A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  Where there was no room for larger animals, the other obvious ‘livestock’ for amateurs to keep were honeybees, which could quite easily be kept in hives in town gardens, although they were more usually to be found in cottage gardens in the country. Of course honey was a substitute for pure sugar, and therefore much in demand after January 1940, when sugar was rationed to eight ounces a week, but its antibacterial healing properties were also valued. In larger country establishments and commercial orchards, bees also pollinated fruit trees. At Broughton Hall in Staffordshire, Land Girl Sibyl van Praet sometimes helped to look after several hives in the kitchen garden. Years later, she recalled that ‘Late one sultry afternoon a swarm formed in an apple tree. I held a laundry-basket high above the garden wall somewhat precariously whilst Mr Lowe [the head gardener] struggled to bring down the heaving, seething, buzzing mass – in one brown ball – safely gathered, a new colony and very precious.’11

  An ex-Swanley girl, Mrs Rachel Thorpe, who worked on an erstwhile fruit and strawberry farm at Wisbech, which in wartime was predominantly given over to vegetables, helped look after bee hives and remembered that the honey was pink because the bees would fly to the Chivers jam factory close by and lick up the jam.

  More popular than bees, and probably more appealing, were rabbits, which were reasonably easy to accommodate in a back garden, although their care required quite a commitment on the part of their keepers. The does had to be mated, the young looked after, the adults killed on a regular basis and a number of hutches maintained, since buck rabbits fought one another if kept together.12 Skinning and curing the pelts also took a certain level of skill.

  The great advantage of rabbits was that they were the only species of livestock which could be reared just as easily in the city as the countryside. On 20 September 1941, the Duke of Norfolk visited Bethnal Green to see the Bethnal Green Bombed Sites Association allotments, but he also looked in on several back yards to inspect chickens and rabbits, and there are photographs extant of the genial Premier Duke of England sharing a joke with a Cockney in front of vertical tiers of rabbit hutches.

  It was said that a single domesticated rabbit provided 2½ lb of meat at little cost, because rabbits could live on food that would otherwise be wasted, and because they were big enough to be killed and eaten when only four months old. (Provided, that was, the children of the rabbit keeper let him do it.) A buck and three does would provide fifty-five young a year, enough for one meat dish for the family each week.

  The only rabbit food that owners could buy – provided they were registered with the Ministry of Agriculture Rationing Division – was bran, at a rate of 7 lb per quarter for each doe. If you owned four does or fewer, you could only purchase bran through a domestic rabbit club. Fortunately, rabbits would eat any amount of raw vegetables, pea haulms, carrot tops and non-poisonous weeds like dandelions, as well as cooked potatoes, lawn mowings, kipper skins, tea leaves and cheese rinds. To see their rabbits healthily through the winter, gardeners were advised to grow a number of strange-sounding brassicas, such as gap kale, marrow stem kale, kohlrabi, perpetual kale and thousand-headed kale, as well as cattle carrots, swedes, sugar beet and chicory. Rabbit droppings were the return: they are rich in the major nutrient elements and could be used as a manure, either fresh or after they have rotted down in the compost heap.

  Rabbits also provided fur pelts. The best rabbit types for this were chinchilla, sable and rex, whose fur felt like plush. Rabbit fur was in the best condition to make pelts between October and April, and the rabbits were killed when they were six months or more. A full-length fur coat required about forty skins.

  The Prime Minister’s wife, Clementine, had an interest in rabbit pelts as the chairman of ‘Mrs Churchill’s Red Cross Aid to Russia’ campaign that began in 1941. In 1943, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes agreed to support this initiative. One WI member recalled: ‘We were urged to keep rabbits, eating the meat to supplement our meagre rations and curing the skins which were then to be made into fur jackets, hats and gloves. Classes on “The Curing of Rabbit Skins” and on glove making were held, whilst other skins were sent to National Headquarters for further processing.’13 In two and a half years, the Red Cross sent 2,07114 fur-lined garments to the Soviet Union, and Mrs Churchill’s fund raised over £8 million.

  As the war wore on, keeping back-yard animals became harder, although resourcefulness and ingenuity sometimes made up for the lack of proper materials. One rabbit keeper, Ken Allen, could not get 1-inch wire for his hutch, so he used the mesh from a Morrison table shelter.15 And domestic animals were kept in some strange places: ‘Admiral Lundy’, the manager of the Savoy Cinema in Brighton, kept both ducks and rabbits on the roof of his flat above the cinema, many feet above street level.

  Despite all the encouragement of the authorities, however, keeping livestock never became truly popular. Taken all in all, that is hardly surprising, since most gardens were not really suitable to become smallholdings. A Wartime Social Survey of May 1945 set out to discover, amongst other things, how many private households kept livestock, and the number turned out to be a very modest 14 per cent. Of these, 72 per cent had hens, so only 10 per cent of all households; 30 per cent owned rabbits, 10 per cent kept ducks, 3 per cent geese, 6 per cent pigs, 1 per cent goats and 3 per cent bees. The average number of hens kept was seven and of rabbits five. It is particularly surprising how few households kept bees, when honey was such a longed-for sugar substitute. The answer must lie in both the initial outlay required, and the knowledge that had to be acquired to make a success of beekeeping.

