Goodnight Sweetheart – Vera Lynn 103 RIP

 

A few Vera Lynn original photos or sheet music in my wartime collection, 2010

Saddened to hear that Vera Lynn passed away yesterday aged 103. She brought the nation together through difficult times in wartime and more recently in Coronavirus.

I grew up with her 1940s music from my late parents who were both wartime evacuees. Vera Lynn and my Mumalways merged and overlapped a little in my head. My Mum trained post war as a hairdresser and there are plenty of pictures of her with Vera Lynn style 40s and 50s hairdos.

Hearing Vera Lynn interviewed recently, she sounded a bit like my late Mum when speaking as they were born in similar areas of London, albeit twenty years apart. That was part of her wartime pin up  ‘girl next door’ appeal. she was sort of part of our family, as she was for many. I’m sure many people have their Vera Lynn memory or story to tell in the wake of her passing.

A few years ago before my Mum died, she told me a strange Vera Lynn related family story about her being a reluctant five year old child look-out for a gaggle  of scrumping evacuee children  including my uncle in wartime Ditchling. One of the gardens they raided was said to be Vera Lynn’s orchard.

This tiny story of rural crime made it into print in Duff Hart Davies’ book Our Land At War about the wartime countryside. I was very proud to show Mum a copy of the book with her memories in it.

https://worldwarzoogardener1939.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/happy-100th-birthday-dame-vera-lynn/

https://dvlcc.org.uk/

As well as growing “Vera Lynn” sweet peas in the wartime zookeeper’s garden at Newquay Zoo in the past, I have a permanent reminder of Vera Lynn in my home garden – my small orchard of two container apple trees. These two small apple trees were bought in memory of my late Mum when she died a few years ago. They are already in fruit this year.

One is called June after my Mum, the other Vera …

Blog post by Mark Norris, World War Zoo gardens project, on furlough from Newquay Zoo, 18/19 June 2020. 

19 June 2020 – Newquay Zoo is currently closed to visitors due to Coronavirus restrictions since March 2020. I have been on furlough and not been near my wartime garden since mid March.  We look forward to reopening safely with social distancing this summer. In the mean time, as the zoo relies for its vital conservation work on its gate income and funding by visitors, you can find out how to support Newquay Zoo by donations. Thank you. https://www.newquayzoo.org.uk/plan-your-visit/updates 

 

World War Zoo gardens project blog has passed the 5000th reader / web hit mark and is preparing for an award- can you help?

Display corner from World War Zoo gardens project June 2010 - Fox Rosehill Gardens, Falmouth, Cornwall display

Hooray! Our World War Zoo gardens project has just passed the 5000 reader mark since we started the blog in Summer 2009. 

We have also recently celebrated our first ‘podcast’ last week – have you heard this? 

We’re now putting the World War Zoo garden project, displays, launch weekend, Facebook & Twitter pages, blog and all forward for a prestigious BIAZA Education (General & Public Visitor) award.(British and Irish Association of Zoos And Aquaria) www.biaza.org.uk   The deadline is  July 23rd, 2010. 

We need your help! We always need feedback and comment from users, readers or visitors on such projects. 

Did it surprise you to learn about this neglected aspect of history? 

Did it surprise you to learn that a modern zoo has a wartime Dig For Victory allotment on one of its former lawns? 

Have you enjoyed looking at some of the objects in the zoo’s wartime collection, featured in photographs on the site? 

Did you get the connection? Has World War Zoo  made you think differently about the past and the resource challenges of the future? 

Has it evoked any interesting memories or family stories of the time? Would you like to share them with us? 

Some of our source material - old wartime gardening books by the fabulous Mr. Middleton, Imperial War museum seeds from their Ministry of Food exhibition online shop, 1940s varieties available from modern seed suppliers like Suttons, all in an ARP 1940s tin medical box - World War Zoo gardens display, Newquay Zoo

Many thanks to those of you who have already left comments or sent us emails about our project and its unusual way of communicating sustainability, recycling and grow your own and food miles “with a  Vera Lynn soundtrack” by looking at the experiences of zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens in the 1940s.   

