One morning [19 October 1939] Bunyard1 said to me that we would deal with library business in the afternoon. He never came back which was not surprising. When on Air Raid Precautions this early morning someone showed me a newly arrived newspaper reporting the death of a noted rosarian, E. A. Bunyard. ‘Did I know him?’
I went up to the R.H.S. and unfortunately it was true. He did not normally carry a revolver but kept it in a drawer except when he went out to his orchard to shoot bullfinches, those lovely pests of fruit trees in bloom. Evidently he had brought it to London with a set purpose. He went to the Royal Societies Club and there shot himself.2
E. A. BUNYARD was not the only nurseryman to feel bleak about his future at the outbreak of war, and probably not the only one to take his own life. But he was a particularly important loss to horticulture: his knowledge of fruits and roses was encyclopaedic, he was a highly skilled communicator and, before he developed money troubles, had given much time freely to help the Royal Horticultural Society. He exemplified the best, most public-spirited kind of nurseryman, the sort who would have an important part to play in wartime, sitting on the County War Agricultural Executive Committees and giving expert, disinterested advice.
Bunyard had known from his experience of the First World War that commercial nurseries do badly when wars are fought, however much amateur gardeners wish to continue to cultivate their gardens in peacetime ways. At the beginning of the Second World War, nurseries tried to continue business as usual, but most soon saw the necessity of moving over to food production, or were forced by the county War Ag to do so. In the process, they lost much rare and valuable stock, and usually money as well, since decorative plants could be sold for more than vegetables.
The gardening writer Stephen Cheveley visited a local nurseryman just a week after war was declared:
There we were, surrounded by his gardens, full of autumn flowers, and he puzzling as to what crops he should grow to keep the place alive during the war. The greenhouses must go for tomatoes. The land would have to carry onions, salad crops, and perhaps cauliflowers and other brassicas. But the big problem was that the place was not laid out on a sufficiently large scale to permit using horses, and the necessary implements, even if he had them. All the work was done by hand and it would not pay to produce vegetables entirely by hand labour.
He was so cheerful and philosophical about the whole business that I came away feeling much better about things in general and rather virtuous in having made a start by uprooting my own flowers.3
If the nurseryman was cheerful, he was probably in a minority, for few can have had illusions about what was to come.
In many counties, the War Ags established horticultural subcommittees to oversee the transfer from growing ornamental stock to food production. Initially, the government allowed nurseries to retain up to 75 per cent of their pre-war area under glass for non-bulb flowers and 50 per cent outside, but there was to be no new planting of perennials or nursery stock,4 and what nursery stock there was should only take up 10 per cent of the acreage. For those nurseries which boasted a list of thousands of different species and cultivars, such as Woods of Woodbridge in Suffolk,5 that was a disaster. Five of the seven glasshouses, which once contained a range of indoor decorative plants, were converted to tomato houses.6 Only two glasshouses were retained for the propagation of decorative plants, and the cold frames were used to grow cucumbers. Those employees that remained would have to be retrained to grow vegetables. True, there was some help available in this changeover: at the beginning of the war, the distance-learning specialists at the Horticultural Correspondence College in Winchester prepared a non-examination course in commercial fruit and vegetable production, which was suitable for nursery workers. The college also produced a leaflet entitled ‘The Professional Gardener at War’.
A number of nurseries specialised entirely in roses, the most popular of all shrubs grown in the garden. Harry Wheatcroft, the rose-grower and breeder from Nottinghamshire, famous for his handlebar moustaches and loud-checked suits, expressed the nurseryman’s predicament very well:
We put the plough through a field of some hundred thousand [rose] trees – a heartbreaking job.7 We tore from the greenhouses the bushes that were to give us blooms for the spring flower shows, and so made room for the more urgent bodily needs of the nation.
Pigs now wander about where our Polyantha roses bloomed. There’s wheat and barley where acres of Hybrid Teas coloured the land – even the humble cabbage stands where standard roses once held majestic sway. The odour of our glasshouses has changed too. Here half a million onion plants have taken the place of the roses. They, in turn, will be succeeded by tomato plants and fruit; then lettuce, while the light still holds, and afterwards the humble mustard and cress . . .
