The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food
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However, in April 1940 Lord Woolton had been appointed to the position of Minister of Food and he survived Churchill’s rise to the position of prime minister. He took over the departing Elliot’s milk scheme with enthusiasm. Like the government’s nutritional advisers, Woolton had witnessed the misery of urban poverty and in him the poor found an ally. Woolton was a businessman, formerly chairman of Lewis’s in Liverpool, and later to become chairman of the Conservative Party. But he and his wife were also philanthropists. As a young man he had lived among the poor as the warden of a philanthropic society for the poor and needy of Liverpool, and during the First World War his wife had helped to run a feeding programme for the distressed wives and children of absent servicemen.59 He was as aware as the scientists that malnutrition took its greatest toll on women during their childbearing years, and that it was the inability of poor women to buy more and better-quality food to meet their greater nutritional needs during pregnancy which left working-class women and their children vulnerable to death, disablement and disease. Woolton’s timing was good. The sense that Britain was under siege was created by the British army’s withdrawal from France at Dunkirk in June and the Treasury was persuaded to be generous.60 Pregnant and nursing women were given priority access to a pint of milk a day at the cost of 2 d. Their children were also allocated two pints of milk a day under the age of one, and a pint a day subsequently.61 This was an extremely successful initiative. By September 1940, 70 per cent of those eligible were parti-cipating.62
The poor showed less enthusiasm for the Ministry of Food’s vitamin scheme, which was also designed to address the problem of poverty-related malnutrition. In December 1941 all children under two (all children under five from February 1942) were given an allowance of blackcurrant juice and Icelandic cod liver oil. When Britain ran out of blackcurrants the juice was replaced by lend-lease orange juice from the United States. But in January 1943 only one-fifth of those eligible were collecting their allocations. The lack of enthusiasm perhaps had something to do with the taste of the cod liver oil, which according to a Ministry official was ‘horrible’. An aggressive advertising campaign eventually pushed up the acceptance of orange juice to nearly half of those entitled to it.63 However, the children’s orange juice ration did not always find its way to its intended beneficiaries. The upper-middle-class Maggie Hay recalled mischievously that it tasted very good as a mixer with gin.64
Two further measures aimed to improve children’s health more generally. In October 1941 The Times reported Woolton as having said, ‘I want to see elementary school children as well fed as children going to Eton or Harrow. I am determined that we shall organise our food front that at the end of the war … we shall have preserved and even improved the health and physique of the nation.’65 The Milk in Schools scheme was now extended to all schoolchildren. School dinners were also introduced, providing about 1,000 calories, or a third of the children’s daily energy needs. By the end of the war, more than 1.5 million children, 40 per cent of the school population, were eating school dinners and 46 per cent drinking school milk.66 The circumstances of war removed the stigma of charity which had surrounded the school milk scheme in the 1930s. By 1945 it was considered perfectly natural that all children should eat school meals and drink free bottles of milk. It was only with the appointment of Margaret Thatcher as Education Minister that free school milk for children over seven was brought to an end in 1971.
Between 1939 and 1945 maternal and infant mortality rates among the working classes declined. The incidence of tuberculosis rose during the difficult early years of the war, but the disease went into decline again in 1942 and the rate of infection continued to drop. The School Medical Officer for the London County Council claimed that any height and weight differences between children of different social classes had virtually disappeared by the end of the war. A more nuanced picture emerged from Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle where it was still possible to differentiate between children at ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools, but the height and weight of the children at the ‘bad’ schools had improved. In the poorest pockets of Britain, such as Jarrow, the number of children who could be classed in the worst health category of ‘D’ had virtually vanished.67 Deficiency diseases such as rickets were essentially eradicated. The nutritionists concluded that besides winning the war with Germany, Britain had also won the war against malnutrition.
Throughout the western world the wartime introduction of planned economies, which accepted responsibility for the health and welfare of all a nation’s citizens, marked a decisive break with the past. In post-war Britain it would no longer be possible for a government, whether Conservative or Labour, to turn away from abject misery, declaring that it was the result of ignorance and, by implication, beyond the means of the government to rectify. The Ministry of Food had demonstrated that it was possible for the government to tackle these issues, and even if certain politicians were reluctant to accept that the state’s relationship to its people should change, the public’s expectations had shifted. This was demonstrated by the British people’s response to the Beveridge Report.
