The Kitchen Front
An
extract from Norman Longmate: How we Lived Then - A history of everyday
life during the Second World War (1971): published by Pimlico ISBN 0
09 908080 x
(used
by permission of The Random
House Group Limited)
Introduction of Rationing, Fish, Meat, Onions, Fruit & veg, Eggs, Milk, Shopping, Disasters,
Making food go further, Guests, Eating out, Black Market, Lord Woolton, Ministry of Food propaganda
'Carrot Flan . . . reminds you of Apricot Flan but has a deliciousness all its own.’
Ministry
of Food advertisement, 1941
One
day in the middle of the war a Staines housewife baked a cake that
contained so few of the usual ingredients that she christened it ‘The
Nothing Cake’. The name – and the fact that her family ate the cake
with enjoyment, though it consisted mainly of flour, custard powder and
dried egg – symbolised the difficulties which British housewives faced
from 1933 to 1945 and the way in which they defeated them. Even those who
never saw an incendiary bomb or heard an enemy bomber had to go into
action several times a day against an enemy even older than Hitler,
hunger.
Women
who remembered the breakdown of food distribution in the first world war,
with its perpetual queues, un-met ration coupons, and desperate shortage
of every necessity from potatoes to edible margarine, dreaded similar
experiences in the second. But this was one area where things turned out
better than expected. The British system of wartime rationing and food
control proved an immense success, due largely to the patriotic
self-sacrifice and resourcefulness of the ordinary housewife. The Kitchen
Front was the only one where Great Britain never lost a battle.
The
housewife was introduced to rationing by easy stages. She first had to
take her ration books when she went shopping on Monday 8th January 1940,
though only for bacon or ham, four ounces a head a week, sugar, twelve
ounces, and butter, four ounces. Meat rationing began in March with 1s.
10d. worth a week for everyone over six, and 11d. worth for
smaller children, the adult ration later being reduced to 1s. 1d.
and 1s. 2d. worth at various times, though offal was
excluded. Fish remained unrationed, but was hard to find. A Ministry of
Food advertisement optimistically predicted:
The fishermen are saving lives
By
sweeping seas for mines,
So
you'll not grumble, 'What no fish?’
When
you have read these lines.
In
July rationing really began, to use an appropriate word, to bite, when it
was extended to tea, for the two ounces a week allowed were not enough for
most families. Women now began to tear open their empty tea packets in
search of a few hidden grains, or followed the Minister of Food's advice
to use ‘one spoonful for each person and none for the pot’. At the
same time margarine and cooking fats went on coupons and before long the
rations settled down at around two ounces of cooking fat, four ounces of
margarine and four – later two – ounces of butter a week. Housewives
began to scrape the last morsel of butter or cooking fat from its wrapper
and finally to rub the greasy paper on dish or frying pan, while many
people gave up sugar in their tea or coffee for the duration. The tea and
sugar rations pressed hardest on old people. A Surrey girl, aged ten, used
to feel sorry for her grandfather who was firmly upbraided by her mother
for stealing an extra spoonful of sugar when her back was turned. Some
people experimented with using honey or golden syrup in their tea, which
turned it black and tasted strange, but in March 1941 jam,
marmalade and syrup also went on coupons, followed by mincemeat, lemon
curd and honey. The amount varied, according to the season, from eight
ounces to two pounds a month. It was a heavy blow to most families when
cheese was rationed in May 1941 at only an ounce a week, barely one
decent mouthful, but the ration later went up and for most of the war was
two ounces, with from August 1941 an extra eight ounces to a pound
a week for agricultural workers, miners, and other heavy workers who
carried their food with them. Every wartime housewife will remember, too,
other highly-prized bonuses – the extra sugar during the jam-making
season, the 'Ministry of Food’ Christmas present of extra rations in
December, the extra ounce of tea for the over-seventies introduced in
December 1944
By
the end of 1940 most family store cupboards were almost empty.
Nathaniel Gubbins's humorous column in the Sunday Express
nicely reflected the universal experience in such melancholy news items
as, in Letter from an Aunt, ‘Your uncle
George came to tea – last of the tinned Salmon’. Tinned salmon, like
tinned meat and fruit and many other items, was not on coupons but they
had all disappeared almost
everywhere until, on the 1st December 1941, the Ministry of Food
unveiled its masterpiece, the points rationing scheme. Under the scheme
every holder of a ration book received sixteen points a month, later
raised to twenty, to spend as he wished, at any shop that had the items he
wanted. At first only canned meat, fish and vegetables were 'on points’,
but in the next twelve months one item after another was added, including
rice and canned fruit, condensed milk and breakfast cereals, biscuits and
oatflakes. The points scheme brought back to the shops items which had
not been seen
for months, for the Ministry had built up stocks to get it off to a good
start. It proved immediately popular for it made the house- wife a
discriminating shopper again, instead of a mere collector of rations.
