On a Wireless Set
Who is this coming to the microphone?
Is it the man again to cast his jest
New-minted on the garrulous unknown?
What sailor comes to answer our request?
What fair economist? What little street
Is emptied of its Joad1 this brain-sick hour
To prate of Plato old or Socrates?
What gardener talks of scarlet-veinèd beet,
Of onions, or the clotted cauliflower,
Or sounds the praise of upward-climbing peas?2
THE ANSWER, OF course, to the last question was Mr Middleton, presenter of the weekly radio programme In Your Garden, and the most famous wartime broadcaster on gardening.
Cecil Henry Middleton was born in 1886, at Weston-by-Weedon in Northamptonshire, the son of Sir George Sitwell’s head gardener at Weston Hall. He was much of an age with Sitwell’s three extraordinary children, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, and almost certainly played with them as a boy, since his father, although an employee, would have enjoyed a considerable status on the estate. Sir George Sitwell was an avid garden maker, both in England and Italy, and published a well-regarded book on design, On the Making of Gardens, in 1909.3
Middleton began his working life, aged thirteen, as a garden boy in the Weston Hall garden, but at seventeen, with only fifty shillings in his pocket, he left home for London. He found work with a seed firm, then took up a place as a student gardener at Kew. By 1912, he was married and already working as a teacher of horticulture. During the First World War, he worked in the horticultural division of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the forerunner of the Ministry of Agriculture. He gained the National Diploma of Horticulture, the highest RHS qualification, and then joined Surrey County Council as an instructor. It is certain that the Director of Wisley, Frederick Chittenden, who wrote gardening bulletins for the BBC, would have known him personally, since they lived and worked in the same county. As we saw in Chapter One, it was Chittenden who recommended Middleton to the BBC in 1931 as a potential presenter of gardening programmes.
In Your Garden was originally broadcast at ten past seven on a Friday evening, but when, in October 1936, a move to two o’clock on Sunday afternoons was mooted, Middleton asked the listeners themselves what was best: ‘There does not seem a better way of finding out what your wishes are, whether you regard me as a stimulation for the weekend’s gardening, or to send you off to sleep after Sunday lunch. The BBC want to please you and I am quite prepared to do what I’m told as far as I can and to give you what you want.’4 The answer from the listeners, who wrote in their thousands, was more than two to one in favour of Sunday, and he did what he was told.
The show consisted principally of Middleton talking to the audience, although he would sometimes invite in another gardening expert for a conversation. People began to think of him as their kindly, knowledgeable, understanding gardening friend from the rural Midlands, in much the same way that a later generation considered Geoff Hamilton. In 1935, the critic Wilfrid Rooke Ley wrote: ‘It is the art of Mr Middleton to address himself to the lowest common denominator of horticultural intelligence without the faintest hint of superiority or condescension. He will assume that your soil is poor, and your pocket poor. All he asks is that your hopes are high and your Saturday afternoons at his service . . . He has the prettiest humour. He stands for common sense and has the gift of consolation.’5 Such a valuable gift was to prove very attractive to his listeners in wartime.
The Ministry of Agriculture was keen that In Your Garden should survive the outbreak of hostilities, and wrote to the BBC asking for assurances on that score. In March 1940 the BBC replied in reasonably enthusiastic fashion: ‘. . . his [Middleton’s] talks are inherently better value than any alternatives that could be found. From the point of view of propaganda or practical advice it is unlikely that we could find speakers who could rise above his level. On the other hand, they might easily fall below it and would not be likely ever to rise to the heights to which he can aspire on occasions.’6
Certainly, for a specialist broadcast, Middleton’s programme was extremely popular, with an average audience in late 1940 of 2,950,000, which was more than the Daily Service or the Wednesday Symphony Concert, but substantially less, not surprisingly, than The Kitchen Front.7 These talks were sufficiently highly regarded by the BBC to be reproduced in its weekly periodical, The Listener.
His appeal lay partly in his pleasant manner, rural accent and simple, even homespun language, which proved to be the best way to strike a chord with millions of novice gardeners. At the end of 1939, he declared:
We are all going to be kitchen gardeners next year, but I hope that doesn’t mean that we are going to neglect the flowers too much. At times like these we need our flowers more than ever: they help to turn our minds to the better side of Nature occasionally. We are all gardeners at heart, and I believe if we were all gardeners in fact there wouldn’t be any wars. But perhaps the fact that most of us are gardeners or garden lovers will help us to live cheerfully through these dark days, and build a sweeter and better world when the nightmare is over. I am sure it will, because the very essence of gardening consists of rooting out and destroying all the evil things,8 and cultivating and developing all that is good and beautiful in life. So let us put forward all our efforts to make 1940 a record gardening year in every way.’9
In a broadcast later that month, while talking about seed catalogues, he said: ‘I thought this afternoon I would get you to come and look over my shoulder, and that we would go through this catalogue together. Shall we begin with the flowers?’10 To which no doubt many listeners replied to the wireless set: ‘Yes, please.’
