the large mansion gardens owned by the rich or well-to-do. The spaces immediately around a big house were almost always laid out on geometric lines, and were bounded by walls and hedges. Parterres were expensively bedded out each year with half-hardy annuals in summer and hardy biennials in winter, while other beds were planted with roses or perennials. Sweeping expanses of well-kept grass sward provided an attractive surface for al fresco meals and games. Further away from the house, across the ha-ha, was a less tended, more natural parkland landscape, which had probably not altered much since the eighteenth century except that the trees were now mature. There was usually a large walled garden or gardens, often a fair walk from the house, with elaborate lengths of glasshouse for both ornamental and productive plants. These walled gardens were intensively cultivated by a dozen or more professional gardeners, providing enough fruit and vegetables, as well as pot and cut flowers, to ensure a sufficiency for the house and its occupants at all seasons.
About a quarter of agricultural land (and the houses that went with it) changed hands in the year after the First World War ended, as a direct result of both the threat of increased death duties in the 1919 Budget and the premature death of many sons of the house. A substantial number of large country houses – perhaps as many as 400 – were pulled down. However, in those that remained, even if in different ownership, the ‘old ways’ were carried on wherever possible. There was no strong imperative to simplify the country-house style of gardening, since labour during the 1920s and 30s was still cheap and plentiful.
‘Private service’ gardening, as it was called, had developed during the nineteenth century into an intensely hierarchical system, which had similarities to the guild system of apprenticeship, even using some of the same language, such as ‘journeyman’.9 As late as the 1930s, and despite the generally low wages, it was still the wish of many country dwellers that when a son left school at fourteen, he should be taken on as a garden boy at ‘the big house’. Often he would not be paid more than a shilling a day for a few months until he had proved his staying power, and the tasks he was set were probably the worst he would ever have to accomplish: steeping new clay pots or cleaning old ones in a cold water tank whilst standing on a stone floor, sweeping floors, cleaning out the heating boiler’s stokehole or digging out weeds from the gravel drive with a broken knife. He wore a gardener’s apron, with a pocket for knife and ‘bast’ (raffia), and strong boots. There was no college training involved; everything was learned on the job.
A bright and ambitious boy would keep his eyes and ears open and eventually be promoted to improver journeyman, then journeyman or sub-foreman, then foreman of a particular gardens department, then under-gardener and, finally, head gardener. In gardens with large staffs, the head gardener was a very considerable person, the outdoors equivalent of the butler, often on terms of mutual respect with his employer and definitely paid a salary, rather than a weekly wage, which he could augment by selling surplus produce.
However, to achieve that career progression, the lad would almost certainly have to move from one garden to another ‘to improve himself’, hence the many small advertisements which appeared in the weekly periodical The Gardeners’ Chronicle. Until a man was appointed a senior gardener, it was impossible for him to marry, since he would be lodged in the all-male ‘bothy’, usually next to the extensive range of potting and tool sheds which gave access to the glasshouses on one side of the walled garden. The proximity of the bothy was at least partly to ensure that the young gardeners could stoke the boilers late at night and early in the morning, and be on hand for weekend glasshouse duties. Once married, a gardener would move to a tied cottage owned by his employer. The head gardener’s house was often to be found in one corner of the walled garden, so that he only had to open his door and walk out into his domain each morning.
At its best, private service on a large country estate ensured the finest examples of productive horticulture that this country has ever seen, thanks both to the amount of money that house owners were prepared to expend on it and to this rigid but rigorous apprenticeship system. In particular, the quality of fruit – figs, grapes, peaches, nectarines and apricots – grown under glass was exceptionally high. Percy Thrower, who became the first really successful television gardener after the war, recalled of his time working at the royal gardens in Windsor in the early 1930s:
The training I had in the fruit houses at Windsor was of a kind that, since those days, it has been almost impossible for a young gardener to obtain. For to grow fruit under glass is an art in itself. In all things we were taught to do the right thing, at the right time: no half measures . . . We had to do our work properly; if we didn’t we were out, and if one were sacked from a private estate in those days it meant leaving without a reference and consequently having little chance of getting a similar position anywhere else in private service.’10
As it turned out, the spirit of perfectionism which this system promoted was to prove unhelpful to both employer and employee in wartime.