To
the Ministry the scheme had the great advantage of being infinitely
adjustable. If tinned sardines or baked beans proved too popular and
stocks began to run low, they simply raised their points value; if cream
crackers or tapioca were piling up unwanted, they had only to cut it to
clear the shelves. Guessing, towards the end of a rationing period, which
items were likely to go up or down, added a new interest to the weary
routine of catering for a family, and housewives turned to the list of
'Changes in Points Value’ in the newspaper with all the zeal of a
gambler looking for the racing results. To discover some points
'bargain’ was also a matter for deep satisfaction. The outstanding
'buy’ was generally agreed to be the large tin of American sausage meat
which cost a whole sixteen points, but besides providing enough meat for
several main meals contained a thick layer of nearly half a pound of fat,
invaluable for cooking. One Cambridgeshire woman thought it added 'a touch
of pre-war luxury' to dull wartime diet and another, in Hertfordshire,
served it so often to a Polish guest that he 'must have thought sausage
meat was our national dish’. Another popular import was Spam, American
canned spiced ham. It had soon become the great wartime standby, fried
with bread as a main meal, eaten cold in sandwiches, serving as the meat
in 'pork' pies, gracing wedding receptions as filling for the vol-au-vent.
The
Ministry of Food constantly urged the public to try entirely new foods,
especially in the case of fish, for which no satisfactory distribution
system was ever found. The queues outside the fishmongers', the one
unrationed item, apart from the even more elusive offal, which could
provide a main course for a meal, were always the longest and the most
frustrating. It will not surprise any wartime housewife that, as one
remembers, the queue outside the fish shop was the only one not to
disperse when the sirens went one morning in Paddington in 1944 and
that even when a V1 cut out overhead the queuers merely ducked. A
Shenfield woman used to wait up to two hours in a fish queue for 'great
slabs of salted cod that had the taste and texture of boiled
flannelette’. A Nottingham woman queued for one and a half hours on a
bitter February morning to obtain three herrings, and a Blackpool woman
admits being moved to tears of disappointment on finding, after she had
queued for an hour drawing nearer and nearer a splendid piece of hake,
that only a wretched piece of tail was left when her turn came, the woman
in front, who ran a billet for airmen, had bought twenty-six portions. To
relieve the shortage the Ministry of Food scoured the world for obscure
varieties, exhorting women to buy them with such verses as:
When
fisher-folk are brave enough
To
face mines and the foe for you
You
surely can be bold enough
To
try fish of a kind that's new.
But
women who did try the new fish rarely did so twice. An East London woman
still winces at the thought of 'great black slabs of. . . that awful tuna
fish', and a Mansfield housewife simply threw away the evil- smelling and
unnamed white fish pressed upon her. But it was whalemeat at which most
palates rebelled. A Nottinghamshire woman never forgave the fishmonger's
assistant who assured her that 'it was really nice. If I cooked it like
stewing steak, no one would know’. The salesgirl had underrated her
family, her husband 'demanding to know what he was eating. . . . The
stunned silence, the expression on the face of the ‘victim’ is
something to remember.' A Falmouth hotel worker remembers a chef who
grilled and served the whale as if it were steak but one guest promptly
sent it back – a very brave thing to do with any dish in wartime – all
the other diners also rejected their steaks and 'even the dog would not
touch them'. A Bournemouth woman who tackled various 'fish of doubtful
origin, like some sort of cat fish' and 'dried salted fish', admits, 'But
the whalemeat beat me. I thought it was horrible.' 'Repulsive',
'revolting', 'ghastly', 'tough and fishy', like a lump of cod liver oil',
like fishy liver', these are how other women describe it, and two sum up
their reactions in the same brief monosyllable: 'Ugh!'
Offal
was even scarcer than fish. What happened to the previously unwanted
sections of cattle, now that everyone wanted them, was the cause of much
indignant discussion in the butcher's queue – and of great rejoicing if
one was in luck and actually offered some. 'If I got some liver I ran home
as happy as if I had won a fortune', one woman remembers. Others acquired
a taste for 'pigs' fry', pigs' trotters, brains, sweetbreads, cowheel and,
according to a Deptford woman, 'best of all, ox-cheek'. In Lancashire
tripe was praised as 'a good standby' though generally felt to need
onions, and a Mansfield woman, who has never tasted one since, says 'we
lived on beasts' hearts'. A few brave women even boiled down a sheep's
head. One Ipswich woman will 'never forget the awful job of preparing it
and getting the bones out. At any rate we had the tongue and some
nourishing soup but I never attempted it again.'