He was plainly a romantic, something which must also have gone down well with many listeners: ‘In these days of strife and anxiety, I often let my mind wander back to the old country village, where the orchards and gardens were humming and buzzing with bees, and our old lime-tree in June sounded like the deep diapason note of a great organ.’11 He was also quietly religious. When talking about gardeners in a broadcast in 1935, he was describing himself:
Generally speaking they’re very much as other men are – perhaps a little better in many ways: wholesome, decent-living people who love their work – usually straight and often deeply religious people, perhaps without knowing it, and certainly without shouting about it. They work hand in hand with Nature and they know their work is under the direct supervision of the Great Architect.12
Though mild-mannered, Middleton did not shrink from the kind of controversy which shook up even his gentle world from time to time. For example, in early 1940, when there were comments in the press about how allotmenteers might undermine the profits of market gardeners, he fought back. ‘Allotment holders, at the best, are only a small percentage of the population,13 so let us put forth all our efforts to avoid a shortage, and not listen to unfounded theories about surplus.’14 Nor was he going to be pushed around by tricky correspondents. He answered a few queries in The Listener each week, and when one person questioned his advice to strip ivy off other people’s trees, he replied: ‘I should think it might easily lead to a thick ear if I were foolish enough to give such advice, but I never did.’15
The BBC realised very early on that they had found a natural radio broadcaster in Middleton. He was so fluent and dependable that, within a short space of time, he was granted the unusual dispensation of no longer having to submit manuscripts of his projected talks, since it was thought that he was more than capable of extemporising from notes, even though the broadcast was ‘live’. Once the war began, however, and broadcasters became extremely careful about what they said,16 Middleton did provide scripts and even submitted to a ‘run-through’.
This precaution did not always prevent him from ad-libbing. He rounded off one broadcast early in the war with the words: ‘Now a last word about carnations. Some of you find them difficult subjects, but it’s because they like lots of lime, so cheer up, the way things are going at the moment there will soon be plenty of mortar rubble about. Just have another go.’17 Generally, though, the Talks Department was tolerant of his minor departures from the script.
He was treated reasonably well by the BBC, although it is hard to escape the conclusion that he was patronised, at least behind his back, because his subject was gardening rather than anything they considered more elevated.18 That said, in 1940, BBC Talks producers bemoaned the fact that they couldn’t find the right presenter for a literature programme, someone they said who would be a ‘Middleton of books’.19
He was paid twelve guineas a programme – and five guineas for the weekly reproduction of his script in The Listener – and if he had to travel, his expenses allowed him to go First Class, which must have been a relief on those overcrowded wartime trains. His duties were a sore trial at times, especially from the autumn of 1940, when he and his wife were bombed out of their house in Surbiton and they had to camp with relatives in Northamptonshire for eighteen months until they could return to Surrey. During that period he no longer recorded In Your Garden in a garden in Cavendish Place, but instead at a BBC station at Wood Norton Hall, outside Evesham, which had been established at the beginning of the war just in case Broadcasting House was bombed.20 His other commitments made these journeys difficult, and his BBC bosses were not very sympathetic when he asked them to arrange extra petrol coupons, calling him ‘grabbing’.21
However, he was protected by powerful allies in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Agriculture who, right from the start of the war, were keen that he should spread the official message that they were taking such pains to develop.22 And even the BBC considered him sufficiently important to be invited to the Corporation’s twenty-first birthday lunch in December 1943, an event at which Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, spoke.
After war broke out, there was initially a marked falling-off in Middleton’s audience ratings, but the BBC sensibly assumed that this had more to do with war conditions than disenchantment, although John Green, his boss in the Talks Department, did point out that the decline might have something to do with the fact that gardening was no longer a hobby and so his ‘soporific appeal’ had diminished.23
Nevertheless, Middleton’s air time was extended during the war. Every so often he broadcast to the forces, and he also spoke on Ack-Ack, Beer-Beer, a Forces Programme series aimed at personnel manning observation posts or working anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. These listeners had many weary hours to kill when nothing was happening, and often made gardens around their installations.
Each year Middleton took a leave of absence from the programme for several months in the summer and early autumn, and his place was taken by Roy Hay, an able, but less charismatic, gardening journalist who was already working on the Dig for Victory campaign for the Ministry of Agriculture and so was well versed in what was required of him.
On the back of his undoubted national celebrity, Middleton was much in demand, promoting the Dig for Victory campaign at exhibitions, talking to gardening clubs and at flower shows all over the country, and writing a weekly column in the Saturday edition of the Daily Express. He was the horticultural consultant to Boots the Chemist, which at that time sold fertilisers and pesticides.
He was the first gardener to become a household name, and was sufficiently famous to be ‘sent up’ by comedians. The music hall trio Vine, More and Nevard wrote and performed a witty comedic song in 1938 with the refrain ‘Mr Middleton says it’s right’. In 1943, he was Roy Plomley’s guest on Desert Island Discs. He even appeared, as himself (as did Michael Standing, head of Outside Broadcasting), in Arthur Askey’s madcap film of 1940, Band Waggon. Despite the strong discouragement of John Green, he occasionally appeared on non-gardening programmes: for example, he was the ‘Mystery Voice’ on Tonight at Eight in February 1944, and took part in Victory Night at Eight, which was transmitted on 14 May 1945, a few days after VE Day. He also participated in three Brains Trust24 radio broadcasts in 1944, much to Green’s disapproval, since he did not consider that Middleton was a ‘brain’.25 Even more worthy was his contribution about country churches, which was broadcast on Christmas Day 1943, as part of a programme entitled What Else Do They Do?.
Historian of the BBC, Asa Briggs, paid the radio gardener this compliment: ‘A man like Middleton, who had established his reputation as a broadcaster before the war, was an artist in his own right – easy in manner, on occasion acid in humour, always capable of improvising, always conscious of his vast, if strictly limited, authority.’26 Those who knew the country house gardening system well would have recognised Middleton as a type: a supreme professional, hard-working and conscientious, who had generations of substantial standing behind him. His pleasant, outgoing personality and natural empathy saved him from pomposity but then anyone who, as a boy, played with the Sitwell children must have grown up with a lively sense of the endearing eccentricities of human nature.
