by Simon Heffer
Devonport’s belief that people could be encouraged rather than compelled to control their food consumption was somewhat optimistic: as with the exhortations to join the Army before conscription, people nursed a strong sense of their self-interest, and resented state interference in their everyday lives. The government introduced a bread subsidy at a cost of £50 million a year, allowing the price of a quartern loaf to be pegged at 9d. However, the price was briefly increased in late March to a shilling for a four-pound loaf, in the hope of causing people to waste less. Yet the ministry was still forced to warn the public on 19 April that consumption of ‘breadstuffs’ continued to run at ‘50 per cent above present and prospective supplies.’97 Devonport returned to the subject on 25 April, telling the Lords food would be a ‘supremely decisive’ factor in the war.98 He wanted a one-pound cut in consumption, and said he was instituting the machinery to ration bread, sugar and anything else necessary if voluntary restraint was not applied. Still nothing changed.
Therefore on 29 May a letter, addressed to the head of the household, arrived in British homes signed by Devonport, imploring all families to cut their bread consumption, ‘and so loyally bridge over the anxious days between now and the harvest.’99 It continued: ‘No true citizen, no patriotic man or woman will fail the country in this hour of need.’ The sacrifice had become easier since March, when a new standard ‘war loaf’, including a high proportion of raw wheat, and potatoes, was inflicted on the public. It tasted unpleasant, so the measure had only limited success. Also, despite the anger caused by the order not to hoard sugar, on 5 April the government issued a blanket Food Hoarding Order, with powers to search any premises where it was suspected.
Devonport’s initiatives were further brought into question by his failure to involve experts on nutrition in the decisions his department made. His existing recommendations for the weekly consumption per head of staple foods would have yielded only 1,200–1,300 calories a day, and would have required to be supplemented by other foodstuffs that were now in very short supply. Regulations were published in March to limit the consumption of food in catered premises such as hotels, restaurants, railway buffets and clubs, by restricting portions and having obligatory, rather than voluntary, days when meat or potatoes could not be served. The first compulsory meatless day in hotels and restaurants was on 17 April. The War Cabinet decided against seeking to impose one on private homes ‘at present’.100 The pressure on meat came from a request from the Army to commandeer a fifth of the imported supply of Argentinian beef for their food reserves in case the U-boat war starved fighting men. However, scientists pointed out that if meat consumption were to be cut, that would necessitate finding even more space in ships to import grain.
By the end of May Devonport had realised the need for overarching state control, rather than piecemeal reform, if he was to succeed in his task of feeding the nation. As he had told the Lords, he had drawn up plans for general food rationing during May (one of the leading civil servants to address himself to this problem, and to price controls, was William Beveridge), but they were not then executed. The constant nagging and doom-mongering had had some effect: the nation became peculiarly conscious of the use and availability of food, which was the intention. However, it was now widely accepted that exhortation was pointless, and rationing would be required: though the War Cabinet decided on 30 May, after yet another discussion, that such a policy ‘was undesirable at present.’101
Lloyd George, in a rare Commons appearance on 10 May, had blithely admitted he had ‘no real anxiety’ about the food supply, which prompted someone to ask why the country had been led to believe in January that it might be starving by the summer. ‘Because I wanted the people to cultivate!’ he replied, which apparently provoked laughter, but was a further measure of his honesty.102 Yet Riddell recorded on 2 June: ‘I told Lloyd George that the sugar queues were causing grave discontent and that sugar distribution called for immediate reform. The working classes are angry that their wives and families should be compelled to undergo this trouble and indignity, while the wants of the rich are supplied much as they were before the war.’103 Ministers could see that some changes to society would be permanent, but they wanted to manage the process and not impose what Riddell termed ‘drastic changes in the social fabric’, such as in Russia.104 The Tsar had been deposed three months earlier, and two groups of revolutionaries were fighting for the future control of the country in a struggle in which the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, would soon come out on top. Few in Britain, from the King downwards, were rash enough to discount the chances of a similar workers’ uprising happening in Britain, should there be sufficient provocations.