Some
offal found its way into sausages, which were unrationed. The sausage had
always been considered comic, but during the war it became a target for
two main jokes: that its ingredients were best not enquired into – one
family nicknamed it ‘sweet mystery of life’ and another 'firewood
sausages' – and that it contained little but bread. A Lincoln woman
remembers a man remarking to her, as their bus passed a queue for
sausages, ‘Why queue? – you can get bread without queueing the other
side of the road. One Essex housewife jokes, ‘We didn't know whether to
put mustard or marmalade on them’. One contemporary cartoon showed even
the fish spurning the sausage which baited every hook. Yet sausages did
provide a meat dish and, as one Ipswich woman who used to queue for an
hour outside one shop before it even opened remembers, 'it seemed a matter
of life and death . . . to get one pound’.
One
of the first ways in which the war made itself felt to the ordinary
housewife was in the sudden disappearance of onions, due to the loss of
supplies from the Channel Islands and Britanny. This was, one Scottish
journalist felt, 'the one real traumatic lack. Their absence was terribly
noticeable.' The taste of this humble vegetable, so long taken for
granted, seemed suddenly the peak of gastronomic pleasure, partly because
with meat rationed by value, not weight, stews, which used the cheapest
cuts, were in favour. At least two Odes to an Onion
were written in 1941.
O
pungent root, so lately dear to me,
Thou
bulbous, aromatic rarity . . .
Today
thou are a treasure vainly sought . . .
began
the lament of one frustrated cook at Tipton, Staffordshire, in January. By
September the shortage was no better as, these verses in one London firm's
house magazine testified:
My
cupboard might as well be bare.
Bereft,
I wander everywhere
And
try, nose in the empty air,
To
sniff a whiff of onion.
In
February 1941 a one-and-a-half pound onion, raffled among the staff of The
Times, raised £4 3s 4d and in March, when one woman remarked at a
first aid lecture in Chelsea that she did not cry if she wore her gas mask
when peeling onions, every woman present instantly shouted, ‘Where did
you get them?’ Onions became popular prizes at socials and one wartime
Girl Guide in Accrington can still recapture her pride at winning one in a
treasure hunt, in honour of which her mother baked a special pie. A
Cheshire doctor remembers ‘taking home in triumph’ the best gift he
ever received from a grateful patient: a large Spanish onion. One 'aunt'
on Children's Hour, wishing ‘A Happy Birthday and lots of
presents’ to one small listener, added, 'I did hear of a lucky girl the
other day who was given some onions, but we can't all expect a lovely
present like that,’ A Worcestershire woman used the same onion in
cooking for a month before finally eating it, and in North Queensberry in
Scotland one family ‘tried putting an onion in a glass of water like a
hyacinth bulb and, as the green shoots appeared . . . cut them off and
used them for flavouring’. The Minister of Agriculture, announcing in
February 1941 a fifteen-fold increase in the onion crop, expressed the
hope that ‘onions would then be eaten and not talked about’, and by
1942 this expectation was being fulfilled.
Onions,
like other vegetables, were never rationed, though the Ministry of Food
operated for them a system of Controlled Distribution under which scarce
items were allocated in turn to various parts of the country. The
shopkeeper had to mark each customer's ration book, but if he had any
surplus he was usually allowed to distribute it. From May 1941 there were
occasional allocations of oranges in this way, though they were usually
reserved for the under-fives and expectant mothers, or for those aged five
to eighteen. A sympathetic greengrocer sometimes stretched the rules to a
favoured customer and one woman who had benefited in this way still
remembers her embarrassment when her landlady’s small son, seeing her
with some precious oranges, innocently asked, ‘Have you got a green book
[for expectant mothers] or are you under sixteen ?’ Her age was then
forty-eight. To be caught trying to get a second share involved social
disgrace and a Tunbridge Wells woman, a self-confessed rubber-out of
pencil marks, still blushes at the memory of being finally 'shown up in a
crowded Sainsburys’. When oranges were available the usual allowance was
only a pound a book, and the peel was carefully hoarded for making
marmalade. A woman doctor in Westmorland remembers being called in at
midnight to see a small girl suspected of having appendicitis and finding
there was a simpler explanation of her stomach pains – the patient had
had for supper the first orange she had ever seen and, knowing no better,
had eaten it peel and all.
