Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Shopping for food became a tedious business. Every citizen was issued with an identity card and a ration book: a buff-coloured general book, a blue one for children under six, and others for travellers, service personnel on leave and seamen. Armed with their books, shoppers had to register with a supplier for each of the rationed items, and stay with that supplier indefinitely – which made it important to cultivate good relations with one or two shopkeepers, who might be prepared to slip extra portions across the counter.

  Queuing became endemic. ‘Queue, queue, queue,’ one girl remembered. ‘What patience and stamina we must have had!’ Housewives grew so addicted to queuing that they would join a line merely if they saw one forming, without even knowing what lay at the end of it – but fish, which was never rationed, attracted longer queues than anything else. When invasion seemed a distinct possibility, the Government advised housewives in rural areas to keep enough food in their homes for at least three days. Among the stores suggested for four people were twelve Oxo cubes, two tins of salmon, two tins of Irish stew or other meat, 14 lb of potatoes, oatmeal, flour and macaroni. ‘Arrange now to join up with near neighbours in the event of invasion.’

  Ground down by shortages, people became depressed by the lack of variety but grateful for anything they could get. Cheese was typically boring. Only one National Cheddar was available, and the production of any other cheese was banned (although of course it continued in out-of-the-way farm dairies).

  At first restaurants were free from controls, but the exemption caused much resentment, as well-to-do people could always supplement their rations by eating out. To make things fairer, new rules rendered it illegal for restaurants to charge more than 5s for a meal, or to provide meals of more than three courses, or to serve meat and fish at the same sitting. The restrictions led to the establishment of Community Feeding Centres, soon (at Churchill’s suggestion) renamed British Restaurants, run by local authorities and volunteers, set up in schools, town halls and church halls to provide midday meals for all comers. Customers paid 9d at the entrance and were given tokens for soup, a main course – maybe minced beef with parsnips and greens – and a pudding. Basic though they were, these places were extremely well patronized, and by September 1943, 2160 of them had come into being. The food was not to everyone’s taste. ‘British to me means Barbarian,’ roared the portly Scottish MP Sir William Darling. ‘They are brutal in their cooking, brutal in their presentation of food. One needs to be British to “take it” in a British Restaurant.’

  Any establishment selling cooked food did well: in the summer of 1942 a pie station was opened in the men’s reading room at Hever, in Kent. The cost of the equipment was met from donations and the sale of horse chestnuts collected by schoolchildren, and the pies, made three days a week by members of the Women’s Voluntary Service, proved highly popular. By the autumn over 7000 had been made – at first for farm workers only, but later for general sale.

  The man universally identified with rationing was Lord Woolton. A cheerful north countryman, with an easy, outgoing personality, he came from Salford, in Lancashire, and went to Manchester Grammar School. Born Frederick Marquis, in 1935, for his work as Managing Director of Lewis’s department stores in Liverpool, he was knighted, and in 1939 he was raised to the peerage for services to industry. He would have liked to become Baron Marquis, but was told that this was impossible, as his own name denoted another grade of nobility; so he took the title Lord Woolton, after the Liverpool suburb in which he had lived.

  In April 1940 he was appointed Minister of Food. In spite of the fact that the entire population deplored rationing, and the boring nature of the wartime diet, he put such energy and good sense into press conferences, broadcasts and positive advertising campaigns that he quickly became known as ‘Uncle Fred’, and often received 200 letters a day, many bringing thanks and congratulation from grateful citizens. Part of his success was due to his habit of warning people in advance when some shortage was in the offing. Whenever he and Lady Denman (Founder and Queen of the Land Girls) visited a farm together, they were received like royalty. His reputation survived even the creation of the dreaded Woolton Pie to which he gave his name – a concoction of potatoes, parsnips, turnips, carrots and oatmeal, seasoned with herbs and awash with brown gravy, under a crust of pastry or potato, created at the Savoy Hotel in London by the master chef Francis Latry.