C. H. Middleton died suddenly of a heart attack outside his house in Surbiton on 18 September 1945. He was only fifty-nine. His funeral was filmed for a Pathé newsreel that was shown in cinemas. His coffin was carried in a hearse crammed with the dahlias that he loved so much. It cannot be unreasonable to conclude that his punishing wartime schedule hastened his end. It was a cruel irony that a man who cared for flowers so much more than vegetables should not have lived to enjoy a retirement growing them.
George Barnes, Director of Talks at the BBC, wrote to Mrs Middleton on the day of her husband’s death:
We turned to him on many important and critical occasions and he never failed us; I shall long remember, for instance, the talk he recorded in [sic] the first day of September 1939.27 But the two qualities of his which are ineffaceable are his modesty and his integrity: he never allowed the insistent demand for his services which fame brought, to lower the standards he had set or to divert him from his task of inspiring and teaching gardening.28
In 1940, Middleton had introduced Fred Streeter, the head gardener at Petworth House, to listeners during an episode of In Your Garden, talking about fruit and vegetables. By 1945, Streeter was filling in for him in the summer months,29 and after Middleton died, the BBC decided that he would simply carry on doing so. Despite the criticism that Streeter’s scripts were more suitable for the country house gardener than the suburban housewife, he retained the job and successfully made the switch to television, presenting Television Garden from 1951, the garden in question being one laid out in the grounds of Alexandra Palace in north London.
Dominant as Middleton was, In Your Garden was not the only programme on gardening during the war. Roy Hay explained in a memoir how Radio Allotment came about:
One day in December, 1941, Michael [Standing, of the Outside Broadcasting Department and later Director of it] became inspired, I like to think, by the Ministry of Agriculture’s suggestion that those who had no time to cultivate an allotment individually might combine with two or three friends and take a plot collectively . . . After consulting one or two members of the Outside Broadcasting Department, he asked me if there was any chance of obtaining an allotment within reasonable distance of the BBC headquarters . . . he hit on the idea of making regular broadcasts from the plot-side to let listeners know how the communal allotment was proceeding, and to share the joys and sorrows common to all gardening tyros.30
Standing wrote to the then Director of Talks, Sir Richard Maconachie, as well as to John Green about the idea, ending with the words: ‘I’d be glad to have your views without too much mockery!’31 But his bosses did not mock, and Roy Hay soon found a piece of ground, ten rods in size, in Park Crescent, a residential square near to Broadcasting House. He also managed to get some money from the Ministry to pay for tools and seeds, since this endeavour was seen as excellent publicity for the Dig for Victory campaign. Hay became the expert advising a group of people who were novice gardeners but professional broadcasters, amongst them Raymond Glendenning, who commentated on the Derby and other major sporting events, and his secretary Sheilagh Millar, as well as Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, who was to become a well-known commentator and a highly regarded war correspondent, and Gilbert Harding, a very famous radio and television presenter after the war. All learned how to grow vegetables under Hay’s tutelage.32 There were even a few broadcasts from Roy Hay’s kitchen in Baron’s Court, when preserving produce or cooking vegetables was discussed, to the accompanying clatter of saucepans.
The live programmes went out for ten minutes every other Wednesday lunchtime, starting on 18 February 1942. They boxed and coxed with a feature on salvage or a classical music concert. They were repeated either on Friday evenings or Sunday mornings. Inevitably, the first programme was on the subject of double-digging. It is hard to imagine how the BBC personnel managed to make it sound interesting, but the programme called forth praise from an unlikely quarter, namely R. G. C. Nisbet of the Department of Agriculture for Scotland, who wrote to Roy Hay at the Ministry of Agriculture to congratulate him. The letter was sent on to Michael Standing with the note: ‘The Scottish Department are well known grumblers and critics so you can imagine the receipt of this letter was heralded with cries of amazement from the Department here.’33
Other broadcasters who became involved in the programme from time to time included Stewart MacPherson, Frank More O’Ferrall and John Wynn Jones. They were always referred to as ‘this amateur team’, and the location was never identified beyond ‘a London residential square’. Every fortnight throughout the growing season, these BBC employees could be found sowing broad beans, staking tomatoes or planting spring cabbages. It was all intensely practical, although there were opportunities for what we would now call banter.34 As the plot was so close to Broadcasting House, it naturally attracted notice from other BBC people: ‘advice, exhortation, criticism, admiration or contemptuous derision were hurled quite unsolicited by passing announcers, programme assistants, engineers and messengers . . . This friendly attention we accepted joyfully as a sign that the allotment was regarded with a degree of proprietary affection that we had never anticipated.’35 It is amusing to think of those clever, ambitious young people – careful not to be too flippant, on air at least – taking pleasure in the germination of the first peas, and developing their powers of description by talking about the taste of a radish or the precision of a well-hoed row; powers that they would later use, in Vaughan-Thomas’s case, to commentate on a Lancaster night bombing raid and Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, and in Michael Standing’s case, to speak from the Normandy beaches on D-Day.
In 1943, Roy Hay left the Ministry of Agriculture and went to Malta to advise on food production. His place on Radio Allotment was taken by his father, Tom Hay, the retired Superintendent of the Royal Parks. Hay senior seems to have managed quite well, despite having a thick Scots accent and a tendency to mumble. In the summer of 1943, the BBC’s Listener Research Department produced a report on the programme, which concluded that gardeners in Scotland, the north of England and the extreme south-west had such different growing conditions that much of the value of the programme was lost for them. Listeners were more likely to describe Radio Allotment as ‘very helpful’ than ‘very entertaining’, which in the context of vegetable gardening that has to be described rather than seen is scarcely surprising. Listener Research found that the programme was most helpful to novice gardeners, again not surprisingly, and that some people thought that the allotment was ‘phoney’.36 But it would be a remarkable programme that won universal praise.