Lemons
simply vanished for the duration and one Tunbridge Wells woman, who had
received a box of them from her nephew, in Sicily with the Eighth Army,
proudly took them round to show her green- grocer who had not seen one for
years. Bananas were the greatest rarity of all and there were many stories
of children given one as a treat who tried to bite into the skin or howled
at the unfamiliar sight. A Gloucester- shire teenager who won a banana in
an office raffle in 1942 – it had been given to one of the typists by a
newly-arrived Australian airman – took it home, where, after it had been
inspected by the neighbours, ‘it was cut up into pieces with a taste for
each member of the family. It seemed criminal just to throw the skin away,
so we put it in the middle of the road outside the house and had a lot of
fun watching the surprised looks of several passers by, a few of whom
could contain curiosity no longer and picked it up to see if it were
real.' Some other fruit were almost as scarce. One London resident
remembers 'word going round that the greengrocer would have a few cooking
apples, queue starting at 6 a.m. following morning. It was a mile
long. One apple apiece until they had gone. I was first to be refused.' A
Rotherhithe woman also turned out at 6 a.m. one Saturday to queue for
three hours outside a greengrocer's. Her prize was 'three apples or
a pound of rhubarb – then home for a warm drink and out again, this time
to the offal shop'. For luxury fruit some ridiculous prices were paid, a
melon in August 1941 fetching £2, for example, and grapes 17s. 6d.
a pound.
A
more serious shortage than fresh fruit was that of eggs, which became
scarce during 1940 following cuts in imports and the slaughter of millions
of hens to save feeding stuffs. Before the war everyone in Great Britain
had eaten on average three eggs a week; during the war the total dropped
to roughly one a fortnight, though there were long periods with none at
all. Most people now realised for the first time the important role eggs
had played in their diet. Anyone whose work took him into the country
would now enquire, as a matter of course, at any likely-looking farm or
cottage if there were eggs for sale. One Oxfordshire farmer remembers a
driver, who was giving him a lift, gladly going eight miles out of his way
– a serious offence during petrol rationing – to buy a dozen eggs from
him. A woman who jokingly asked someone to be careful other case on a
railway journey as it was 'full of eggs', was embarrassed when one fellow
passenger after another pleaded with her to sell them some. A wasted egg
was a major disaster. A London woman remembers frying her husband their
only egg that week for his breakfast, until 'it got more and more like
lino as I kept it hot. In a fury I cast it into the kitchen boiler and
gave him breakfast in bed after that.' But while the ordinary adult, 'the
holder of R.B.1' in the jargon of the Food Office, went short, the
'priority classes' of expectant mothers and children under five actually
received on average slightly more eggs during the war than the pre-war
average. The sight of a small child reluctantly and messily toying with a
precious egg, while other members of the family watched hungrily, was one
to try the patience of even the most conscientious mother. A Lancashire
curate's family compromised when their small daughter, born in December
1943? brought two welcome eggs a week into the household by letting her
have what she wanted, but taking it in turns to eat any she refused.
To
compensate for the shortage of shell eggs, from June 1942 onwards packets
of another wartime novelty from America began to appear on the grocers’
shelves. Few things more rapidly evoke the whole feel of wartime than the
slightly biscuity (some said 'cardboard') taste of dried eggs. The
Ministry of Food's publicity campaign stressed how much shipping space
dried eggs saved – 'Shell eggs are five-sixths water: Why import water
?’ – but to the housewife they possessed a simpler attraction: they
were almost always available. Apart from a few months in 1942 and
1943 at least one drab, grey packet, its contents equivalent to a dozen
fresh eggs, was available on every ration book every four weeks, and for
long periods they could be sold without restriction to registered
customers. Although one Southampton woman felt that 'everything tasted
rubbery with dried egg and Yorkshire pudding came out of the oven as flat
as it went in', personally I found a dried egg omelette perfectly
palatable and scrambled dried eggs were the favourite bedtime snack among
the monitors in my house at school. I found that a little cheese greatly
improved the flavour, and the nurses at a Clydeside hospital favoured them
spread with mustard. The small amount of dried egg powder required was
deceptive. One Scotswoman, who proudly cooked the first breakfast other
married life in October 1944, 'mixed the egg as instructed on the
tin. It didn't look very much so we doubled the amount. It still looked a
bit on the small side so I added a bit moreby this time three-quarters of
a tin had been used. What we didn't know was that it swelled in cooking
and we had enough . . . to feed a family of twelve.' A little later in her
marriage the mistake might have seemed less hilarious, as it did to the
wife of a Middlesbrough cinema manager whose 'husband . . . decided to
make an omelette from dried eggs and used up a whole precious packet,
which nearly caused a divorce'. Dried egg became the universal resource
for housewives puzzled what to give their family at the next meal. The
wife of a miner living in Blaenavon, Monmouthshire, remembers that when
she made her invariable reply, 'Wait and see', when he asked what was for
supper, he would make the ritual, but only too truthful, retort: 'Oh, I
know, dried egg!'