An example of particularly lavish pre-war estate gardening was to be found at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. Designed by James Gibbs, with an interior by William Kent, this large mansion was bought by a very rich Anglo-American couple, Ronald and Nancy Tree, in the early 1930s. House, garden and parkland had been neglected by an ancient but declining family, but the Trees brought the estate back to life and Ditchley became a byword for grand but comfortable and stylish country living; it was the scene of many large and smart house parties throughout the decade.
Nancy Tree was a Southern belle from Virginia with a salty sense of humour, a penetrating intelligence and great taste. She was probably the most talented interior decorator of her time, founding the English interior decorating firm, Colefax and Fowler, after the war. Not surprisingly, she was also an inspired garden maker. She and Ronnie Tree, who had been elected MP for Market Harborough in 1933 and was a political ally of Winston Churchill, made a handsome and charismatic couple.
At Ditchley, six professional gardeners lived in the bothy, working under the head gardener, Mr Williams, who resided in the larger house that came with the job. There were seventeen indoor and outdoor servants in all, as well as farm workers, gamekeepers and grooms; all of them seemingly necessary to keep the 3,000-acre estate working well.
On one side of the house was a cricket pitch, laid out and tended by the gardeners; on the other a sunken Italianate parterre designed by the young landscape architect, Geoffrey Jellicoe, using stone from Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, which had recently been sold. Before the war, this parterre was bedded out with red dahlias, pelargoniums and begonias, which sounds very striking, although during hostilities the more restful and easier-to-maintain lavender, rosemary and box replaced them. There was also a beautiful herb garden designed by Jellicoe’s business partner, Russell Page.11 A four-acre kitchen garden, with a range of glasshouses and a ‘cutting’ garden, provided most of the fruit and vegetables, as well as floral decorations for the house.
Ditchley became one of the most fêted houses in England, the scene of a ball for a thousand guests in June 1937. The women all wore red and white; among them were Mrs Winston (Clementine) Churchill, Lady Diana Cooper, the wife of MP and author Duff Cooper, and Merle Oberon, the American actress. As Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe drove away at the end of this dazzlingly elegant evening, they wondered to each other, perhaps with a shiver of foreboding, whether they would ever see the like again.12
Ditchley apart, times were already changing even for some of the greatest houses, and by extension for the outdoor staff who worked for them. Percy Thrower, the son of a head gardener, saw that the future for an ambitious young horticulturist was to be found not in the country houses but in the public parks. He left Windsor in 1935 to go to work for Leeds Parks Department.
In the 1920s and 30s, substantial provision was being made for public parks and recreation facilities, such as playing fields, to accompany the enormous surge in house building in towns and suburbs. In 1925, the National Playing Fields Association was founded; this organisation lobbied the government of the day for five acres of open space per 1,000 head of population, of which one acre would be for parks and four for playgrounds and playing fields. The following year, the Institute of Park Administration came into being; this was the professional body that represented park superintendents.
In the 1930s, Parliament passed a number of helpful measures, including the Physical Training and Recreation Act, which enabled grants to be made for the purchase and development of land for these purposes. Crucially, the London County Council Green Belt Scheme was introduced in April 1935, to protect the countryside around London from unfettered and undesirable development. After King George V died in 1936, the public donated money to a fund to boost the provision of memorial gardens, playing fields, tennis courts and the like.
Many of the new suburban parks were designed by their superintendents, although often in conjunction with landscape architects. In 1926, the celebrated landscape architect and town planner Thomas Mawson, working on Stanley Park in Blackpool, incorporated a rose garden and Italian garden amongst the many different types of sports pitches in an innovative design.
Mawson also did some work with one of the best-known park superintendents, Captain A. Sandys-Winch, who laid out no fewer than seven parks in Norwich in the 1920s and early 1930s, including Waterloo Park, which boasted an impressive 300-yard-long herbaceous border.13 As was frequently the case elsewhere, much of the work was done by labourers on unemployment relief schemes.
