A London magistrate stared down at the young man in the dock. “You’re the kind of modern who doesn’t know that there’s a war on,” he said. “Well, if you don’t, it’s time you did. For wasting bread you’re fined a quid.
”
That was the fate of Edward Kelly, a man whose eye was always bigger than his belly, who piled his plate high and thought nothing of the waste. The war had made bread a crime. In 1918, in the closing months of the First World War, food riots had torn through Germany. Twenty years later, Adolf Hitler explained his hunger for land to the east with brutal simplicity.
“I need the Ukraine,” he said, “so that no one is able to starve us again as in the last war. ” Food was at the top of his agenda, and food would dominate how war changed everything in daily life. For Frank Kendall, a man who didn’t think of himself as belligerent, the war was a hundred small reminders. His food card proved that evil forces were working overtime to sink the ships that brought wheat and meat from abroad.
Their aim was to frighten shipping away from British ports by inhuman methods of warfare. In 1939, the merchant navies of the empires told their own story. More than 1,200 vessels flew the French flag, more than 1,500 the flag of the Netherlands, more than 1,600 the Japanese flag. They brought the bounty of empire to the kitchens of the mother countries.
Britain, which depended on imports for 70% of her food supply, had more than 6,700 ships in her merchant marine. A dependence that made her vulnerable, as the Battle of the Atlantic would prove. When Britain declared war on September 3rd, 1939, propaganda immediately focused on the need to produce and conserve food. In the little village of Camberley in Surrey, life had been quiet and lovely.
Then the war came, and everybody panicked. They started cutting back and giving out ration books. Despite the dependence on food imports, the British government did not introduce rationing immediately. Only petrol was rationed at once.
Churchill complained bitterly. He didn’t want this sort of nanny government telling people what they should eat. But plenty in the government realized they’d left rationing far too late in the First World War, moving towards a food crisis and a dangerous position with morale. The first food items were couponed from January 1940.
Rationing was designed to manage shortages and ensure fair distribution. Meat, sugar, and all other commodities were limited. The breweries started making their own beer, called “arms and legs” because it had no powder in it. The effect of rationing, as Churchill had feared, was inevitably to tell people what they could eat.
Since what they could eat was not the normal diet, part of the government’s work was to tell people how to eat well. “We cannot produce or import enough fruit in wartime,” the broadcasts said, “but we are growing more green vegetables to take their place. Some of these are richer in vitamin C than fruit. ”
Behind the scenes, nutritionists were testing what rations people needed to survive.
They weighed the food before it went in, then weighed their friends’ waste when it came out to see how healthy it was, analyzing the calcium. They found that the ration eventually introduced was absolutely fine. We all stayed healthy. In September 1939, British ships offloaded at British ports to supply British shops that delivered to British homes.
Seventy percent of cheese, almost 80% of fruit, and more than 50% of meat consumed. Some 20 million tons of food every year. All that changed. On Monday morning, January 8th, 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 and more items added until, by the second half of 1942, almost every food item was rationed except vegetables. The rationing 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 for each person. Rationing was imposed almost everywhere. Taking sugar as an example, 280 grams per adult per week was allowed in Germany, 250 in Britain, 500 in France, and in America, which depended on the Philippines for almost all of its sugar, 250 after the Japanese conquest.
There were three colour ration books. Buff for adults, blue for teenagers, and green for infants. Adults weren’t allowed any oranges, but teenagers and children were each allowed about two, which they could get on their ration books. There must have been quite a lot of the under-five class who didn’t know what an orange was.
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. This was fairly far on in the war. She was given a banana, and her very good friends got pieces of banana, but I only got a sniff of a banana skin.
Ann Collins was the first child to get her teeth into the cargo, all of which was reserved for under 18. She had no doubt eaten bananas before, but there were others who hadn’t. The captain of the ship had to explain how to peel these strange fruit. Even then, some of the kids didn’t seem to know how to eat them.
Bananas were effectively unavailable, and many other items, although theoretically available with coupons, were in very short supply. The allocation of stock to shopkeepers depended on how many customers they had registered, not on the size of the shop. This had the potential to incline people to register at larger stores. You took your ration card to the shop, and he had a pencil, and you got your rations.
