THE DAY WAR was declared, 3 September 1939, was a sunny, warm Sunday. Some people recalled going out into their gardens to try to come to terms with what had happened and to make solemn resolutions. Margery Allingham, the detective novelist, who lived in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, close to the Essex coast, described her feelings:
‘I went down to the end [of the garden] and sat under the laburnum and the fancy red oaks. I could smell the sea, and I watched the sky over the rookery in the Vicarage elms, more than half expecting that I should suddenly see the warplanes coming like starlings in the spring, making the sky black. If the boys were right, they were just about due.1
The following day, Harold Nicolson, husband of Vita Sackville-West and owner of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, wrote in his diary:
I get up early. It is a perfect day and I bathe in the peace of the lake. Two things impress themselves on me. 1. Time. It seems three weeks since yesterday morning . . . 2. Nature. Even as when someone dies, one is amazed that the poplars should still be standing quite unaware of one’s own disaster, so when I walked down to the lake to bathe, I could scarcely believe that the swans were being sincere in their indifference to the Second German War.2
It is hard to overstate just how anxious was the civilian population in those very early days of the war, and how convinced they were that the invasion of Britain was imminent. It seems rather obvious to us now that Germany, under its Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his National Socialist party, could not risk an invasion until it had subdued western Europe – in particular, France, with its five million soldiers or reservists – but that is with the benefit of hindsight and our knowledge of the larger picture. As far as the ordinary Briton was concerned, once the country had entered into the war on behalf of Poland, all hell would break loose.
The memory of the deaths of nearly 1,500 British civilians on home soil from bombs dropped by Zeppelins in the First World War, the founding of an Air Raid Wardens’ Service in 1937, the false alarm before Munich in 1938 and the evacuation of thousands of children and mothers from cities on 2 September all fed this extremely twitchy mood. At the very least, the population feared a ferocious attack by as many as 30,000 German bomber planes.3 False alarms did not help the nerves: people in many places remember hearing a siren sound just after the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, finished speaking to the nation at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September. The population was perfectly aware that they would be targets for the enemy. They knew that major cities could be destroyed, however brave and skilful the pilots of RAF fighter planes. In 1932, Stanley Baldwin – former prime minister and well-known pessimist – pronounced his depressing but unarguable opinion that ‘the bomber will always get through’. The actions of the Italian air force against Abyssinian armies in 1935–6, the devastating bombing of Shanghai, Nanking and Canton by the Japanese in the summer of 1937, and of Barcelona and Guernica by German and Italian bombers in the same year, showed just what was horrifyingly possible. Indeed, the British government was of the opinion that Germany might strike even before war was declared. As Baldwin predicted in Parliament: ‘tens of thousands of mangled people – men, women and children – before a single soldier or sailor suffered a scratch’.4 Fear of the bomber was no idle or neurotic anxiety.
In 1937, the Committee of Imperial Defence – the forerunner of the wartime Ministry of Information – calculated that, on the evidence of what had happened to Barcelona, there might be 1,800,000 home casualties, a third of them fatal, in the first two months of the war.5 So seriously did the government take the airborne threat that in early 1939 it issued one million burial forms to local authorities and began to stockpile collapsible cardboard coffins.6 Moreover, it was expected that German aeroplanes would also drop poisonous gas, hence the manufacture and distribution of gas masks to every member of the population at the time of the Munich crisis.7 An intensely gloomy report by a group of eminent psychiatrists from the London teaching hospitals and clinics, submitted to the Ministry of Health in October 1938, suggested that serious bouts of hysteria and incidences of nervous breakdown were a distinct possibility, with psychiatric casualties exceeding physical ones by as much as three to one. That would have meant at least four million people suffering from acute panic and other nervous conditions in the first six months of bombardment. These doctors envisaged the necessity for a network of treatment centres in bombed cities, clinics on the outskirts and mobile teams of psychiatrists.8
Plans were drawn up for the evacuation of some government departments to seaside towns, and for the taking over of country houses to be used as army camps and hospitals. The government had an obvious duty to do everything it could to protect the civilian population from the worst effects of German bombing, so public surface shelters were built, basements of steel-framed buildings allocated, and in February 1939 local councils began to deliver Anderson shelters for erection in back gardens. These shelters for up to six people, capable of withstanding flying shrapnel although not a direct hit from a bomb, were named after Sir John Anderson, then Home Secretary, who instigated their development and oversaw manufacture from 1938 onwards. Families with an annual income below £250 were given a shelter for free, while richer households paid £7. By September 1939, one and a half million Anderson shelters had been distributed, and more than two million were erected in the course of the war.