In the interwar years, park superintendents tried very hard to please local residents, especially in the way of colourful bedding displays, carpet bedding and floral clocks, using many of the same horticultural techniques as estate gardeners employed. Most bedding was grown in glasshouses on site. This required a twice-yearly explosion of activity, firstly in May when the spring bedding of biennials and bulbs was pulled up and replaced with half-hardy annuals – especially the reliable pelargoniums and begonias – and in autumn when the reverse happened. It was a very labour-intensive process, but the results were extremely popular with the public and had the practical advantage that no plant stayed in the ground long enough to be adversely affected by the smoky atmosphere which choked all industrial cities until the Clean Air Acts of the 1950s. Public parks, then as now, were for leisure and relaxation in pleasant surroundings; parks superintendents did not concern themselves with food production.
Paid relief schemes for unemployed men, such as those which provided labour in the public parks, were commonplace in the early 1930s. Unemployment amongst working-class men was very high, particularly in the heavy-industry centres, and the dole was simply not enough for families to live on without considerable hardship. January 193314 saw the nadir of the country’s economic fortunes, with 2,955,000 people out of work, a quarter of the workforce. Enforced idleness turned a fair few of them to allotment gardening, in order to help feed their families.
An allotment was a piece of ground usually, but not exclusively, ten square rods in area, which was 302.5 square yards or one sixteenth of an acre. This parcel of ground could be rented for a modest sum – usually one shilling a rod – from a landowner, a charity or a local council. The allotment, as a means whereby those without gardens could grow edible produce, dates from the huge upheaval created after 1750 by the Enclosure Movement, which effectively took away common grazing rights from landless rural labourers. For a variety of reasons – some paternalistically philanthropic, others self-interested – landowners began to make land in small parcels available to labourers who had lost their common rights. The first Enclosure Act to stipulate that some land be set aside for ‘poor gardens’ was that for Great Somerford in Wiltshire in 1806.15
Agitation for better and more reliable allotment provision, especially in the towns, led to the Allotments Act of 1887, which gave local authorities powers to acquire land for allotments. The Smallholding and Allotments Acts of 1907 and 1908 required councils to look for suitable land, both in country and town, and to provide allotments where there was a demand for them.
During the First World War, the progressive shortage of food at home prompted the government in December 1916 to give local authorities power to take over unoccupied land for allotments. By the end of 1917, there were one and a half million plots, producing, it was said, two million tons of vegetables a year.16 After the war ended, more than 50,000 acres of requisitioned land were taken back out of cultivation by local authorities, and mainly used for residential developments. By 1929, the number of allotments had sunk below one million; the numbers had slid further, down to 819,000 by 1939. Of these, many were ‘statutory allotments’17, in other words they were on land specifically bought by the authorities for use as allotments, and which could not be sold for building, say, without the permission of the Minister of Agriculture. Others included railway allotments, of which there were a great many. The railway companies had a tradition of leasing land on each side of railway lines as allotments; indeed the four main railway companies were important landlords in this respect. That said, the allotment had come to be seen as the preserve of the urban and rural poor, and the interest in allotment gardening of the early years of the century was long gone.
However, allotments did have a champion in the shape of the National Allotments Society (NAS), which had originally been founded as a small co-operative in 1901, but had grown substantially by the 1930s to represent many local allotment societies. Indeed, affiliation fees were the Society’s main source of income. The NAS mediated with landlords and government departments on behalf of local societies, acted as an information bureau, helped recover compensation for damage on allotments, ran a fire insurance scheme, and also provided publicity and advice material.
The extreme danger and uncertainty of the international situation, culminating in the Munich crisis of September 1938,18 concentrated the minds of the officers of the National Allotments Society on the possible forthcoming conflict. Its annual report averred that:
It [the Society] still holds steadfastly to the opinion that allotments are of immense service to the nation in times of peace, and are indispensable in times of war; and that the contribution which they make to personal and public health are immeasurable, and it believes that no other spare-time occupation combines so many recreative and economic advantages.19
In 1939, the NAS was largely run by two energetic individuals, the Secretary, G. W. Giles, and the Treasurer, Henry Berry, who was also a member of the London County Council. There were regional committees of the NAS in the provinces. The President, Sir Francis Acland MP, died in June 1939 and was succeeded by Lord Trent, who was the son of Jesse Boot, the philanthropically inclined son of the founder of Boots the Chemist. Both Acland and Trent were high-minded, public-spirited men and helpful advisers to the secretariat.