I can remember my mother. There was a little corner shop up the road, and we decided we would support him. Then there was the row because he put sugar paper on the scales. Well, that sugar paper is heavy.
And if you only got two ounces of butter, my mother said, “I’ll have it on the scale without the paper. ” “Oh, no, no, can’t do that. ” And she said, “I’ll have it like that or I won’t have it at all. ” So, we didn’t go to him anymore.
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 weren’t 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. The shopkeeper would keep back a bit of cheese for Mrs. So-and-so down the road who was a good friend, and she would get a bit slipped in her bag without anybody mentioning it as she was doing her shopping. The Ministry of Food appointed 900 inspectors to enforce the law and investigated complaints against those suspected of involvement in the black market.
The penalties for those caught — a fine of £500 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. One Labour Member of Parliament labelled black marketeering treason of the very worst kind. There were calls for harsher penalties.
“I want to talk to you about what is called racketeering or the black market,” said the broadcaster. “It is being stopped. 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. As crime rates rose across the board, looting was common, though commonly unreported.
There was a hell of a lot of looting. When the people went down the shelters, the houses would get broken into. They wouldn’t bother about the raid. They’d just get in and help themselves.
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. We used to have a ration of sweets, but eventually that was cut right down, and we all had to pool all our sweets. We got about half a dozen a week, I think.
Then we used to have trifle on a Sunday, but as the war went on, it became just a jelly. Children in war and peace, whose walks to school were not through city streets, could always find treats. In war, they just became less selective. We stole like anything.
I lived in a very old village just outside Oxford. Many of the gardens had apple trees, pear trees, plum trees, and we stole everything we could find over the hedge because we were hungry. We ate everything. We ate crab apples from the hedges in the fields.
Crab apples basically aren’t edible, but we ate them. Because there weren’t many sweets, she’d give us a bag of sugar and a stick of rhubarb, and we used to put the rhubarb in and eat it that way. Sounds horrible now, but we thought it was great. Rationing meant queuing up, and it garnished or perhaps 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. Rationing was just a part of daily life, same as queuing. Always get to the back of the queue, no matter where you went, the cinema, a chocolate bar, no matter what. Back of the queue.
It became just part of your life. You didn’t think anything of it. We had to queue in the town to get the unrationed meat. The classic expression “guns for butter” illustrated how rationing affected different countries differently.
In France, the weekly allowance for butter and margarine was 200 grams. In Britain, 150. In Australia, for butter alone, 390. In Britain, about 2,000 collective eating places were established, developed from the emergency service originally set up in London for bombed-out Blitz victims.
Lord Woolton gave his blessing in Liverpool, where he opened the first provincial municipal communal feeding center. He, too, did a spot of tasting and found the soup good. 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 can get an excellent lunch here for under a bob. ”
Other services were offered to those living away from the centers of population. You couldn’t set up canteens for rural workers, so they had a lovely thing called the rural pie scheme, and the Women’s Voluntary Services would distribute nice meat pies to rural laborers. They found ways of evening out and making sure that those people who really needed 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 didn’t want to spend their precious foreign exchange on food imports to improve the working class diet. Göring was quite serious when he meant “we’ve chosen guns over butter,” because they didn’t 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, a month before invading Poland.
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. 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, 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 in 1940: tomatoes, 900 million bushels. Eggs, 37 billion.
Pigs, 16 billion pounds. Milk, 107 billion pounds. What happened was that it pulled agriculture in America out of depression. At last farmers got enough money for their food.
The industrial complex in America got going again because it was creating arms and ships, all those ships to save Britain. “Get going, farmer. It’s up to you. Farmer, save democracy.
More barley. More corn. More beans. More milk.
More rhubarb. More spinach. More grapefruit. More cabbage.
More grain. Grain for life. ”
Morale depends on many things. What is in the pantry might be at the top of the list, but rationing didn’t 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.
For cab horses, too, the news was brighter, for the more they rationed petrol, the better it was for the friend of man. The wardrobe was not immune from wartime shortages. All that whimsy had to be put away, for fashion was rationed. Clothes rationing was introduced in June 1941.
