THE TWO YEARS that followed VJ1 Day on 15 August 1945 were, in a number of significant ways, a dreadful time for Britons. True, victory meant peace at last after six weary years, but the demobilisation of the forces was a slow and piecemeal affair, and when they finally got home, service personnel found a very changed physical and economic landscape.
Britain’s blitzed towns and cities required a great deal of reconstruction. Three quarters of a million houses had been badly damaged or destroyed. Many historic buildings had also been reduced to rubble, or were finished off by demolition squads. Materials to repair blitzed dwellings or build new ones were in very short supply. Concrete bunkers, barbed-wire entanglements and forbidding notices disfigured the coastline, city parks and the countryside.
The civilian population was shabby, grey, thin and very tired. There was not much to cheer them up, since there was little to buy in the shops, even if they had money and coupons to spare. The abrupt end of Lend-Lease in August 1945 meant that factories were forced to produce goods for export rather than home consumption in order to generate foreign exchange and pay back the Americans.
There was also precious little for anyone to do in their leisure time and few places to go. Even the weather conspired against them, for January and February 1947 was the snowiest and coldest winter for many years. Matters were made worse because all fuels were severely rationed. People remember feeling everlastingly cold. Only the gradual implementation, between 1944 and 1948, of what came to be known as the Welfare State brightened the prospects for a population that had so enthusiastically embraced its foreshadowing, the Beveridge Report, in 1942.
To add to the communal misery, bread and potatoes were rationed for the first time in 1947. (How Lord Woolton must have disapproved.) Other food supplies were also tight, the shortages exacerbated by the need to try to provide help for shattered European countries. As a result, in August 1946, the Central Office of Information2 sent the BBC a memorandum, prompted by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries’ ‘Dig for Victory – Over Want’ campaign, the name given to the post-war push to keep gardeners producing fresh vegetables and fruit.
According to the COI, the 1946/47 campaign would have two main objects:
(i) To ensure the continued cultivation of vegetable production on existing allotments and, so far as is practicable, to ensure that further allotments are taken up.
(ii) To secure, by more efficient production methods, an increased output from allotments and gardens, especially during the winter months.3
There was a world shortage of bread grains, so farmers had been asked to cultivate a further half a million acres for arable crops, both to provide bread flour and to feed livestock. These were acres which had, partly at least, grown vegetables during the war. So, just at the moment when kitchen gardeners thought they could lay down their hoes, they were told that the need was more urgent than ever.
The memorandum went on:
Since the end of hostilities the production of vegetables by private enterprise has declined and the proposed campaign is intended to re-awaken the public to the gravity of the food situation in relation to vegetables; to stimulate those who have continued to cultivate their allotments and gardens and to encourage those who have, with the conclusion of hostilities, devoted their energies to re-designing their gardens for the growth of flowers, etc., to renew their efforts in the cultivation of vegetables.4
This was probably a pious hope, particularly as the monthly magazine that the Ministry of Agriculture was proposing to issue in order to support the campaign would cost gardeners 6d, and had to be sent away for. The memorandum proposed ‘Dig for Victory – Over Want’ weeks, and announced that there would be film publicity as well as advertisements in newspapers. The BBC was asked to help with broadcasts. However, the anticipated cost of the enterprise was only £30,000, so it was plainly a much scaled-down affair. Apart from Fred Streeter mentioning the campaign once a month in his ‘Fruit and Vegetables’ wireless talk, the BBC does not seem to have been much inclined to promote the government’s efforts. It was hardly surprising. In the slang of the time, everyone was thoroughly ‘browned off’.
Despite that, the Defence Regulations that empowered local authorities to let land for allotments, together with the suspension of restrictions on keeping pigs, hens and rabbits, survived the expiry of the Emergency Powers (Defence) Acts in February 1946. Indeed, they were not allowed to lapse until 1951 because of the pressing need to maintain food production at as high a level as possible.
The figure of three million allotments that Robert Hudson had so optimistically envisaged early in the war had never been anything like achieved. Indeed, it was never much more than half that number, and even that began to decline as peace beckoned, despite the pious intentions of 96 per cent of allotmenteers and 86 per cent of private gardeners who responded to an MAF survey in 19425 to continue food production after the war.
Approximately half a million allotments had disappeared or ceased to be cultivated by 1947. This was mainly due to the rush by local authorities to reclaim the ‘non-statutory’ sites, so that they could build much-needed houses on them, and not just in the big cities that had been bombarded. But there was something else at work here: the allotment seemed intimately associated with the war, upon which most people understandably wished to turn their backs. As the wartime community spirit, born of adversity and a compelling common purpose, gradually seeped away, allotments became almost exclusively the province of older men, who had rediscovered their misogyny now that no one was telling them that everyone had to pull together. By the 1950s, women were far less commonly seen on allotments. As for children, many of them could not wait to give up picking caterpillars off the brassicas. Allotments were associated with ‘make do and mend’ – many an Anderson shelter found its way to an allotment site to be used as a makeshift tool shed – monotonous diets and austerity. More and more allotments became neglected and unkempt, making them progressively less attractive to the disengaged. And there were other factors. Frozen food, for example, was playing an increasingly important role for the housewife: if you could buy peas which, when defrosted and cooked, were as good as, if not better than, those you picked from your allotment, there was less inclination to go on battling with pea moth and greenfly. By 1955, there were only 800,000 allotments; all the wartime gains and more had been lost. School gardens likewise declined after the war, in some places made back into playing fields immediately, in others continued with for a few years yet.