In the early months of 1939, with war threatening once more, the NAS voiced anxieties that the government was not preparing sufficiently to increase domestic food production and would not do so until the crisis actually arrived:
For many years it [the allotment movement] has made an important contribution to food supply, public health, useful employment and national well-being. In the last war it admittedly made a most notable contribution to our country’s needs. It is, of course, now prepared to undertake with all its strength any national service asked of it and as, in spite of all the difficulties against which it has to contend, it is in a finer state of organisation and loyalty than a generation ago the contribution which it could make to the nation’s strength if a special call came would be considerable.20
It was the local allotment associations, in tandem with those authorities which took their duties under the Allotments Acts seriously, who would prove to be the engines for allotment growth as the war threat intensified, as well as relentless prickers of the consciences of those not doing their utmost to provide the necessary land.
During the 1930s, the NAS became closely allied with the Friends’21 Allotments Committee, chaired by Dr Joan Fry,22 which raised funds by public subscription to provide half-price fertilisers, seeds and tools for unemployed allotmenteers. This scheme had operated initially in the mining valleys of South Wales during the 1920s but expanded its range elsewhere during the Depression. By 1931, the Ministry of Agriculture was sufficiently impressed with what it had achieved to match public donations pound for pound. The scheme was popular, with 102,000 applicants in 1938. The NAS had representatives on this committee, and local affiliated allotment associations organised bulk buying and distribution for it, as they did for their own members. At the outbreak of war this scheme was extended to include indigent old-age pensioners, widows of servicemen, and wives of men serving in the armed forces.
The interwar housing boom was the main reason for the decline in numbers of urban allotments after the 1914–18 conflict. In many localities, houses had been built on old allotment sites, much to the sorrow of the NAS, since hard-won soil fertility was lost forever beneath concrete and brick. The Society regarded the precipitous fall in the number of allotments as a national misfortune and in 1939 pressed the issue of security of tenure with the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, receiving nothing more substantial than fine words in reply. Dorman-Smith refused to promise central government funds to help local authorities in this regard, nor would he give assurances concerning security of tenure beyond the growing season. This issue would become even more prominent in the war years, when much land was taken in by local authorities for ‘wartime’ allotments, without there being any guarantee of security of tenure when the war was over. All the Minister would agree to do was to send a strongly worded appeal to the local authorities, reminding them of their statutory responsibilities.
Allotment holders, garden owners and estate gardeners all depended on commercial concerns to provide them with seeds and plants. There were hundreds of plant nurseries and dozens of seed businesses, either serving a local customer base or sending their goods across the country by rail or road. Nurseries either offered an extensive range of hardy plants, or specialised in particular types of plant: hardy nursery stock (that is, trees and shrubs); herbaceous perennials; alpines or greenhouse plants. Vegetable plants could be bought in the spring at many country nurseries, or at their shop outlets in towns. Most perennial plants were ‘sent for’ – that is, ordered from a catalogue and delivered to the householder in the dormant season, between November and March, having been dug up from fields. Only tender greenhouse plants were sold out of pots; the rest were ‘bare-rooted’. Many nurseries were small in extent, perhaps only an acre or two. There were no garden centres as we know them. Seeds were also bought mail-order, although Cuthbert’s did sell a selection of cheap packets through the high street chain Woolworth’s. Bare-rooted roses and soft fruit could also be acquired there.
In the late 1930s, market gardening in Britain was not in very good shape, thanks to the ease with which cheaper hardy vegetables could be imported from northern Europe, and tender vegetables and fruit from colonial dependencies or the Dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.) The value of imports of fresh fruit and vegetables was a very substantial £33.8 million in 1939. For example, nearly 250,000 tons of onions were imported that year, mainly from Holland and Belgium,23 and 80 per cent of the country’s fruit came from overseas.24 As a result, there had been little investment in horticultural infrastructure or mechanisation in the years before the war, so processes were labour-intensive. (In that regard, commercial horticulture was similar to agriculture.)
There was one particular type of market gardening operation which was to prove very useful during the war. The Land Settlement Association was a co-operative set up by the government in 1934. Its aim was to settle unemployed industrial workers – especially miners – from the north-east of England as well as Wales in communities of smallholdings. These men would grow market garden produce, which would then be sold through the co-operative.