The Anderson shelter was designed by an engineer called William Patterson and consisted of six corrugated-steel sheets, bolted together to form a rounded arch, which had to be half dug into a trench in the garden. Fifteen inches of soil was to be piled on top and patted down, to help mitigate the effects of bomb blast, and to make the shelter look less obvious from above. Their very presence in so many suburban and urban gardens underlined daily to civilians how serious things had become. And as it turned out, by no means all families found them congenial places to be during alerts and raids, especially since they tended to flood in wet weather. Civilians continued to worry that the shelters were conspicuous from the air, so many householders made them more appealing and less obtrusive by growing shallow-rooted rock plants, nasturtiums, marigolds, lettuces or marrows on the top, and rambling roses around the entrance. Some even grew rhubarb or mushrooms inside. But no one ever came to love them. Sir John Anderson, who was not known for his lively sense of humour, when complimented on the marrows growing on shelters, replied tight-lipped, ‘I had not intended the shelters for the cultivation of vegetables.’9
The threat of immediate aerial bombing and the resulting casualties were worries enough for the government to deal with, but it also had reasons to doubt the stout-heartedness of civilians. There had been war-weariness in the general population during the last year of the First World War, exacerbated by extensive food shortages. In 1917 and 1918, a number of European countries, including Russia, had been radically destabilised by revolutionary mass movements. The Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies had been abolished. In Great Britain, there was a distinct mood of pacifism abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. This was exemplified by the success of the Peace Pledge Union, founded in 1934, which had more than 100,000 members by 1939. The Labour Party opposed rearmament until 1937 and voted against the introduction of conscription in April 1939. Even after the Munich crisis in September 1938, there were plenty of ‘appeasers’, calling for negotiations with Hitler. In the same years, the economic Depression and associated unemployment had widened the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Urban slums shocked liberal social commentators but little was done about them. Class-consciousness and snobbery were endemic. There was a gaping chasm between the Jarrow Marchers and the Bright Young Things.
What is more, before the conflict, civilians had become increasingly vocal in their criticisms of government policies. There were a number of reasons for this, including a certain erosion of deference after the convulsions of the First World War, coupled with the fact that women of property over thirty had the vote from 1918, and were given it on equal terms with men from 1928. Ordinary people had begun to expect politicians to listen to them. The obvious result of increased participation in the democratic process was a growth in knowledge and interest in national affairs amongst the middle classes (although less discernibly amongst workers), and a more sceptical attitude towards their political masters.
Taking all these factors into account, the government was pessimistic about how united and stalwart the civilian population could be relied upon to be in the circumstances of a new war. ‘For those planners, often of military background and somewhat contemptuous of anyone not in uniform, the average civilian was less the British bulldog than the pampered poodle: lacking in moral fibre, easily demoralised, neurotic under pressure and as likely to snap at its owner as at the latter’s assailant.’10
Yet because the country needed to be put on a complete war footing, it was vital that those civilians co-operated fully and did not buckle. A breakdown in consensus at the beginning of the war would obviously have been disastrous. In order to avoid such a breakdown, the government thought it helpful, even imperative, for civilians to see themselves as front-line troops, with victory depending on them just as much as their brothers in the services. Much of the propaganda aimed at civilians during the war reflects this, as the widely-used expression ‘Home Front’ indicates.
Right from the beginning, the policymakers worried over the very ticklish question of civilian morale. ‘Morale’ has always been a difficult word to define, although everyone knows it when they see it. A Cambridge psychologist employed by the Ministry of Information defined it as a lively and not too serious spirit of adventure which met emergencies clear-eyed and calmly. That is inadequate, since morale is also intimately connected with optimism. A better definition came from the social research organisation, Mass-Observation,11 in 1941:
By morale, we mean primarily not only determination to carry on, but also determination to carry on with the utmost energy, a determination based on a realization of the facts of life and with it a readiness for many minor and some major sacrifices, including, if necessary, the sacrifice of life itself. Good morale means hard and persistent work, means optimum production, maximum unity, reasonable awareness of the true situation, and absence of complacency and confidence which are not based on fact.12
That is certainly setting the bar very high, but it does at least include all the elements likely to promote good morale.
Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass-Observation, wrote in 1940:
British people can stand a tremendous amount of pain. Many (e.g. the unemployed) have been trained to intellectual pain for years. There is no danger whatever that morale on the home front will crack up, so long as morale is not treated as an ephemeral word, but is regarded as the attribute of human minds. And so long as these human minds are not regarded as uniform and just so many mathematical units, but are treated as variable and delicate human characters.13
That surely was the key.
If the reaction of Nella Last, a housewife from Barrow-in-Furness who wrote a diary throughout the war for Mass-Observation, was representative of the majority of civilians, the exact nature of morale worried them as well. On 27 April 1941, at the height of the so-called Barrow Blitz, she wrote: ‘What is “morale” – and have I got any, or how much? And how much more could I call on in need, and where does it come from and what is it composed of?’14
The government’s anxiety to foster high morale meant that it sometimes fell into the trap of too much de haut en bas exhortation. As Margery Allingham put it: ‘Addressing the nation became a mania like diabolo,15 or so it seemed to us who were addressed. We were addressed like billy-o and, knowing just how important we were and how unnecessary it was to convince us that we had anything to do but fight, we were often dismayed.’16
Reflections on how to maintain high morale led to a lively and long-lasting debate at the Ministry of Information, whose Directors during the war were Lord Macmillan, then Sir John Reith, followed by Duff Cooper and, finally, Brendan Bracken from 1941.17 One thing on which all were agreed was that the civilian population needed to be kept busy: ensuring people were occupied, in order that they did not have too much time to reflect on dangers or deprivations, was an important strand of thinking to be found in government circles, and definitely influenced their attitude towards the population growing some of its own food.
Over the vexed question of whether to tell ‘the people’ the truth about the progress of the war, senior figures in the Ministry were divided. Some held the view that they could endure anything, provided that they did not think they were being hoodwinked or taken for fools. However, even if the MoI had been consistent about this, it was often thwarted by the service Ministries withholding all but the most anodyne facts about the prosecution of the war.
In practice, during the first eight months of the conflict the civilian population was generally told very little about how the war was progressing, which was why the overrunning of neutral Norway by the Germans in April 1940 proved such a paralysing shock after the truth of the situation was finally revealed. Two months later, after the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk – a far more serious reverse than Norway – the country was taken into the government’s confidence by Winston Churchill, and his popular support did not suffer as a result. Indeed, quite the reverse.
In the summer of 1941, Churchill remarked in Parliament, during a speech about the defence of Crete, that ‘the British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst, and like to be told that they are very likely to get much worse in the future and must prepare themselves for further reverses.’18 Understandably, people prided themselves on being so perverse.
The day before war broke out, wireless broadcasting became restricted entirely to the newly named Home Service, which came on air at 7 a.m. on 2 September and broadcast usually from 7 a.m. until just after midnight throughout the war. In June 1940, the Home Service was augmented by a Forces Programme. Both the government and the BBC’s bosses expected the Corporation to play a very important role in raising, or at least sustaining, civilian morale, although it took time before the Corporation’s broadcasts settled down to perform adequately the dual, and often contradictory, roles of informing and uplifting the people without giving any useful information to the enemy. As the historian of the BBC, Siân Nicholas, put it:
As far as the government was concerned, the BBC’s most important wartime function was the swift dissemination of official information to the general public. War would disrupt virtually every aspect of normal life, and the general public would need to be advised how to cope. More than this, they had to be encouraged to identify their day-to-day hardships with the wider national endeavour . . . Radio’s immediacy, its directness, its sheer ubiquity, marked it out for this task.19
The fear of helping the Germans, even tangentially, led to the suspension of broadcast weather reports on 5 September, much to the particular irritation of farmers and gardeners. These were not reinstated until 2 April 1945.