In 1941, William Beveridge was asked to chair a minor government committee on insurance benefits, but the report that he published in December 1942 was more far-reaching and called for a comprehensive system of social security based on subsistence-rate benefits, a new health service, and measures to ensure full employment. The cabinet response to the report was divided. The Labour Ministers – Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton – were all in favour of reform, although not necessarily in the shape that Beveridge had suggested. But they were not in a position within the coalition government to direct social policy. For the most part the Conservatives maintained their pre-war attitude to the poor and remained resistant to welfare, which they insisted would reduce initiative. They had no desire to engage in any attempt to redistribute wealth. Lord Beaverbrook and Kingsley Wood – who had once tried to intimidate John Boyd Orr and who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer – were both unenthusiastic. Churchill himself ‘was said to be “allergic to post-war policy”’.68 The Conservatives did their best to tone down Beveridge’s recommendations and obstruct radical reform.
If the report did not exactly galvanize Churchill’s coalition government into action, it caught the imagination of the British public. Within two weeks of publication 635,000 copies of the report had been sold. One week later, nine out of ten people interviewed for a Gallup poll believed that its proposals should be adopted.69 The British public’s enthusiasm indicated that the war had stimulated the desire for a fairer society where everyone had work, a decent house and enough nutritious food to eat. The government could not completely ignore public enthusiasm and, in response, the Ministry of Reconstruction was set up in November 1943, headed by the popular Lord Woolton. Family allowances and educational reform were introduced before the war came to an end and the benefits of the wartime provision of school meals were extended into the post-war world by R. A. Butler’s Education Act (1944).70 By the general election of 1945 the British people were ready to vote for a Labour government, which they felt would strive to construct a fairer society.71 Welfare was no longer seen as a special service for the needy but as a social service for all. Thus, the statutory fortification of foods, such as bread, which was continued after the war, applied a protective policy across society.72 However, the egalitarian notion that everyone should receive the same share, which Woolton had applied to food rationing, animated much of the thinking behind the development of the measures introduced by the welfare state. The unfortunate result was that the fundamental inequality of the food rationing system came back to haunt post-war welfare measures and pensions, in particular, were set too low to really lift the most needy among the aged out of impoverishment. Nevertheless, the war marked a decisive break with the past in that, after 1945, ‘government … never recovered from the wartime expectation that it should continually “do something” in all spheres’, and that it was right
and proper for the state to take responsibility for its citizens’ health and well-being.73
HEALTH AND MORALE – THE ARMY CATERING CORPS
The stimulus for the British army to improve military catering was the negative impact that dismal food had upon the morale of the troops. ‘When it started out the food was good … by the time it reached us it was not very appetising. To anyone nurtured in comparative comfort … the conditions, particularly in the mess, were appalling.’74 This was the opinion of R. P. Evans, a Bren-gun operator in the 8th Battalion Worcestershire Regiment. Military cooks took little pride in their work, which was hardly surprising given that they were poorly paid and allocating kitchen duty to an ordinary private was used as a mild form of punishment. Having agreed to train as a navy cook in 1940, the nineteen-year-old brewery worker R. B. Buckle was indignant to discover that the instruction consisted of being used as a dogsbody, peeling potatoes and cleaning up the kitchens. When he came to take his cook’s examination he still had no idea how to make Yorkshire pudding or pastry for an apple pie. An obliging Wren* made most of his meal for him. As the paymaster tasted ‘a small spoonful from my plates and pronounced me a cook it crossed my mind, if this was how other departments were trained I wondered how we expected to win the war’.75
In the first years of the war the dreadful army food was a major source of discontent among servicemen stationed in Britain. After the British army was driven out of France in June 1940, well over half of the 3 million strong British armed forces were stationed in the home country. In theory this should have made it easier to feed them, but the miserable food situation in the winter of 1940–41 was reflected in the military rations. In his Mass Observation diary for 9 February 1941, the reluctant recruit Edward Stebbing complained: ‘Tea today: one piece of bread and jam, a piece of cake and a cup of tea.’76 A typical day’s fare would be, for breakfast, a small piece of bacon or liver, porridge and two slices of bread. Lunch at noon would be meat, potatoes, cabbage and carrots, followed by semolina. Spotted dick (a suet pudding with currants) and custard was more popular but less frequently served. Tea was bread and butter, cheese, and possibly a slice of cake, followed by a supper of cold pudding or bread and butter and cocoa.77 It was recognized that hard physical training meant that soldiers required extra meat, but the home service ration of 3,300 calories allocated British soldiers only 6 ounces a day.78 Canadian troops stationed in Britain, used to far higher standards at home, were horrified by the British army food. It was one of the main topics in letters home, and in two Canadian camps in August 1941 there were sit-down strikes over the fact that there were only two cooked meals a day.79