  Woolton understood not only the intricacies of the food supply, but also the need to put over the necessity for rationing to the public. One of his most successful inventions was The Kitchen Front, a five-minute radio programme which came on after the eight o’clock news six mornings a week and encouraged housewives to greater efforts of economy and imagination in the use of whatever ingredients they had. In his memoirs he recorded how, having decided that ‘the public was either going to laugh or to cry about food rationing, and that it was better for them that they should laugh’, he summoned two professional entertainers to his assistance:

  I asked two ladies named Miss Elsie and Miss Doris Waters – who were more widely known as ‘Gert and Daisy’ – if they would come to see me. I told them that I wanted their help in making people see that food rationing – which was increasingly inevitable – was not necessarily a matter for perpetual gloom … They said to me, ‘But, Lord Woolton, we don’t think you understand: we are music hall artistes.’ I did understand, and told them in greater detail the sort of things I had in mind. To my intense joy, one of them said, ‘Do you mean something like this?’ and they proceeded, quite impromptu, to do a little turn.

  The lively Gert and the dim Daisy – described by one fan (Ralph Arnold) as ‘looking like every man’s favourite aunts’ – became immensely popular, and people loved repeating their jokes, especially when they were spiced with a little smut.

  Gert, or it may have been Daisy, had overslept, because her alarm clock had stopped. She hopped out of bed in her nightdress, put her head out of the window, and saw a man delivering milk. ‘Have you got the time?’ she shouted. ‘Yes,’ was the eager reply, ‘but what shall I do with my horse and cart?’

  Woolton had an endearing readiness to record encounters with members of the public. Staying one night in the Cotswolds, he was accosted by a woman who said that her small daughter became confused when she recited the Lord’s Prayer, and after the line ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, frequently asked, ‘Why do we have to have both God and Lord Woolton?’

  His book reveals how fair-minded he was, and what a magnificent grip he had on a task of immense complexity; but – perhaps for propaganda reasons – he told a big white lie when he claimed that corruption scarcely existed. He certainly did his best to suppress illegal transactions, and recalled that, ‘unknown to everybody in the Ministry of Food except the Chief Permanent Secretary’, he ‘housed in a separate building a group of men very skilled in tracing defaulters: they were ever on the look-out for organised attempts at dealing in the black market’. He also introduced severe penalties for infringing the food regulations – a fine of £500 with or without two years’ imprisonment, and an additional fine of three times the value of the capital involved in the transaction. These measures may have deterred serious criminals, but any amount of minor breaches of the rules were committed, every day and everywhere, especially in the country.

  Woolton had a marvellously direct way of addressing housewives. ‘Many of you must have a very good stock of canned foods,’ he said in one broadcast. ‘Make it last. Go easy with the tin-opener and regard all your tinned food as an iron ration.’ Economy with cheese was another of his themes:

  Don’t eat cheese unless you need it. Don’t eat it as an extra. Some people must have cheese, such as miners and farm-workers, and if it were rationed, it would make it short for everybody. I know it is a question of changing the habits of a lifetime, but war makes us do that.

  He was right about cheese, which had been the staple fare of farm workers for generations. One old shepherd of sixty-five sa
id that cheese had been his ‘regular fare’ for seven days a week. He had always depended on it for energy, and now he was obliged to eat onions with his bread and margarine, which wasn’t the same at all. Another veteran labourer echoed him: he used to eat a pound and a half of cheese a week, for lunch, dinner and tea – but now he had only bread and margarine.

  Besides exhorting cooks to be imaginative in their use of scarce ingredients, Woolton also urged them to hand in surplus aluminium utensils and even milk-bottle tops for reuse in aircraft parts. Lord Beaverbrook launched an appeal, promising to ‘turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes’. In one village alone – Arborfield in Berkshire – nine and a half tons of scrap metal were collected, as well as eight sacks of aluminium. The campaign was hardly needed, as scrap aluminium was already abundant, but it evoked one spirited response:

  My saucepans have all been surrendered,

  The teapot has gone from the hob,

  The colander’s leaving the cabbage

  For a very much different job.

  So now, when I hear on the wireless

  Of Hurricanes showing their mettle,

  I see in a vision before me

  A Dornier chased by my kettle.

