They used to say of Edward Kelly that his eye was bigger than his belly. He always piled his plate with more than he could ever eat, and of bread especially he was wasteful. When the judge heard the case, he looked at him and said, “You’re the kind of modern who doesn’t know that there’s a war on. Well, if you don’t, it’s time you did.
For wasting bread you’re fined a quid. ”
War has never been only about the battlefield. In the great conflict at the heart of the twentieth century, the Second World War, those who were not in uniform, whose countries had not been invaded, still found themselves in danger and their lives totally changed. This is the story of those who lived in the shadow of that war.
In 1918, in the closing months of the First World War, there were food riots in Germany. Twenty years later, Adolf Hitler explained his grab for land to the East quite simply. “I need the Ukraine,” he said, “so that no one is able to starve us again as in the last war. ” So food was at the top of his agenda, and food to keep the people healthy dominated the way the war changed daily life.
Frank Kendall is at war. He may not have thought of himself as very belligerent, but that is what he is, a belligerent, someone engaged in war. A hundred things beside his newspaper remind him of the fact. His food card is evidence that evil forces are working overtime to sink the ships that bring him wheat and meat from abroad, their aim to frighten shipping away from British ports by inhuman methods of warfare.
In 1939, the size of the merchant navies of those countries that had empires told the story. More than 1,200 vessels flew the French flag. More than 1,500 flew the flag of the Netherlands. More than 1,600 flew the Japanese flag.
They brought the bounty of empire to the kitchens of the mother countries. The United Kingdom, which depended on imports for seventy percent of its food supply, had more than 6,700 ships in her merchant marine. The convoys were bound to suffer some losses, but more and more material was reaching them, and when an important convoy came, the Royal Navy saw to it that it went through. That dependence made her vulnerable, as the world’s longest battle, the Battle of the Atlantic, would prove.
When Britain declared war on September the third, 1939, propaganda immediately focused on the need to produce and conserve food. One woman remembered living in a little village called Camberley in Surrey, which was very quiet and lovely. Then all of a sudden the war came. Everybody panicked, and they started cutting back and giving out rations and ration books.
Despite its reliance on food imports, the British government did not introduce food rationing immediately. Only petrol was rationed at once. For some in the government who opposed rationing, the reasons were ideological rather than practical. Churchill complained bitterly that they should not introduce rationing.
He did not want this sort of nanny government telling people what they should eat. But plenty in the government realized that they had left rationing far too late in the First World War and had moved toward a food crisis and a really dangerous position with morale. The first food items were couponed from January 1940. Rationing was designed to manage shortages and ensure fair distribution.
Once the scheme got going, it governed just about everything. Meat and sugar and all the other commodities. The breweries even started making their own watered-down beer, which people called arms and legs because it had no powder in it. The effect of rationing was, as Churchill had feared, inevitably to tell people what they could eat.
And since what they could eat was not the normal diet, part of the government’s work was to tell people how to eat well. The country could not produce or import enough fruit in wartime, but they grew more green vegetables to take its place, some of them richer in vitamin C than fruit. In the background, nutritionists were working away, interested in testing what kind of rations people would need to survive. They did incredible things.
They weighed the food before it went in and then weighed their friends’ waste when it came out to see how healthy it was, analyzing it for calcium and all those sorts of things. Then they found that the ration that was eventually introduced was absolutely fine. And as one woman remembered, they all stayed healthy. “Mum never ever bought rubbish.
She always made good solid food. ”
In January 1940, for the first time, housewives all over Britain set off to the shops with their ration books. Bacon, butter, and sugar were rationed, with more items added until by the second half of 1942 almost every food item was rationed, except for vegetables that were produced in sufficient quantities. The British system was administered with coupons contained in ration books, based on the idea that the coupons represented the minimum amount of food the government guaranteed would be available to each person.
Rationing was ultimately imposed almost everywhere. Taking sugar as an example, two hundred and eighty grams per adult per week was allowed in Germany, two hundred and fifty in Britain, five hundred in France, and in America, which depended on the Philippines for almost all of its sugar, two hundred and fifty after the Japanese conquest. In Britain there were three-color ration books: buff for adults, blue for teenagers, and green for infants. Adults were not allowed any oranges, but teenagers and children got about two each on their ration books.