All nurserymen in every county are making these drastic changes; much beauty has been destroyed and there’s no need to pretend that it hasn’t meant a heavy financial loss. Carnations, roses, flowering plants, trees and shrubs yield a good deal more in cash per acre than the crops and vegetables I’ve mentioned. However, our actions today can’t be measured by money, and perhaps we should be proud that our business has found us in charge of a small piece of British soil that we can now use for the country’s good.8
This destruction, he wrote after the war, had cost the business over £100,000.9
Cheals of Crawley was a large, family-run nursery concern that had been founded in the 1860s at Lowfields, close to where Gatwick Airport now sprawls. It had a varied clientele, including some of the largest country estate owners in the south of England, and even had a thriving garden design service department, which laid out the Italian Garden at Hever Castle, amongst others. The nursery staff worked with the greatest of the pre-war landscape architects: Thomas Mawson, Sylvia Crowe10, Brenda Colvin and Geoffrey Jellicoe. The Cheal family were Quakers and their business practices were predicated on a strong community ethic.
The war caused a considerable interruption to their business, especially in the garden design department. Cheals no longer had the opportunities to advertise their wares and speak to potential customers at the big flower shows like Chelsea, which was where they had wooed the pre-war amateur gardener. Perhaps influenced by their Quaker ideals, the company refused to allow the quality to decline: there was ‘still a Cheals way of doing things’.11 But maintaining standards was well-nigh impossible with staff numbers so much reduced. The company switched to food production, but was permitted to keep its large stock of fruit trees, which were gradually sold during the five years of war. The staff also lifted, and presumably destroyed, many trees and shrubs from the fields, to free up land to grow cereals, including oats to feed the five horses that were retained for carting, since petrol was so hard to come by.
An analysis of the value of stock and crops shows starkly how much ornamental nurseries lost financially when they switched to food production. In 1941, the Cheals nursery stock was worth £15,500, while food crops brought them a mere £400. In 1942, the stock value had fallen to £12,700 while food crops went up to £1,600. The nursery grew potatoes, which netted £6 a ton, sugar beet at £4 a ton, and sweetcorn, which was sold to the Canadian troops stationed around Crawley.
The glasshouse space, as in most nurseries, was filled with tomato plants. Tomatoes were the most profitable food crop by some distance, even though their cultivation required considerable modifications to the dahlia greenhouses. In 1942, Cheals produced – indoors at Lowfields and outdoors on the lighter land at their nursery at Pulborough – ten and a half tons of tomatoes, which sold for £90 a ton.
Early in the war, Cheals was also designated the local ARP headquarters, so time had to be spent filling sandbags and equipping the offices with special telephones and first-aid supplies. In early 1944, the head ARP warden, who was also the Cheals chief clerk, was cycling home after an air raid when a delayed-action incendiary bomb detonated as he rode past and killed him. That summer, substantial damage was sustained when a local ack-ack gunner brought down a V-1 flying bomb, which damaged glasshouses and buildings and narrowly avoided harming some of the workers. These occasional, but very real, dangers were the lot of all nurseries based in the south-east of England.