We’d love you to leave us a comment.

You can browse the earlier articles back to July 2009 or look at our blogroll for useful links, including the excellent Imperial War Museum  Ministry of Food exhibition running throughout 2010.

You can comment via our blog direct to the project team.

Talk about fresh! Talk about food metres, not miles! Everyone gets conscripted or enlisted – Kat from our Cafe Lemur washing some of our surplus salad lettuce for use in the zoo cafe, once zoo keepers had used as much as they could! World War Zoo project, Newquay Zoo.

Bright sparks and seeds of ideas for the wartime zoo keepers’ garden – young Cornish business entrepreneurs brainstorm ideas for our wartime zoo weekend

'Team Exploration' handling part of the Zoo's World War Zoo wartime life collection, one of the teams of bright sparks enlisted on the 'Men in Business' and 'Women in Business' days for young business entrepreneurs from Wadebridge and Falmouth Schools, January 2010, Sands Resort Hotel, Newquay (picture by Kate Whetter, event organiser for Devon and Cornwall EBP Education Business Partnership)

 

It’s seed time at the World War Zoo gardens at Newquay Zoo. After a quiet snowy January when not mush could be practically done outside,   ‘Home Guard’ variety seed potatoes are being chitted and sprouted ready for planting. ‘Vera Lynn’ sweet peas are among the seeds for new displays of food and colour (the wartime garden cleverly manages both) ready to sow and plant. The garden is getting busy again … 

Excitingly last week,  I had the chance to take a couple of our wartime life display cases to a ‘Men In Business’ event in Cornwall run by the Cornwall Education Business Partnership (EBP). We set a business challenge about our Plant Hunters and World War Zoo gardens event at Newquay Zoo on 1 to 3 May 2010 to some very bright teenage business studies students from Wadebridge and Falmouth school and community colleges in Cornwall . Biology meant I didn’t attend the ‘Women in Business’ event but we’ve received their ideas back from Kate Whetter the EBP organiser. 

In the short time allotted, the students came up with and presented to our panel of local business people (from Newquay Zoo, Volunteer Cornwall and Creative Juices) some great ideas about events, marketing and the use of new media such as blogging. 

Great design suggestions of discount tickets for the zoo shop or food vouchers in the style of ration books, along with wartime style posters exhorting or enlisting people to “Fall In, Families!” and come along to the zoo. Free  “trail sheets designed like ration books to take you on a self-guided tour around the zoo to discover ‘”how the animals were used and treated in wartime” (to quote from the students’ sample leaflets and blog entries).   

“Solve puzzles and break secret codes” using the help of Zoo staff in uniform in the company of 1940s re-enactors who stamp your booklet. The group were quite taken with the story of Frank Kingdon-Ward, plant collector and wartime secret agent, when shown one of the original pilot’s silk escape scarves for South East Asian jungles. Suggestions of discounts and prizes for the ‘bestest dressed’ 1940s visitors to the zoo where “adults and children can dress up as World war 2 people”.  

 More sound effects, “listen to music from 70 years ago”  and more chance to look at and handle the zoo’s growing collection of objects from wartime life pictured on our blog since August 2009. Learning ‘bomb shelters’  was another unusual idea, full of sounds and display panels. (We did have to say no sirens, bangs and flashes etc because of the animals nearby!) 

Other brilliant suggestions by students included having veterans and volunteers to tell their stories alongside the wartime zoo keeper’s garden display and display cases. This worked really well informally at last August’s event with visitors and our older volunteers  sharing and retelling their family stories with their families and zoo visitors and staff. Our play areas  transformed or retitled into ‘Assault courses’. The chance to get stuck in get digging new garden areas and filling sandbags on your family day out. Thrifty gardening tips, recycled planters and seeds to take away. These were all great suggestion that we will think about for this and future World War Zoo garden events.   

Powdered eggs, reproduction posters and original wartime gardening advice books from the Newquay Zoo archive collection of wartime life, World War Zoo gardens project (copyright: Newquay Zoo).