One broadcaster noted there must be quite a lot of the under-five class who do not know what an orange is, and there were likely to be a few sticky moments while they decided whether it was a good thing or not. One girl at school had a sister married to someone in the Navy who brought back bananas, fairly far on in the war. She was given a banana, and her very good friends got pieces of banana, but one girl only got a sniff of a banana skin. Bananas were effectively unavailable, and many other items, although theoretically available with coupons, were in very short supply.
Shopkeepers had a difficult job. They had to manage the unreliable supply of staples with bombing and other factors holding up delivery. They bore the brunt of complaints from already grumpy shoppers when things were not available. They took on responsibility for the administration of rations, and they faced the temptation of black marketeering, for which there were severe penalties.
Most of the black market in Britain was under the counter. A shopkeeper would keep back a bit of cheese for a good friend and slip it into her bag without anybody mentioning it while she did her shopping. The Ministry of Food appointed nine hundred inspectors to enforce the law and investigated complaints against those suspected of being involved in the black market. The penalties for those caught, a fine of five hundred pounds plus three times the value of the goods involved and a possible two years in prison, should have been a major deterrent.
But throughout the war, illicit trade flourished. Official outrage led one Labour Member of Parliament to label black marketeering treason of the very worst kind, and there were calls for harsher penalties. A wartime broadcast declared, “These food cheats are the enemies of the people. They’ll get no mercy from me.
There must be no dirty fingers in the people’s food. ”
The spirit of the Blitz was a real thing, but much romanticized since the war. Through the war years, the black market was just one area of crime that flourished. Crime rates rose across the board, and looting was common, though often unreported.
One man remembered that there was a hell of a lot of looting going on when the people went down the shelters. The houses would get broken into. The thieves would not bother about the raid. They would just get in and help themselves to what they could find.
Those abiding by the law were able to buy their weekly rations in lots rather than all at once, which created another source of conflict when the shopper’s idea of what they had did not tally with the shopkeeper’s record of what they took home yesterday. Treats and unexpected goods also caused much consternation for shoppers and shopkeepers alike. One woman remembered having a ration of sweets that eventually got cut right down, with everyone pooling their rations to get about half a dozen a week. They used to have trifle on a Sunday, but as the war went on it became just a jelly.
Children whose walks to school were not through city streets could always find treats. They just became less selective. One boy who lived in a very old village just outside Oxford remembered stealing everything he could find over the hedges because he was hungry. They ate crab apples from the hedges in the fields, though crab apples are basically not edible.
They ate them anyway because there were not many sweets. His mother would give them a bag of sugar and a stick of rhubarb, and they would dip the rhubarb in the sugar and eat it that way. It sounded horrible now, but they thought it was great. Rationing meant queuing up, and it created the British reputation for forming orderly queues.
There was the queue to obtain the ration book and the ration stamps, and the queue at the shop to buy the allotted amount. It became just part of daily life, the same as queuing. You always got to the back of the queue, no matter where you went, the cinema, a chocolate bar, no matter what. It became just part of your life.
You did not think anything of it. There was always a mid-week queue you had to join to get the unrationed meat. Perhaps the classic expression “guns for butter” can illustrate how rationing affected different countries differently. In France, the weekly allowance for butter and margarine was two hundred grams.
In Britain, one hundred and fifty. In Australia, for butter alone, three hundred and ninety. In Britain, about two thousand collective eating places were established, developed from the emergency service originally set up in London for bombed-out Blitz victims. Central eating received Lord Woolton’s blessing in Liverpool, where he opened the first provincial municipal communal feeding center.
Churchill detested the socialist sound of the word “collective,” so he christened them British Restaurants. They served a plain meal for nine pence with no loss of ration coupons. You could get an excellent lunch there for under a shilling. Other services were offered to those living away from the centers of population.