Sunningdale Nurseries in Berkshire was a smaller concern than Cheals and its wartime problems were proportionately greater. Apart from the rhododendron wood, which did not require much maintenance, the rest of the nursery was ‘a sea of weeds and scrub. The propagating was confined to a few bell jars, the larger beds overgrown and overrun by weeds, and there were no frames or greenhouses.’12 This was a nursery whose infrastructure was already neglected, but the war vastly exacerbated the problem. However, as so often happened at the time, a keen plantsman saved the day: in this case, Louis Gray, the manager, who ‘kept his eye on the numerous special forms and seedlings that amounted to so much of the basic material in rhododendron collections through this long period and indeed is still unsurpassed’.13
As time went on, the restrictions on nurseries grew steadily tighter; so much so that by 1942, only 10 per cent of glasshouse space could be allocated to permanent flower crops, and only a quarter of open land could be used for raising flowers. This order hit bulb nurseries very hard, and therefore particular areas of the country, such as Cornwall and Lincolnshire, where the daffodil growers were clustered together. That year, Mr E. Watts of Devoran, Cornwall, told a radio audience:
Next week I’m hiring in a tractor to plough . . . under daffodil bulbs in fields which will be carrying a corn crop this summer, followed by cabbages next winter. Ploughing under these bulbs means a tremendous loss to me. We flower farmers have been a lifetime building up our stock of daffodils, and the bulbs represent much of our capital. I’ve already ploughed out practically half what I had, and you can quite imagine how I feel towards this utter destruction. The bulbs have to lie out in heaps to rot. But that doesn’t count much in wartime.14
Some nurserymen went further than was strictly required by the War Ags. Angus Wilson, a well-known iris breeder, was one of these. A fellow nursery owner, Olive Murrell of The Orpington Nurseries, wrote to the artist Cedric Morris, who bred irises as well as painting them, bemoaning the fact that Wilson had ploughed in all his irises for potatoes.
In fact I feel so dreadfully upset . . . that I have not replied [to him] for fear I say too much and get him on the raw and he tells me to mind my own business!!! As he had seven acres surely he could have kept the cream of them in one acre and given the rest to Potatoes. I really think he must have quite lost all proportion. I know how difficult it was to keep quite sane at the beginning of the War, but after all his years of work and the fine collection he had amassed it does seem quite mad to destroy the whole lot for Potatoes.15
For nurserymen specialising in large nursery stock – magnolias, rhododendrons and camellias, which were the staples of woodland gardens, for example – a decade might pass before plants were big enough for sale, so this switch to food production was especially damaging. It really was small wonder that some nurserymen gave up the struggle and preferred to sell their nurseries – usually for a knockdown price. The number of notices advertising the sale of nurseries in the specialist press rose sharply during the war.
Glasshouses were a particular liability for nurserymen and market gardeners during the war, as they became harder or even impossible to heat, especially after stringent fuel restrictions were introduced. Even when ‘cold’, they still needed to be repaired, and both glass and timber were in progressively shorter supply. There were many acres of glasshouse along the southern coastal strip – where sunshine hours are highest – and these were especially vulnerable to damage from bombs, especially ‘doodlebugs’, which often ran out of fuel and plummeted before they reached their target, London.
Not all nurseries and market gardens were situated in the countryside; a number were near or even in big cities, and here bombers naturally also caused problems, for greenhouses in particular. Gordon Veitch, who owned a market garden in Birmingham, had to contend with forty bombs falling within 400 yards of his property during the war, and much of his time was taken up replacing glass in the greenhouses. One Sunday, his entire family spent the day picking pieces of glass out of a chrysanthemum crop.
Commercial operations were closely overseen by the paid War Ag advisers, whose tasks ranged from detailing every holding and plotting the fields on a map, to discussing with growers the niceties of crop rotation and notifying the authorities of derelict land that could be brought back into cultivation. These advisers also had to enforce the often unpopular regulations. For example, Hubert Taylor, who oversaw 4,000 horticultural growers in one area of Hampshire, had the unenviable job of telling sweet violet nurserymen that all their stock had to be thrown away in favour of a more useful crop.16 Strawberry growers too were to get rid of most or all of their stock and instead grow potatoes, runner beans, ridge cucumbers for pickles, and tomatoes, since the Ministry of Agriculture considered strawberries to be a ‘luxury’. As the operation’s profits would usually decline substantially as a result, the adviser’s job required a good deal of sensitivity. Nor would everybody toe the line: one grower in Somerset was fined £10 plus costs in the magistrates’ court in February 1941 for cultivating strawberries instead of cabbages on a quarter-acre of land.
