Dig For Victory
The Dig For Victory Campaign was launched by The Ministry of Agriculture one month after the outbreak of the Second World War, it was to become one of the most memorable slogans of the whole conflict. Britain’s Home Front was encouraged to transform their private gardens into mini-allotments. Lawns and flowerbeds were turned into vegetable gardens. All space was utilised, back yards, window boxes and Anderson shelter roofs. Many people kept pigs and rabbits for food, and chickens for their highly prized eggs.
Over ten million instructional leaflets were distributed to the British people. The propaganda campaign was successful and it was estimated that over 1,400,000 people had allotments.
"We’d got this great big garden and we’d dug it up in patches. Each classroom had a patch to dig and the photograph is my class holding lettuces, carrots and stuff. Our ‘Dig for Victory.’
We just went out in the garden and our teacher was with us.
As far as I can remember we just went out and dug a patch and sowed our seeds and hoed and weeded, mostly lettuces. We used to take them home and have them for supper. I can remember that, with bread and butter. It was a Cos type lettuce, if you chopped them up with vinegar and sugar they were delicious." Betsy
"Every family had an allotment to grow our own vegetables which although seasonal it always meant that there was plenty. People used to share vegetables a great deal, vegetables and fruit. The only thing that was difficult in those days, I remember, was meat. But I can very distinctly remember I didn’t like meat at all, so the family were quite pleased about that because it meant that there was more for them. But a lot of people kept chickens, some people kept pigs, rabbits and there was always a local black market." John
"If you had fruit growing in your garden you were lucky. We had a lot of gooseberries so we were lucky." Edith
"When Dad went up on the allotment I went with him and I’d do a bit of digging. He taught me how to dig properly, he taught me how to earth up potatoes, earth up leeks, string beans and all that. Many a time my job was to wheel the wheelbarrow down from the allotment loaded with vegetables a lot of which was given away because he used to grow stuff that was ready usually on mass and you got far more than you could use there was only three of us and as I say .… ‘oh give 'er a knock and give 'er some potatoes.’ Where he’d got a surplus, he could only handle so much at a time. Rather than let it waste he would give it away. Mind I won’t say that we weren’t given things. We had chickens I remember those and rabbits." William
"My father had some plum trees on his allotment and we used those for making jam, we hadn’t got an apple tree, but we’d got plums and rhubarb, we used to have that. All the men had an allotment, they worked very hard really when you consider they worked long hours in the Works and then they went up and did the allotments." Betty
"We used to grow tomatoes, greenery and my mother was a real good bottler, she could bottle anything and she used to make bread and pastry. She was self-sufficient, well she had to be with six boys didn’t she. I don’t think we went without because my father was a grocer and anything that wasn’t rationed, that you could pay, it weren’t under the counter but I mean you could, I mean pay for it you know. It wasn’t black market stuff, it wasn’t rationed." Maurice