You could not set up canteens for rural workers, so the Women’s Voluntary Services distributed nice meat pies to rural laborers under what they called the rural pie scheme. They found ways of evening things out and making sure that those people who actually really did need more food got more food. In 1939, Germany was virtually self-sufficient in food. Since the Nazis took power, they had been re-engineering the national diet to make it less dependent on imports.
In 1933, they did not want to spend their precious foreign exchange on food imports to improve the working class diet. Göring was quite serious when he meant they had chosen guns over butter. They did not want to spend money on importing fodder from Denmark or bacon or milk to feed the working classes. They wanted to spend it on iron from Sweden to rearm.
Rationing was one way of simplifying the guns-for-butter choice. The USSR had a food rationing system in place in 1931. Germany introduced it a month before invading Poland, and Japan six months before attacking Pearl Harbor. In the Soviet Union, which lost so much of its fertile territory to the German invasion, those living in the shadow experienced a war-long shortage of food.
In 1940, the grain harvest had been 95. 6 million tons. In 1942, it was 26. 7 million.
In the face of the German invasion, factories had been relocated, and in these, workers’ canteens were set up that served an estimated 25 million meals every day. Unlike the workers’ canteens set up by law in the UK, the meals served in the factories of the Soviet Union were barely the stuff of survival. Thin soups and sometimes scraps of meat fell well short of the calories required by manual workers. Germany’s pragmatic approach to food doomed many to hunger and death before the war even started.
Based on the Reich’s spurious racial theory, a category of “useless eaters” was defined. As the Reich’s boundaries moved east, a ration was set for the Jews of Eastern Europe at 420 calories every day. Seventeen hundred is considered the minimum requirement for survival. Jews in the occupied territories and in the Reich did not have to worry about rationing because they were not permitted to go to markets, deal with farmers, or buy eggs, butter, milk, meat, or fruit.
Additional food for German mine workers was authorized following the fall of France, which guaranteed an increase in Germany’s food supply. For families in Britain, and even more in her dominions, and when the war reached it in the United States, rationing was a chore and replacement foods were often less than delicious, but starvation never threatened. The US was the only country that had an agricultural boom. Wartime production soared: tomatoes, eggs, pigs, milk.
The war pulled agriculture in America out of depression. At last farmers got enough money for the food they were growing. The industrial complex got going again because it was creating arms and ships, all those ships to save Britain. A broadcast urged, “Get going, farmer.
It’s up to you. Farmer, save democracy. More barley. More corn.
More beans. More milk. More rhubarb. More spinach.
More cabbage. More grain for bread. Grain for life. ”
Morale depended on many things.
What was in the pantry might be at the top of the list, but rationing did not stop there. Anything that could be used for the war effort was restricted and rationed. Petrol for private use was severely restricted. Ivor Novello, as famous an entertainer as any in his day, was imprisoned for four weeks for black market abuses of the petrol ration.
It was not easy for a chap to keep his Rolls-Royce on the road. Cab horses, though, had brighter news, for the more they rationed petrol, the better it was for the friend of man. The wardrobe was not immune from wartime shortages. Clothes rationing was introduced in June 1941.
Millions of men and women in uniform had, after all, to be outfitted, which limited the amount of fabric available for civilian clothes and set new challenges for those on the home front. One woman remembered growing like a weed, as her mother used to say, so most of the coupons went on her. Her mother was a dressmaker who could make clothes out of just about nothing and kept her well clothed. A shortage of elastic caused extraordinary problems for women who relied on it to hold up their underwear.
If it failed as they walked, the unflappable wearer would step clear, lean down, retrieve the garment, and walk on. Those prepared would put the garment back on, secured with a small gold safety pin carried in one’s purse for just this purpose. Women, at a time when bare legs were not considered proper, suffered from parachutes having first call on silk and nylon. In imitation of their missing stockings, ladies perfected the art of drawing a deceptive seam down the back of their legs.