Millions of men and women in uniform had to be outfitted, limiting the amount of fabric available for civilian clothes and setting new challenges for those on the home front. I was growing like a weed, as my mother used to say, so most of the coupons went on me because I was growing very quickly as nine or ten-year-olds do. My mother was a dressmaker and could make clothes out of just about nothing, and she kept me 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 it back on, secure 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.
My mom’s friend, she was a lot younger, and she used to give me dresses to dress up. Stockings had a seam in those days. She would put this colour on her legs and then draw the line on it. That was fun.
The government invested heavily in promoting the recycling and reshaping of everything short of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear. There was plentiful advice about how to repurpose holy jumpers, worn overcoats, and frayed blankets. “Perhaps we can help you,” said the announcer. “Your old clothes, put away and forgotten.
Use us now. For instance, I could make a smart costume for the young lady. ” “That’s all very well, but I’ve never turned a pair of trousers into a skirt in my life. ” “Never mind.
It’s quite easy to do. Ask at your technical institute. There’s probably a local make, do, and mend class where you can learn. ”
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.
Shopping was different. Cooking was different. Eating was different, and for many people, digging for victory became part of their routine. As the war progressed, children walking to school saw their environment change.
Parks, sports grounds, and school yards were dug up and crops were planted. “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. ”
Governments set to work on campaigns to increase food production both at the agricultural and domestic levels.
“Work on the land, though not so spectacular as most war work, is equally as important as destroying U-boats or bombing enemy factories. ” The result in Britain was that the amount of arable land increased by 43%, ensuring that basic food supplies could be supplied to British people from British soil. “High in the Welsh mountains, we’ve discovered 50,000 acres of deep soil which can produce grand potatoes. This fine crop is 1,000 feet above sea level.
”
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 use every piece of land. If everyone else in your street had a garden and was starting to dig it up, you would be encouraged to do that as well. Mr.
Topham himself was helping to add to Britain’s larder while keeping an eye on the world’s most famous steeplechase course. It was not just Liverpool’s famous Aintree race course that the city was digging up. A whole golf course was being plowed up for victory. Nearly 200 acres near Liverpool being made ready for oats, potatoes, and, I sincerely hope, onion.
Drake played bowls in the hour of crisis, but just watch this hero calmly sinking a putt with that tractor coming up astern. Digging for victory was a fine expression, but it didn’t get the job done. 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 wasn’t that good in towns at the beginning. That’s something the Dig for Victory campaign really helped to improve, with exhibitions where they would have model gardens. People could go and walk around and see physically how to grow food, which foods could be grown at different times of the year. “The dreadful fate of this poor man was due to lack of garden plan.
You cannot eat lilies, but you can make sure of greens for next winter if you plan your sowing now. ”
Guided by the Ministry of Agriculture, the people followed national plans for growing food. More than half the manual workers in Britain had a garden or an allotment. My dad left just a small area of grass to me to play on, and he turned the whole of the back garden into vegetables.
We had a greenhouse and a cold frame. My dad kept half the street in fresh vegetables. We used to grow leeks, potatoes, carrots, and citrus trees. I don’t remember that we ever really went without, because you 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. It was improvised and had an ad hoc feel, but the Dig for Victory campaign worked. In 1942, harvests were declared the best on record.
“From the very beginning of the war, one of Germany’s principal aims has been Britain’s starvation. Yet today, Britain can claim to be the best fed country in Europe, and her 1942 harvest looks like being the greatest on record. There are now 6 million more acres under crops than before the war. ”
Farmers needed extra help to bring in the bumper crops.
Volunteers were sought. As with many other jobs during the war, it was women who stepped forward. Thousands helped by joining the Women’s Land Army. You would be directed to the countryside, where you would either work on a farm and take the place of male laborers, or you would join what they called the Timber Corps, felling and chopping up trees, which is very, 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. “Girls, as we know, are playing their part on the land just as faithfully as in the workshops. And although a picture of farming may look like a holiday, believe me, it’s one of the toughest war jobs there is.
”
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. Minimum wage for land girls was 28 shillings per week, as against an average 38 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.
It was very hard for them to have any expression of their sexuality. In the war, if they went off as land girls, billeted in hostel-type situations, women did form liaisons. Many women said the war was fantastic because people were so worried about the war effort, they didn’t much care what they were doing anymore. “We were just left to our own devices.
