dig for victory
Monday, March 1st, 2010Not much happening gardening wise with all this rain we’re having. So.. this weekend I toddled off to the imperial war museum to see the Ministry of food exhibition…
The exhibition documents the governments ministry of food campaign during world war two for growing your own. Leaflets were handed out during the war on how to grow your own veggies month by month “dated 1945″ and these can now be downloaded on the site
If your in London I highly recommend visiting the exhibition which is on until January
There are also some books published alongside the exhibition ..
Two that I couldn’t resist are…
Mr Middleton had a gardening radio show at the time.. Here’s the review I swiped from Amazon..
Mr Middleton was the Alan Titchmarsh of his time, and that time was during the last war, when the nation hung on to his every word during his BBC radio programmes on gardening. He was the first media gardener, exhorting us to Dig for Victory, Dig for Dear Life, and (as in this book) advising us that “An Allotment is like the army. The first month is the worst: after that you begin to enjoy it”. In 2008 Aurum re-published with success his wartime book Digging for Victory; now here is a second, first published in 1945 – a guide to what to plant, and how, and when, all through the year, from Celeriac to Strawberries. Reproduced in facsimile, it is full of sensible tips, as well as period advertisements for Mushrooms as a War Food Crop and The Value of Cloches (since, “as Mr Middleton advises us, ‘Available food will have to be shared with a starving Europe, which may mean even greater sacrifices for us’”). Qualcast advertise their mowers, even though they admit no new ones have been made since 1940, forcing the old ones “to do sturdy and efficient work through the war”. And, as Mr Middleton reflects, looking towards a new post-war dawn of peace, “Won’t it be grand when we can sit on the old garden seat, and listen to the birds instead of the sirens…?” Sage, gruff, touching and especially relevant to these new times of thrift, Mr Middleton’s All-Year-Round Gardening guide is the perfect gift for 2009. Mr Middleton was the BBC’s “famous gardener” on the radio during the war.
How would you survive on wartime rations? Eating for Victory (subtitled Healthy Home Front Cooking on War Rations) makes for absolutely fascinating reading — and may answer the question as to what the reader might have made of these more straitened times.
The book reproduces official Second World War instruction leaflets (which have never before been published in book form) and demonstrates how millions of people in Britain endured food shortages during the hardships of WWII. With a perceptive foreword by Jill Norman, Eating for Victory shows that the government endeavoured to keep morale high by producing a host of the upbeat leaflets included here on such subjects as ‘using up stale crusts’ and ‘foods for fitness’ (the leaflets are most amusing in this area, showing how much thinking has changed over the years — the use of fats and lard looks very quaint in these more enlightened times). But what gives particular pleasure here is the verbatim reproduction of the original artwork and typefaces, which vividly conjures a lost era. To read this entertaining little book is like climbing into a time machine to take us back to the 1940s. –Barry Forshaw
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It’s a lovely bright sunny day here today; hopefully spring has finally sprung and sometime this week I can get down to my plot to get my potato bed ready for planting later this month “No more rain please” My plot needs to dry out a little so I’m not wallowing in a mud bath..