Almost
as common a sight in wartime kitchens as the dried egg packet was the
dried milk tin. Controlled Distribution of liquid milk began in November
1941, the usual amount allowed being from two to two-and-a half pints a
head a week, and to supplement it from December tins of dried skimmed milk
powder, known as Household Milk, went on sale. Each was said to equal four
pints of liquid milk when water was added and, for most of the war, every
family was allowed one tin a month. Household Milk, though barely
drinkable by itself, was certainly better than nothing in coffee or cocoa
and just better than nothing in tea, but really came into its own in
cooking. Children under one, and later two, years old were also entitled
to National Dried Milk, a full-cream product much nearer the real thing.
To find a chemist with tins of this which had outlived the 'Not for
consumption after. . ‘ date on the label, and could now be sold to
ordinary customers, was a real triumph. One of the innumerable changes to
which housewives had to become accustomed in those years was a new
milkman, for even if their usual roundsman had not been called up, from
the autumn of 1942 only one milkman, apart from the Co-op, visited each
street, and deliveries were often cut to four days a week. The baker could
call up to three times a week, but most other goods the housewife now had
to carry home herself, usually unwrapped. This produced some strange
sights. One could see dignified men in business suits carefully carrying
kippers by their tails and fur coated women laden with string bags bulging
with – a great treasure – ham bones. It became socially acceptable to
stop a perfect stranger in the street and ask where she had found some
scarce item and soon, as one woman remembers, the news would spread and
housewives would be hurrying from all directions like flies round a jampot’.
Most
familiar brands of goods simply vanished, as production was concentrated
in a few factories to save labour. The 350 varieties of biscuits on sale
pre-war were reduced to twenty, and soft drinks were sold under labels
like 'Orange Squash, S.W. I53’, the only clue to the manufacturer's
name. Packages were standardised, labels grew smaller and less colourful,
and if one saw a familiar name it was often on some old stock that the
shopkeeper had been trying to get rid of for years. (One man remembers
buying in 1943 a packet of porridge oats printed with an entry form for a
competition that had closed in 1937.)
Although
in most homes money was now more plentiful than before the war, the
smallness of the rations made careful shopping more necessary than ever.
One question much debated in the queues was whether it was better to
spread one’s ration books over several shops, to increase the chance of
obtaining the vital extras, or to register the whole family with the same
shopkeeper, in the hope of preferential treatment when some scarce but
unrationed item like coffee, custard powder or pepper known as 'white
gold’ – was available. People also argued about whether one did better
at a large shop or a small one. Many women still praise the private
rationing scheme run by the large firm of Sainsburys, but others have
kindly memories of some ‘small shop round the corner’ which, perhaps,
put a precious jelly aside when some child's birthday was approaching.
Despite a few surly or bullying shopkeepers and assistants, who sent their
customers out muttering darkly ‘Just wait till after the war!’, most
shops, large or small, went to great trouble to be fair. The trouble taken
in the village shop at Bourton in Dorset speaks for itself. The manager's
wife, having received one Christmas seven pounds of dried fruit, actually
counted out the various items to ensure that each registered customer got
her fair share. One housewife's allocation was three prunes, four dates,
twelve raisins and one ounce of sultanas. 'We made a Christmas cake,’
she remembers, 'though it wasn't a very big cake.’
When,
about once a year, new ration books were issued, it was possible to change
one's retailer without explanation, but to do so in between was, in the
words of a Coulsdon housewife, 'rather like getting a divorce’. It was
obviously sensible to try to keep on good terms with your shop- keeper. In
one Colchester shop it was a joke among the customers that when the owner
put up the welcome notice 'Currents today’ not one of them dared to
correct his misspelling. To lose one's ration book was also a serious
matter, though it was replaced on payment of a shilling, and on signature
of a declaration witnessed by a responsible person. The most famous excuse
was put forward by a travelling circus family who wrote to Blackpool Food
Office, 'Please can we have new ration books as the others have been eaten
by our elephant ?'
An
even greater disaster than a lost book was a waste of food. A woman living
in Irvine, Ayrshire, who told off her son for drawing on her single egg
for that week never did so again: full of contrition, he tried to rub out
his picture, with disastrous results. An Ipswich woman who incautiously
left a packet of tea – four people's ration for a week – in the baby's
pram while choosing her books at the library, came out to find that the
baby had emptied the whole half-pound on to the ground. A four-year-old
girl in Paignton, mistaking the week's sugar ration for toilet cleaner,
emptied it all down the lavatory. An Enfield woman put a precious gift of
fresh eggs from a cousin in waterglass in a bucket kept in the bedroom,
safely away from her small children, until 'One day the elder girl found
she was tall enough to reach door handles, found the eggs and amused
herself making a squishy mess'. One Northampton woman, who saw a dog
dashing out of a butcher's shop with a large piece of suet in his mouth,
followed him on her bicycle and watched him bury the suet. 'When the dog
was safely away I went to the spot . . . and confiscated the hidden
treasure . . . I took home that suet, cut out the mauled part and then
made suet pudding.'