With the ruthlessness for which he was now renowned, Lloyd George recognised that Devonport was out of his depth, and his resignation was received with relief on 30 May. Devonport had not endeared himself to his officials, and won the reputation of a procrastinator and a poor delegator. As a retailer himself, he was considered prone to avoid taking measures (notably rationing) that disobliged those in his trade. Doubts about his probity in this matter precipitated his resignation on the grounds, it was claimed, of ill-health. As with so many of Lloyd George’s superannuated cronies, he collected a viscountcy on the way out.
His replacement, on 19 June, as food controller was Lord Rhondda, who had been president of the Local Government Board. Quarrels in the 1890s about Liberal organisation in Wales had caused him to fall out with Lloyd George, but the two eventually came to respect and admire each other when Lloyd George realised Rhondda was not a political rival. Unlike many of the prime minister’s friends he was a man of some distinction, courage and genuine ability. He had survived the Lusitania and had, as David Alfred Thomas, been Liberal MP for Merthyr Tydfil. He had left Parliament in 1910, believing he would not obtain preferment; but Lloyd George recalled him with a peerage as one of his ‘men of push and go’, not least on seeing the success Thomas had made of his family’s mining business in South Wales. A prominent opponent of war profiteering in the coal industry, he could be relied upon to oppose it in foodstuffs.105 He was charged with managing shortages and keeping supplies moving while using the bread subsidy to keep its prices down, and seeking to impose a ceiling on the prices of other foodstuffs. Rhondda’s terms verged on the draconian. He demanded the support of the War Cabinet should he find it necessary ‘to take over the whole food supplies of the Country, to reduce the price of the necessaries of life although it may involve an expense of many millions to the Exchequer, to utilise the Local Authorities for the purposes of food distribution, and to take strong measures to check profiteering.’106 The government agreed. ‘The man who seeks to profit by the necessities of his country at the time of our peril, when thousands are cheerfully making the supreme sacrifices in the cause of liberty, is nothing short of a blackmailer and must be treated as such,’ Rhondda said as he took office.107 He promised his ‘first effort’ would be to seek to lower prices.
On 6 August 1917 he announced new regulations for the control of the food supply, hoping not just to ensure all had enough to eat, but to help allay anger among the working classes. He proposed to enlist local authorities to ensure the system worked: ‘Supplies must be conserved. Supplies must be shared equally by rich and poor, and prices must be kept down,’ he told his colleagues in charge of local government, and the Scottish secretary.108 He asked local authorities to set up food control committees to ensure economical use of food, acting on advice prepared by Rhondda’s department. This might include communal kitchens, which would have the benefit of conserving fuel as well as regulating the supply of food. The committees were to oversee local distribution of sugar, bread and meat, and to ensure fixed prices were enforced. The alternative, Rhondda made clear, was the ‘vexatious system of individual rationing.’ There would be a new system of regulation for caterers and institutions, and a scheme for registered retailers to help stave off a black market.
Enforcement of price controls was rigid: i
n early September George Thompson, a seventy-four-year-old farmer from Spalding in Lincolnshire, was fined £5,500 – £100 on each count – and £250 costs after admitting fifty-five offences of selling potatoes at £15 a ton, £3 10s above the fixed price. The court was told he had disregarded the order ‘to an enormous extent’ and had made ‘very large sums of money’: estimated at £5,000 or so.109 The defence described the ‘resentment’ felt among potato growers that those with the best produce, who could have sold it for £40 a ton, were being forced to sell at the same price as those producing inferior potatoes. That was deemed an irrelevance. Thompson’s potato business was huge, and he was described as a ‘pioneer’ of potato farming; he was made an example of pour encourager les autres, particularly the small fry. The huge fine did not put him out of business – which rather proved the point about his excess profits. Nor was it much of a deterrent: another Lincolnshire farmer was fined £200 for two counts of overcharging for potatoes, and the chairman of the bench announced that any further cases would be dealt with ‘even more seriously’ than the £100 per offence tariff.110 Later in October a market gardener in Bedfordshire who pleaded guilty to thirty-seven counts of overcharging was fined £3,700, made to pay £200 costs, and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment on each count: the thirty-seven custodial sentences, fortunately for him, to run concurrently.