By the time war broke out, there were 1,100 smallholdings in twenty-six settlements with a total acreage of 11,000, of which 3,000 were used for growing horticultural produce while the rest were for small-scale livestock and arable farming. Each smallholding consisted of an area of five acres, with a cottage; the smallholder was provided with suitable livestock by the Association. By 1939, more than 1,200 glasshouses had been erected and there were 80,000 ‘Dutch lights’25 in use.
A public-spirited inhabitant of Worthing, Joan Strange, wrote in her diary on 2 July 1939:
. . . went to Sydenham and discussed the Land Settlement Association’s scheme there. Each family has a house – four [sic] acres of land, one greenhouse, one pigsty and one hennery. There are 159 families, all are unemployed miners from the North. It works well in the majority of cases but some of the wives are discontented and prefer a husband on the dole plus near neighbours, cinema, pub, fried-fish shop and Woolworths!26
Market gardeners were not notably progressive in their methods, partly because money for capital investment was scarce but also because they had surprisingly little to do with the horticultural research institutes, and vice versa. As we shall see, the war would provide the impetus for closer contact, to their mutual benefit. The important institutes with a horticultural remit were Long Ashton, near Bristol, East Malling in the fruit-growing area of Kent, and the John Innes Horticultural Institution at Merton, in south-west London.
In the years before the war, scientists in these institutions were working on a variety of research projects: the development of F1 hybrids27, virus-free soft fruit, dwarfing rootstocks for fruit trees, plant hormones and hormone rooting powders, reliable seed and potting composts, effective treatments for a variety of pests and diseases, the impact of pesticide residues and vitamin-C-rich fruit syrups.
Amateur gardeners looked to the Royal Horticultural Society, since it was the one organisation concerned with research into the specific problems that they encountered. In 1939, the RHS was an important source of expert gardening advice for ordinary gardeners, and had been so, despite vicissitudes, since its foundation in 1804. Established to advance horticulture in all its branches, the RHS held a unique position in the gardening life of the country; or in England, at least, since that was where most of its members lived. It was a self-confident, learned and philanthropic organisation, but also Anglocentric, conservative and sometimes unimaginative. Its membership was predominantly upper middle class, its leading officials patrician. It catered primarily for well-heeled gardeners in the south-east of England, among them many amateur experts, ranging from landowners with vast woodland gardens to old ladies with pocket-handkerchief gardens full of rare plants.
The membership was divided into Fellows and Associates. Prospective Fellows had to be nominated by an existing Fellow and pay an annual subscription of between one and four guineas, while Associates were men who were employed in horticulture and who paid a subscription of 10/6d. It was a matter of Gentlemen and Players. The membership rose during the 1930s to 36,500 in 1939, but still consisted of only a tiny fraction of those who pursued gardening seriously. No doubt the necessity of finding a Fellow to put your name forward, as well as the substantial cost, restricted membership to the better-off and horticulturally well-connected. Nevertheless, the RHS did have a formal relationship with a great number of affiliated societies – local horticultural clubs that paid a small fee, and received some group benefits in return – and these both helped to disseminate information from the RHS and also, to a limited extent, informed the Society of local concerns.
The RHS held flower shows and meetings at fortnightly intervals throughout the year in the New Hall, opened in 1928, in Greycoat Street in Westminster. Those staged between February and October lasted for two days, while the rest were for one day only. These shows were known, not surprisingly, as ‘Fortnightlies’, a name that stuck, long after the shows ceased to be held so frequently. The biggest events spilled over into what became the Old Hall in nearby Vincent Square, where also were accommodated the Society’s offices and meeting rooms and the Lindley Library, with its 20,000 volumes. Some of the shows were given a title: for example, the Daffodil Show, the Early Market Produce Show, the Fruit and Vegetable Show and, of course, the Great Spring Show. The Great Spring Show was held in the last week of May – to suit the many large-garden owners who grew rhododendrons – not in Vincent Square but in the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital.28 The show had been there since 1912, after it outgrew its space in the Temple Gardens. No plants were sold at any of the shows.