In the early days, the government did not sufficiently appreciate just how short of imported fruit the nation would become and, at least initially, orchard fruits were no more favoured than strawberries, especially because many commercial orchards were neglected during the 1930s and it would take time, money and skilled labour to bring them back to optimum fruiting. The Ministry ordered that derelict orchards be grubbed up and potatoes grown there instead, and no new fruit trees were to be planted unless authorised by the War Ags. Where existing fruit orchards did survive – as in Kent and Herefordshire particularly – the fruit had often to be picked by city dwellers who heeded the call to ‘Lend a Hand on the Land’ and spent their summer holidays in the country. (They also helped get the harvest in.)
In the case of derelict or abandoned land, advisers, such as Ron Sidwell of Worcestershire, would generally recommend that a local grower take it over after the War Ag had sent its Machinery Unit to clear the trees and scrub, and Land Girls had done the initial manual cultivation. Sidwell’s tasks also included lecturing growers new to vegetable crops on pest control together with other vital cultural information.
Sidwell recalled after the war that nurserymen who had turned to growing vegetables from flowers could be devious. They would cultivate pelargoniums amongst their lettuces and cabbages, so that it was very difficult for him to estimate what acreage there was under flower cultivation, and whether it was more than the 10 per cent allowed.17 This kind of deception was strongly deprecated by the authorities.
These horticultural advisers, especially the younger women ‘straight out of college’, did not always impress the people they went to see, among them Harry Fox at Lulworth Castle. No doubt he took his tone from his superiors: ‘Some days quite unexpectedly a young woman from County Hall in Dorchester would make an unannounced visit to see if all the available ground was cultivated and planted up. These “advisers” were well meaning [but] knew almost nothing about the “land” and its seasons. They had been hurriedly trained, had never used a spade or a pair of secateurs and were thoroughly unpractical.’18 This seems harsh, but such a judgement may have to do with the fact that this adviser wanted Harry’s boss to plant tomatoes in the vinery, when he knew that the vine leaves would make it too shady for them to thrive. When the adviser came again and saw thin, etiolated plants, she accused the head gardener of not feeding them enough. Perhaps in that case, Harry Fox had a point.
Generally, the changeover to food production was easier for the workers in market gardens and nurseries, used to large-scale growing, than for those who had worked in country houses and suburban mansions before the war. In September 1941, when Muriel Green became an under-gardener on a large estate in Suffolk that had been taken over by the army, she complained that, after what she had experienced in a private garden, ‘the work is far messier and different in a commercial garden. I prefer the neat particular methods I was trained to.’19 Inevitably, most private estates were becoming messy and different, especially if they had turned more or less completely to food production.
Commercial nurseries and market gardens were just as badly hit by the compulsory conscription of young men as farms were, perhaps even more so since it was sometimes possible for a farmer to persuade the county War Ag to reserve one son at least to continue to work at home. So market gardens came to be largely staffed by girls of the Women’s Land Army. On the whole, these girls took to the work since, unlike on many small farms, there were often a number of like-minded, or at least like-aged, girls to befriend, and fun could be found in the strangest places. And the work varied through the year, even if certain jobs were loathed. The most unpopular was undoubtedly the picking of Brussels sprouts, since it had to be done in all weathers in winter, and the girls could not wear gloves since these became wet and then froze. It was all right once the feeling had entirely left the hands, but many a Land Girl could have wept as her hands thawed out at dinner time.
Beryl Robe joined the Women’s Land Army in December 1941, just before her eighteenth birthday, and was sent to a large and well-known market garden in Milford, Surrey, owned by F. A. Secrett,20 who was sufficiently well-regarded to be asked to give advice to the RHS and MAF for their bulletins. The market garden was over 100 acres in size, and Beryl worked in the company of about twenty other girls of a similar age. She recalled later that ‘vanners’ – horses that pulled carts – were still used, although tractors were increasingly replacing them.