One woman remembered her mother’s young friend giving her dresses to dress up in. Stockings had a seam in those days, and she would put color on her legs and then draw the line on it. She thought that was funny. The government invested heavily in promoting the recycling and reshaping of everything short of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, and there was plentiful advice about how to repurpose holey jumpers, worn overcoats, and frayed blankets.
A broadcast featuring the clothes themselves suggested that an old pair of trousers could be turned into a skirt. “Ask at your technical institute,” it advised. “There’s probably a local make, do, and mend class where you can learn. Or why not get together with your friends and form a make, do, and mend group.
Then you can all help each other. ”
There was an even more concerted effort to encourage improvisation, adaptation, and the adoption of ersatz ingredients in the kitchen, where Britain was forced to respond to the reduction in imported foodstuffs in a number of ways. Shopping was different. Cooking was different.
Eating was different. For many people, digging for victory became part of their routine. As the war progressed, children walking to school, no matter which country they were in, saw their environment change. Parks, sports grounds, and school yards were dug up and crops planted.
A broadcast urged, “It’s hard, but we can’t afford to waste land. The farmers can’t win this war, but idle farms could soon lose it. ” To shore up food supplies, governments set to work on campaigns to increase food production both at the agricultural and domestic levels. The amount of arable land in Britain increased by forty-three percent, ensuring that basic food supplies could be provided to British people from British soil.
The Dig for Victory campaign started as a call for farmers to plow up non-farm land to grow crops, and it spread to parks, commons, golf courses, building estates, and even race courses. It was very successful in showing people the possibilities of the land they had and making people feel that it was really necessary to go out and use every piece of land. If everyone else in your street had a garden and was starting to dig it up because of the campaign, you would be encouraged to do that as well. Liverpool’s famous Aintree race course was dug up.
Nearly two hundred acres near Liverpool were made ready for oats, potatoes, and onions. Digging for victory was a fine expression, but it did not get the job done by itself. Digging meant planting and weeding and harvesting and then digging and planting again. Getting people with no experience to do the job meant talking to them, in information films that played along with newsreels in local cinemas.
The actual knowledge about gardening, about farming, about growing food was not that good in towns at the beginning, and that was something the Dig for Victory campaign really helped to improve. There were exhibitions with model gardens where people could walk around and see physically how to grow food, which foods could be grown at different times of the year. One man remembered that his dad left just a small area of grass for him to play on and turned the whole of the back garden into vegetables. They had a heated greenhouse and a cold frame.
His dad kept half the street in fresh vegetables. They used to grow leeks and potatoes and carrots. They had citrus trees. He did not remember that they ever really went without, because they never had a lot of fancy stuff.
In all of this, the royal family played its part, with crops planted on many royal estates. One thousand four hundred and thirty-three acres of the King’s Sandringham estate were used to grow fruit, vegetable, and cereal crops as a contribution to the war effort. The Dig for Victory campaign worked. In 1942, harvests were declared the best on record.
A broadcast announced that Britain could claim to be the best fed country in Europe, with six million more acres under crops than before the war. Grain crops were the heaviest ever harvested. About half the wheat they required was now grown at home. Farmers needed extra help to bring in the bumper crops.
Volunteers were sought, and as with many other jobs during the war, it was women who stepped forward. Thousands joined the Women’s Land Army, either working on farms to take the place of male laborers or joining the Timber Corps, felling and chopping up trees, which was very heavy work. For young women during the war, escaping to a farm in the country seemed appealing and was a chance to do one’s bit. The Women’s Land Army was open to younger women than the other services, from seventeen and a half.
Hard it was. Forty-eight hours per week in winter and fifty in summer. The women were employed and paid by the farmers, although at a lower rate than men who were or had been doing the same work. The minimum wage for land girls was twenty-eight shillings per week, as against an average thirty-eight shillings for male agricultural workers.
Often the women lived in miserable conditions, in cold accommodations with no proper bathing facilities and with insufficient food. But there were many ways in which these privations were a small price to pay for a freedom and an acceptance that had been unknown in the pre-war world. For many women who were lesbians, the war was tremendously liberating. In the 1930s, their lives would be very restricted at home, with the idea of the dutiful daughter staying home looking after her parents.