So much for amateurs, who had the choice whether to cultivate a garden or not. The position of established (and would-be) professional gardeners was uncertain and anxiety about future employment widespread. On 6 April 1944, the government had announced plans to provide training for fit men and women released from war service, and this was targeted at agriculture and horticulture as well as other types of industrial employment. A game of ‘pass the parcel’ then ensued between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Labour as to who should arrange this training. In the end, the Ministry of Agriculture took on the responsibility and a conference was organised in March 1945, which included the usual interested parties.6
This conference attempted to look into the future prospects for professional gardening. The members estimated that there were about 80,000 full-time gardeners in post before the war, and anticipated that, in future, rather fewer would be needed for private gardens and estates but that there would be ‘a steady increase in the demand for gardeners in public parks, sports grounds of institutions . . . and cemeteries’.7
As far as training was concerned, Wisley, Kew and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, agreed to instruct men with some previous experience, Kew and Wisley suspending their student gardenership scheme until the supply of government trainees was exhausted – although they did take back those former students whose studies had been interrupted by the war. The conference decided that most training of demobbed novices would have to be done in twelve-month placements at carefully selected horticultural establishments and gardens, with the funding split between state (40 per cent) and employer (60 per cent). The RHS put a notice in the July 1945 issue of the Journal, giving a brief outline of the Ministry’s scheme, and asking Fellows in England and Wales to offer suitable placements if they could. In the event, the Society was more proactive in this matter than were parks administrators, who had to be chivvied. The government scheme started in March 1946. However, it is doubtful whether this initiative made a great deal of difference to the number of trained gardeners.
In 1944, the Ministry of Agriculture had also sought advice, separately, from the Horticultural Education Association about the training of ex-service personnel as ‘jobbing’ gardeners, i.e. men (and they were mostly men) who worked part-time in a number of gardens. The Association was keen to make clear to the Ministry that gardening was not some kind of soft option – ‘Gardening is not light work unless the jobs are specially chosen – the light jobs are few in number and in most cases the employers of jobbing gardeners do the light work themselves’ – and it recommended a minimum of a year’s instruction in a public park or garden, or in a commercial firm which specialised in jobbing gardening and landscaping work.
In a conclusion which shows a lively appreciation of the difficulties, the Association’s Secretary, a Mr G. C. Johnson, wrote:
HEA council hopes that if a scheme is initiated, possible trainees will not be given an unduly optimistic impression of the prospects of jobbing gardening. War-time demands and wages can be no guide to what can be earned in the post-war years. Persons judged to be unsuitable for other jobs by reason of low intelligence, or poor physique should not be encouraged to take up this type of work.
Though sensible, this was bound to be a vain aspiration. He continued: ‘Lastly, to make a success of jobbing gardening demands initiative, a good general knowledge of gardening operations coupled with hard work, and ability and willingness to humour the whims of their prospective employers, who often need help, but not guidance.’8 How right he was, but such pessimism did not augur well for a successful initiative.
At the end of hostilities, the prospects for Land Girls and other female gardeners were even less promising, since many had to give way to returning male employees, especially in commercial operations, and they were not included in any post-war retraining scheme. To add insult to injury, Land Girls were given neither a medal nor any kind of official recognition, or indeed any of the post-war benefits such as resettlement grants to which even civilian auxiliary workers were entitled. Post-war benefits for the WLA were something for which Robert Hudson had fought in Cabinet, but he had come up against the adamantine opposition of Winston Churchill, amongst others.
The Land Girls were not impressed. As one of them wrote: ‘I joined in June 1939. I have lost my pre-war office job . . . my sole souvenir of five and a half years’ loyal service is a rather battered scarlet armlet – not even a discharge badge.’9 The shabby treatment of Land Girls prompted Lady Denman to resign from her position as Director of the WLA in protest, much to her colleagues’ consternation, since she was the public face, and driving force, behind the organisation. In the end, after questions in Parliament, and lobbying, Land Girls were allowed to keep their greatcoats and the government contributed to their benevolent fund. That was all. The WLA was disbanded in November 1950. In 1951, when Lady Denman was invested with the Grand Cross of the British Empire, the King told her, ‘We always thought that the Land Girls were not well treated.’10 It was not until many years later, in 2008, that the 30,000 surviving Land Girls and members of the Timber Corps received a specially designed commemorative badge and certificate.