The work could be extremely heavy, in particular the lifting and moving of Dutch lights over frames of lettuce seedlings, which would later be planted out in the fields. There were at least a dozen banks of frames, each one over a cricket wicket21 in length, with forty or fifty Dutch lights. Lettuces were one of Secrett’s main crops. ‘I can remember very long, hot summer days spent cutting many hundreds, going down lines of lettuce feeling each heart with the back of my knuckles to make sure it was firm enough and ready to be cut for market.’22 She also cut up rhubarb crowns and left them outdoors in boxes to catch the frost, before planting them out in rows in the field. This was to force them into precocious growth, so that they would command a higher price in the shops.
The girls picked beans and peas on a piecework basis, paid by each 28 lb box. They would stay at the Land Army hostel at the weekends to gather these crops, earning almost as much in a couple of days as they did in the rest of the week.
For the owners of commercial operations, however, the new workforce could pose problems. Willie Barker, a market gardener from Walton-on-Thames, had to depend on a very motley labour force, about which he complained: Land Girls, Romany gipsy women camped nearby, recuperating Welsh Guardsmen from nearby Sandown Park, and volunteers from the Surrey Land Club, who were mainly office girls who liked to help out at weekends. These girls were very willing but inexperienced, and did not always know the difference between a weed and a young carrot.
Market gardens like Secrett’s and Willie Barker’s sent their produce to Covent Garden. Barker took to driving there in the daylight during the Blitz, rather than before dawn, but the journey was often made very fraught and circuitous by recent bomb damage. Smaller or more remote operations tried to sell their crops locally, if they possibly could, to avoid the difficulties and expense of long journeys. For example, before the war there had been a Waterperry stall at Swindon market; in wartime this was switched to Oxford, because it was much nearer to Waterperry. This stall became famous in the area for the quality of the fresh fruit and vegetables sold there, as well as the cut flowers, plants and certificated virus-free raspberry canes. All this produce had to be dug up, counted, tied and put in the marketing shed the day before, ready to be placed on the van early in the morning. Ursula Maddy, a student at Waterperry during the war, recalled:
Anyone who has been involved in the marketing of vegetables, or bunching flowers or tying up bundles of raspberry canes will know how important it is to be able to count . . . If asked for example to pull four dozen bunches of baby beetroot – the dozen still reigned supreme at that time – the marketer would first cut forty-eight ‘strings’, short lengths to be used for tying the bunches, not too long as that would be wasteful of string, and not so short as to be fiddly and time-consuming. The ‘strings’ were then tucked into the belt and the marketer stood astride the row of beet, pulled the six largest within reach, tied them neatly and always with two turns round the necks, and dropped the bunch at the side of the row . . . The bunches were then picked up, counted and packed neatly into the wooden bushel boxes, all of which were marked with the school’s name; the produce was finally hauled up through the gardens on flat trolleys to be washed in the marketing shed sink.23
Upwey Nurseries, near Weymouth, sold its produce directly from the glasshouses. Mrs B. M. E. Male joined the Land Army in February 1943 and was sent there to help grow tomatoes. The tomato seed was sown in old wooden fish boxes (a feature of living near the coast) and put in a propagating house; seedlings were then potted on into five-inch pots and either sold to amateur gardeners to grow on or planted out in the two other houses.
The workers sold tomato fruits to the public every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 6.30 a.m., having picked them the previous day and weighed them into 1 lb bags. The price was fixed – regardless of whether the tomatoes were grown under glass or in the open – by the Ministry of Food, at 1s.8d per bag. Even at that time of the morning there was always a queue of people already waiting when the staff arrived for work, and they would sell 600 to 700 lbs a day.
One year at Upwey, the glasshouse tomato plants developed a disease early in the season, so Mrs Male’s superior planted cucumbers in the glasshouses instead. ‘Of course my Boss had to go to court as he had broken the law but he was only fined a small amount. He made quite a packet from his “mistake”, well worth while and the people enjoyed the cucumbers.’24 This illustrates the insouciance with which generally law-abiding people often broke emergency wartime regulations, and how they viewed being ‘had up’ for it. That is perhaps not to be wondered at, since people’s lives were circumscribed by so many regulations, often applied in an infuriatingly bureaucratic, if not actively draconian, manner. Indeed, the rise in crime figures in the early years of the war was largely the result of there being so many more laws to break.