Fellows of the RHS benefited from a monthly journal, mainly written by the Society’s officers or Fellows, for which they received no fee. The Society owned one garden, at Wisley in Surrey, which it had been given in 1911. Here a number of scientific officers were employed, both to pursue research projects useful to amateurs and to give written advice to Fellows, provided that the latter sent in specimens according to very strict prescriptions. There was even a garden inspector, who would look at Fellows’ gardens and give advice for a daily fee of three guineas.
The gardens at Wisley were open to the public, except for Good Friday and Christmas Day. On Sundays, only Fellows and their guests were admitted. Garden visitors could reach Wisley by trains of the Southern Railway, although then, as now, it meant an expensive taxi ride from West Byfleet or Weybridge stations. The National Fruit Trials were based at Wisley,29 although this was an unsatisfactory situation, since – strangely – the trees were planted in a frost pocket, and suffered from damaging spring frosts two years out of three. The flower trials were relatively modest; certainly much less extensive than they are today. Each March, the Society held a distribution of surplus seeds and plants. Everything had to be requested in writing; this was the era of the postcard, sent one day and arriving the next, and costing 1d in stamps.
The Royal Horticultural Society was governed by a council of fifteen members, composed of the good and great in the horticultural world: scientists, nurserymen, professional gardeners, and knowledgeable amateurs who owned large gardens. Like most learned societies at the time, it was run predominantly by men. In 1939, a number of eminent public figures sat on RHS committees, including the artist John Nash; Lt Col. Leonard Messel, OBE, who owned the world-renowned garden of Nymans in Sussex, and after whom a beautiful pink magnolia is named; E. A. Bowles of Myddelton House, Enfield, one of the great plantsman luminaries of the first half of the twentieth century, who sat on both the Scientific and the Narcissus and Tulip committees; and E. A. Bunyard, a Kent nurseryman and self-confessed epicure, who presided over the Fruit and Vegetable Committee.
During the early years of the twentieth century, the RHS had a good relationship with government, at least partly because of its multifarious and helpful activities during the First World War. During that time, it had raised money for the Red Cross, established a horticultural War Relief Fund, allowed the Horticultural Hall to be used as a billet for Australian troops and organised the dispatch of plants to army field hospitals in France, as well as seeds and flower show rules to the civilian internment and prisoner-of-war camp at Ruhleben. This camp, based at a racetrack outside Berlin, was highly organised by the mainly British inmates and even boasted a Ruhleben Horticultural Society, affiliated to the RHS and with almost a thousand members. This society put together flower show competitions, and also held botany classes, where all the plants studied came from the pond in the middle of the racecourse. A glasshouse was made from tobacco boxes, and cold frames were constructed to nurture flowering bulbs. Much ground was dug and thousands of vegetable seedlings planted.
Crucially, the RHS was also involved, from 1917 onwards, in promoting food production in gardens and allotments, organising expert lectures and making demonstration gardens. It also encouraged jam-making and fruit-bottling – to make good use of surplus fruit – and campaigned for the government to release more sugar supplies so that gardeners could make their own preserves.
In the interwar period, the Society lobbied the government on a number of issues, in particular trade descriptions of insecticides and the importance of controlling the burgeoning grey squirrel population.30 In 1932, the president, Henry McLaren, the second Baron Aberconway (who owned Bodnant Garden in north Wales and was chairman of the Glasgow shipyard John Brown and Co.), wrote a letter to The Times encouraging gardeners to continue to buy and plant nursery stock, despite the economic difficulties that the country was facing during the Depression. The Society was certainly the nurseryman’s friend.
As war threatened, during the Munich crisis, it was natural that the War Office should turn to the Society again to requisition what was now the Old Hall, this time for the training of the Territorial Army.
The RHS catered for all enthusiastic gardeners, but there were also a number of specialist plant societies in existence before the outbreak of the Second World War. The National Rose Society was one of the earliest to be founded (1876), but dahlias (1881) and chrysanthemums (1884) followed closely behind. They survived the Great War intact, and were joined by the Iris Society in 1922 and the Alpine Garden Society in 1929. Rock gardening had become increasingly popular as plant enthusiasts journeyed to the Alps, with plant hunter Reginald Farrer’s overheated prose ringing in their ears.31 Curiously, there was no national society for promoting the amateur growing of vegetables.32 That work fell to the National Allotments Society.