At one point during the war, Lady Denman had been called down to Longford Castle in Wiltshire to arbitrate in a dispute over wages between Land Girls working on food production for the Earl and Countess of Radnor. Some years after the war, the Dowager Countess wrote:
I remember standing beside our beacon fire on VE night in 1945. We were telling ourselves that the miracle had happened; we were all alive, the house had not been bombed, the troops in it were British and not German, we had won the war! Nevertheless, in all the rejoicing my husband, speaking as the owner of a country house, said to me ‘Now our personal problems begin.’11
The Radnors were by no means alone in feeling a sense of chill foreboding. The country houses and their gardens and parks which had been requisitioned by the government for wartime duties had fared extremely badly. Even those not substantially damaged by heavy war machinery and careless servicemen had not had anything spent on their fabric for six years. Without the kind of maintenance that was routine in peacetime, these estates degenerated very quickly. Those parts of gardens no longer used for food production became hopelessly overgrown even more quickly than the wallpaper curled or the plaster fell. As the garden historian Miles Hadfield put it: ‘The largest, most magnificent house can, with central heating and little else, remain uninhabited with little harm for many months. But an untouched, even merely unmown garden, can become an almost irrevocable wilderness in weeks.’12 That may be a little melodramatic, but the general point is a good one. For some gardens, the point of no return had arrived even before VJ Day was celebrated. For many others, it was only a few short years away.
The owners of requisitioned country houses could ask for government reparations for damage actively caused, or which had come about as a result of lack of maintenance, but that did not solve the real problem, which was the disappearance of the workforce. Servants never returned in pre-war numbers, partly due to rising wages, which made them often unaffordable, and partly because of their own widened horizons. Wages had risen by 50 per cent during the war, while prices had only increased by 33 per cent. Farm rents were low, so land was not generating much wealth; meanwhile this was a time of dizzying hikes in death duties and other taxes. By 1947, supertax on the wealthy had reached 90 per cent. The landowning classes were broke and getting broker. The last thing they wanted was unsustainably large wage bills to perpetuate a way of life that, even to many who were born to it, seemed increasingly anachronistic.
In the largest houses, with the largest gardens, the shortage of skilled gardening labour showed very quickly. A system that had previously demanded such high standards meant that any falling-away was highly visible. The decorative parts of gardens were choked with aggressive perennial weeds from six years of neglect. Moss had spread like a green stain on gravel paths that had once been raked weekly on a Friday afternoon, while shrubs outgrew their space and hedges became unkempt, swiftly shooting up into trees. Tender bedding plants no longer filled the parterres, leaving empty beds to be colonised with weeds. Only the real survivors of the plant world – daffodils and snowdrops, rhubarb, apple trees, bergenias, water irises – continued to flourish year after year. With their boilers cold and pipes furred, the greenhouses were emptied of their dead plants, often leaving only a ‘Black Hamburgh’ grape, its rampant shoots finding their way through the broken panes of the hand-made curved-edged glass. The bothy, where the unmarried gardeners had lived, stood empty or was rented out, while the door of the potting shed hung off its hinges. Inside, the unwanted clay pots lay in their hundreds in rows on the wooden shelving, never to be filled again, while rusting garden tools hung from hooks, no rough hands left to grasp their smooth handles. The hand-made red bricks in the kitchen garden walls crumbled, while algae grew thick in the central pond and the cankered branches of apple trees sloughed their bark. Wanton vandalism often wrecked what decay had not.
At Longford Castle, the Dowager Countess opined:
The flower-garden round the house, lawns, paths and even the gravel in the front and the yard at the back are almost like the rooms you live in; keep them orderly and maintained and they are a pleasure to all, but once they deteriorate they are a depressing burden. As in the house you can reduce them in size, simplify, mechanize, yet it is inevitable that they will remain too big for the owners to do them for themselves. I remember in the war that one hardly noticed the weedy paths between the beds of onions in the rose-garden. After the war it seemed as important to get back good lawns, straight verges and clean gravel as to have flowers again. Lack of order and maintenance can wreck morale both indoors and out.13
That demoralisation was widespread; it took owners of a very particular and unusual stamp not to yield to it.
One garden that had brought in modern machinery during the war to make up for the lack of labour was Levens Hall in Westmorland. But this, predictably, caused a different problem. The head gardener, F. C. King, in answer to an article by G. Copley in The Gardeners’ Chronicle, wrote that his employer now only needed to employ four men, rather than the ten required before the war, if King used new technology to the full:
It would seem to me that I have a tractor which works about four weeks a year, a clipping machine which works five, a sterilizer one, and at least four young gardeners looking for other employment, for I can hardly recommend my employer to retain both them and the machinery. If my experience be duplicated, where does Mr Copley suggest the lads who come back should look for employment, or does he suggest I should get rid of the tools in favour of the lads?14
It was a difficulty, and one all employers had to deal with sooner or later. Most chose the tools.
Ted Humphris and his employer, Mr Cartwright, at Aynhoe Park did not see the end of the army occupation until 1947. The troops left a legacy of concrete emplacements and Nissen huts, although it must be said that the concrete slabs came in useful for laying out a new terrace. Humphris substantially simplified the garden. He mourned the loss of so many fine trees, but managed to get the lawns back in order in a couple of years, grass being such an amenable medium, if mowed frequently. A fierce storm in early 1947 damaged the glasshouses; the peach house was pulled down, its timbers and glass used to repair others and build a new one.