High morale also depends partly on getting enough to eat and in sufficient variety; a hungry population is likely, by its nature, to be demoralised. This was the major challenge to the Ministry of Agriculture, under Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, as well as the Ministry of Food, after it was set up on 8 September 1939 with William S. Morrison as Minister.20 (The first Ministry was principally concerned with producing food, while the second had the equally vital task of distributing it, via a rationing system if necessary.)21 It is against the background of the government’s desire to keep morale high that we must view its attitude to civilians becoming engaged in domestic food production.
The experience of the Great War had convinced most people who lived through it that there would be food shortages, and associated rationing, and that growing more food in Great Britain was absolutely vital. They also expected the threat from German submarines to feature prominently once again, preventing or disrupting the import of a great many staples such as coal, but also tropical and subtropical fruits – bananas, pineapples, oranges and lemons – as well as hardy vegetables like carrots and onions, which had mainly been imported into Britain from western Europe during the 1930s. In 1939, at a time when central planning was frequently muddled and incoherent, there was no doubting official determination to feed the embattled nation.
From 1938 onwards, as war looked increasingly likely, there had been public debate on the morality of rationing food. Many politicians, especially on the Left, maintained that in the last six months of the First World War it had been the fairest means of distributing vital foodstuffs in short supply. There were some dissenting voices: according to the Daily Express, ‘The public should revolt against the food rationing system, that dreadful and terrible iniquity . . . There is no necessity for the trouble and expense of rationing.’22 Nevertheless, by the time war broke out, the population in general seemed to have accepted that rationing was inevitable and were grimly resigned. Indeed, in November a British Institute of Public Opinion poll found that 60 per cent of those questioned thought rationing necessary. Some shopkeepers had already started to conduct their own rationing, keeping back basic supplies for their regular customers.
After war broke out, there was a flurry of intense activity by the government to ensure that every British citizen was counted. Not only did ration books need to be issued, but an accurate census was necessary for the purpose of conscription and in order to keep tabs on potential enemies of the state. 29 September 1939 was National Registration Day, after which every adult and child received a unique identity card.
Forthcoming rationing was announced on 1 November 1939, and came into force on 8 January 1940. Each household had to register with a supplier for the rationed items, which initially consisted of bacon, butter and cheese, but later included sugar, tea, eggs, meat and sweets. Vegetarians were issued with a special ration book, which entitled them to more cheese and eggs as substitutes for meat. Unlike other items, meat was rationed by price rather than by weight. (From 23 September 1939, petrol – for the 10 per cent of the population who owned a car – was severely rationed to seven gallons a month, allowing for journeys of no more than 200 miles.)
Rationing was just one part of the answer to the problem of providing enough nutritious food for everyone; increasing home food production was the other. On 2 September 1939, the first task for Mr W. Gavin – Agricultural Adviser at the Ministry of Agriculture – was to organise the setting-up of War Agricultural Executive Committees for each county in the United Kingdom under the Cultivation of Lands Order, 1939. This order authorised the ‘War Ags’, as they became universally known, to exercise on the Minister of Agriculture’s behalf ‘certain powers conferred on him by the Defence Regulations for the purpose of increasing home food production in time of war’.23 The Minister sent a circular letter to these county committees, outlining their immediate task: to bring into tillage another one and a half million acres of land in England and Wales. In order to achieve this, he promised them as free a hand as possible.
The War Ags became the main engines for the official dissemination of information and expertise to farmers and commercial gardeners during wartime. Ministry officials, landowners, farmers, gardeners and scientists sat on these committees; their tasks ranged from compelling (often reluctant) farmers to put their grass pasture under the plough to organising lecturers to speak to village Women’s Institutes. In counties where there were a lot of commercial horticultural operations, a horticulture subcommittee was established, which employed paid advisers. By mid April 1940, 10,000 square miles or 1,900,000 acres of pasture had been ploughed up to provide wheat that before the war had mainly been imported from Canada, as well as other foods like potatoes and cabbages.24
But British agriculture could not produce everything required, especially vitamin-rich lemons and bananas. By 1939, nutritionists were already well aware of the vitamins required for health, both in adults and children. They knew which diseases and conditions were the result of deficiencies, rickets in children being the most common and harmful of these. They also knew that the British were not as healthy as they should have been. In 1938, it was estimated by Sir John Boyd Orr, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on the science of nutrition, that half of the population had a diet deficient in some nutrients, while a third (primarily the urban working classes) had a ‘seriously inadequate diet’.25 Just as the imminent prospect of food rationing naturally increased the collective desire of keen gardeners to grow their own food, by definition unrationed, so the realisation that the population needed both health-giving vitamins and morale-boosting variety in their diets meant that the government was keen to encourage them to do so.