In the war, if they went off as land girls, billeted in hostels, women did form liaisons. Many said the war was fantastic for them because people were so worried about the war effort that they did not much care what they were doing anymore. They were just left to their own devices, and they had a great time. Over eighty thousand women from all over Britain became land girls, joining the women who served as air raid wardens, fire watchers, in the munitions factories, or in the armed services.
As in the shadow of war, the role of women changed. A broadcast noted, “These girls are a great success on the land. They love their work. In fact, the only complaint from farmers is they will keep on getting married.
”
For those who were married, and for homemakers everywhere, the business of contributing to the war effort was a constant daily demand. The war’s shadow fell everywhere, and it fell for the duration on the family kitchen, where improvisation, substitution, and inspiration kept families healthy. The housewives of Britain had to learn to make the rations work for their families. Often, thoughts of the absent son or husband reinforced determination to comply with restrictions and help the allies win the war.
But the resolution of the housewives was tested as the war progressed, and it became harder and harder to live on what was available. As people got hungrier and food became more monotonous, morale dipped. Programs from the Ministry of Food encouraged people in their efforts to be frugal and innovative in the battle to feed the family. Rationing was one of the most important policies enforced by the British government during the war, and it was also one of the most difficult to communicate to the public.
This was about education as much as it was about instruction. By the middle of 1941, the Ministry of Food had established an effective consultation process with scientists like the nutritional biochemist Jack Drummond. Though unknown to popular history, these scientists played key roles in Britain’s survival and ultimate victory by strongly influencing the prioritization of food imports, which, despite the attrition of the Battle of the Atlantic and the urgent need for war material, the government never suspended. But the availability of food did not mean the availability of everything familiar and loved.
Getting out the government’s message about diet and economies and recipes was important. The radio was a huge distributor of information. People relied on it so much during the war. The daily broadcast of The Kitchen Front on BBC Radio was essential listening for the home cook.
It was an awful program with Gert and Daisy, two charladies talking about what food had so many points this week. To modern ears, it seems toe-curlingly condescending the way the BBC spoke to the little people and told them how to eat. But it was just one government initiative that gave the Ministry of Food the chance to guide housewives in how best to feed their families healthy food. The Ministry of Food opened food advice centers all over the country.
Their advice was free, whether you wanted to know about buying food or cooking it. Some centers answered two thousand questions a week. New and appetizing dishes included the eggless cake, mock fish cakes, and a steamed chocolate pudding that used a little bit of cocoa and quite a lot of carrot. The government presented the cartoonish Dr.
Carrot, the bespectacled bearer of vitamin A, as a friend of children and lied that it was his diet of carrots, so fortunate that they were readily available, that allowed ace night fighter pilot John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham to see in the dark. One boy remembered rubbing a carrot on the brick walls to get the skin off before eating it, because the fighter pilots had carrots. Then there was the national loaf, made from home-meal flour with added calcium and vitamins. It was described as gray and mushy and preferred by only one person in seven to the white bread it replaced.
At first the government were very reluctant to introduce wholemeal bread. They knew it goes stale, it is stodgy, people do not like it, people will not buy it. But towards the winter of 1940, it became increasingly clear that there was no way the British could manage if they just carried on milling away a large percentage of the wheat. Eventually the nutritionists were able to persuade the government to institute what became known as the national loaf.
If you wanted something to eat, you could always have a slice of it. Paradoxically, while the health of the middle class dipped, that of working men and women in Britain rose as their diet improved. The wealthy, being wealthy, were largely unaffected. Although the royal family ate the same meals as their subjects, as Eleanor Roosevelt on a state visit in 1941 discovered at Buckingham Palace.
After the presentations, Mrs. Roosevelt drove with the King and Queen to Buckingham Palace, where she was their guest for the early part of her stay. “We were served on golden silver plates,” she reported, “but our bread was the same kind of war bread every other family had to eat. ” The national loaf, fit for a king.