  The Ministry of Food became an enormous organization, eventually employing 15,000 people, many of them based in Colwyn Bay, on the north-west coast of Wales, where they took over hotels, boarding houses and the premises of Penrhos College, the girls’ school which had been evacuated to Chatsworth. Scattered round the country were 1300 Local Food Offices, which distributed ration books, and licensed shopkeepers to handle them. Unknown to most of the population, the Ministry also stockpiled food in secret warehouses, against the threat of invasion. Woolton himself travelled huge distances, rallying his troops, and often broke the long haul to Colwyn Bay by staying a night at the Lygon Arms, a coaching inn at Broadway, in the Cotswolds.

  The best antidote to rationing was the Dig for Victory campaign, launched by Sir Reginald Dornan-Smith when Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in October 1939, and taken over by his successor Robert Hudson in 1940. ‘Let Dig for Victory be the motto of everyone with a garden,’ he exhorted in a radio broadcast. The phrase entered the national vocabulary and conscience – yet ‘Dig for Victory’ was not the Minister’s invention. It was coined by the London Evening Standard, and the real architect of the crusade was the Scottish economist Professor John Raeburn, head of the Agricultural Plans Branch at the Ministry of Food, who was only twenty-eight in 1940 but had already worked at Nanking University, fascinated by all things Chinese.

  ‘Dig, dig, dig,’ went the campaign song, ‘And your muscles will grow big … Just keep on digging/Till we give our foes a wigging/Dig, dig, dig for Victory!’ The Ministry’s Leaflet No. 1 made gardening sound easy: ‘Grow for Winter as well as Summer,’ it urged:

  Vegetables for you and your family every week of the year. Never a week without food from your garden or allotment. Not only fresh peas and lettuce in June, new potatoes in July, but all the health-giving vegetables in winter when supplies are scarce – SAVOYS, SPROUTS, KALE …

  The leaflet gave a year-round cropping plan, but made no mention of slugs, wireworm, blackfly, birds, frost or any of the other hazards that dismay amateur horticulturalists.

  Especially in London and the large northern cities, a high proportion of houses lacked gardens; but the Cultivation of Lands (Allotment) Order of 1939 empowered councils to take over unused land, and so enticing were the Ministry’s posters, encouraging countless people to have a go, that the number of allotments provided by local authorities rose from 815,000 in 1939 to 1,400,000 at the end of the war. The increase was due in no small part to the advocacy of the National Allotments Society, which claimed that plots ‘are of immense service to the nation in times of peace, and are indispensable in times of war, and that the contribution which they make to personal and public health are [sic] immeasurable’.

  The Indian professor N. Gangulee, a research scholar at Rothamsted Experimental Station, who toured Britain and wrote a series of articles which were published in a small book, The Battle of the Land, was impressed by the increase in numbers, and by the work people were putting in. In 1943 he calculated that home production of vegetables and fruit amounted to 600,000 tons a year, and concluded that allotment holders were ‘making a valuable contribution to the war effort’. He also praised the enthusiasm of gardeners in RAF camps, especially one barrage-balloon crew who had built a greenhouse out of old car windscreens.

  Even the most unlikely patches of land – tennis courts and railway embankments, the moat of the Tower of London, the ground beside the runway at Manchester Ringway parachute-training base (now Manchester airport) – were dug up and planted. Bomb sites were cleared of rubble – with enormous labour – and brought back to productive life. The wrecked roof garden of Selfridge’s emporium in Oxford Street was cleared and restocked. Schools sacrificed their playing fields for growing vegetables, which the pupils were allowed to take home. Children of five or six were taught to recognize good and bad plants, and were set to pulling up weeds. Boys were excused lessons to go and work on farms. ‘The [Education] Committee have given permission for ten senior boys to pick up potatoes in school hours,’ said the record of the school at Akenfield in autumn 1941. ‘The school has been closed for the salvage drive, blackberrying, wartime cookery demonstrations and meetings.’

  The effort made gardeners feel they were contributing to the national cause – and Woolton urged them on. ‘This is a food war,’ he announced in 1941. ‘Every extra row of vegetables in allotments saves shipping … The battle on the kitchen front cannot be won without help from the kitchen garden.’