In 1944, the Radio Allotmenteers even ventured a hook-up with the north of England, talking live to a Yorkshire allotment gardener in Leeds. This temporarily quietened the justifiable criticism that English gardening programmes mostly benefited listeners in the south. The programme was discontinued in 1945 because the BBC personnel became too busy to cultivate the allotment. But it says much for their commitment that they saw through the 1944 season, when there was so much happening in the war to take them away from London.
Although In Your Garden and Radio Allotment were the most popular gardening programmes, there were others, such as the five-minute Over the Border – which featured panels of experts in both Edinburgh and London – and Backs to the Land, which was broadcast every fortnight at lunchtime on Saturday, alternating with features such as ‘Discussion on Rabbits’, ‘Talk for Beekeepers’ and ‘Pig Clubs’.
There were also some one-off transmissions: Roy Hay, for example, recorded a Saturday Afternoon programme in January 1942, entitled ‘Digging for Victory in the East End’, which was about Bethnal Green (see Chapter Three). There was even a humorous radio play, entitled Digging for Victory, by Lawrence du Garde Peach, which was scarcely disguised propaganda for government information leaflets and must have made for pretty unexciting listening. The immortal last lines were: ‘Back to the land – and if you are able, contribute a sprout to the national table.’
The BBC broadcast one regular and high-quality schools programme, Science and Gardening. It was aimed at children of about thirteen years old and was hosted by two horticultural scientists called Keen and Lawrence. The programme mixed botany, plant physiology and practical horticulture. Since most schools cultivated gardens during the war, the audience was no doubt substantial, especially as it presented an opportunity to bunk off formal lessons.
Of course, broadcasters and gardening writers were no more free agents during the Second World War than anyone else, and their output was both dictated and circumscribed by the fact that at least three Ministries were extremely interested in conveying particular messages to the population. For reasons of circulation and ratings figures as well as for fear of censorship, they were also keen to accentuate the positive, or at least steer clear of the negative. It is small wonder, therefore, that worthy stories concerning blind people taking on allotments, children winning prizes at flower shows, or old age pensioners bicycling twenty miles to their allotment three times a week were often used as a counterbalance to dismal or downright alarming stories from home and abroad. The business of public relations was less sophisticated than it is now, but at least the Ministries could confidently expect the contents of their press releases to find their way into print and on to the wireless.
Nothing gives modern gardeners a keener sense of the gulf between then and now than reading gardening books and periodicals from this period. The advice on offer was severely practical and often couched in a homespun yet, at the same time, curiously pretentious style. Irony, which runs through modern journalism like a name through a stick of rock, is almost absent from these doggedly high-minded publications. That said, the information was clear and unequivocal and, most importantly, accurate, for almost all the writers had started life as professional gardeners, having trained at Kew or another horticultural establishment before becoming full-time writers.
Magazines included Garden Work for Amateurs, which was firmly aimed at beginners, The Smallholder (‘The war food-growing weekly’), the very popular Amateur Gardening and My Garden. My Garden was the most upmarket publication, appealing especially to those garden owners who had employed gardening staff before the war. It was owned and edited by a well-known journalist, Theo A. Stephens, and was a small-format magazine with excellent black and white illustrations and sometimes even colour pictures. A number of first-rate amateur gardeners contributed to it, including Beverley Nichols, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde,37 and even Captain W. E. Johns, author of the ‘Biggles’ books. Stephens recalled that the My Garden offices were next to those of Popular Flying, a magazine of which Johns was editor. When asked by Stephens whether he had ever written about his gardening experiences, Johns told him that he was tired of writing about flying and that it would be a pleasant recreation.38 He wrote for My Garden from 1937 until the magazine folded in 1951, under the title ‘The Passing Show’. My Garden could be rather whimsical and overwritten at times, but it supplied an otherwise unsatisfied need, since it catered for an educated readership of garden owners who had no intention of giving up their entire gardens to vegetables; indeed, the kitchen garden scarcely ever got a mention. Considering how bombarded on the subject gardeners generally were, this must have been something of a relief.
Expert amateurs as well as many professionals read the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society and The Gardeners’ Chronicle. However, these publications had a very small impact on ordinary gardeners, especially novices, who gleaned almost all their information either from listening to wireless programmes or from reading gardening columns in the popular press.39 Of these, the most popular were those delivered or written by C. H. Middleton. According to a Ministry of Agriculture inquiry in 1942, 72 per cent of the sampled owners of wireless sets listened to gardening radio programmes; of these, 79 per cent tuned in to Middleton’s programme In Your Garden, while 13 per cent listened to Radio Allotment, but only 4 per cent to Roy Hay’s other programmes.40
What is more, of the 77 per cent of the sample who derived knowledge from newspaper columns, 21 per cent read Middleton in the Daily Express, which made him the most popular newspaper columnist as well. This is not at all surprising, since he was undoubtedly the best at it. He wrote as he spoke, naturally and without affectation, deploying a fund of hard-won knowledge and an attractive, self-deprecating humour. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he never assumed that he was always right, nor did everything go smoothly for him. He plainly did not mind being thought of as a ‘character’ – what man of head gardener stock would? – shown by the fact that a line drawing caricature of him, with his trademark curly-brimmed felt hat, detachable round collar and round spectacles, appeared on the page, together with a facsimile signature. Here are two examples of his approach:
Watched a man sowing peas the other day, and felt tempted to tell him he was doing it the wrong way, but I didn’t. I did once venture a word of friendly advice to a stranger who was planting gladiolus corms upside down, but he said he preferred them that way and told me to mind my own business, so now I pass by and hold my peace. But about these peas . . .41
Reproducing a letter he had received, which ran, ‘You tell me to dig up my lawn and grow food, the government shouts “Dig for Victory”, but why should I, if it is only to put fat profits into the pockets of seed merchants? Do you think I am a perfect fool?’ he replied: ‘Well, no, I wouldn’t go as far as that but I do think it is rather foolish to write such piffle without a little knowledge.’42
The Daily Express gave big money prizes to its readers: £1,000 in 1939 to the best allotment holder, who was then taken on to give tips every Saturday in the newspaper, and £5,200 in 1940 to the winner of the ‘Grow More Food’ competition. That strongly suggests that Lord Beaverbrook considered that Middleton’s column sold newspapers.