For the British soldiers the food was one among many discontents. The army was made up of conscripts who saw themselves not as soldiers but as civilians in uniform. In contrast to the conscript army of the First World War, which was mainly made up of men who had been servants and farm labourers and who were accustomed to a culture of deference, the conscripts in the Second World War were better educated and less deferential towards the upper classes.80 These men resented high-handed upper-class officers, chafed against what they saw as pointless army discipline, the low pay, the sack-like uniforms and the public’s low regard for the ordinary squaddie. Leaky tents and damp barracks, disagreeable food, cheerless NAAFI* canteens serving revolting tea, all took their toll on morale.81 Stebbing reported, ‘All the time one hears grumbles about the stupidity of the military authorities, the red tape, the habit of doing things in the most awkward and roundabout way, the silly trivial things we are made to do, the shortage of food’.82
The army realized that something would have to be done. Ordinary men who had been called upon to risk sacrificing their lives for their country had a right to expect a decent level of care in return. In the sphere of food, in 1938 the army had already appointed Isidore Salmon of the J. Lyons Company to advise the quartermaster. He initiated the building of a new army cookery school at Aldershot and lobbied hard for the creation of a new catering corps. He pointed out that unless the cooks were better paid and properly trained they could hardly be expected to take pride in their work and produce appetizing meals. An Army Catering Corps was set up in March 1941 with Richard Byford, catering manager of Trust Houses, as its director. Byford put together a team of managers from the catering industry and the food in army messes gradually improved.83 The level of improvement can be seen in the cookery notebook which Fusilier H. Simons kept while attending his course at Aldershot in 1944. He was taught how to use a variety of different field ovens and how to build one out of scrap if no oven was available. The cookery lessons gave instructions on how to make a roux, salmon and potato cakes, a variety of stews and hotpots and how to prepare dehydrated foods so that they would at least be edible.84 By mid-1943 food seems to have faded as a source of discontent in the army stationed in Britain.85
The men who supervised food reform within the British army were drawn from the catering industry, and their focus was on improving the standard of cookery. In the Australian army the man appointed to shake up the army messes was Cedric Stanton Hicks, Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Adelaide and one of the growing body of new scientists of nutrition. Hicks had supervised the South Australian League of Nations’ nutritional survey and was, therefore, very much alive to the issue of nutritional deficiencies in the Australian diet. He brought a quite different quality of commitment – it might be described as a crusading zeal – to the effort to improve not only the taste but also the nutritional value of army meals.
During his tour of inspection as the newly appointed catering adviser to the Australian army, Hicks found the cooks as incompetent and uninterested in their job as the ones in the British army. He was astonished to discover that they were still cooking with Soyer stoves, invented by the famous Victorian chef Alexis Soyer during the Crimean war (1853–56). The stoves routinely burned the porridge, soups and stews and they reduced cabbage to a sludge-like mush. Hicks claimed that the local farmers were benefiting greatly because the soldiers left most of their food on their plates uneaten and he calculated that about 40 per cent of the army food supply ended up as pig slops.86 Not only did the Soyer stoves produce inedible food, they were, Hicks expostulated, ‘the most efficient destructor of Vitamin C that could be devised’.87 He began a concerted campaign to outlaw the stoves and eventually persuaded the Australian army to adopt the Wiles’ steam cooker, a mobile oven which could cook a meal in twenty minutes while a convoy was on the move. It used less fuel than the Soyer stove and Hicks was later to demonstrate, with the help of a scientist from CSIRO* that vegetables steamed in this way retained 75 per cent of their vitamins, a huge improvement on the 80–85 per cent vitamin depletion rate in a Soyer stove. When the 4th Military District tried out the new stoves Hicks’s efforts were vindicated as the troops actually returned for second helpings of their vegetables.88 These mobile steam cookers were eventually adopted by the British army in 1944, to much praise.
