Jambusters (20 page)

Just months after its inception in 1922, the BBC began broadcasting gardening talks which ranged from practical advice supplied by the Royal Horticultural Society to gardening traditions and history with luminaries such as Vita Sackville West speaking about their specialist areas. The advice given by the RHS, however, was described as ‘entirely impersonal, read by an anonymous announcer, and peppered with Latin names’.
⁶
As the BBC developed, so it felt it had to offer listeners more appealing programmes and they asked the society to recommend speakers who could talk on gardening. Mr Middleton’s name was put forward as one of a pool of gardening experts and he broadcast for the first time on 9 May 1931, with the opening words: ‘Good afternoon. Well, it’s not much of a day for gardening, is it?’
⁷
His easy manner and his conversational style of speaking made him one of the most popular speakers on the radio and by the outbreak of the Second World War he had been broadcasting his own programme
In the Garden
for five years.

Mr Middleton’s programme reached 3.5 million listeners each week. It was a gift to the government, especially given his role in food production during the last war. When he was not working on his weekly broadcasts he was toiling in his own garden or travelling around the country giving lectures and offering advice to professional and amateur groups alike. His BBC talks were so popular that people who were unable to hear them broadcast would often ask for transcripts, so that in 1942 he published
Digging for Victory
, which included talks covering the autumn, winter and spring months from September 1941 to May 1942. In his preface he wrote:

In happier days we talked of rock gardens, herbaceous borders, and verdant lawns; but with the advent of war and its grim demands, these pleasant features rapidly receded into the background to make way for the all-important food crops. But interest in the garden has never slackened; it has, if anything, been intensified by the urgent necessity of growing food, and presumably most of my old friends still listen when I hold forth on Leeks, Lettuces, and Leatherjackets, instead of Lilac, Lilies, and Lavender.
⁸

The WI often quoted tips from his weekly broadcasts in their advice to institutes. He was particularly good on advising storage solutions for root vegetables, onions and fruit that could be kept through the autumn and winter, but he also had much to say on the subject of bugs and caterpillars, which brought out a playful side:

I have noticed a good many white butterflies about and you know what that means – caterpillars on the Brussels and other greens if something isn’t done about it. I find a tennis racket a very good thing for swatting white butterflies. I am getting quite expert at it and developing quite a good over-arm stroke, but even so, you can’t swat them all and they still find their way to the cabbage leaves, so I usually have a look through the plants to find their eggs. These are laid in clusters and stuck to the underside of the leaves; they are bright yellow and easy to see, and if you squash them with your thumb and finger that means one colony of caterpillars less.
⁹

One of the key messages he gave at the beginning of the war was that plants take time to grow. However much the government encouraged the nation’s gardeners to plant, sow and reap, they could not speed up the growing cycle of, say, an apple tree. Patience was always required. A tree that was planted in one year and had its small crop of fruit picked in the following season would not do as well, longer term, as a tree that was allowed to become established and then crop better in the second or third season.

Apples vary enormously and some store better than others and people had to work out how the crops could be staggered so that not all the apples ripened at once and went to waste. The storage of apples is an art and the autumn pages of
Home & Country
were full of advice about how not to bruise them when they were picked, on the best form of wrapping, or indeed whether to wrap at all when paper was in short supply. With careful handling and cool, not too dry conditions, apples picked in September could be crisp and ready to eat the following spring. Mr Middleton told his listeners that he had once kept apples in perfect condition until the end of May by storing them outside, in old fruit boxes piled up against a wall and covered in old sacks, odds and ends and finally a few pieces of corrugated iron: ‘We had some pretty sharp frosts while they were there and the whole pile was buried
under snow for a time but the apples were well protected. We took out a box at a time as required, and there were very few bad ones among them.’
¹⁰
Mrs Van Praet, who was a land girl in the war but later a WI member, recalled storing apples and pears in a sturdy thatched building in their orchard at Broughton Hall on the Staffordshire–Shropshire border where she worked. ‘The fruit had to be constantly monitored and with those going rotten being jettisoned for the compost heap.’ Edith Jones stored her apples in a granary next to the wash house at the farm. Those that were not keepers she would bottle, along with her pears, plums and damsons.

Preserving food was a way of life that was still well understood in the countryside though electricity and fridges in towns and cities had brought more modern food-storage possibilities. Cold storage was already used by commercial growers and meant that by the 1930s people could buy fresh apples in towns more or less all the year round. The trouble came during the war and not just because there was a shortage of apples but owing to the government fixing the price of apples regardless of the time of year. The effect of this was that it did not pay the commercial growers to store apples during the winter and spring but to sell them as quickly as they could. ‘This may lead to plentiful supplies between now and Christmas, but precious little after that,’ Mr Middleton said in October. He recommended to his listeners they should put any good ‘keepers’ in store for as long as possible and buy from shops while supplies were still plentiful. He also encouraged those who had no apple trees to buy keepers and store them in cool conditions so that they too would have stocks of apples into the next spring. This is just another example of how the war changed attitudes towards food. Growing one’s own food, even in small quantities, helped to protect families from the vagaries of the food supply chain.

The WI took this advice to heart and published a series of drawings and articles on how best to store apples. One showed a wooden box with troughs and furrows of newspaper separating the lines of apples. They explained how the fruit should be graded and each variety kept separate with plenty of ventilation so that the sweating of the crop in the first few weeks would not give rise to rotting. Once this process had been completed then the apples could be wrapped individually in newspaper or in the trough and furrow box system. The sweet smell of stored apples evokes childhood memories for many people and something that has all but disappeared today.