Middleton also published a number of books, some of which were collections of his broadcast talks, such as Mr Middleton Talks About Gardening, which appeared in 1935, Your Garden in War-Time (1941) and Digging for Victory (1942). He also wrote Colour All the Year in my Garden (1938), and an encyclopaedia of gardening, Mr Middleton Suggests (1939).
Next in popularity for its gardening output was the Sunday Express, which disseminated information via a comic strip, although there was nothing remotely comic in the single-minded dedication with which ‘Adam the Gardener’ went about his tasks. ‘Adam the Gardener’ was written by Morley Adams, a man better known for his books of crosswords. Cyril Cowell, who illustrated the strip, made Adam consciously old-fashioned, even for the 1940s, by giving him a wraparound beard, a felt hat, and corduroy trousers ‘yorked up’ below the knee. This was presumably to reassure readers that he was experienced and knew that what he was doing was the right thing. Morley Adams was a journalist, and must have had some good sources amongst professional gardeners of the old school, for the practical information imparted so tersely by the illustrations and text was accurate, if sometimes dispiritingly perfectionist. On 5 May 1940, as German tanks rolled towards the Low Countries, the strip was entitled ‘Beetroot, Bark-Ringing and Marrow’. In a few frames, Adam dealt with sowing maincrop long beetroot for use in the autumn, checking the rate of sap rise on apple and pear trees if they were growing too vigorously, and planting marrow seedlings on a compost heap.
Sometimes, the juxtaposition of his comic strip with national events was startling: on 23 June 1940, Adam the Gardener was blanching salad crops; on the same page, the government was appealing to the Empire ‘to fight on to the final victory’, just a few days after Winston Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’ speech.
Most of the other newspapers carried their own column of practical gardening advice: Albert Gurie in the News Chronicle, Richard Sudell in the Daily Herald and Percy Izzard in the Daily Mail. Although forgotten now, H. H. Thomas, the Daily Telegraph columnist, was a tremendous swell, since he was the son of Queen Victoria’s head gardener, trained at Kew, and wrote thirty-two books, including Making Love to Mother Earth (1946), a title which did not immediately encourage the reader to conclude that it was an account of laying out a two-acre garden in Buckinghamshire.
Raymond Keene used humour in his approach to the subject in the Sunday Pictorial. He took on the persona of an ‘old-timer’ talking over the garden fence to a young neighbour called Robinson, and used excruciating puns to embed practical information in the minds of the readers: ‘It is true he [Robinson] has dug trenches in Britain, planted mines in North Africa, and raised hell in the Ruhr, but back home again phlox to him were what shepherds watched at night; asters were merely millionaires.’43
There were also a number of unsigned columns in the Sunday national papers and the larger regional ones; these were written by people working in the MAF publicity division, who issued them weekly during the growing season. They were studiedly earnest, practical in content and often highly compressed. This unsigned comment in the News of the World in spring 1940 was almost certainly provided by the Ministry: ‘Soot is fine stimulant for strawberry bed; also deters slugs.’ Deathless prose it was not.
What was entirely missing in wartime was the kind of inspiring and intriguing gardening column by an established writer that was made popular by Vita Sackville-West44 and Beverley Nichols in the decade after the war. And the range of topics covered by wartime writers was also rather narrow: there was little written about the design of gardens, about visiting those that had been designed or indeed about garden history.
Quite often, a gardening-orientated cartoon would appear in one or another of the newspapers, as for example that by Wyndham Robinson published in the Sunday Express on 19 May 1940, which depicted a little man in Home Guard uniform towered over by an enormous, menacing wife in a dress, next to a spade. The caption read: ‘I’m off to Parashoot dear, YOU can dig for victory’.
Newspapers and magazines were very good at propagating gardening campaigns of a charitable nature; there was never any shortage of coverage of Red Cross initiatives, for example. In 1943, the Horticultural Committee of the Red Cross Agricultural Fund developed a scheme to increase the supply of onions to the armed services at home, the demand for which the Ministry of Food simply could not meet. The committee proposed that Onion Clubs be set up, and the scheme was well publicised in the RHS Journal and elsewhere.
It is suggested that each club should consist of 12 to 20 members who should aim at cultivating between them a quarter of an acre of Onions for sale to the NAAFI45 or the contractors to the Admiralty, the proceeds going to the Red Cross. In some cases, instead of taking over new ground, a number of garden-owners may undertake to grow more onions than they need, and arrange for the surplus to be collected at a convenient centre in due course.’46
The Secretary of the National Allotments Society wrote to The Times, adding the Society’s weight behind the campaign and suggesting that certificates or small prizes should be given by local allotment associations to the person who grew the most. ‘If every allotment-holder in the country gave only 7 lb, 5,000 tons would be available for this worthy cause.’47 These estimates of productivity were always unverifiable, but they were uncritically published and no doubt impressed the readers.
