A visit from the Queen
families were squeezed into the tiny flats, including one mother of 25!
‘My mum Flo was only 4ft 8in, but I saw her punch a man down three flights of stairs for slapping me when I was a kid,’ recalls 83-year-old Ron Hilson. ‘She lost a sister Roda in the Tube disaster in ’43’; another sister Maud was decapitated by a lorry in the blackout in ’45 and her son Teddy died of TB in ’46. She was so grief stricken she lost all her hair, but she never gave up the fight. The war brought out the strength in women.’
While Flo and the other women of Russia Lane went into war work in the factories, and with many of the borough’s schools closed down or evacuated, it would have been easy enough for Ron and his pals Frankie Tovey, Ronnie York, Joey Donnovan, George Quinn and Ken Cushway to get into mischief. Instead, the self-styled Schoolboy Gardeners of Russia Lane, borrowed shovels from George’s dad who owned a stable in Russia Lane. The year before, the government had introduced National Growmore Fertiliser, but George’s dad’s steaming manure, laced with spent hops from nearby breweries, did the job nicely. Before long, lines of stately ‘Home Guard’ potatoes grew majestically from the soil.
Ron remembers his old pals fondly. ‘It was great,’ he said. ‘We had good times, even when Hitler was dropping bombs on us.’
Word of this new breed of gardener spread and on the 17th June 1943 the Queen visited. Where once she toured during the Blitz to raise morale, now she came to admire the veg. The royal group visited Brady Street, Warley Street, St Peters Avenue, Ravenscroft and Belhaven Street Allotments as well as a piggery – where a stray goat nibbled Her Majesty’s handbag!
The bombsite allotment scheme ended when the war did, as local councils began the huge post-war slum-clearance schemes, but 75 years on its success resonates.
Gardening is primal, a source of comfort and escapism. We may no longer be Digging for Victory, but we are a country digging for meaning, purpose and, increasingly, sustainability.
A recent report by the National Garden Scheme urged us as a nation to promote gardening as something, that can play a powerful role in physical and emotional health. It even asked doctors to prescribe gardening for patients with cancer, dementia and depression. But this will come as no surprise to the readers of AG and those who survived the war years.
■ In the first week of the Second World War, 70,000 tonnes of British shipping was sunk by Nazi U-boats. It raised the question of how an island of 45 million people was going to feed itself.
■ Food rationing came into force in January 1940, to ensure limited supplies were fairly distributed, and ended in July 1954.
■ The Dig for Victory slogan was unveiled by the Mayor of London just after the Blitz broke out in September 1940.
■ At the start of the war there were only 819,000 allotments in Britain. By 1943 there were over
1,675,000 and the number of private gardens used for growing vegetables had gone from three million to five million.
■ Onions, which had come from countries now occupied by the Nazis, became so rare they were given as birthday presents or raffle prizes, and bananas were unheard of. Vegetables were grown everywhere, from airport runways and rooftops, to railway sidings, zoos and palaces. Vegetables were also planted in the dry moat around the Tower of London, as a patriotic gesture of defiance.
■ Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, enlisted the help of cartoon characters Potato Pete and Dr Carrot to drive home the importance of vegetables. He also put his name to the ubiquitous ‘Woolton Pie,’ a dish described as ‘steak and kidney pie, without the steak and kidney’, and persuaded the general public that ‘a carrot a day keeps the blackout at bay’.
■ Theft was an unfortunate problem and the courts came down hard if anyone was caught. In St Helens in Lancashire a man who sold 8d (about 3p) worth of stolen onions was saved from a prison sentence only because he was 73 years of age.