Humphris also began to use machinery. ‘Reluctantly many of the pre-war practices in the kitchen garden had to be abandoned for labour saving reasons. One major change was the use of a motor plough and cultivators instead of spade and rake.’15 But some garden tasks could not be mechanised. ‘The many varied fruit trees trained along the garden walls, which for over a hundred years had provided an abundance of succulent fruit, were torn out of the ground, for no better reason than shortage of labour to attend to their many needs. The war years had certainly hastened the end of the old methods of cultivating and running a garden.’16
As for Ditchley Park, the reign of the Trees did not long survive the war. The couple divorced in 1947, and Nancy married Colonel C. G. Lancaster and moved to Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. In any event, the times were out of joint. The servants who left by 1942 never came back in the same numbers in 1945, and without them, the very particular charm and attraction of Ditchley Park – grand yet luxuriously comfortable – could not survive. Geoffrey Jellicoe, designer of the Italianate parterre, wrote:
After the war Ronald Tree tried to adapt the house to the new economic conditions, but this was not to be. The final decision to leave England came after he had purchased a splendid set of wrought iron gates and stone pillars for the entrance forecourt and was unable to get a permit for their erection (I remember the costs of the material involved was a few pounds and I remember, too, seeing the stonework lying disconsolately on the ground). After this he sold Ditchley17 and retired to Barbados, where I built him a Palladian mansion out of coral, entrance gates and all.18
Although Ditchley Park has survived and flourished as the home of the Ditchley Foundation, the great west parterre has been grassed over.
In 1951, Nancy Lancaster divorced her second husband and in 1954 moved to Haseley Court in Oxfordshire. She retained the famous ‘chess set’ topiary garden that Mr Shepherd, one of her predecessor’s gardeners, had continued to clip, without payment, all through the war years. In the walled garden, she laid out a charming garden in the Sissinghurst style, with the help of the designer Vernon Russell-Smith. After a fire in the big house, she moved into the converted coach house in its grounds, while still somehow retaining control over the walled garden. When I went to work for her in the summer of 1974, there were only two gardeners: Mr Clayton, the Northumbrian head gardener, and a retired farm worker called Tom Chalk. Mr Clayton thought it his duty to teach me the ‘old ways’, as if I were a journeyman improver from fifty years before, so I caught just a last, fleeting glimpse of the system first established in Georgian times.19
It is possible to argue that post-war exigencies ended once and for all the servitude experienced by both indoor and outdoor staff in great houses. Never again would substantial numbers of gardeners be at the beck and call of capricious mistresses and mean masters, trapped in a severely hierarchical system from which it was difficult to escape, even their homes tied to the job, and so lost if the job was lost. But it is also possible to argue that never again would horticulture reach such a high standard of excellence, and that most of those gardeners took enormous pride in their skills and knowledge and did not often feel that their shackles chafed. There may have been more of the latter at the war’s end, but the system had had its day. All that was left on many estates were the ghosts of aproned gardeners carefully closing wooden doors in garden walls against the rabbits at the end of a long day.
There were precious few high-profile champions for these houses and gardens after the war, with the exception of the National Trust and, to a lesser extent, the Ministry of Works, the forerunner of English Heritage. During the war, the National Trust had accepted into its care a number of very fine houses, most usually left or given because of the financial difficulties of the owners, or their conviction that circumstances were going to be so different after the war that hanging on to these heritage pieces was pointless. Among these gifts were Killerton in Devon, Wallington in Northumberland, West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, Charlecote Park in Warwickshire, Blickling Hall in Norfolk, Polesden Lacey in Surrey and Stourhead in Wiltshire. All had very notable parks or gardens surrounding them.
Even someone who did not know what had happened to estate gardens during the war could infer from the substantial number of large country houses that were either sold or allowed to become ruinous and/or demolished in the years after 1945 that the situation was critical. In 1974, it was estimated by the organisers of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s first exhibition on the subject, The Destruction of the Country House, that about 250 houses ‘of architectural and historic importance’ had been lost in the thirty years since 1945. In 2011, John Martin Robinson put the number of English country houses demolished between 1945 and 1955 at nearly 1,000.20 Even if not all of those were of particular architectural and historic importance, that still represents a great loss to the country’s cultural heritage.
Of course, Britain was comprehensively bust in 1945, and the socialist government under Clement Attlee’s premiership was mainly uninterested in underwriting the renovation and renewal of large houses belonging to the aristocracy that his party so heartily disliked. The particularly large number of Victorian houses demolished in the 1950s pricked the conscience of thoughtful people like John Betjeman, who could see their historical, cultural and aesthetic value, but it was an architectural style that was comprehensively out of fashion. The Victorian Society was founded in 1958, to champion the cause of many properties in trouble, but by then it was too late for dozens of them.
After a house’s sale or demolition, the pictures, furniture and books might find other careful owners, but the gardens, being so much more changeable and dynamic, could not be preserved, and the memory of most is now only enclosed in leather-bound albums of monochrome photographs, stuck in the basements of county records offices. Even houses that survived, if they changed their use, lost the gardens they once had. For example, Hewell Grange in Worcestershire, which once had immensely elaborate formal gardens, became a borstal in 1946. The gardens are still tended by prisoners at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, but they would be scarcely recognisable to the Windsor-Clive family who owned them before the war.
There were also a number of gardens famous or noteworthy in their own right which were in need of saving. These gardens the National Trust was very reluctant to consider, since suitable capital endowments were unlikely to come with them.