  Bright, boldly coloured posters and leaflets put out by the Ministry encouraged housewives to be economical and inventive, and to cook healthy food. ‘Doctor Carrot, the Children’s best friend’, said one, with a drawing of the good, carrot-shaped physician carrying a little case marked ‘Vit. A’. People were assured that carrots would help them see better in the dark, and so negotiate the hazards of the blackout more safely. Carrots achieved unprecedented importance in the national diet and appeared in numerous guises: curried carrot, carrot cake, carrot jam, carrot lollies. A national competition announced in December 1941 was won by Marjorie Casey of Palmer’s Green with her Carrot Savoury Pudding, chosen from a huge entry by ‘a mixed committee of tasters at the Ministry of Food’.

  ‘Food is a munition of war’, said another official poster. ‘Don’t waste it.’ One of the Ministry’s major aims was to make people eat less bread and to increase the consumption of potatoes, hence a seductive leaflet proclaiming ‘There is no vegetable more useful than the homely potato. It is a valuable yet cheap source of energy, and one of the foods that help protect us from ill health. It contains the same vitamins as oranges …’ Spuds were a central element of wartime food, and their nutritional value was so successfully promoted – not least by the bouncy cartoon character Potato Pete, who had his own song – that at the end of the war consumption had gone up by 60 per cent. No doubt the Minister would have been delighted to learn that some people’s dogs developed a passion for baby potatoes, and made for the fields when the crop was being lifted.

  Of course there were disasters – as when a bomb landed among the vegetables lovingly grown by Herbert Brush, a pensioner in Forest Hill, south London. ‘I went round to look at the allotment,’ he recorded in his diary for 26 October 1940, ‘but it was a case of looking for the allotment. Four perches out of the five are one enormous hole, and all my potatoes and cabbages have vanished.’

  One class of gardeners was dismayed by the Ministry of Agriculture’s drive to grow food: the owners of nurseries which raised ornamental plants and flowers for the market. Compelled by the War Ags to switch many of their greenhouses and much of their land to vegetable production, they found their incomes tumbling. Harry Wheatcroft, the celebrated grower and breeder of roses – he of the outrageous handlebar mou
stache – spoke for dozens of his fellow nurserymen when he lamented:

  We put the plough through a field of some hundred thousand [rose] trees – a heartbreaking job. We tore from the greenhouses the bushes that were to give us blooms for the spring flower shows, and so made room for the more urgent bodily needs of the nation.

  Pigs now wander about where our Polyantha roses bloomed. There’s wheat and barley where acres of Hybrid Teas coloured the land – even the humble cabbage stands where standard roses once held majestic sway. The odour of our glasshouses has changed too. Here half a million onion plants have taken the place of the roses. They, in turn, will be succeeded by tomato plants and fruit; then lettuce, while the light still holds, and afterwards the humble mustard and cress.

  Besides the craze for vegetables, there was such a tremendous drive for collecting herbs that hedges and gardens must have been stripped nearly bare. Before the war almost all the plants used in the manufacture of medicines had come from Europe and the Far East. With the supply cut off, the Government created a body of experts who appealed to the public to gather wild herbs. Every county set up a herb committee, and the Women’s Institutes, the Women’s Voluntary Service, Scouts, Girl Guides, schools – all joined in. An official guide, The Hedgerow Harvest, sent thousands of people out foraging, and the result was enormous: in the five years of the war, more than 4000 tons of herbs were collected. Rose hips – the fruit of the dog rose, a traditional remedy for exhaustion and stomach upsets – were gathered in huge quantities to make ruby-red syrup packed with Vitamin C. In 1944 the Knockholt WI earned a special commendation for picking 97 lb of hips, but their efforts were far exceeded by those of Doris Frecknall, of Woodhouse Eaves in Leicestershire, who alone collected a quarter of a ton. Meanwhile, the Monks Risborough WI sent nine sacks of belladonna stalks to the Islip Herb Centre for the production of pain-killing drugs.