 

Curiously the only thing they didn’t seem too enthusiastic about was trying authentic wartime food. No fat, no sugar, powdered egg (still available form the 1940s Society online shop), mock banana. Despite being only teenagers, they’ve obviously heard how uninspiring yet healthy much of the food was, often depending on what you could grow. We look forward to trying out some wartime nibbles on visitors at the World War Zoo gardens event at Newquay Zoo on 1 to 3 May 2010. Lots of seeds of ideas for the future for our growing wartime zookeepers’ garden project – thanks to the students, staff, organisers and hotel staff who hosted the event.  

Bought from the IWM online shop, a beautifully packaged seed packet with the famous colours and image of one of my favourite wartime posters 'Dig For Victory'

 

Maybe the soon to open  ‘Ministry of Food’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London  will have more success tackling the poor opinion of wartime rations http://www.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.6574    

Speaking of seeds,  beautifully packaged wartime dig for victory seeds have been bought for the zoo garden from the Imperial War Museum’s online shop along with reproduction posters and books which are hard to obtain as originals. This includes the poster of  the famous Off The Ration exhibition at wartime London Zoo, about which we’ll blog more in the future. Check out the exhibition and addictive online shop http://www.iwmshop.org.uk/category/639/Ministry_of_Food   

In the February  2010 edition of Grow Your Own magazine www.growfruitandveg.co.uk , there is a good write up by Sara Cork in her article Digging for History about war-time veg gardening,  the IWM Food exhibition until 2011 and one at the Garden Museum in London until 7 March 2010 www.museumgardenhistory.org.  Other gardening magazines are available  in your local newsagent ! Thanks for the three free packets of tomato seeds in the magazine which will go into our wartime zoo keeper’s garden for this summer, no doubt to be eaten like last year’s strawberries by cheeky scrumping small children! 

Happy digging! Contact us at the World War Zoo gardens project via comments on this blog. We look forward to seeing you on 1 to 3 May 2010 at our World war Zoo garden weekend.  Then there’s the Twitter reminders , the attendance function the students told me about on Facebook (for fans of the worldwarzoo garden page on Facebook) … “Fall In, Families!”

Lions, leaves, Vera Lynn and lettuces! Wet weather returns to help the garden grow …

Vera Lynn at our wartime garden launch in fine 1940s original photo form with some original sheet music

After a few parched weeks as summer begins and ends in September with plenty of  leaves falling (why do so many garden blogs become obsessed by weather?) the welcome overnight and early morning rain has returned to perk up our early Autumn crops of salad veg (iceberg lettuce, pak choi, spinach beet, radiccioand leaf salad). Soon some leafy stuff should be big enough to thin out, feed the thinnings to our many animals (so nothing is wasted) and hope the rest bulks up before slugs, wet weather and rare frosts here finish them off (Newquay Zoo is in a sheltered valley close to the sea).

October gives us a chance to get some fresh choices of seeds sown for next Spring, choose an apple tree to put in to celebrate Vera Lynn (she’s still in the charts at 92!) and another of our Vera Lynn links – sweet peas, a variety named after this wonderful woman.  (My brief family connection with wartime gardens, evacuees and Vera Lynn is mentioned in earlier blogs).  Find out more about her musical contribution to wartime Britain at http://www.veralynn.org

More buckets of leaves collected from the wartime zoo gardenbefore our veg are buried under autumn colours are going down well with various zoo animals as places to hide food, new scents, dig for bugs or unusual bedding. Fishing leaves out of the Humboldt Penguin pool near our wartime garden is an unpleasant but necessary task at this time of year, as left in the pool it greens up quickly despite UV filters. Strange dark shapes of masses of leaves spook penguins into thinking predators are lurking, like submarines below the surface.   Penguin Poo on the other hand (guano) would prove a fine natural fertiliser if we could let it build up and dry off – traded for many years, especially useful in wartime, it’s one reason why many penguin beaches were dug up and damaged.