Like newspapers and magazines, books suffered seriously from paper and ink restrictions during the war, and they contracted in size as a result. Nevertheless, the innovative Practical Gardening and Food Production in Pictures (1940) by Richard Sudell contained a great number of black-and-white photographs as well as line drawings; it sold very well, both during the war and after it. Equally popular was The Vegetable Garden Displayed, which was to prove one of the greatest contributions that the Royal Horticultural Society made to the dissemination of information during the war. Published in 1941 and priced at a modest one shilling, this was the Society’s most successful publication to date. Like Sudell’s book, it had monochrome pictures, providing a step-by-step illustrated account of the tasks a conscientious vegetable gardener should undertake. The murky pictures, shot at the RHS gardens at Wisley, showed a variety of male gardeners, all wearing cloth caps and waistcoats, taking great pains to dig a straight celery trench, make a carrot clamp or sow peas in a drill. The important monthly tasks were enumerated, and there was a copy of the plan from the ‘Growmore’ Bulletin No. 1, to which RHS experts had of course contributed. Emphasis was laid on maximum productivity, using crop rotation, catch crops48 and successional sowings. There were forewords by both Robert Hudson and Lord Woolton, setting the food Ministries’ seal on the project. This publication went through eight impressions in the course of the war.
What is more, in an admirable and public sign of reconciliation, the book was translated into German and published in September 1947 under the title Frisches Gemüse im ganzen Jahr (Fresh Vegetables All Year Round). The German version contained the same photographs as the original one; the only changes concerned the varieties of vegetable recommended.
Wartime gardening books often started with a patriotic clarion call to arms, and then returned to their default position – a series of complex disquisitions on exactly how to double-dig, and all the remedies that should be employed in the battle against the garden’s enemies. The prose was didactic and sometimes dour; substance mostly won over style. But at a time when most people acquired knowledge of new skills through the printed word and had little leisure, such books were invaluable.
A typical example was War-time Gardening by John Reed Wade, published in 1940. In the Foreword the author wrote: ‘The effort of each individual gardener may be small; but when you think of the millions of gardens there are all over the country which could be changed over from the production of flowers to the much more practical production of vegetables and fruits, it will be understood how great and magnificent an effort for victory on the home front lies within the hands of those who own a garden.’49 If garden owners felt reluctant or uncertain, it was not from want of expert encouragement.
Two female writers who added a definite sparkle to garden writing were Constance Spry and Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. Constance Spry had become famous in the 1930s for her innovative, relaxed style of flower arranging. However, her ‘war work’ was a cookery book aimed at garden-minded housewives who wanted to do interesting things with vegetables and make their rations go further; it was called Come into the Garden, Cook. This book had the signal virtues of being witty, well-written and original. It was almost certainly read in the main by middle-class housewives trying to manage without the cooks they had employed in peacetime.
Eleanour Sinclair Rohde was an Oxford-educated historian, and her interest in kitchen produce was antiquarian as well as practical. She had been trained in the cultivation of medicinal herbs during the First World War, when there was the same shortage of drugs which was to dog the Ministry of Health in the Second World War (see Chapter Twelve). Mrs Rohde set up a nursery in Surrey and, during the war, employed Land Girls and prisoners of war to grow herbs and unusual plants. She was a prolific journalist and had also published a number of books on herbs and vegetables before the war, which were still in print. She continued to write books, including Hay Box Cookery (1939), The Wartime Vegetable Garden (1940), Culinary and Salad Herbs (1940) and Uncommon Vegetables and Fruits (1943). Although there is little evidence to suggest, as her Times obituarist did in 1950, that the mantle of Miss Gertrude Jekyll had fallen upon her, she was certainly influential, in particular reviving the idea of the herb garden, and raising the profile of vegetables and herbs amongst an educated readership. She was more of a practical and practising gardener than Constance Spry, and correspondingly less forthright in her remarks. Like Mrs Spry, she had a very ready appreciation of what foods were good for you.
The Dig for Victory campaign would not have had much impact without the enthusiastic co-operation of the print and wireless media, but nor would it have reached such a wide audience were it not for the black-and-white Pathé Pictorial newsreels and short educational films made for the Ministry of Information by the Crown Film Unit and shown in cinemas.50
These films featured vegetable gardening, often with the message that gardeners should plan ahead if there was not to be ‘want’, especially in winter. There were longer films, too, such as the Ministry of Information’s ‘Dig for Victory’, made in 1941 in conjunction with the RHS and featuring a commentary by Roy Hay, who had a pleasant, neutral speaking voice. ‘Food is just as much a weapon of war as guns,’ he told the audience. This film was most informative on the subject of necessary practical operations, like planting leeks and lifting cabbages. It finished with the familiar refrain: ‘Isn’t an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?’
The Ministry of Agriculture made ‘How to Dig’ in 1941, again with a commentary by Roy Hay. This stupefyingly dull film was nevertheless extremely clear – and the digger was brilliant at his task. However, it is hard to imagine that it was popular with cinema audiences, who had no choice but to watch these public information films before the big feature was screened. Remarks like ‘Thorough digging is essential to success in gardening’ must have been enough to make their hearts sink.
However, there were obviously not enough gardeners doing their bit, because in 1942 the Ministry of Information released a perky cartoon entitled ‘Filling the Gap’. It reminded viewers that twelve million hundredweight51 of vegetables was imported before the war that could not now be imported, and continued: ‘There are still too many lawns and flower gardens and vacant plots all over the country, which must be dug and must grow vegetables . . . Every bit of land must play its part or we shall go short . . . So put your garden on war service. If you haven’t got a garden, go to your local council and ask for an allotment.’ The film ended with the words, in block capitals, ‘NEXT WINTER MAY BE A MATTER OF LIFE OR DEATH’. This shows how seriously the authorities viewed the impending food crisis of late 1942 and early 1943.
Often the short films were linked to published Ministry leaflets. One such was a cartoon entitled ‘Blitz on Bugs’, which featured a voiceover by C. H. Middleton: ‘Tackle the pest, tackle him early. Dig for Victory leaflet no. 16 tells you how.’