With
food so scarce many women acted on the principle 'what the eye doesn't see
. . .’ or even, on occasion, 'what the eye does see . . .’ One
London woman, who dropped the family's entire butter ration on the kitchen
floor, simply scraped it back on the dish for an important guest, though
her small son made pointed remarks on the subject at table. A Birmingham
woman, whose husband's dinner was knocked out other hand, pushed it back
on to the plate and ‘tidied it up’ with some more gravy so that ‘the
poor man never knew until long after the war’. A King's Lynn woman saw a
neighbour who had dropped half a dozen eggs in the gutter when pushing her
pram scraping them up; she scrambled them for supper. Even doctors relaxed
their customary standards. A Westmorland doctor who found her weekly joint
covered with maggots 'scraped them off and roasted the joint again’. She
also salted down butter in a large bedroom jug. 'One morning I found a
mouse drowned in the salty water,’ she remembers, 'but I used the
butter.’
Most
women had some private 'wrinkle’ to make the rations go further, like
begging the grocer for the cheese rind for flavouring or the scraps of
meat from the bacon slicer, mixing cornflour with the dried egg to stretch
it out, shaking up the top of the milk in a bottle to make butter, melting
the butter and spreading it with a brush, or putting saccharine in the
teapot rather than the cup. Dripping on toast, baked potatoes served with
bottled sauce, and bread soaked in Oxo were all useful for visitors, while
the favourite snack taken to her munitions factory by my sister consisted
of sandwiches filled with potato crisps. Keen cooks regarded each new
shortage as a challenge to their ingenuity. Dried elderberries and chopped
prunes were used in cakes as substitutes for currants, and one woman
successfully tried wine gums, though they tended to sink to the bottom of
the dish. Household Milk and melted chocolate was used for icing, and,
until the vigilant Ministry of Food restricted sales to 'medicinal
purposes only’, glycerine and liquid paraffin in place of cooking fat.
Little was thrown away. One Hertfordshire family ate to the last crumb a
'disinfectant cake’ made by mistake with Dettol, which had been kept in
a bottle labelled 'Almond Essence’. A Croydon housewife served her
family 'M.I.5 Pudding’, refusing to disclose the ingredients. They were,
in fact, liver, sausage meat and onion, and her children 'thought it
super’.
In
wartime guests who did not do justice to the food set before them were
rarely asked twice. A London woman remembers queueing for hours for some
liver and cooking it with the week’s bacon ration 'to make a delicious
supper for a business guest and the wretched man let me give him the best
helping and left it on the side of his plate’. Equally infuriating were
husbands who did not appreciate their wives’ sacrifices. One Melton
Mowbray housewife can still barely forgive her husband for having secretly
helped himself each morning to golden syrup to sweeten his tea from a
two-pound tin she had hidden on a top shelf. Only when the time came to
call on this vital reserve did she discover it was empty. And every
wartime housewife will share the feeling of mingled exasperation and
amusement of a Nottingham woman whose husband, having offered to do the
shopping, returned home empty- handed. ‘The queues,' he explained, 'were
awfully long.’
To
bridge the gap between rations and appetites the government expected every
family to eat out, on average, about one day a month and for some members
of the family to have their main meals at school or work. School dinners,
which before the war had been available only to 250,000 children, were by
its end almost universal, numbering nearly 1,850,000 a day. Factory
canteens had numbered 1,500 in 1939. By 1945 there were 18,500 and any
firm over a certain size was legally compelled to provide one. The most
important innovation of all was the British Restaurant, a simply furnished
cafeteria, providing a filling meal very cheaply. A typical dinner at one
in London in 1942 consisted of roast beef and two vegetables, treacle
pudding, bread and butter and coffee and cost only l1d. By the end
of the war there were 2,000 British Restaurants serving more than half a
million meals a day. Their nearest equivalent in the countryside was the
Pie Scheme, launched in 1941, under which meat, and later fruit, pies were
distributed to village centres for sale to workers in the fields. Sad to
relate, not all the million pies sold each week were greatly appreciated.