It was thanks in large part to the purposefulness and vision of the RHS President, Lord Aberconway, as well as that of the National Trust luminary, James Lees-Milne, that a dedicated NT and RHS Gardens Committee was brought into being, with the aim of administering and raising money for the maintenance of a small number of the best gardens in England that could be given to the National Trust. In late 1947, Lord Aberconway called a meeting with Lees-Milne, as well as Dr George Taylor of Kew and the King’s brother-in-law, Major David Bowes-Lyon, who was to be Aberconway’s successor as President of the RHS. They proposed setting up a Gardens Fund. James Lees-Milne was of the opinion that ‘There are thousands of English people who love gardens even more than buildings, and would willingly subscribe to such a fund.’21 This initiative was immensely important as a first step towards creating a climate of interest in, and care for, historic gardens.
Lord Aberconway told the Fellows of the RHS at the Society’s annual general meeting in 1948 that ‘only gardens of great beauty, gardens of outstanding design or historic interest would be considered . . . and those having collections of plants or trees of value to the nation either botanically, horticulturally or scientifically’.22 As it happened, there would be far more gardens with those characteristics to save than the money and will to save them.
Nevertheless, Lord Aberconway mobilised the gardening aristocracy as best he could. Vita Sackville-West made a radio broadcast appeal for donations to the newly formed Gardens Fund. She also suggested that the National Trust approach the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing, which raised money to help retired or sick district nurses. Since 1927, this charity had been supported by grand garden owners when they opened their gardens once a year to visitors, under what was called the Gardens of England and Wales Scheme.23 The Queen’s Institute agreed that, from 1949, a share of the proceeds would go to the Gardens Fund, in return for the Trust actively supporting the Scheme. The arrangement has lasted to this day.
In 1948, the National Trust took on its first garden, Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, which had been developed thirty years earlier by an American, Lawrence Johnston.24 There was no endowment, and in the early years after opening, the costs far outweighed the visitor receipts. In 1949, the garden might see as few as seven visitors in a day, while the bill for gardeners’ wages was £20 10s. a week.25 By 2011, however, the number of visitors had reached 177,000 a year. Lord Aberconway’s own garden, Bodnant, passed to the National Trust with an endowment in 1949. In 1954, another great garden also came to the Trust: Nymans in Sussex.
Acquired gardens provided many different and complex challenges to the National Trust, in particular how to retain the very personal and specific atmosphere created by a garden owner, whilst taking account of plant growth and change over time, as well as the need to provide appropriate public access.26 But from the point of view of conservation and as a spur to garden historians,27 this burden was crucial.
In 1946, to his credit, Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, established a fund designed to help save important houses or landscape for the nation, as a memorial to those killed in the Second World War. This fund – £50 million a year initially – saved a few grand country houses and, with them, their gardens, but it was cut to £10 million in 1957. The 1950 Report of the Gowers28 Committee on Houses of Outstanding Historic or Architectural Interest, which found that the main reason that the great houses were falling into ruin was the ‘burden of taxation’, emphasised the need to preserve both house and setting if estates were to be given to the nation in lieu of death duties. Nevertheless, no one in 1950 could possibly have predicted the renaissance of so many houses that did survive in private hands, thanks to the courage, drive and optimism of their owners, especially the ‘stately home as public leisure ground’ pioneers like the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquess of Bath.29 Not until the early 1980s was their task eased by a more sympathetic tax regime combined with low inflation.
In 1974, the architectural historian John Harris wrote:
There can be no plea for a continuance of the aristocratic tradition, and there can be no government help for any owner who wishes to live an aristocratic way of life. Fortunately most owners of houses open to the public are hard-working and dedicated to the new life for their houses. We can all participate in this life with a sense of national pride in one of the greatest artistic achievements of western civilization. It is surely of immense consequence that this achievement can give pleasure and happiness to millions, who at will can move from noisy dusty cities to enjoy the country house in its park and estate, that perfect union of art with nature.30
This may seem self-evident now, but it certainly did not in the years after the war.
So much for the big houses and their gardens, but the future of gardening in England no longer lay with them. Harry Roberts, a prescient contributor to a book of essays about England published in 1945, wrote:
In the present century Britain has been engaged in two great wars, conducted on novel lines, with novel weapons; the total effect of which on gardening in this country is bound to be immense. Already one sees a great reduction in the number of large gardens in private hands. The cultivation of flowers except on the smallest scale is discouraged, and large estates all over the country are being split up for building development. After the war, nearly all gardens in private hands will be essentially villa gardens or cottage gardens. We shall then see who among us are real gardeners.31
As it turned out, there were some real gardeners, and with the decline or disappearance of many country estates, it was time for plantsmen to take a more important role in the horticultural life of the nation. These were the owners of village manor houses and old rectories, often bought for a song after the war and filled with furniture bought equally cheaply at provincial auctions. These houses possessed smaller gardens than those that surrounded stately homes, and the employed help might be only that provided by a steel worker or farm labourer supplementing his wages on a Saturday morning, or a semi-retired professional gardener. The results might possibly be a Sissinghurst; they would never again be a Chatsworth. Nevertheless, they could be very appealing and were to become attractions to visitors in their own right.