During the early 1920s, gardening and gardens as subjects for media attention were confined almost entirely to daily newspapers and magazines, of which Amateur Gardening, Popular Gardening, Garden Work for Amateurs and My Garden were prominent. Professional gardeners read The Gardeners’ Chronicle.
However, in March 1924, less than two years after the British Broadcasting Company was founded,33 the first practical gardening bulletins were broadcast on the radio. These were provided to the BBC by the Royal Horticultural Society, and mostly written by Frederick Chittenden, director of Wisley Gardens. At the end of 1924, the RHS also supplied a separate bulletin for the north of England. From time to time, well-known gardeners, such as Vita Sackville-West and Marion Cran,34 provided more elevated contributions. In 1931, the BBC asked the Society to recommend gardeners who might be approached as speakers. One of the names – others were Sackville-West and Dr H. V. Taylor35 – was that of C. H. Middleton.
Mr Middleton’s36 first broadcast, on 9 May 1931, began: ‘Good afternoon. Well, it’s not much of a day for gardening, is it?’ It was immediately obvious that he had what it took to shine in this new medium. However, for the first three years, he was just one of several broadcasters under RHS direction. It was not until September 1934 that he was given his own weekly series, In the Garden, which soon changed to In Your Garden. The programme was a great success – and, as we shall see, the obvious vehicle for publicising a wartime gardening campaign – and he continued broadcasting regularly until his untimely death in 1945.
The wireless was well set up before 1939 to be the medium for mass communication to the British people during the war. There were only 25,000 television sets, and in any event, the television was turned off on 1 September 1939 during a Mickey Mouse cartoon ‘for the duration’. Radios were not expensive, and most people in the country could get wireless reception. It was estimated that thirty-four million people listened in, although radio licence evasion was so rife that the numbers may have been substantially higher than that. There were two services, National and Regional. Before the war, programmes were broadcast from 10.15 a.m. to midnight. The output was a mixture of news, talks, drama, variety and comedy, dance music, classical music and schools broadcasts. Outside broadcasting was possible, but it was in its infancy. Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the Director General of the BBC, was notably high-minded, so there was an overtly educational slant to much of the programming. Garden talks were, therefore, meant to be as informative as they were entertaining. ‘By 1939 the BBC had, by virtue of both its monopoly position and its broadcasting achievements, created a new social focus for the British people, a common source of information and entertainment that neither the press nor the cinema could rival.’37
One of the starkest differences between the early and late years of the 1930s was the intensification of government intrusion into people’s private lives, culminating in the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act passed on 24 August 1939. In effect, the Act turned the government of the United Kingdom into a benign dictatorship and allowed for the enacting of a great many Defence Regulations. These were divided into five parts: security of the state, public safety and order, ships and aircraft, essential supplies and work, and general and supplementary provisions. Defence Regulation 62 – under the heading of Essential Supplies and Work – was concerned with the control of cultivation and termination of agricultural tenancies, and 62A referred specifically to giving powers to local authorities to release land for wartime allotments.
A second Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was passed on 22 May 1940, when the risk of invasion was at its height. As the historian E. R. Chamberlin put it:
Passed in a single day, instantaneously it turned the United Kingdom into a military camp whose sole objective was military survival. Civil rights gained over a millennium of bitter struggle were suspended ‘for the duration’, for the Act thereafter allowed the government to issue, without further recourse to Parliament, what orders and regulations it considered necessary to prosecute the war.38
During the course of the next year, 2,000 separate orders were made, ranging from the taking down of road signs to specifying what crops farmers were allowed to grow.
As the international situation grew darker and darker in the summer of 1939, especially after the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed on 23 August, civilians became extremely unsettled. They sometimes tried to allay their anxieties by solid toil in the garden. A journalist, Maggie Joy Blunt, who lived in a cottage in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, wrote in her diary that when she heard the news of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, ‘I returned to my cottage, believing wishfully that threatening clouds would pass. I began to prune ramblers.39 All that week I seemed to be perched on the top of wobbly steps in the late summer sun wrestling with dead rosewood and wavering crimson-tipped new shoots, waiting for news, waiting for news.’40 As it turned out, she had only ten days to wait for the news that she, and so many others, dreaded.