One young girl, living in a north Norfolk village, never forgot the local
doctor's disgusted glance at the pie she had just taken up for her sick
father's dinner, and his remark, 'Good God, man, if you can eat that, you
can eat anything'‘
After
public criticism of the lavish meals being served in hotels and luxury
restaurants, in July 1940 it became illegal to serve more than one
main course at any restaurant meal, the restricted dishes being marked on
the menu by a star. One unfortunate woman and her daughter, who arrived at
Liverpool from India in September 1940, and as yet knew no better,
confidently ordered whitebait, assuming it to be the fish course, only to
learn later they were no longer entitled to a meat course, so they ‘went
to bed very hungry’. In June 1942, after complaints of profiteering,
controls were tightened still further with the introduction of
a 5s maximum for all restaurant meals, though luxury establishments
could demand an extra 7s. 6d, cover charge, and some
luxuries, like oysters and caviare, were excluded. Certain 'patriotic'
dishes, like lentil cutlets, were labelled with a V for Victory. One
Scottish gourmet considered the V 'an indication of the victory of
necessity over the palate’. It has been left to these later years,’ he
wrote sadly, 'the experience of potatoes and margarine as a main dish.’
Many
famous West End resorts, like the Cafe Royal, would not accept bookings
after 9.30 or had by then long since run out of food. Even
the Savoy by
1942 served vegetables already on the plate. No coupons were surrendered
for restaurant meals, though anyone staying in a hotel for more than three
days had to hand in his ration book, or the emergency ration card one
could obtain for journeys away from home. The only source of unrationed
food to eat at home came in food parcels from the Dominions and United
States, which went mainly to those with friends abroad. Like most people,
I never saw one.
Charges
were often made about the existence of a widespread Black Market but the
opinion of one farmer that 'there was more talk than do about this' was
also held by the then Minister of Food. The Ministry was also remarkably
successful in keeping down prices. In the first world war food prices had
risen by 130 per cent, in the second, which was half as long again, they
rose by only 20 per cent, and even without government subsidies the
increase would have been only 50 per cent.
The
most outstanding achievement of all was surely that at the end of six
years of war the British people were far healthier than they had been at
the beginning. In 1939 the average housewife hardly knew a calorie from a
protein; by the end of the war, to the delight, if embarrassment, of the
Minister of Food, she was angrily writing to complain if her corner shop
was failing to provide her family's share of body- building, energy-giving
and protective foods. This result reflected credit both on her and on
the15,000 employees of the Ministry of Food. But the greatest
responsibility for the Ministry's success, which had ensured that Britain
was not starved into surrender, rested upon one man: Frederick Marquis,
1st Baron Woolton.
When,
in April 1940, Lord Woolton became Minister of Food he was aged
fifty-eight and had had an exceptionally varied career. After leaving
Manchester University he had become warden of a social-work settlement in
the Liverpool slums, then, after the first world war, had risen to be
managing director of the great Manchester store of John Lewis – not to
be confused with the London firm of the same name. In 1030 he reluctantly
agreed to become director-general of the Ministry of Supply and in 1940,
even more reluctantly, Minister of Food. When Churchill came to power he
told his cronies, 'We shall have to be ready with a rescue squad for
Woolton', but instead, three years later, it was Woolton who was called in
to rescue his Conservative colleagues, and forced, much against his will,
to become Minister of Reconstruction, to show that the government was in
earnest about post-war planning. As Woolton had foreseen, his abilities
were totally wasted in his new post, while his successor as Minister of
Food is now largely for- gotten. (He was in fact Colonel J. J. Llewellin.)
From
4th April 1940 to 12th November 1943 Lord Woolton was, in
the ordinary housewife's eyes, the Ministry of Food. ‘I found the
Ministry of Food suffering from a general depression', he wrote in his
memoirs. ‘The press was against them and they were dejected, and frankly
puzzled, by their unpopularity.' His first step was to restore morale by
visiting his staff in their offices and by inviting the King to tour his
headquarters, which raised the Ministry's public standing. About its
competence he had no fears; the detailed planning and administration which
rationing involved was just the type of job at which the Civil Service
excelled.
The
next step was to gain public confidence. Although never an effective
parliamentary speaker, Woolton became an excellent broadcaster. He would
spend a day preparing a twelve-minute talk and sit in his shirt- sleeves
in the studio, repolishing his script and working right through the lunch
hour. Woolton's policy was simple; to ration nothing, however scarce,
until there was enough to go round and then to ensure that the ration,
however small, was always honoured. He had no sympathy with those who
complained that others could get some luxury which they never saw. 'Food
control,' he insisted, 'does not mean preventing the other fellow from
getting something. It is a means of ensuring that we get all the things
that are necessary.'