Lions featured heavily in wartime propaganda as a national symbol, including the disturbingly titled film The Lion Has Wings. I hope not!  The Lion House lawn (that we partly dug up wartime style to make our veg garden) is an especially busy area at the moment, but not to admire our leeks. It’s used more to get a good view of Charlie, a newly arrived male lion from Longleat as company for his retired older sister Connie our Lioness, all filmed for TV and our website. Some fabulous YouTube links on the Newquay Zoo website www.newquayzoo.org.uk feature short films by staff on  ‘behind the scenes’ activities including Charlie’s arrival).

Maybe we’ll make one in the spring about how our wartime garden grows …

Successful second day of our Wartime zoo life exhibition … and Vera Lynn back in the charts!

A much visited box of ration books, gardening books and wartime recipe collections.

Day 2 of 2: Another busy exhibition day on Bank Holiday Monday talking to zoo visitors about the wartime zoo garden project, in fact not much time to plant more seedlings beyond another bed of leeks.

Lots of  “jawjaw” about “war war” but mostly listening to people’s experiences of wartime, especially evacuees (ahead of today’s St. Paul’s commemoration) and children and their parents who had just done “the war” and wartime childhood at school.

Objects such as gas masks, a mystery object (a banana), Mars Bars (our staple and suitably wartime diet for two days talking), Kitkat wrappers (scanned and sent by fabulous 40s girls of The Polar Bears re-enactment group)  and ration books, but especially Powdered eggs (thanks to the 1940s Society for a fresh supply) got different generations talking, teaching and reliving each other. So no need to write captions for this two day museum exhibition!

Most people, especially older visitors agreed how important it was that the experiences and lessons of this time are not forgotten. Vera Lynn, the new Makedoandmend.com website and the 7oth anniversary of the outbreak of war, linked to the week’s television schedules and the new Imperial War Museum exhibition “Outbreak” were mentioned by visitors.

The usual bank holiday weather watered the wartime zookeeper’s garden for us which will keep on growing whilst the exhibition goes back into store. We photographed sections of it laid out to share with you over the next few blogs. We’ve a winter ahead scanning, conserving, cataloguing and preparing resources for schools. Research into wartime zoos goes on.

Scrumping apples in Vera Lynn’s Garden …

 

Blog 4: A bit of wartime colour ( and an unsolved crime)

Some sweet peas and sunflowers are already in bloom around Newquay Zoo. Being environmental or sustainable today or a thrifty victory gardener in wartime didn’t mean dull with no colour at all. Flowers, like a visit to a zoo, were inspiring and a boost to morale. Sunflowers come in handy as animal enrichment still, one seed head feeding a wartime chicken for a week.

One variety of sweet pea will have to wait another  few months for planting, the appropriately named “Vera Lynn” for some much needed colour.

I look forward to this flowering next year as I’ve always had a soft spot for Vera Lynn and her songs. It’s all down to my mum as a tiny five year old child being lookout for a gang of fellow evacuees scrumping apples out of Vera Lynn’s orchard in Ditchling in Sussex. (The truth is now out and the statute of limitations suggests she can no longer be hunted down by the police or television’s Inspector Foyle for this wartime crime!) Appropriately we’ll have a small apple tree in the keeper’s wartime garden, to be planted in late Autumn.

You’ll be able to see a picture of my mum as a child sitting on her back garden Anderson shelter, covered with vegetables,  on part of the display panels for the wartime zoo garden at Newquay Zoo.

Our World War Zoo gardens project will be a practical living memorial, almost history that you can eat in the form of a wartime “dig for victory garden” being recreated at Newquay Zoo in Cornwall. This lauches to visitors on 30th and 31st August, 2009 commemortaing the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of war.

More news of this project follows over the next few weeks as we prepare the ground and get planting.

Watch this space! Follw us on twittr:  worldwarzoo1939 or log on to the Newquay Zoo website and look at events and ‘what’s on’ sections

Mark Norris, World War Zoo Project team, Newquay Zoo, Cornwall, UK