Lionel Fortescue, for example, retired from his career as a ‘beak’ at Eton College in 1945, and moved to the West Country, as it had a kinder climate for gardening than Berkshire. The garden he made around The Garden House, Buckland Monachorum, in Devon, was to become one of the brightest jewels of post-war gardening, and is now administered by a charitable trust and regularly open to the public.
Close in age to Fortescue was Sir David Scott, who retired as head of the Consular Service in the Foreign Office in 1947 to live in one wing of Boughton House in Northamptonshire, which he rented from his cousin, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. There, with his wife, Dorothy, he made, out of a ‘vast thicket’, an informal tree and shrub garden, which became famous amongst gardeners for the quality and rarity of its plants. This garden was created by two people grieving for the loss of their only child, a son killed in North Africa in 1941. They were one couple amongst many to discover the healing qualities of gardening after the war. In 1970, after Sir David’s wife had died, he married Valerie Finnis, head of the alpine department at the Waterperry School of Horticulture, and one of Miss Havergal’s students there during the war. Together, the Scotts continued to develop one of the most highly regarded plantsman’s gardens of the post-war era, a powerful draw for keen gardeners when it opened twice a year for the National Gardens Scheme.
An acquaintance of the Scotts, Maurice Mason, a Norfolk farmer who grew sugar beet and corn in a big way during the war, developed a garden that contained ten glasshouses, including several tropical ‘stove’ houses. He is commemorated in a widely grown begonia that he bred called Begonia x masoniana.
Amongst wartime combatants, Peter Healing of the Priory, Kemerton, in Worcestershire, had used the time he had been forced to spend in a German POW camp to good effect. He recalled later:
By the end of the war I found myself in Germany with only one book, William Robinson’s [The] English Flower Garden,32 perhaps one of the best gardening books ever written, and it was through him that I pictured the form that the borders must take . . . The main border, some 150 feet long and now eight feet wide, was planned to start with grey foliage through white, cream and pink to pale yellow, working up by strong yellows to a crescendo of reds, maroon and bronze. From there it would fade gradually in the reverse order down to whites and greys in the far distance.
The second border was to be whites and creams, with pale pinks and lavender, while the cross-border under the ruin would be every shade of red. It would never become garish or too strong as there are so many really dark reds and bronze flowers and foliage to choose from and these would absorb the heat of the scarlets.
Such ideas were translated into yards of planting plans and proudly transported home at the end of the war. Little was it realized that not only were very few of the plants or seed available but that these quantities would involve much propagation.33
Although William Robinson is the name on the spine of The English Flower Garden, the chapter on colour was in fact written by Miss Gertrude Jekyll. In it she explained her theory of colour and the way it should progress in a border, from the very palest at the end to the hottest colours in the middle, and then gradually pale again. What Peter Healing created at Kemerton was a classic Jekyllian herbaceous border, and one that became famous in the 1980s, when garden photography really began to do justice to the quality of colourist plantings.
Existing gardens happily rescued from neglect after the war, to become appealing destinations for garden visitors, also included Ralph Dutton’s garden at Hinton Ampner House in Hampshire. This garden had been abandoned in wartime to ‘that rough gardener – Mother Nature’.34
At last the sad years of war ended, and in July 1945 I was back in my house gazing out onto the chaos of what had once been a well-kept garden. The wide terrace had been given up to rough grass, trodden by the two hundred little feet of the children who had inhabited the house during the war. We had no machine to do the work, nor petrol had we possessed one, but I was lucky in finding two elderly men expert in the use of the scythe. Thus during the long summer evenings they spent many hours rhythmically mowing the rough herbage – a Millet scene – till the terrace had once again some semblance of a lawn.35
Another contemporary, the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley, remembered in 2001 what it was like when she and her husband, Hugh, moved to Cholmondeley Castle in 1949. ‘When friends came to stay for the weekend, we gave them an axe and a saw, and told them to set to. There was thick scrub of laurel and Rhododendron ponticum everywhere, and clearing took years. Things were funny after the war – petrol was rationed, it was hard to get help, and making a garden was practically unheard of.’36 All these people still employed gardeners, but not on anything like the scale that had been commonplace amongst their class before the war.
In more modest and, of course, far more populous gardens, the process of reclamation could happen much more quickly. Gardeners often could scarcely wait to put back their lawns, take the tomatoes out of the herbaceous border and hide the vegetables once more behind the rustic trelliswork. Nella Last in Barrow-in-Furness wasted no time in getting rid of her poultry and reinstating the lawn. A month before VJ Day, she wrote about wanting to get home from an outing in order to cut and roll the lawn: ‘It was just as lovely in the garden, and work was a pleasure. As the sun cooled, people started to come out to cut the lawn and water seedlings; the music from “Music Hall” drifted out through open casements . . . When I looked out of the back-bedroom window, I could not realise that I’d had an untidy hen-run so recently.’37
Wartime measures might be happily abandoned, but on a Sunday afternoon in the second half of the 1940s, there was precious little else that the householder could do except some kind of gardening. Shops were closed, there were no spectator sports like cricket or horse-racing, and few people had access to what limited television there was. Little wonder, therefore, that gardening flourished, especially the specialisms like rock gardening or rose growing, once the nurserymen had recovered their poise and were sending out plants once more.