Commercial market gardens tended to be one-site operations and often highly individual in their approach. Not so the Land Settlement Association, which was run co-operatively, with a number of smallholders based on one of several sites. The tenants of the LSA more than repaid the government’s faith in them, although this may have much to do with the fact that all new smallholders appointed in wartime were men with existing horticultural or agricultural skills. In a debate on ‘post-war work’ in the House of Lords in February 1944, the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine recounted to the House the results of a survey of 550 LSA tenants. He told their Lordships that after wages, rents, taxes and other costs had been deducted, each tenant made an average profit of £418 a year, equivalent to more than £16,000 today.
The LSA’s output of important produce climbed substantially between 1939 and 1943. For example, in that period receipts from the sale of pigs, poultry, eggs and crops nearly doubled. Between 1940 and 1943, sales of tomatoes and lettuces rose more than five times, and those of onions twelve times. Even taking into account the increase in prices of vegetables during that period, these were still substantial gains in productivity.25 This is impressive considering that the smallholdings were only five acres in size, although the tenants had the advantage of being part of a large co-operative.
Back garden and allotment growing could only ever augment the efficient commercial growing and distribution of vegetables and fruit, especially for the urban population. Commercial gardening operations had access to fuel to heat glasshouses, stronger insecticides and greater supplies of fertilisers. The varieties of vegetables grown were often not the same as those employed by amateurs, since yield took precedence over taste, and neither were cultivation methods or machinery.
This was one reason why there were a number of large-scale seed houses – Suttons, Carters, Thompson and Morgan, and Webbs being the best known – which catered specifically for the amateur market. These concerns sold their seed through both horticultural sundries shops – of which there was at least one in every town – and hardware shops, as well as by mail order. Cuthbert’s sold much of their seed through the high street retailer Woolworth’s at 1d a packet. Other wartime seedsmen which, like Cuthbert’s, no longer exist included Dobbie’s of Edinburgh,26 Sowerbutts of Ashton-under-Lyne, Alfred Dawkins of Chelsea and Ryder and Son of St Albans.
The larger seed firms such as Suttons sent out coloured brochures or catalogues each year, mainly in late autumn, so that gardeners could choose what they wanted during the slack period in winter. (Head gardeners often tackled this task on Boxing Day.) These brochures became very thin during the war, and what illustrations survived to illuminate the text were in black and white. In 1943, the government insisted that catalogues should only be sent out to customers who specifically requested them, in order to try to cut down on waste paper. Vegetable seed catalogues were free, but flower ones cost 1d.
Suttons sold most of its seed by mail order, but also some through retail outlets such as Barrow’s Stores in Birmingham and Messrs E. Dingle in Plymouth, as well as the Suttons office and shop at 69 Piccadilly in central London. The company could call itself the ‘Royal Seedsmen’ because it was ‘by appointment’ to George VI. In the autumn of 1941, the foreword to the main catalogue for 194227 was entitled ‘Food for Thought – Thought for Food’, and was accompanied by a picture of broccoli being harvested in a field, with horses pulling a cart – and a formation of Spitfires flying overhead, just in case the point was missed. The foreword began:
During the past year this island has been a fortress – a fortress which stands firm today notwithstanding the fact that the enemy has violated so many of the laws of war in his efforts to break the spirit of our people. It may truthfully be said that the spirit of England has never been more sure and steadfast than at this hour of destiny. While our brave men do battle with the enemy and the dwellers in our great cities stand up to attack, it is the bounden duty of those who have the smallest space to cultivate, to do so intensively, in order that the brave may be fed and that the life line of the Atlantic may not be unduly strained. ‘I vow to thee my country all earthly things above Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.’28
The use of the words ‘bounden duty’, a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, together with the quotation from a well-known hymn, gives a pointer to the religious convictions of the Suttons in the business: ‘Mr Phil’ Sutton, his son, Owen,29 and two nephews, Martin and Noel.