It was obvious, to the home Ministries at least, that gardeners had an important part to play in providing vitamin-rich green leaf vegetables, salads, onions, carrots and tomatoes, to take the place of imported fruit and vegetables. And the authorities knew this had to get under way quickly, since they had learned important lessons from the experience of the First World War, when shortages were already extremely acute before production by gardeners finally achieved substantial proportions in 1917. They were particularly keen on increasing the number of allotments under cultivation, since this would give the millions of urban dwellers without gardens the opportunity to grow their own vegetables.
Early on, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries estimated that productive home gardens and allotments together could produce as much as a quarter of non-cereal supplies. This was just one of the many unprovable and often highly optimistic statistics that issued from the Ministry during the war years, but it had a marked influence on policy – and public attitudes.
Interestingly, MAF officials did not consider the cultivation of allotments as purely for the production of extra fruit and vegetables. In an internal minute dated 8 September 1939, a Mr Sanders is reported as saying: ‘Stress should be laid on the need for as large an increase as possible in the number of allotments, not only on account of the importance of augmenting the quantity of health giving foodstuffs, but also because of the steadying effect [my italics] of work on plots on the large body of persons who will be concerned with allotment work.’26 Three days earlier, G.W. Giles, the Secretary of the National Allotments Society, had told the Minister of Agriculture in a letter that one of the latter’s predecessors, Lord Ernle, had said that during the First World War, allotments did more than anything else to ‘steady the nation’s nerves’.27 Giles also reminded Dorman-Smith that the latter had once said that the ‘recreational and health-giving properties of allotments were probably of more importance than the produce grown upon them’. It was Giles’s opinion that they were of equal value and importance. Whenever the subject of home-grown produce was brought up in Parliament, legislators would line up to praise the advantages – economic, recreational and even spiritual – of kitchen gardening. For example, in the House of Lords, the Marquess of Crewe referred to ‘the moral advantage, which the people derive from their [allotment’s] existence’.28 These assumptions informed what soon became known as the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign (see Chapter Three).
The period between 3 September 1939 and 10 May 1940, when the Germans invaded the Low Countries, was known as the ‘Phoney War’ or ‘Bore War’ because, despite the dire forecasts, and the presence of a large British Expeditionary Force in France, there was little fighting.29 During this time, although not physically threatened as feared, British civilians had to get used to many unpleasant or dreary restrictions. The restriction they loathed most was the necessity to darken their homes at dusk, using blackout curtain and blind material, boards or shutters. Instantly, houses were cast into a Stygian gloom, which depressed their occupants, even though they accepted the necessity of it.30 ARP31 wardens patrolled nightly to see that the blackout was strictly enforced and ‘Put that light out!’ became a common refrain: many perfectly respectable people found themselves summonsed to the magistrates’ court to be fined because of an evening’s carelessness. The headlamps of cars also had to be covered, except for a narrow strip which cast a thin, dim light on the road ahead; small wonder that the blackout was a major contributory factor in the record-breaking numbers of deaths, particularly of pedestrians, on the roads during the war. Torches had to be treated in the same way as headlights, with the result that people bumped into each other or lamp posts in the dark, and women were often frightened to go out at night. And any gardener who had once relied on street lights to provide enough illumination to dig his vegetable plot after tea in the winter would now have to depend on moonlight instead.