After the remarkable fruit harvest of 1940, when the WI alone reported 1,000 tons of jam, over one million kilograms, or 4 million half-pound jars, had been made, the ripening season of 1941 was disappointing and gardeners everywhere struggled to produce even a decent percentage of what they had enjoyed in the glut the year before. It was demoralising for those women who had taken on allotments and gardens in early 1940 and celebrated success over their excellent potatoes and carrots. But they soldiered on.

A vital prerequisite for a healthy vegetable crop is decent fertiliser. Edith Jones had excellent compost made from a mixture of straw with cow manure from the barns, hen droppings, which are rich in nitrogen, and garden waste. She was fortunate. Other women growing vegetables on allotments had to rely on artificial fertilisers to help their crops. Throughout the war, fertiliser was in limited supply so people had to resort to using kitchen waste and even night soil, the contents of their privies, to encourage their plants to grow. The government had control of all fertilisers but there was a serious shortage of potash until 1943 when Canada began to mine and export the precious mineral. Potash was hard to replace and it was much missed by industry as well
as gardeners. Ashes from wood fires or bonfires contained potash and could be used on gardens but most households used coal and coal ash was no use, except for keeping back nettles.

But fertiliser itself was not enough to encourage the kitchen garden or allotment to flourish. ‘If you take a cart-load of vegetables from the plot and put back a cart-load of farmyard muck, you will have made a fair exchange, the soil will be quite satisfied and produce another cart-load of vegetables.’
¹¹
Farmyard manure mixed with straw was ideal as it is bulky and decayed slowly, releasing food into the soil gradually. It was difficult to get farmyard manure because the farmers were using it on their own fields in the absence of manufactured fertilisers and of course there was the question of transport. So the WI and other groups stepped up their campaign to use all forms of waste materials in various stages of decay to provide the bulk and slow-releasing nutrients that the straw otherwise provided.

Mrs Van Praet, the land girl, was taught how to mix potting soil from leaf mould, which she would collect in great sackloads from the nearby woods. She would add to this a bucketful of lime gravel taken from the derelict tennis court at the hall and stir them both together with garden soil and a little bit of sand. ‘Thus we produced a wonderful, loamy mixture. It certainly worked well and our tomatoes were magnificent in both colour and flavour. This was an indoor job which I enjoyed as it kept us out of the wind and rain.’

Miss Hess, the agricultural adviser to the WI, was keen on compost heaps. She urged members to throw anything from the garden or kitchen onto the heaps, proposing two or three heaps about five feet square and four feet high for a modest-sized garden. There was even a lecturer doing the rounds in the early years of the war who spoke about composting. A member in Cirencester was so inspired by a description on the radio about
how to construct a proper compost heap she was said to have constructed a ‘lordly pile which is one of the sights of the village’.
¹²

Vegetables and fruit were one aspect of country food production but the other was animals. WI members were encouraged to keep poultry, pigs, goats and rabbits for their meat and fur. Chickens, ducks and turkeys were relatively easy to manage, even in a small garden, and many people kept hens for eggs and later, for the pot, though a hen at the end of her laying days is fit only for a well-cooked stew. Ruth Toosey kept hens. Caroline remembered: ‘We always had plenty of eggs though I do remember my mother making cakes with dried eggs, which were dry as a result. Meat was scarce during the war but the real horror was the soup that my mother made using a sheep’s head. It had bits of meat and vegetables floating about it in and I remember it tasted disgusting. There used to be a race to see who could eat it up fastest and reveal the flower pattern on the bottom of the bowls.’

Nella Last, another prolific wartime diarist for Mass Observation, and member of her local WI in Barrow-in-Furness, kept chickens in her little back garden. She often referred to them in the diary, and sometimes had concerns. In September 1941 she wrote: ‘I felt a bit worried over one of my chickens: it has “gone back” for some reason. I’ve got some chicken pills and gave it one today. Such a kind little hen, she took it quite well. I hope it does her good, for I’d hate to lose her now. The others all look well: they are thriving and eat a lot.’
¹³
Edith Jones wrote a great deal about her chickens in her diaries. Hatching chicks was always a delight for her and she would have at least three sittings a year. She also bought new pullets for laying and had a series of sheds around the garden and orchard which hens progressed to at various stages of their development. Some weeks
she would take a gross of eggs to the market, which she would sell at 1s 6d a dozen, giving her 18s (£38.40 today).

Leigh WI in Lancashire encouraged their members to keep poultry and were pleased to report in 1940 that two members had started from scratch and others had increased their stock. ‘The following increases were reported: 24 pullets, 11 cockerels, 12 day-old chicks, 12 ducks and 7 geese.’ The total number of fowl in the village was not given but the minutes’ secretary reported that 2,283 eggs had been preserved that season. Hookwood WI in East Sussex kept a meticulous log of all their members’ produce and livestock activities. It was kept by Mrs Daisy Jackson and was subtitled ‘Drive for more food production’. Mrs Jackson reported on one member’s poultry: ‘Mrs H Brown keeps chickens, ducks and bantams which have all done splendidly in egg laying. From January 1 to October 31 from 18 hens – 1429 eggs, from 5 ducks – 465 eggs and from 3 bantams – 91 eggs. The bantams didn’t start till March and left off in September. The ducks left off at the end of September but the chickens are still going strong.’
¹⁴
Lady Denman had always been keen on poultry keeping, as was the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith. He told his audience in a BBC broadcast:

The hen is an excellent medium for the production of food, not only does she spend her life in providing us with excellent food – an egg is a meal in itself – but at the other end of her period of economic production she provides us with a well covered carcass of meat. When we realise that to maintain this production we can feed her on all sorts of household waste without much expenditure for other foods, the importance of the humble fowl in this war is clearly demonstrated.
¹⁵