Page 37 - ALG Issue 1 2016 No social share

General
The history of our allotments
Charity bookshops often contain some real gems which are very illuminating about the past. I recently came across a geography text book for junior school age from the 1930s which contains the following:
“The rst eld which the bus
passed was divided up into
plots, with paths between each plot.
Janet could see plants growing in tidy rows. There were rows of bean-sticks too.”
On some of the plots people were working.
“Look Mummy,” cried Janet, “there are some gardens”. “They are called allotments, dear,” replied her mother.
“People use them to grow vegetables and owers on them”.
“Why don’t they grow them in their own gardens at home?” asked Janet.
“Because there is not enough room” answered her mother. “Most of the gardens in towns are small. If people want to grow vegetables they have to have more space”.
“Why can’t they have bigger gardens?” objected Janet. “It would be much easier for them”.
“But the houses are too close together. It would have been much better if the people who built the houses had left room for larger gardens”.
“Do you know,” went on Mrs Crosland, “there are some towns where the people have no gardens at all? The houses are all built touching one another. There is just one little yard or “court” as it is called, for the houses which are built round it. Very often, also, the people who live there are so poor that they have to share a house with other people. Sometimes there are three or four families sharing one little house. The children have no nice garden to play in. There is only the court. If people are fond of owers they have to grow them in little boxes on the window sills”.
Hardingham, B.G., 1935 Ourselves and Our Cousins – The Foundations of Geography 3
Well! Nothing like some early lessons in knowing your place in society! Allotment tenants were poor and lived in slums without gardens. At least the author is too genteel to add that they all shared a netty with others in the court.
What must it have been like for a child raised in terraced streets with no gardens to learn at school in the geography book that they were too poor to have a proper garden and that there was something intrinsically inferior in their Dad (or Mum) having an allotment and raising the family’s own veg? And that you had to be posh, with a nice garden, to get to ask questions in a geography book? We note that the inquisitive Janet asks no questions about whether it was fair for some people to have gardens and others not and why this was the case. You can almost hear the clipped BBC received pronunciation of her mother’s replies!
The 30s were a dif cult time with a lot of poverty and hunger, when the Society of Friends set up allotments for unemployed men so that they could maintain their dignity by working on
the allotment to provide for their families. It is easy for us in
the 21st century to deride the sentiments expressed above; perhaps we should just be grateful that allotments, poverty and unsatisfactory housing actually got an airing at all. And be eternally grateful that the connection between allotments and poverty and “growing your own bene ts”, though not entirely forgotten, is largely obsolete now.
Elizabeth Allnutt ADI Mentor
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