You may not be lucky enough to own an ideal kitchen garden like this, but a flowerbed will grow beetroots just as well as begonias, and there may be room for vegetables on top of the Anderson Shelter, or in your backyard, or even on that flat roof – and surely, isn’t an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?
Home-grown fruit and vegetables may have helped to liven up monotonous wartime rations but they also proved attractive to birds. And for the second time in a generation, garden birds discovered we were fickle friends, as Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall recalls: ‘The birds did of course become the gardener’s enemy, in a much stronger way when your diet depended on protecting your crops from the birds. Gardeners always have had – and especially at this time – a love-hate relationship with the birds of the garden.’
So people came up with ingenious strategies to keep birds off their precious fruit and veg, including home-made nets created from wooden sticks and cotton thread. But unlike the situation in the First World War that had given rise to the sparrow clubs, this time the government recognised that birds played a vital role in killing agricultural pests, so there were no longer calls for wholesale culls.
Nevertheless, birds continued to suffer: at a time when many people were close to starving themselves, they were hardly likely to put out waste food for the birds to eat. The Ministry of Food urged people to either eat leftovers, or recycle them, so scraps once given to the birds now ended up in communal pig bins.
Birds also suffered badly during two of the hardest winters of the twentieth century, 1939–40 and 1946–7. Even though the second of these freezing winters occurred nearly two years after the end of the war, this was still a lean time for garden birds, as food rationing continued to be in force for almost a decade after the end of the conflict.
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Britain now entered a period of austerity. This would continue right up to the end of the 1950s, when increased economic prosperity finally led Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to make his famous pronouncement that ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’ But curiously, our attitudes to gardens – and our attitudes to garden birds – began to change long before this, as Jenny Uglow points out: ‘There was a slight reaction, and people wanted gardens to be places of colour and scent, and smell…’
Gardening for pleasure was back on the agenda, and part of the pleasure was communing with wildlife. This was reflected, in 1945, by the publication of a little book called Garden Birds, published in the ‘King Penguin’ series. Garden Birds was written by the secretary of the RSPB, Phyllis Barclay-Smith.
Barclay-Smith was a tough, no-nonsense woman in a largely male-dominated world. She served for more than half a century as the assistant secretary of the RSPB, where she was affectionately nicknamed ‘The Dragon’, and was once described (by the leading conservationist Max Nicholson) as ‘the queen bee in her global hive’.
She was also one of the very first people to realise the enormous potential of winning converts to the conservation cause through the birds people saw every day from their back window. The title of her book was the very first time in Britain that the term ‘garden birds’ had appeared in print, and marked a turning point in the way we thought about them.
Garden Birds was, as you might expect from the author’s character, relentlessly no-nonsense and practical in its approach, as Jenny Uglow notes:
She begins by saying that because of industrialisation and the growth of the town, our garden birds are threatened; and that we must make habitats for them. She tells you what trees to plant, where the birds like to nest, and so on. Welcoming the birds back, and not making the garden fiercely productive, is a wonderful reaction to the ferocity of war.
The design of post-war housing also reinforced these trends. In most Victorian and Edwardian homes the kitchen was at the side of the house, out of sight of the back garden. But post-war architects often placed the kitchen at the back of the house, with a clear view of the garden. Jenny Uglow believes this made a huge difference to the growth of interest in garden birds: ‘The number of sinks I’ve seen which look down the garden, and you put objects of interest and entertainment out there, such as the bird table. And so you look from the sink, which is the epitome of drudgery, into the garden, which is the epitome of freedom – and there are these birds, coming and going.’
Outside, the nation’s second-favourite bird – the Blue Tit – was getting up to some novel antics. This was reported by presenter Chris Trace on the children’s television programme Blue Peter, in the early 1960s: ‘It’s not only humans who enjoy a drink of milk. People living all over the country are getting up in the mornings and finding their milk bottle tops torn off, and some of the milk missing…’
Actually it was the cream – not the milk – that was missing. Blue Tits and Great Tits were pecking through the foil tops of bottles left on the doorstep, to get at the rich cream which, being lighter than the milk, had floated to the top. Incredibly, the practice had first been observed in Southampton in 1921, when milk bottles had cardboard tops; but it really took off during the 1950s, when the entire British population of Blue Tits appeared to learn how to get at the cream almost overnight.
This may have looked like an example of evolution in action, but as Tim Birkhead reveals, it was actually a case of individual birds watching and learning from each other, as they always do:
Blue Tits and Great Tits are inquisitive birds, always poking around, peeling off bits of bark and lifting up leaves looking for food items, and peeling off the lid of a milk bottle is not that different really. Birds are doing these things all the time – it’s just with the milk bottles we could see it happening. It was like a little window into their world.
These weren’t the only culprits. According to ornithologist James Fisher, writing in 1957, at least eleven different species of bird had by then been observed opening milk bottles in Britain: Blue, Great, Coal and Marsh Tits, Blackbird, Robin, Chaffinch, Starling, Song Thrush, Dunnock, and of course our cheeky friend the House Sparrow. The practice was also observed abroad: with Great Spotted Woodpeckers in the Danish capital Copenhagen, Jackdaws elsewhere in Denmark, and the Steller’s Jay in parts of western North America. Fisher, and his colleague Dr Robert Hinde, ascribed the behaviour to ‘an insatiable curiosity worthy of Kipling’s Elephant’s Child’.
But even before the delivery of milk to the doorstep went into decline, the tits stopped pecking at the foil tops because of our changing tastes. As we became more health-conscious we switched to homogenised and skimmed milk – thus removing the cream from the top of the bottle.
According to the RSPB, the practice appears to have died out somewhere around the turn of the millennium. Because Blue Tits are so short-lived – typically surviving for just one or two years – within a decade or so the knowledge handed down from parent to youngster no longer included the ability to raid milk bottles.
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Most people didn’t begrudge the tits their share of the cream, perhaps because they were amongst the earliest birds to establish themselves in suburbia. But the post-war period also saw the arrival of two newcomers to the British suburban scene – a dove and a parakeet. The very different welcomes they received would challenge our ideas of what it meant to be British.
The first newcomer, the Collared Dove, arrived almost unnoticed. This was perhaps because it doesn’t have a very glamorous or exciting image, as Mark Cocker confesses: ‘I love all birds, but there’s something essentially very boring about the Collared Dove! Somebody I know described its song as like a rather bored football fan – “U-ni-ted… U-ni-ted…” There is something rather dreary about Collared Doves, and they are beige in colour, but they conceal an incredible story of expansion.’
Originally from India, the Collared Dove had slowly extended its range westward to reach Turkey by the sixteenth century, and the Balkans by the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, in the 1930s, the species began a steady westward surge across Europe, reaching Hungary in 1932, Germany in 1945 (where it is