One woman could really say that they did not really go without, because if her mum could do something with it, she did. But it was not easy, because you could not go in and have a lovely steak when you went out. There was no such thing. With meat a scarce commodity and rations limited to around a shilling’s worth of meat, innovative ways of making cheap cuts of meat go far and taste good were at a premium.
Rabbit and other game were not rationed. Country dwellers benefited from the exception of game more than those in the great cities, though rabbits were kept as well as trapped and put meat in the family diet. One man remembered living in a semi-detached with a garden of about a quarter of an acre. His father cultivated it, and they ate what he grew.
He also kept dozens of rabbits in little boxes. The family brought them up, he petted them, and then his father killed them and they ate them. Pies, rabbit or otherwise, were a popular way of stretching what limited meat and flavorings were available, bulking up scraps of meat with plentiful vegetables, suet pastry, or batter. One woman remembered that when you were allowed a shilling’s worth of meat, you did not buy the expensive stuff.
You bought mince. Her mother would make a shepherd’s pie sort of thing, cooking all the meat they could get with onions and lots of vegetables and then putting lots of mashed potato on top. From time to time, other less familiar food found its way into the shops. One woman remembered that just after Norway fell, a lot of their whaling ships came home to England.
So in the butcher shops, whale meat was unrationed. You could buy as much as you liked. But some people did not like it very much. Lord Woolton was the Minister of Food.
An official recipe named for him appeared in The Times in April 1941. The pie was promoted all over the place. It was basically vegetables cooked in wholemeal flour, really stodgy, sort of sticky, with wholemeal pastry over the top. It did not taste as bad as it looked.
Woolton’s pie was a less adventurous recipe than some which tried to emulate favorite dishes with mock recipes. Mock duck, mock goose, and mock fish were all attempted. Mock apricot flan, using carrots, was invented by the Ministry of Food, which claimed it reminded you of apricot flan, but with a deliciousness all of its own. Perhaps washed down with coffee made not from coffee but chicory essence, also no doubt with a deliciousness all of its own.
Actually, most people never made mock cream or ate Lord Woolton’s pie or anything else. They just made do with what they got and had a slice of bread and a baked potato. The war lasted for five and a half years in Britain, years in the shadow of dull diet, rationing, and the national loaf. But there were no food riots, just grumpiness and bad jokes.
This was in no small measure due to the government’s determination that everyone should suffer equally. Price controls prevented gorging, and subsidies helped the poorer sections of society to cope with the inevitable rising costs. During the war, British farm income quadrupled and farm laborers’ wages doubled. Initially, restaurants had been exempt from rationing, but this was seen as favoring the wealthy who could afford to eat out, and so restrictions were introduced in 1942.
One restriction was that the maximum price for a meal was to be five shillings, but restaurants could charge extra for entertainment, and the passion for tea dances, dinner dances, and cabarets grew. Through planning, improvisation, and hard work, Britain never starved. Had her leaders been as ruthless as Stalin, the ships plowing across the Atlantic would have been reserved for war-winning material and millions might have died. The worst food crisis in terms of the Battle of the Atlantic was when five ships all carrying bacon were sunk on the same day.
Bacon was very important to the British ration because it provided flavor, but there never was not enough food to keep everybody going. On the supply of sufficient and sufficiently nutritious food depended the health of the home front. Being fed, being able to feed the family, was also vital to maintaining morale. But morale depended on many things.
Life in general was pretty everyday routine, probably like it was before the war, by the rationing and the street lights and the cinemas and different things. Living in the shadow is a story of people who just got on with it, made the best of it, and they got on with it so long as they thought it would end in victory. As the song went, “Oh, here’s a plan that’s fair and square, everybody gets their share. No more griping anywhere.
Get the point, Mrs. Brown. One for you and one for me. It’s as clear as ABC.
Share alike for victory. Get the point, Mrs. Brown. That’s what a rationing plan is for, Mrs.
Brown. Mrs. Jones, the grocery man or the butcher store, your share is there with the Kellys and Cohens. Equal service in the stores.
Fancy pants or cotton drawers, she gets hers and you get yours. Get the point, Mrs. Brown.
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