Meanwhile, the Royal Horticultural Society, like many other voluntary organisations, was preparing itself for the challenges ahead. From July 1939 onwards, the council had been discussing emergency plans, in particular for the evacuation of staff from Wisley, since it might have been in the invasion path to London – although in the event that did not happen. The rarest books in the Lindley Library were moved to a safe haven in Aberystwyth in west Wales. Oddly, once the Blitz began, many other books were taken from the Lindley Library to Wisley, obviously no longer considered in danger. The offices there already housed collections from the John Innes Horticultural Institution, particularly vulnerable to bomb damage at Merton, which was nearer to London. As early as October 1938, E. A. Bunyard, a Kentish fruit and rose nurseryman and stalwart RHS supporter (of whom we shall hear more in Chapter Eight), had produced a report for the RHS on the organisation of emergency food growing for wartime, a report which was to strongly influence government thinking.32 In it he advocated a planned approach, suggested that increased amounts of seed that might become scarce should be obtained, that there should be vegetable trials in various parts of the country, and that those vegetables with high protein levels such as haricot beans should be tested for their suitability. As for fruit, he thought that maximising production was of the essence; this could best be achieved by good pruning and hygiene in orchards. He recommended that instructional information and pamphlets be devised, and to this end he chaired a committee to develop them.
As a result of Bunyard’s recommendations, in September 1939 the Society initiated a programme of lectures and demonstrations for the general public. It later became a member of the Domestic Food Producers Council and willing expert adviser to the nascent Dig for Victory campaign.
At the same time, Bunyard stressed in the RHS Journal how important it was that people should not assume that, with the suspension of the flower shows, there remained little point to the Society. In his opinion, Fellows would need the expert advice and encouragement that they received from the Journal, in all branches of horticulture. Receiving the Journal was the principal privilege of being an RHS Fellow, and the best way of keeping in touch with the Society’s work. He suggested to the Council that it continue monthly with a quarter or a third devoted to wartime gardening. As a result, the Journal was published throughout the war, even if, by necessity, it did become a shadow of its pre-war size in the middle years.
Inevitably, however, the war did clip the wings of the Society. Initially, the fortnightly shows at Vincent Square were cancelled,33 as was the Chelsea Flower Show; no yearbooks were published; the RHS ceased to give money to subsidise plant-hunting expeditions, since these had been thwarted by the uncertainties of the international situation; and the trials at Wisley were truncated, with those remaining being mainly of vegetable varieties. The numbers of Fellows and Associates steadily declined during the war to 26,492 at the end of 1941 and 24,772 in 1942.34 This decline was to prove a headache for the Society, as it needed the revenue from subscriptions and advertising in order to carry out its work on the food production programme and the useful trials at Wisley.
In the summer of 1939, E. A. Bunyard, in some financial difficulty, resigned from the Council and the other committees on which he had served voluntarily in order to take up a paid position as Keeper of the Library and editor of the RHS publications. The vacancy on the Council was filled by Dr H. V. Taylor. Taylor became an important link between the Society and the Ministry of Agriculture throughout the war, in particular on matters concerning the Dig for Victory campaign.
The RHS could only influence its own members, in the main. But in September 1939, millions of ordinary people needed to achieve a mental transition from peace to war, in gardening quite as much as other spheres of domestic life. Helping people to change course radically required a concentrated effort by the print and broadcast media. Newspapers were understandably a little slow off the mark; peacetime theorising about war is a very different matter from the fact itself. The Gardeners’ Chronicle, for example, was still concerned with peaceful matters even on the day before war broke out. There were, for example, descriptive reports on the late August Southport Show. However, on the subject of the last RHS show, it commented: ‘In all the circumstances a large show could not be expected at this fortnightly meeting of the RHS . . .’35 And there was an advertisement in the Situations Vacant section for ‘Experienced gardener, good all-round man, in case of War, SINGLE-HANDED. Wife as Laundress . . .’36 These particulars show a clear appreciation that many gardeners, especially the youngsters, would not be able to avoid the imminent call-up.
By the following Saturday, the Chronicle was up to speed, or rather its advertisers were, with insertions such as: ‘Circumstances prevent the holding of our Annual Vegetable Show by seedsmen, Dickson and Robinson’ and ‘Owing to the International Situation, Stokesley Show for September 21st has been cancelled’. The Dahlia Society did not hold its annual exhibition, which must have been a great disappointment to gardeners who had striven all season to get these pampered darlings of the tender flower world to as near unblemished perfection as possible.