One short film, entitled ‘The Compost Heap’, was made by a New Zealander, Margaret Thomson, who was the first female film director to work in Britain and who also made a number of educational films concerning children. ‘The Compost Heap’ was released in 1942, and showed very clearly how to make a four foot by three foot heap in the vegetable garden, as well as what to put on it and how to turn it.
Although cinemas were almost always urban places of entertainment, the regional offices of the Ministry of Information also arranged film showings in rural village halls and schoolrooms; where no electricity was available, a projector van could be hired, free of charge. What is more, a commercial concern, Plant Protection Ltd, which was owned by ICI and sold fertilisers and pesticides, commissioned a series of five silent, colour films on vegetable gardening which were offered free of charge to clubs, factories and offices, and came complete with screen, projector and someone to operate it. The series was entitled A Garden Goes to War with individual titles such as ‘Spadework’ and ‘Odd Jobs in the Garden’. According to The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1,200 people – of what must have been a particularly captive audience – watched these films in an Ilford air-raid shelter at Christmas 1940.52
The National Allotments Society’s annual report for 1941 congratulated the Ministry of Agriculture on their Dig for Victory campaign, which admittedly was nothing startling, since the Society did so without fail each year.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries have conducted this very successful campaign on ‘two fronts’ so to speak, firstly, that of publicity, and, secondly, that of practical advice.
Both branches of activity have been remarkably well done, so much so, that it has confounded the critics of Government methods.
The coloured posters and charts displayed have been so original and arresting as to arouse the interest of nearly every member of the community. The simplicity of their design, and the message and helpful advice which they convey, has struck the popular imagination and set the nation digging.53
The information poster certainly came into its own during the Second World War, becoming a powerful tool for disseminating advice, for motivating the population and for changing established habits of mind and action quickly and radically. A wartime poster’s impact was immediate but fleeting, which meant it had to be clear, concise and unambiguous. On the other hand, by its nature, it lacked the wearisome verbosity of many of the information leaflets thought necessary by Ministries. And, particularly where subtle pictorial humour was deployed, as with Fougasse’s seminal ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ posters, the results were images that lived on in the memory.
The Ministries of Agriculture, Food and Information, as well as the War Office, all engaged artists and graphic designers to design posters. Many of these turned out to be works of enduring quality and appeal. For artists, this war work was a life-saver. In late 1939, most were facing a crisis. Almost overnight people stopped buying paintings, since war conditions breed uncertainty and a loss of confidence on the part of those with the money to spend on art. Exhibitions became more difficult to stage and commercial art studios also suffered and were forced to lay off staff. Fortunately, artists found a champion in Sir Kenneth Clark,54 who was Director of the National Gallery at the outbreak of war – as well as Director of the Film Division of the Ministry of Information. Gathering together old friends and colleagues, such as Paul Nash, Dame Laura Knight and Henry Moore, into a committee, Clark persuaded the Ministry of Information to fund the modest administration of what became known as the Central Institute of Art and Design, based at the National Gallery, whose task was to introduce potential artists to the appropriate ministry departments. The idea was that CIAD would ‘act as a centre of information and as a clearing house on all matters relating to art and design and to diffuse such information in the interests of artists and designers’.55 CIAD liaised with government committees, in particular the Ministry of Information’s War Artists’ Advisory Committee, also chaired by Clark. As it turned out, only a very few well-known artists, such as Edward Ardizzone and Sir Muirhead Bone, were given contracts and paid a salary. Most artists and cartoonists were only commissioned for specific projects.56
Without doubt, Abram Games was one of the most talented and successful of wartime poster artists. Of Polish-Jewish descent, he was born in the East End of London. After a brief period at art school, in 1932 he went to work for Askew Younge, a commercial art studio, but was sacked four years later for being unruly. He was told by his boss that he would never make a poster designer as he was not humble enough, to which Games replied: ‘I am humble only before God.’57 He became a freelance designer, eventually finding work from London Transport and the Co-operative Building Society. By the time he was conscripted in June 1940, at the age of twenty-six, twenty-four of his posters had been published.
Initially, Games was a private in the 54th Division, detailed to draw maps. However, in early 1941, his fortunes improved when the army decided it needed a professional designer to draw posters, and his name came first, alphabetically, on their list. He was interviewed by the public relations department at the War Office and made up to a corporal, and once he had retrieved his drawing instruments from the cellar of his bombed-out home in the East End, he set to work in an attic room at the War Office. By the end of the war he had designed one hundred information posters concerning many aspects of army life, from cleanliness to handling ordnance safely.
In 1942, he designed two posters with a horticultural theme, the aim being to inspire troops to grow vegetables in their camps. One shows a plot of cultivated land, with young green plants in rows, and a garden fork and spade standing upright holding up a table, above which they transform into a kitchen fork and knife. In between the cutlery is a plate of vegetables, a mug and an army cap. The caption reads: ‘Every piece of available land must be cultivated. GROW YOUR OWN FOOD And supply your own cookhouse’. The other – ‘Use Spades Not Ships – Grow Your Own Food’ – depicts a gigantic oval garden spade above rows of greens on the left, joined with a ship’s bow and funnel on the right, above a blue sea.
Games used unexpected colours and sharp lines to depict strange and memorable collisions of disparate ideas. His motto was ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’, and there is a clean spareness about his work which feels modern but which also harks back to Soviet Realism. He was particularly clever in his use of the mutation of forms, for example drawing a sword that gradually morphed into a paintbrush or indeed a spade turning into a ship’s bow.