Having installed better ovens Hicks devised a balanced mess ration which contained a generous 3,944 calories, but he thought it likely that the existing cooks would continue to ruin the food. His ‘growing realisation that food might well be a deciding factor’ in determining the performance of troops fortified his resolve, and ‘at fever heat’ he pushed for the better instruction of army cooks. ‘“Fighting with food” became our slogan.’89 Hicks pulled in First World War veterans who were now in the catering trade managing hotels and restaurants and set them to work reforming army cookery. In March 1943 Hicks finally won his battle to set up an Australian Army Catering Corps. By this time the main focus of Australian fighting was on New Guinea, and Major N. M. Gutteridge was appointed as the liaison officer between the Medical Directorate and the Quartermaster Nutrition Branch on the island. From then on medical officers were in constant contact with the catering advisory staff and a process was set in motion whereby continuous inquiries about food and health in the field were relayed
back to nutritional headquarters, which then adjusted methods and supplies. This system worked well in improving the skills of the cooks and raising awareness among the troops as to the benefits of eating the right sorts of food.
FIGHTING ON BULLY BEEF AND BISCUITS
The influence of the new army catering corps on field rations was not to be felt until well into the conflict. In the early campaigns the food rations received by the British empire’s combat troops were little different from those the soldiers ate in the trenches during the First World War. In 1941 the British 8th Army in Egypt was one-quarter British and three-quarters imperial. Three Australian divisions, as well as Australian Air Force squadrons, were joined by the Indian army and a huge force of pioneer soldiers mainly drawn from the African colonies, who dug tank traps, manned anti-aircraft batteries, constructed railways, put up telegraph lines and loaded and unloaded the ships bringing supplies into the Red Sea ports.90 The staple diet of all of these soldiers was bully beef and hard biscuits. Gerald Page, an army cook who served in the North African desert, described these biscuits as ‘a cross between Cream Crackers and Dog Biscuits’ – the ones made in Australia were reputed to taste like ‘dry, solid, soap’.91
In his diary in September 1941, R. L. Crimp, a soldier in a British motorized platoon, described the process of distributing desert rations. ‘At 6 o’clock, armed with sacks, canisters and empty water cans, we accompany the corporal to platoon HQ for rations. The sergeant’s already built “basic” piles on the ground – four cans of bully, a tin of milk, a tin of cheese, and six oranges – for each section [of half a dozen men] … Jam and margarine, in 7 lb tins, come once a week and go round in rotation.’ The men fought over the tinned potatoes as they particularly disliked the yellow sweet potatoes grown in Egypt. ‘For once, the fresh is not preferred.’92 The monotonous and unpalatable diet was made worse by the quality of the water, heavily chlorinated and so saline that the tea curdled. The troops in North Africa created a brew known as ‘char’, very strong tea drunk with condensed milk and as much sugar as possible.93 Crimp described how brewing ‘desert char’ was a consoling ritual. The ‘desert army [was made up of] thousands and thousands of little groups whose very core was a fire tin and a brew can’. The men would gather around, the ‘section mugs … marshalled on the ground’ ready with tinned milk and sugar already added.94 The German troops fighting in the desert subsisted on an equally unimaginative diet of canned sausage meat, cream cheese in tubes, sardines, dried peas, salted vegetables, greasy margarine and jam and a moist black rye bread known as Dauerbrot (long-lasting bread). This was washed down with ersatz coffee, which the soldiers thought was execrable.95 It was joked that it was this heavy diet, inappropriate for the climate, that defeated Rommel’s troops in North Africa, but the joke would have held for either side.96