Most interesting is the editorial on wartime gardening, which appeared in that issue, the first of the war:
Everybody whose whole time is not engaged in other forms of national defence, and who has a garden or garden plot or allotment, can render good service to the community by cultivating it to the fullest possible extent. By that is meant not only getting the largest amount of produce from the soil, but also in keeping the ground in good heart, for the war upon which we have entered may last a long time and therefore next year must be considered as well as this year.37
No one was deluded into thinking it would all be over by Christmas this time. The editorial went on to advise on the importance of not letting pests spoil produce, ‘as so much is so often damaged and wasted in the kindlier days of peace’.
As early as this issue, professional gardeners, as represented by the contributors and editor, also put down a marker regarding flowers: ‘Subject always to the great needs of food production imposed by war-time conditions, flowers of all kinds may play their part by brightening parks and gardens and bringing cheerfulness into homes, hospitals and sick rooms.’ And the editor offered the hope that autumn orders for bulbs would not be cancelled, ‘as springtime will come as certainly as summer and winter, and we may need the beauty of flowers when there may be so much that is unbeautiful, pitiful and painful. Moreover, flowers inspire faith, hope, cheerfulness and courage, and these we may need in large measure until brighter and more peaceful conditions are reached.’38 This hope must also have been based on the fact that the Chronicle numbered amongst its readers and advertisers many ornamental plant nurserymen, who were understandably extremely anxious to see that the bottom did not fall precipitately out of their market on the declaration of war.
The Gardeners’ Chronicle editorial on 16 September, while acknowledging the many very knowledgeable amateurs in the country, opined that there were innumerable gardens where neglect was rife and whose vegetable and fruit crops were far smaller than they should be. It was hoped that a garden committee of the older gardeners and skilled amateurs would be formed in every parish, to advise people on how to make their gardens more productive.
In the same issue, there was also a heartfelt plea from the President of the Horticultural Trades Association – the organisation for the nursery trade, both then and now – for people not to cancel their plant orders, since nurserymen needed to sell their existing stocks of plants – bare-rooted trees, shrubs and fruit bushes, as well as herbaceous plants – before moving over to food production.39
Nurserymen such as R. Tucker and Sons of Faringdon couched their appeals for custom in patriotic terms: ‘Together with all nurserymen we have offered our entire resources to the government and are doing everything in our power to produce more food. However, unless we can clear large quantities of our stock during the next six months we shall not be able to carry out our obligations. We therefore appeal to our customers to plant as usual.’40 They also played on the gardener’s natural anxiety about shortages, saying that the need to increase acreage for food production would lead to depleted stocks – and inflated prices – in the future.
The Gardeners’ Chronicle initially advised readers against digging up lawns to grow vegetables, since it was thought they would be needed for grazing small animals, such as rabbits and Indian Runner ducks, which would provide manure to promote soil fertility in vegetable gardens. On 30 September, the editorial leader suggested that gardeners grow ‘the more handsome’ vegetables in herbaceous borders, in a move that anticipated the ‘integrated gardening’ trend of the 1980s. Suggestions included ‘Painted Lady’ runner beans, cardoons, beetroot, even potatoes, as well as immortelles (everlastings), for displaying in the house in winter. The periodical was also beginning to warn against ‘early forcing’ of fruit and vegetables, because of the heating required to do it, and recommended instead the use of glass cloches as a way of extending the growing season at both ends of the year. ‘Cloches against Hitler’ soon became the catchy, if rather fatuously grandiose, slogan for promoting the inexpensive protection and gentle forcing of crops in the garden.
As with the rest of the gardening press in the days before war broke out, the RHS Journal for September 1939 gave few hints of the trouble ahead, because it was printed in August. But the next monthly edition was very different. In October’s issue, notice was given that future flower shows would be cancelled, although the Society did subsequently hold a special Autumn Show at the end of October. In the December issue, this was pronounced ‘a great success, coming as it did after a stand-still period of several weeks. The support given by the trade exhibitors and by the Fellows themselves showed the advisability of maintaining the usual practice of the Society in holding Fortnightly Shows.’41 And, as was noted in the December Journal, ‘It is perhaps fortunate, if anything about war could be so described, that the outbreak of hostilities happened at the season of preparation; this has made it possible to increase the area available for the cultivation of vegetable crops without the loss, or partial loss, of a growing season.’42 Fortunate indeed.