Games’s daughter Naomi remembers him saying: ‘I wind the spring and the public, in looking at the poster, will have that spring released in its mind. You have to involve the viewer in your thought processes. There will be an inevitable association between image and advertiser. Lettering, to be kept to the minimum, is never to be added as an afterthought.’58 In 1948, Games wrote in the magazine Art and Industry, ‘I felt strongly that the high purpose of the wartime posters was mainly responsible for their excellence.’59 He continued to produce memorable images after the war, in particular the iconic Festival of Britain emblem.
Another poster artist, Hans Schleger, who worked under the name of Zéro, was also Jewish, but in this case a German refugee who had been naturalised in 1939. Two of his posters have a distinctly contemporary feel to them: one is a picture of potato rows with the word ‘food’ composed of vegetables and a large placard reading ‘Grow Your Own’; the other shows a cabbage with a spoon and fork on top placed on a table, and the words ‘Feed Right to Feel Right’ printed as a heading on a newspaper close by.
More conventional in style, but no less memorable, is a poster devised by Peter Fraser of a smiling, pipe-smoking allotmenteer marching along a path with a garden fork over one shoulder, clutching vegetables in one hand and a trug of more vegetables in the other, with allotment sheds in the background. Since this poster was published late in the war, the slogan reads ‘Dig on for Victory’. And who could resist the appeal of John Gilroy’s grinning pig, with the strapline ‘We Want Your Kitchen Waste’, or Lewitt–Him’s60 poster advertising the ‘Off the Ration’ exhibition at London Zoo in October 1941, showing a kangaroo carrying carrots in one paw and a pig, a hen and a rabbit in her capacious pouch?
In April 1940, the artist Duncan Grant, who was a member of Kenneth Clark’s committee, wrote to the Ministry of Information recommending that female artists should also be employed, on the grounds that they would give a different version of wartime life. He was pushing at an open door, because that month Evelyn Dunbar was commissioned to undertake six pictures of women’s work, for a fee of fifty guineas.
Evelyn Dunbar was one of five women chosen by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (there were thirty men), but the only woman to be given six-month-long salaried commissions. She was born in 1906 in Rochester and studied at the Royal College of Art. She had developed an abiding interest in farming and gardening which served her well during the war, and made a modest name for herself in the 1930s, collaborating with others on a series of large-scale murals based on Aesop’s fables at Brockley County School for Boys in Lewisham, London. She also illustrated Gardeners’ Choice, a book describing forty garden plants, as well as the 1938 Country Life Gardeners’ Diary.
From the start Dunbar made it clear to the MoI that she was particularly interested in agriculture and horticulture, so she spent much time recording the work of the Women’s Land Army, in their many and various roles. Her pastoral pictures included Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, Sprout Picking in Monmouthshire, Land Girls Pruning at East Malling and A Canning Demonstration. This last depicted a group of ladies in hats, sitting in rows at one end of a cavernous village hall listening to a demonstrator explaining the finer points of fruit preservation. There is something both tender and wryly humorous in her treatment of the subject. Indeed, her images of a rural Britain at war have something of the neo-romanticism of Eric Ravilious or John Piper.
It was not only artists and graphic designers who were employed in recording and propaganda work; photographers were also considered vital for capturing the evanescent moment, whether it be Tommies making a brew in the Normandy bocage or a woman drinking tea amongst the rubble after a night of air raids. One of these was Cecil Beaton, the fashion and portrait photographer, whom the Ministry of Information employed from July 1940 as an official war photographer. He spent the war capturing images of the Home Front, as well as of troops in the Middle East, China, Burma and India.
In 1943, the MoI asked him to take pictures of the girls at work at the Waterperry School of Horticulture for Women (see Chapter Four). Although Beaton had worked for Vogue magazine before the war, he does not appear to want to make his subjects beautiful, but rather to capture something of their youthful earnestness, as well as a certain shy coquettishness, perhaps inevitable when sheltered young women found themselves under the keen scrutiny of an elegant and well-spoken man. Amongst the extant photographs is one of the Principal, Miss Beatrix Havergal, thinning glasshouse grapes with a forked twig and a pair of fine scissors, and another of her teaching her students to prune pear cordons on a wall. The image of the immaculate and productive kitchen garden, with its straight rows in strong diagonals, is almost painterly in its composition – and must have been the despair of any amateur allotmenteer who saw it. But the grimy hard work and grind is not glossed over: there are pictures of girls bent almost double as they ‘thin’ onions in a field and pick strawberries, or tackle the spraying of fruit trees without any kind of face or hand protection.
Undoubtedly the most famous horticultural image of the war was that of the left boot planted on the spade as it is just about to be pushed down into soil. This iconic picture, with its strong suggestion of Everyman, embodied in a tweedy leg ending in turn-ups and a stout and scruffy boot, under the words ‘Dig for Victory’, depends for its impact and appeal on its simplicity and purposefulness.
There are two separate stories concerning the origins of this image. For a long time it was thought that the boot belonged to a highly experienced and hard-working allotmenteer called William McKie, who was lauded in the Acton Gazette of 7 February 1941 under the headline ‘The Man whose foot all the nation knows’.
However, there may be a stronger claimant to the boot, one Thomas Morgan Jones, who worked for Morgan–Wells, an advertising agency in Chancery Lane. He recalled sketching out a drawing for a photograph and then bringing tweed trousers, a pair of boots and a spade from his home in Sunbury-on-Thames, as well as some soil from nearby Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The soil was placed on a board. A photographer called John Gill captured the image in the studio and added the sky later.61 If you look closely at the image, you have a sense that the spade could not go further into the soil, or perhaps that is simply auto-suggestion. Whatever the truth of the origins of this image, it remains the most powerful visual symbol of the involvement of British gardeners in growing their own food in wartime.