Almost every sort of farmer and food retailer, no matter what the foodstuff concerned, deluged Rhondda’s department with complaints about how the bureaucratic planning of the control of prices and production did not always coincide with reality, and the need to recoup investments made in the past. The government argued, with some justification, that farmers had done well in the first years of the war when prices rose, and should grin and bear the difficulties. That took no account of the many lean years farmers had had before the war, in an agricultural depression that had started in the mid-1870s, when many had run down their capital and businesses in order to survive. All Rhondda could do was appeal to their patriotism ‘at this time of crisis, the gravest in the history of our nation.’111 Such exhortation was not inevitably successful, but Rhondda tempered it with a warning that social unrest would explode if food prices did not fall: events in Russia were all too immediate. Landowners savaged Rhondda’s policy – characterised by farmers as being ‘to squeeze the producer to the last farthing’ – and warned it would restrict supply.112
Throughout the autumn the avalanche of regulations continued: such as a ban on dealing in specified imported dried fruits, which became a state monopoly, and a Milk Order outlining a distribution plan and fixing a relatively high price – 7d a quart initially but rising to 8d from 1 November – to placate dairy farmers. The Ministry of Food issued a fortnightly publication, the Food Journal, beginning in mid-September, in which Rhondda could take the public into his confidence about his plans. Writing on 12 September, he said that ‘an urgent appeal is made to all classes to economise consumption’ and that the ‘unnecessary middleman’ – the wholesaler – was, in respect of foodstuffs which the government now controlled, being eliminated, and with him went some of the scope for profiteering.113 During September the ministry tightened control on the distribution and sale of sugar, potatoes, meat, bread, flour and cereals: and every time prices rose more agitation began among organised labour, with the miners still restless and, in September, representatives of shipyard workers demanding pay increases. Meat prices were fixed high, according to Prothero, to persuade farmers to move from the production of cattle to the production of cereals; nonetheless, in early October he had to plead with the country to eat less meat. Apparently, the price was not high enough.
The government also announced it wished to harvest the forthcoming crop of horse chestnuts. Though inedible, they could be processed and substituted for grain used in various industrial processes, notably in munitions manufacture, and the grain thus freed up used for feeding people. With manpower stretched – it was estimated that 5 million women were now working, 200,000 of them on the land, and the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps were seeking 10,000 recruits a month – it was decided that schoolchildren, used to collecting conkers, would be exhorted to harvest the nuts. Schools were urged to group together to supervise collections and arrange for them to be sent to the director of Propellant Supplies – yet another new branch of the bureaucracy. Landowners were also asked to collect chestnuts.
Rhondda’s price ceilings started to limit food supplies. Farmers claimed they could not stay in business at the prices they were allowed to charge. By late November there was a butter shortage, because the prices fixed no longer made it economical for Dutch and Danish exporters to sell their goods to Britain. Rhondda’s defence was that the price had almost doubled before his cap had been introduced; milk could not be imported, and it took much less to make cheese than it did to make butter, so the milk available should first be used to make cheese. He had, however, arranged imports of butter from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. The government now bought and sold 85 per cent of food eaten by the public, with 2,000 food control committees around the country.