We had a great time. ”
Over 80,000 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 the shadow of war fell, the role of women changed. “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.
“What a picnic. It takes 25 lbs of potatoes, 15 lbs of onions, 10 lbs of meat to feed them, and that’s only one course. Talk about ration books. ”
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 course of the Second World War, and it was also one of the most difficult to communicate to the public. The Ministry of Information tried to go about this by working very carefully with the departments that were responsible. This was about education as much as it was about instruction. “Dehydration is another weapon of defence against the U-boat.
This is a demonstration in Connecticut of dehydration in the home. The trays go on top of nine 100-W lamps, and the process takes about 10 hours. ”
By the middle of 1941, the British Ministry of Food had an effective consultation process established with scientists like the nutritional biochemist Jack Drummond. “The answer to the vitamin question is not pills, but good food in plenty of variety.
” Though unknown names to popular history, these scientists played key roles in Britain’s survival and ultimate victory by strongly influencing 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. “England needs meat. She shall have meat. Sugar, an essential to bodily health and warmth.
Thousands of bags will be diverted to help the people of Britain. ”
But the availability of food did not mean the availability of everything familiar and loved. Getting out the government’s message about diet, economies, and recipes was important. The radio was a huge distributor of information.
A lot of the campaigns would be known mostly through the wireless. People relied on that so much during the war. It was a daily ritual to listen to it. 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 on this week. To us now, it seems toe-curlingly condescending the way the BBC spoke to the little people and told them how to eat. The show was just one government initiative that gave the Ministry of Food the chance to guide housewives in how best to feed their family healthy food. There were efforts to make people understand the reasons why rationing was there, informing people about the blockades on shipping and where food came from.
The Ministry of Food opened food advice centres all over the country. “Their advice is free, whether you want to know about buying food or cooking it. Some food advice centres answer 2,000 questions a week. ”
New and appetizing dishes included the eggless cake, mock fish cakes, and steamed chocolate pudding that used a little bit of cocoa and quite a lot of carrot.
The government presented 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. You took the carrot and rubbed it on the brick walls to get the skin off, then you ate 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 grey 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’s stodgy, people don’t like it, people won’t buy it. It became increasingly clear towards the winter of 1940 that there was no way the British could manage if they just carried on basically 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 national loaf. Paradoxically, it meant that 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. “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. With meat a scarce commodity and rations limited to around a shilling’s worth, 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 more than those in the great cities, though rabbits were kept as well as trapped. We lived in a semi-detached and had a garden of about a quarter of an acre. My father cultivated it and we ate what he grew.
He also kept dozens of rabbits in little boxes. We brought them up and I petted them, and then he killed them and we ate them. Bulking up scraps of meat with plentiful vegetables, suet pastry, or batter was popular. You were allowed a shilling’s worth of meat; well, you didn’t buy the expensive stuff, you bought mince.
She used to make shepherd’s pie sort of thing. She’d cook all what meat we could get and onions and lots of veggies, then she used to put lots of mashed potato on top. From time to time, other less familiar food found its way into the shops. Just after Norway fell, a lot of their whaling ships came home to England.
In the butcher shops, whale meat unrationed. Buy as much as you like. But some people didn’t like it very much. Lord Woolton was the Minister of Food.
“Oh, Lord Woolton,” exclaimed a small shopkeeper, “could you be in our shoes for a single day? How much wiser you would be. ”
An official recipe, named for the Minister, appeared in The Times in April 1941. The pie was promoted all over the place.
This was basically vegetables cooked in wholemeal flour, really stodgy, sort of sticky. Then you put wholemeal pastry over the top. It didn’t 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 reminds you of apricot flan, but with a deliciousness all of its own. Perhaps washed down with coffee, made not from coffee, but chicory essence. Actually, I don’t think most people ever made mock cream, 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 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 favouring 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. “Hardly looks as if we were on the verge of starvation, does it? The food comes in, there is even shipping space to import scrap iron in the form of old guns from St.
Helena. ”
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 flavour, 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 the morale of the home front. Morale depended on many things. Life in general was pretty everyday routine, like it probably 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.
“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. ”
