The Spade as Mighty as the Sword by Daniel Smith

Author:Daniel Smith [Smith, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781311295
Publisher: MBI

It was the posters that did it – ‘Dig for Victory!’ Just working in an office (however much good work there was to do) and one’s occasional fire-watching didn’t seem enough; there was still some time to spare during the weekends, that sacred institution so beloved of Englishmen! Also, that poster was a challenge. The very large boot pressing in the spade was undoubtedly a man’s – daughter and I felt quite able to prove that two pairs of smaller feet could do the job equally well.

The ‘boot on the spade’ poster, which first appeared in 1941 and was reproduced some four million times up to 1945, could hardly be accused of subtlety yet there is perhaps no more famous advertising image produced by any British government, with the honourable exception of the First World War poster Your Country Needs You featuring Lord Kitchener. The Dig for Victory poster is also at the centre of an intriguing mystery: exactly whose left foot is it in that boot? There are two major claimants to the title, both backed by contemporary sources.

The most widely touted owner of the said extremity (whose champions include the Imperial War Museum) was one Mr W.H. (William Henry) McKie, a senior member of the Acton Gardening Association and an allotment holder in Acton Vale. He was the subject of a story in the Acton Gazette on 7 February 1941, under the headline ‘The Man whose foot all the nation knows.’ With a long interest in horticulture, Mr McKie had originally come upon the joys of vegetable growing at the start of the First World War. However, like Mr Middleton, his real love remained with flowers and he was particularly renowned among his fellow Acton gardeners for his spectacular gladioli, dahlias and zinnias, all of which had won numerous competition awards over the years. Sixty-six years of age at the outbreak of the Second World War, he had listened to the call of civic duty and reverted to nurturing vegetables. Often to be found working away on his plot on both Saturdays and Sundays, he was there one day when official photographers came to the site and, so it was said, took the famous shot.

This tale is perfectly credible and was something of a propaganda coup – the story of an elderly gentleman at the heart of the community doing the right thing and making his contribution to the national effort, just as he had done in the Great War. The story of the rival claimant, Thomas Morgan Jones, may initially lack some of that romanticism but its leading protagonist lived out a remarkable war story of his own.

Tom Jones, a resident of Sunbury-on-Thames in Surrey, was an artist with the Morgan-Wells advertising firm based at 9 Bishops Court, Chancery Lane in London. Six feet tall and of slender build, he had wanted to join the RAF but was turned down and so became eager to ‘do his bit’ in some other way. On 25 February 1941, less

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