A study of the 1942 Suttons catalogue reveals that a number of seed varieties which were popular then are still widely grown by gardeners today: parsnip ‘Tender and True’, radish ‘French Breakfast’, perpetual spinach, turnip ‘Early Snowball’, tomato ‘Sutton’s Abundance’, carrot ‘Sutton’s Champion Scarlet Horn’, cucumber ‘Sutton’s Improved Telegraph’ and cabbage ‘Improved Winnigstadt’. If a particular strain of a cultivar had been bred by the Suttons plant breeders, the firm was bound to add the fact to the vegetable’s name. The firm sold vegetable seed collections at a variety of prices, depending on the number of cultivars, from 8s.6d (6s. for the small garden) up to 42s. It also sold asparagus crowns, sea kale roots, strawberry plants, like ‘Royal Sovereign’ and ‘Cambridge Early’, Jerusalem artichokes, pot and sweet herbs, and seed potatoes, such as ‘Arran Pilot’, ‘Majestic’, and ‘King Edward VII’.
Flowers were relegated to the back of the catalogue but still consisted of an extensive variety of annuals, both hardy and half-hardy, as well as alpines and perennials. The gardener could also buy a collection suitable for an unheated greenhouse. Gardeners were advised to plant half-hardy annual seed in the ground late in the spring, on the assumption that they would have no opportunity to germinate it under glass.
Suttons also sold flower bulbs and perennial plants. Fifteen shillings would buy twelve ‘Good varieties, our selection’ of delphiniums, while 27s.6d bought twelve ‘Better varieties, our selection’ and 54s. ‘Newer varieties, our selection’. It is tempting to think that customers were throwing good money away by buying the ‘Good varieties, our selection’.
Suttons were substantial grass seed merchants as well, even providing a ‘Cumberland-turf mixture’ – highly recommended for golf courses – which the catalogue assured the customer would produce ‘a sward similar in character to sea-washed turf’. For the home gardener, they advertised a mixture suitable for tennis and croquet lawns.
The list of horticultural sundries is intensely appealing to any keen gardener: serge aprons for 12s.6d while best shalloon cost 13s.6d, both requiring three clothing coupons; bamboo canes; trug baskets; metal foil bird scarers; birch and palm besom brooms; galvanised buckets; glass cloches; three types of glove (Ladies’ Gauntlet, Ladies’ Chamois and Men’s Hedgers); hydrangea colorant; wall nails; garden nets; seed sowers; wasp and fly traps, and Haws’ galvanised watering cans in three-, four-, six- or eight-quart sizes, all with both a fine and a coarse ‘rose’. It was even possible to buy sterilised potting soil at 3s.6d a bushel. However, I suspect the most helpful equipment for the urban gardener was the Universal Pump sprayer, with four feet of rubber hose, two feet of brass lance, and a spray nozzle and jet, advertised as ‘Very useful also in case of Air Raid fire’.30
Like Cheals, Suttons boasted a garden design and construction department. ‘Customers are offered practical service of the highest standard and we cordially invite inquiries for making new gardens or for re-designing present ones to suit war conditions.’31
As with so many other horticultural operations, these seedsmen became heavily dependent on female labour. One employee was Lillian Harbard, a city girl who had worked for the matchmakers Bryant and May in Bow, east London; this unpleasant occupation was made much more so by the bombing of the East End. In early 1942 she joined the Land Army, since, understandably, she wanted to leave London to work in the country. She was sent to work for Suttons Seeds at their Slough trial grounds, growing vegetable plants for seed. (She put on three stone in weight and was much healthier as a result.) The gardeners harvested the plants in the autumn, using billhooks, then laid them out to dry. They threshed the bigger seed with a small machine in the field, and the small seed with old-fashioned flails in the barn. Then they bagged the seed up and sent it to the Reading headquarters, where there were cleaning machines. They also grew flowers on the trial grounds and collected the seed, but only enough to keep the strains going until the war was over.