At the annual general meeting of the RHS in 1948, Lord Aberconway remarked – to laughter – that somebody had suggested to him that the marked increase in membership of the Society was as a result of austerity and the absence of petrol, so that there was little else to live for. The audience might have thought that comment funny, but it contained a great deal of truth.38
There was no denying that the war had changed private gardening, making it a more communal experience. After the conflict, it gradually became more inward-looking once more, mirroring the increasing introspection of a population which gradually, through the 1950s and 60s, traded many of its former public pleasures for the private delights of the television. Gardening was no longer so obviously a shared activity, where vegetables and cultivation tips were exchanged across the garden fence. In the post-war years, gardens were places where amateur enthusiasts grew perfect blooms of chrysanthemums, dahlias or hybrid tea roses, often for exhibiting in the local flower show, but there to prove individual skills rather than the grower’s attachment to national solidarity or a defiant fist shaken at Adolf Hitler.
One definite boost to gardening, especially commercial growing, was the revival of the Chelsea Flower Show in 1947, much encouraged by the horticulturally sophisticated King George VI. The nurserymen were initially very dubious about whether it was possible, and the show was certainly rather smaller than the pre-war exhibitions. However, Lord Aberconway averred that it was ‘as full of artistry . . . and of interest . . . The exhibitors thought they could not do it, but they rose to the occasion wonderfully and they did it.’39 The Chelsea Flower Show continued to be an important event in the annual ‘London Season’; in those years it was smart to be seen there, since it was not yet the seething mass of humanity that it became in the 1970s.
In the same year, 1947, the RHS published The Fruit Garden Displayed. Like its companion, The Vegetable Garden Displayed, this book remained in print for decades. The Royal Horticultural Society had had ‘a good war’, and peacetime would consolidate its pre-eminence as the main adviser to keen amateur gardeners, in England at least.
Those nurseries which exhibited at Chelsea were facing a very different world. Some embraced the opportunities, while others faltered. For Cheals, an old-fashioned family concern that had prided itself on its high standards of cultivation and its exalted clientele before the war, the winds of change were very cold. Many country estates were broken up, the houses frequently sold for institutional use or carved up into flats, if not demolished, and much land in the south-east of England was sold for housing development. Garden design commissions, which of course had had such a beneficial effect on their nursery plant sales, became decidedly more modest.
Worse still, there was hardly any plant stock left at the end of the war – it had either been sold and not replaced, or had grown too big to be easily sellable – so although there was a sudden substantial demand from gardeners, many nurseries could not meet it. Customers had to order in spring for an autumn delivery, and even had to pay in advance. In desperation, Cheals turned to the Dutch to provide wholesale trees and shrubs, because the wonderfully fertile soil at Boskoop meant that they grew more quickly there.
At Sunningdale Nurseries, which had been in such a sorry state during the war, the future was brighter. James (Jim) Russell set about reclaiming the nurseries, and laid out roads, lawns, show borders and a propagation unit. He also had the sense to employ Graham Stuart Thomas, who was to become the pre-eminent expert on shrub roses, as his manager in 1956.
Generally, the nurseries that recovered best were those that catered for the massed ranks of modest gardeners. Harry Wheatcroft, with his brother, discovered that they had sustained grievous losses amongst rose varieties during the war. He particularly mourned the disappearance of a rose he had bred called ‘Peter Pan’, never to be resurrected. Nevertheless, their nursery recovered quickly, Wheatcroft believed because of the loyalty of pre-war customers, and was soon winning prizes again, notably at the 1949 National Rose Society’s autumn show. The nursery staff also helped to lay out a new trial ground for the National Rose Society, near St Albans. This Society achieved its largest membership in the 1950s. Everybody could grow roses in their gardens, and most people wanted to. Indeed, roses positively thrived in industrial cities before the Clean Air Act of 1956, because the sulphur in the atmosphere kept ‘blackspot’ fungus at bay.
Wheatcroft’s fortunes were also boosted by something that happened at the beginning of the war. As France was about to be overrun, François Meilland, a young rose grower in the south of France, managed to smuggle out – via the American consulate in Lyons – a small package of budded rootstocks of a new hybrid tea rose that had impressed rosarians at a conference in France in the summer of 1939. This rose was remarkable for its healthy and strong growth, and the size and shape of its golden-yellow flowers, with their distinctive and, to my mind, rather dispiriting pink edge. After the war, it was named ‘Peace’, in the English-speaking world at least. Harry Wheatcroft initially bought 10,000 ‘eyes’ (to ‘bud’ onto rootstocks), but the rose’s popularity grew so rapidly that in the end he sold far more than that. ‘Peace’ captured the public imagination, and it was planted in most post-war rose gardens, often no doubt where the wartime vegetables had once grown.