Lord
Woolton's greatest success was in winning the ordinary housewife to his
side with a brilliant publicity campaign. The phrase The Kitchen
Front soon became universally familiar through a series of press
advertisements carrying the message, 'Food is a munition of war. Don't
waste it', supported by Food Flashes at the cinema, short
talks every morning in The Kitchen Front, after the
eight o'clock news, and comic dialogues between 'Gert and Daisy', Elsie
and Doris Waters, who often appeared with Lord Woolton on the platform.
Sometimes the Ministry offered recipes like 'Pigs in Clover – a novel
way with baked potatoes and sausage', sometimes warnings like It's not
clever to get more than your share', sometimes simple encouragement:
'Carry on Fighters on the Kitchen Front. You are doing a great job.' Its
most sustained efforts were devoted to boosting the consumption of
'Carrots, bright treasures dug from good British earth' and 'Potatoes . .
. a rich store of all-round nourishment'. The faces of Dr. Carrot and
Potato Pete were soon looking out from the pages of every women's
magazine, the one thin and alert, the other plump and reassuring. 'Call me
often enough and you'll keep weir, Dr. Carrot told mothers. The Ministry
also constantly stressed that 'carrots contain sugar' but the public
remained unconvinced. The claim that 'Carrot Flan. . . has a deliciousness
all its own' proved only too true, and one wartime child has described how
his father, after a single mouthful of carrot marmalade, simply picked up
the pot, walked out and emptied it on the compost heap. The Ministry's
master-stroke was spreading the belief that carrots enabled one to see
better in the dark, thus ex- plaining the sudden success of' Cat's-eyes
Cunningham’, and other night- fighter aces, which was in fact due to the
introduction of radar.
Potato
Pete became so well known that one Battersea schoolgirl affectionately
called a class-mate she 'had a crush on’ by this name, and according to
the Ministry there were few things he could not do, from saving fuel to
combining with rhubarb and honey in ‘Sweet Potato Pudding’. The
Ministry offered a weekly prize to the green- grocer with the best selling
potato display, and organised ‘Potato Pete's Fair’ in Oxford Street,
where visitors could buy 'Potato Stamps’ to exchange for extra potatoes
at their greengrocers'. Its efforts succeeded by the end of the war in
raising the consumption of potatoes by 60 per cent, the largest increase
in any commodity.
Woolton’s
other great 'filler’ was bread and in April 1942 he launched the
National Loaf made from grey, wholemeal flour. The public never really
took to it and in his memoirs Woolton admitted that people blamed every
minor ailment on 'this nasty, dirty, dark, coarse, indigestible bread',
but by the end of the war 20 per cent more bread was being eaten than in
1939. Perhaps the rumour, passed on to Lord Woolton at a party, that it
was an aphrodisiac, helped.
Over
the staff entrance to the Ministry of Food was the inscription 'We not
merely cope, we care’ and complaints from the public were always
carefully investigated, Lord Woolton personally signing many thousands of
the replies. A woman living in a Sussex village, where the local shop
refused to accept the Emergency Ration Cards issued by her children's
boarding schools, who sent a protesting telegram to the Ministry at 8 a.m.
one hot July day, was astounded when, at 6 p.m. that evening, while she
was 'busy dismembering a revolting sheep's head . . . a departmental young
man, with black coat, pin-striped trousers, umbrella and bowler hat,
appeared on the terrace of our country cottage, perspiring in these
unsuitable clothes after a country walk of five miles uphill. He had a
local Food Office girl with him. ‘I'm the man from the Ministry’, he
said.' He explained that he had looked into her complaint, and had already
put matters right. 'Next day I had urgent calls from the village stores,
as the lorries began to arrive . . . asking if I could lend the services
of the schoolboy sons to help unload.' Thus did Lord Woolton's Ministry
cope and care.
Few wartime ministers can still be remembered with such admiration. One Dorchester housewife explains the reason. 'Lord Woolton was always so sympathetic and if he could not give us more butter he added an extra ounce to the margarine. We all trusted and loved him.’ When this great public servant died in 1961 no one wrote his biography and no statue was raised in his memory and, ironically, his name is now linked with one of his Ministry's few failures, Woolton Pie, a combination of carrots, parsnips, turnips and potatoes, covered with white sauce and pastry. 'Dry and uneatable’ was the general verdict, according to a Brighton war worker, and one London W.V.S. member recalls that when she placed 'about the hundredth of the war’ before her five-year-old he took one look and burst into tears. An Ipswich British Restaurant manageress cautiously admits it was 'one dish which was not a favourite’. From Aberdeen a wartime dishwasher at a hotel, who saw what even the hungry British public would not eat, pays Lord Woolton's memory a sincere, if back-handed, compliment: 'I just can’t believe that such a wonderful man could have given his name to such a dish’.