In order to try to minimise the damage bombing might do to the company’s site, Suttons had a number of contingencies in place before the war started. By May 1939, twenty-four volunteer firemen, sixteen air-raid wardens, eight decontamination officials and sixteen first-aiders had been recruited from the workforce. In this regard, Suttons was very similar to thousands of other medium-sized businesses situated in provincial towns. The firm’s patriotism extended to storing 1,000 tons of coal for the Ministry of Fuel on part of the company’s sports ground, between the bowling green and the workers’ allotments. When Reading town centre was bombed on 10 February 1943, a secret radio station was damaged. Ten days later it was transmitting again from a small room in the glasshouse complex at the Suttons trial grounds.
Because the Chelsea Flower Show was cancelled during the war, there were none of the magnificient displays of flowers and vegetables that had so distinguished the company in the pre-war era.32 Despite that, shortage of labour meant that Suttons was forced to try to get the seed testing done earlier in the year, so that there was not too much rush in the busy autumn and winter selling period.
By the summer of 1942, seed itself was in short supply. Before the war, a large percentage of that sold had been imported from countries like North Africa and Italy, which had a better and more reliable climate for seed growing. British winters made it impossible, for example, to produce cauliflower seed because the heads died in cold weather. However, by the third year of the war, those countries were in the thick of the fighting. By early March 1942, Suttons had already sold out of runner bean, onion, leek, early potato and cress seed, and deliveries of other seeds to customers were taking three weeks. It was not a happy situation. However, only in the following autumn did the exigencies of trading in wartime surface openly, in the 1943 brochure: ‘Orders will be fulfilled from first-class stocks, but under present conditions we cannot undertake to handpick seed to the standard which has been customary in the past.’ For a company that began trading in the 1860s and took pride in being the Royal Seedsmen, that must have been very difficult to admit.
The larger items, such as seed potatoes, were sent to customers in jute or hessian bags, but these became so scarce that by 1942 the customer was paying a deposit of a few pence on them: ‘It is of National Importance that sacks and bags be returned to us, when the Deposit Charge for same will be credited.’33 By the time of the next annual catalogue, the customer was reminded of this ‘Under the conditions of The Control of Textile Bags (No. 1) Order, 1943 . . .’ an example of Whitehall micromanagement if ever there was one.
North Americans were very generous in sending seed to Britain to augment depleted stocks at home. Unlike plants, seed did not present any phytosanitary challenge, and was also easy to transport in bulk. By January 1943, ninety tons of American-raised seed had been distributed to members of the National Allotments Society. Seeds came in collections in boxes, and included the name and address of the donor, which often initiated thank-you letters from grateful recipients. Some of the seed was unfamiliar to British gardeners, and some, like sweetcorn, did not grow very well in a cooler climate. Seed also arrived from the Dominions, including Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and in this case it was channelled through the Royal Horticultural Society to prisoner-of-war camps in Europe (see Chapter Ten).
The success of food production in market gardening and commercial horticultural enterprises can, at least to some extent, be gauged by the size of acreage devoted to it during the war. Between 1936 and 1938, more than a quarter of a million acres on average were under vegetables, but this had almost doubled to just over half a million acres in 1945. The potato acreage of 600,000 acres also doubled. On the other hand, the amount of fruit grown hardly changed in the six years of war. The worst affected nurserymen were those specialising in ornamental stock. Flowers and nursery stock declined from a high of 25,000 acres in 1939 to 18,000 in 1940, 14,000 in 1941, 12,000 in 1942, and 9,000 in 1943 and 1944. In other words, the overall ornamental acreage in 1942 was less than half its pre-war level.34 This was almost all as a result of the increasingly restrictive regulations issued by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Only in 1945 did the acreage begin to climb slowly once more. By then, commercial nurserymen and seedsmen were aware that they would have to make further major adjustments, this time to peacetime conditions. But at least, after the Battle of El Alamein was won and the tide of war turned, so that the prospect of a victorious peace took on a more discernible shape, they could begin to expand, knowing that gardeners would once more be clamouring to improve the look of their flower gardens.