The scarcity of supplies prompted illegal hoarding, even though the harvest – in which many of the schoolboys of Britain participated, following an appeal the previous spring by Neville Chamberlain – had been good. Queues started to form at shops, a phenomenon hitherto rare in Britain. By interfering in the pricing of meat the government encouraged farmers to slaughter livestock before Christmas, causing a shortage of fresh meat in the new year; its availability had already been restricted by the turning of grazing land into arable land. Unrest followed, thanks to press stories that the moneyed classes – stigmatised as ‘food hogs’ – could still feast in expensive hotels and restaurants. There was certainly a class divide in the availability of food, and to an extent a geographical one. The government had since the spring of 1917 urged better-off families with gardens, or who could afford to rent allotments, to grow as much fruit and vegetables as possible, which further insulated them from hardship; and rural families were often better fed than urban ones, because of the availability of hare, rabbit and pigeon. The poorer families were, the harder it was to find decent food, and there were claims that the most impoverished were edging towards malnutrition and having to seek charitable help.
On 4 December Mrs Flora Drummond, the leading suffragette known as ‘the General’, led a deputation of housewives to Rhondda to demand rationing. They told him that ‘some of them had to stand [in queues] for four, five or six hours for sugar and butter.’114 They complained that luxury foods such as chocolate and fancy biscuits were still being produced when there were not enough basic foodstuffs to go round. Challenged by the deputation about the milk shortage, Rhondda said local food control committees had been ordered to ensure women and children had priority during distributions. However, he resisted rationing, even though London’s meat wholesalers announced that ‘we are mighty close to an emergency’, and it was feared other big cities would run out before Christmas. It promised to be an unfestive season: it was almost impossible to buy spirits in London, and wine was twice the price of a year earlier.
The King and Queen, visiting Deptford on 11 December, had seen enormous queues and were distressed by ‘the hardship experienced by the poor, while the richer portion of the community do not suffer in this respect.’115 The King was worried that women in queues were losing pay by having to miss work, or being forced to neglect their children, and urged Lloyd George to act. There was also the sheer waste of time – time many women could have spent on the war effort. The King was agitated about the price of food, and lobbied Lloyd George about it throughout the winter of 1917–18: to him, it was an obvious trigger for revolution. Davies, the prime minister’s secretary, on behalf of his master, promised the matter would have ‘serious attention’ and that Lloyd George would visit poorer areas the following week.116 His solicitude had little effect: on 17 December it was reported that 3,000 people were queuing at a shop in south-ea
st London for margarine; a third were unlucky.117 A lack of tea had already harmed morale: so much so that the War Cabinet ordered the shipping controller to accommodate a request from Rhondda to supply more tonnage for tea imports.118
Fear of unrest spurred increasingly intense action, not all of it successful. The War Cabinet urged Rhondda, whose general dynamism was punctuated by an occasional remarkable lack of proactivity, to set up a nationwide network of 2,000 local committees to improve food distribution. On 18 December he upbraided the committees for not ensuring better distribution and thereby eliminating queuing, which he said ‘must be stopped, and stopped immediately’, but this had little or no short-term effect.119 Rhondda’s plea to his 2,000 local committees to improve distribution was also largely fruitless. And, for all his assiduousness, he seemed partly responsible for a shortage of butter: 3,000 tons had been imported in November and December 1917, compared with 30,000 tons in the same months of 1913. It was not because of shipping losses that butter was so scarce, but because Rhondda had fixed the price at £11 9s per hundredweight. This had stopped Dutch exports, because the butter cost £22 5s per hundredweight to produce.120 Then a shortage of cereals renewed calls to ban the brewing of beer, something Lloyd George, understanding the country’s difficult mood as it was, wisely dismissed.
Nor did Rhondda’s pleas to the public to restrict their consumption of food, or for people to use their usual grocers and other retailers rather than touring looking for supplies, have much effect. The attempt to control food began to appear chaotic, which hardly boded well for formal rationing, given the bureaucratic complexity of the proposed scheme – not just with shoppers tied to certain shops, but with shops having their stock regulated according to the hours they were open for business; and goods distributed by a ticketing system. Hoarding was punished by heavy fines and imprisonment, but also provoked fears that officials would start raiding middle-class homes and inspecting their larders, and people would be denied the right to have any food other than that required for immediate consumption. As with so many other bureaucratic edicts, that against hoarding would require much explanation and refinement.