As a result of the intensive air attacks on London during September the staff of headquarters moved to Puddephats Farm in Markyate, Hertfordshire. There were further apologies to readers of the magazine for the lack of the usual blue cover which had to be dropped since the heavy paper ‘used up nearly one-third of the amount of paper allotted to us by the Paper Control’. Paper was controlled from the beginning of the war. Newspapers were limited to 60 per cent of their pre-war consumption of newsprint and magazines had to follow suit. Paper supply was officially limited and controlled by the Ministry of Production in 1942. Restrictions of all kinds followed in alarming succession as the bombing raids on London and other British cities intensified.
Sybil Norcott was responsible in large part for the kitchen garden at her parents’ farm outside Dunham Massey near Manchester. Her mother was disabled with multiple sclerosis and her father was occupied by farm work. ‘The farmhouse garden was no kaleidoscope or blaze of colour but a utility garden. During the war the name utility was apt. The garden was down to earth, a basic necessity but it provided luxuriant fruit and vegetables for family, friends and neighbours in a time of frugal living. We grew early peas and beans, strawberries with ruby-red jewel like fruits, Cox’s orange pippin apples and any number of other wholesome produce. No fertilisers were used, just good sweaty, currant cake coloured, rotted donkey manure, either spread or well dug in,’ she explained.
Sybil was born in Lancashire on Shakespeare’s birthday in 1928. Her father was one of thirteen children from Liverpool and her mother, who had been orphaned as a child, was from Cheshire. Sybil’s father had always wanted to farm and soon after her birth he was granted tenancy of Heath Farm in Dunham Massey. ‘At last my father achieved his childhood dream. He had a farm of his own and it was there that I spent a wonderful childhood,’ Sybil said. Although the farm was isolated she was very happy. She had a Manx cat, a dog called Peter Pup and a donkey called Tommy. She was an inquisitive little girl and very outgoing, so Peter, the farmhand, took her under his wing and taught her a great deal about nature. ‘Peter could not agree with his extravagant daughter-in-law so he moved into an empty loose-box on the farm and converted it into a bedsit. He became the granddad I had never known.’ Peter was a keen gardener and he created a kitchen garden for Sybil’s mother, growing her soft fruit, herbs and all the vegetables she could ever want. When Sybil was old enough, Peter made her the child-sized spade which she still has, and he taught her to dig, sow and harvest. ‘I even had a little plot of my own. I called it the secret garden for it was past the poultry houses and surrounded by a tall hawthorn hedge.’ Peter retired when Sybil was still a little girl and her father took on another farmhand, an Irishman named Martin.
Like Peter, Martin was a great naturalist and he enjoyed nothing more than lying on his tummy observing the animals in the covert. He used to take Sybil with him and she watched with him as the fox cubs learned their skills while playing rough and tumble with one other. He showed her the barn owl which raised a brood in the loft over the stable and explained to her how the owl spread out the laying of her eggs so that they hatched at intervals. This meant the mother could feed the baby owlets at their individual stages of development and the oldest owlet would sit on the other eggs and keep them warm while the mother owl went out hunting.
Martin moved into Peter’s loose-box and Sybil remembered him refilling the feather mattress on his bed whenever they plucked a duck. His ways with the natural world fascinated her. ‘Martin carried a dried fox’s tongue in his pocket. He would soak it, cover it in Vaseline and bandage it on wounds. It could draw out thorns, heal a cow’s foot and even soothe a horse’s hoof after shoeing. I always thought it had magic powers. And when he had done with it he would put it back in his waistcoat pocket.’ He had a lovely gentle sense of humour, which always delighted her. On Saturday nights he would go to the pub ‘to refresh himself well’, riding on her father’s bike. It didn’t have a bell but the mudguards rattled so loudly that her father would hear him coming back late in the evening and know he was safe. One night he was later than expected: ‘Dad asked him if he was drunk. “Nay Mester, I was just sober enough to know I was not quite drunk. Sure, it was the bike. It wouldn’t stand still while I got on it.”’
Sybil’s father harvested potatoes in the traditional way, helped by Martin. ‘Dad drove the horses, pulling the old-fashioned potato digger and Martin took charge of emptying the full hampers into the cart. The potatoes were stored at the edge of the field in hogs. Between cartloads Martin would dig a wide gully, leaving the soil in a heap on either side. The potatoes were tipped, then shaped into a triangle and covered with straw. The soil was replaced, leaving a gap at the top with the straw protruding to allow for the spuds to dry without sweating. Later the potato tops covered the whole hog to guard against the frost.’
Sybil learned so much about life and nature from the two farmhands and from her father but she also required formal education. This began at Partington Village School and then continued, from the age of eight, at Altrincham Girls Grammar School. When she was twelve her mother decided to join the WI. Sybil was too young to join the local institute, as the minimum age was fourteen, the statutory school-leaving age; however, Partington WI took girls from twelve so she and her mother joined that institute in 1940. She explained: ‘My mother wanted very much to join but the track to the village was through the woods and my mother did not want to walk that route on her own. She was afraid. So she asked me to accompany her on my bike, which of course I did and that is how I came to join Partington WI.’
The war brought relatively little change for Sybil, though the proximity of the village to Manchester meant that she was only too aware of the so-called Christmas Blitz which reached its height on the two nights of 22 and 23 December, killing 684 and wounding four times as many civilians. When she left Altrincham Grammar in 1944 she worked on the farm full time as this was considered to be proper war work. She was already experienced at most aspects of farming and had learnt to drive a tractor at seven so she slipped easily into the role. Her mother, who had become thoroughly involved in Partington WI, was not able to work outdoors. ‘My mother never complained about her condition, she was so brave, and she took on all manner of voluntary work during the war. The WI is not just an institution, it is a way of life and one that my mother embraced. So from an early age, when Mum was laid up, I did a lot in the house as well as working outside.’ Sybil was perhaps unusual in that she had so much responsibility for home production at such a young age but she was certainly not alone. Peggy and Majorie Sumner down the road in Hale turned their back garden into a vegetable patch, though Peggy admitted she did not have green fingers and the only line of peas she ever grew to maturity provided but one serving. She was nevertheless a good knitter and she managed to combine that successfully with her civilian ambulance work.
One of the most useful propaganda tools the government had in encouraging people to grow their own food and to make their excess produce available was via the BBC Home Service. The weekly fifteen-minute gardening programme was fronted by Mr Middleton, who had been broadcasting to the nation’s gardeners since 1931.
Cecil Henry Middleton was born in 1886 in Northamptonshire. His father, John Robert Middleton, was the head gardener to Sir George Sitwell, so that the young Mr Middleton grew up with the Sitwell children, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. At the age of fifteen he began to work on the Sitwell estate but by seventeen he had left Northamptonshire and moved to London, becoming a student gardener at Kew. During the First World War he worked in the horticultural division of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries and was involved in food production, later going on to join Surrey County Council as a horticultural instructor. He had also had a spell working in the seed trade, so that by the time the war came he had experience of many aspects of food production as well as gardening. Although a modest man he was proud of the gardening tradition and resented the portrayal of gardeners as ‘funny old men with
battered hats and old moth-eaten trousers, and with whiskers and very little intelligence’. He was the complete opposite of the caricature, being neat and bespectacled but with a warm and engaging manner.
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 bonfire
s 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.
Jambusters Page 15