Suttons of Reading, the seedsmen, also recovered relatively quickly. The firm had a stroke of luck in September 1945, when the Dutch somehow managed to export 5,000 tons of bulbs to the United Kingdom, which meant that Suttons could fulfil that autumn’s bulb order after all. The company’s garden construction department also thrived; it collaborated with a firm of garden architects, Messrs Milner Son and White, and sent its own workmen to carry out the Milner plans for herbaceous and shrub borders, lily ponds and rock gardens, terracing and hedging. A 1950s advertisement read: ‘Character, simplicity, charm and restfulness are the keynotes of a garden designed by SUTTON’S of READING.’40
Those people living without gardens in towns and cities saw their main pleasure grounds, the public parks, regain much of their pre-war attraction, with the return of the brilliantly colourful bedding schemes of old and the grassing over of utilitarian model allotments. Parks were definitely the beneficiaries of the move of ambitious trained gardeners away from private service, since public authorities could offer more advantageous terms and conditions, and did not require such a level of old-fashioned deference from their employees.
However, the question of wilful and accidental damage in parks was still an issue: ‘to practice horticulture as we knew it in pre-war days in fenceless parks is not only heart-breaking but a waste of time, money and labour’, wrote a gloomy park superintendent in 1948.41 Even after the railings were put back in many parks, the vandalism continued. It was not as widespread as in the war years, but it never again disappeared entirely.
To make way for returning demobbed male gardeners, as well as refugees from country house gardens, not to mention new machinery, women mainly lost their jobs in parks and public gardens. The fifty girl gardeners at Kew had been reduced to six by 1946. In any event, many Land Girls married straight after the war and left market gardening or farm work for good. Not until 1975 did those few female gardeners who remained in horticulture achieve equal pay with men. Today, in very changed circumstances in the labour market, there are probably more women in managerial positions in horticulture, both professional and commercial, than there have been at any time since the very particular conditions of wartime.
The research stations that had contributed markedly to the success of wartime commercial horticulture were brought under the control of the Ministry of Agriculture after the war. One regretted consequence of this was the ending of the student traineeship scheme at the John Innes Horticultural Institution. However, with their public reputations enhanced, the stations expanded in both size and number, most notably with the foundation of the Glasshouse Crops Research Institute in Littlehampton and the National Vegetable Research Station at Wellesbourne.
The country’s gratitude to agriculture and horticulture for the part they played in feeding the nation ensured a fair wind for reforms in the immediate post-war years. Sir Daniel Hall’s blueprint for the future, Reconstruction and the Land, formed the basis of the 1947 Agriculture Act. This provided guaranteed prices and subsidies to farmers and promoted the rapid mechanisation of agriculture, which had begun in wartime, thus ensuring a more efficient industry at a time of rapidly increasing population and expectations.
One of the Act’s effects was to encourage the use of pesticides, in the interests of cost savings and productivity. Gardeners were not slow to follow farmers, and for a generation, they sprayed lavishly. However, in the 1970s, as the evidence of damage to land and wildlife gathered strength – and public opinion gradually turned against chemicals – the organic gardening movement, spearheaded by Lawrence Hills and his Henry Doubleday Research Association,42 expanded. The leading lights of this movement readily acknowledged their debt to the pioneers of thirty years before, in particular Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour and the other founders of the Soil Association.
In A Green and Pleasant Land, I have attempted to bring to the reader’s attention those gardeners who particularly deserve to be remembered for their contributions to the war effort. These were the parks superintendents, who abandoned their much loved floral displays to teach urban novices how to grow Brussels sprouts, together with the massed ranks of unmarried women – Miss Elizabeth Hess, Miss Viola Williams, Miss Edith Walker, Miss Dorothy Hinchcliffe, Miss Beatrix Havergal amongst them – who, unencumbered by husband or children, worked tirelessly on county horticultural committees and in horticultural colleges, or drove around the countryside in the pitch black to teach other ladies in draughty village halls how to sow peas or collect medicinal herbs. As important were the middle-aged nurserymen and older professional gardeners, as well as the girls of the Women’s Land Army, who together grew the vegetable produce that really made a difference to the nation’s health. These people showed an impressive devotion to duty, which could probably only be sustained while there was a pressing external threat to life and livelihood.
As for amateur gardeners, their horticultural efforts had been a significant feature of their war, bringing them together with others and giving them a sense of common purpose. Their hours of patient gardening became part of the accumulated shared memories of civilian life, especially each spring when thoughts turned once more to sowing seeds and spending weekend afternoons with neighbours and children on the allotment. The success of the Dig for Victory campaign might have been more apparent than real – the result of a collusion between government, press and professional gardeners – but its very existence and persistence enhanced the self-image and morale of gardeners and even of those who never dug up their gardens or rented an allotment but knew somebody who did. In short, ‘growing your own’ became a shared and positive national experience, sufficiently strong and pervasive to survive to this day.
For those people still alive who went through the war, there is satisfaction and pride in the memory of how they and their contemporaries thoroughly confounded the politicians, the military hierarchy and, most particularly, the psychiatrists by their behaviour. With insignificant exceptions, those battling on the Home Front showed themselves equal to the tasks required of them. They refused to buckle under the pressure brought about by restrictions, shortages, overwork, lack of money and security, strain, danger and demoralisation. The growing of, and delight in, vegetables, fruit and flowers helped a significant number of them to do that. Those of us who came afterwards have much upon which to reflect, and for which to be grateful.