  The subject of domesticated livestock starkly pointed up the divide between the country and the town. Country people had always kept small animals – usually poultry and pigs – in their gardens, to a greater or lesser extent. Even if enthusiasm had declined in the immediate pre-war years, most country people remembered their mothers salting bacon for the winter, and making a meal out of every part of the animal except the squeak. And country people had a tradition of bartering eggs for other goods with their neighbours. Urban keepers might have access to the many Dig for Victory exhibitions mounted in towns and cities, where animal experts stood ready alongside the gardeners to answer questions, but that can never have been the same as living next door to an expert livestock keeper.

  Country people also had the opportunity to eat wild animals, as well as plants. Villagers could easily acquire a couple of wild rabbits or a brace of pigeon, for a favour done for someone who had permission to shoot on a farm or landowner’s estate. With so many gamekeepers away at the war, these animals, classed as vermin, were numerous. Even game birds were given away: Muriel Green recorded in her diary in October 1939 that her family had been given three partridges by the local baronet.16 Her mother ran the village garage, so perhaps a little extra petrol had gone the baronet’s way. Who knows? And there was plenty of fishing to be had in brooks and trout streams, for anyone with the leisure to fish them.

  These were all ways of varying the diet which were not usually open to town dwellers. It is small wonder that many believed country people ‘had it easy’. It also seemed to them unfair that the rural population could take the opportunity to buy fresh vegetables at source from market and mansion gardens, rather than having to wait until they appeared in shops, and have such easy access to farmhouse butter or duck eggs. Country people could also pick their own apples and pears, while children could be sent blackberrying in the hedgerows in autumn and to pick dandelion leaves in spring for salads and nettles for nettle soup. Muriel Green wrote excitedly, after a trip to the local woods in March 1941: ‘We have found an onion ersatz. Garlic! Wild garlic! . . . it was as good as any onion.’17

  Country people, on the other hand, were quick to complain that they could not take advantage of eating in British Restaurants18 or works canteens, where the food was cheap and nutritious, and that by the time they arrived in their local town on an erratic bus service on a Saturday afternoon, there was
nothing left worth buying in the shops.

  Not surprisingly, many people happy to grow vegetables thought keeping livestock was a step too far. It was (or could be) a substantial commitment of both time and money, initially at least. Nor did the population in general feel happy about dispatching live creatures when required. According to a disgusted Alan Thompson, some would not even take the trouble to save kitchen waste for other people’s livestock: ‘There are plenty of people too busily occupied, or maybe some too lazy and unpatriotic to exert themselves and undertake any work of national importance.’19 That seems a bit harsh in the circumstances, but certainly livestock keeping never became anything more than a minority interest in wartime, even if a strong folk memory of it remains to this day.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FIERCELY STIRRING CAULDRONS

  THE OTHER SIDE of the coin of the government’s concern to get civilians to grow food and keep animals to supplement their rations was to encourage them to do something useful, healthy and thrifty1 with what they produced. Not only did the authorities think that people were ignorant of gardening techniques, but they also believed they would need a good deal of help in understanding what different foods offered them in the way of nutritional values, how to stretch their rations in the most efficient way and how to cook food properly. ‘The people’ became the target for a concerted campaign by the Ministry of Food, whose remit was the supply and distribution of food as well as – in conjunction with the Ministry of Agriculture – the provision of information and education. For a brand-new ministry, these were major challenges. Fortunately, cometh the hour, cometh the man.

  A strong case can be made that Frederick Marquis, the first Baron Woolton,2 was one of the great heroes of the Second World War. As Minister of Food, he oversaw a department whose task was nothing less than ensuring that what food there was found its way equitably to all civilians, as well as the armed forces, and that no one in Britain starved.3

  Lord Woolton was not a politician. He was first a social scientist, with a pronounced interest in the poor,4 then a journalist, a civil servant during the First World War concerned with procuring clothing for the army, and finally a shopkeeper on a very large scale, rising through the ranks at Lewis’s department store in Liverpool to become chairman of the company in 1936. In 1939, he was elevated to the peerage. At the start of the war, he had sufficiently caught the eye of politicians to be recruited for the job of Director-General of the Ministry of Supply, but was then swiftly promoted by Neville Chamberlain to be the non-partisan Minister of Food, succeeding William Morrison in April 1940. Once Lord Woolton had learned how to deal with politicians and civil servants – no easy task for a successful, independent-minded businessman – he set about making sure that the population had enough of the right kind and amount of food both to survive and to have the strength to do the duties required of them.

  Lord Woolton was tall and striking-looking, with a humorous smile and an unassuming, courteous manner; indeed, he was known colloquially as ‘Uncle Fred’. His origins were modest – his father had been a Salford saddler – but he was well educated, having attended first Manchester Grammar School and then the University of Manchester, where he read combined sciences. His natural empathy and ‘common touch’ served him, and the Ministry, extremely well on a number of fraught occasions, but he combined those virtues with a ferocious work ethic. For example, his frequent twelve-and-a-half-minute radio broadcasts rarely took him less than eight hours to prepare, and he studied hard to ensure that his delivery on air was natural and engaging.

  Looking back some years after the war was over, Lord Woolton wrote:

  As a nation, it was broadly true to say [in 1939] that we were indifferent to both our agriculture and our horticulture. We could get cheap food abroad . . . There was, in fact, little except potatoes that we grew in this country that somebody else could not produce either cheaper or earlier . . . Those of us who had been through the First World War knew how nearly we had lost it by being starved out by the submarines . . . When war began we were importing 29.3 million tons of food, which was rather more than half of our total consumption.5

  Rationing had already been in place for three months when Woolton took over at the Ministry of Food, and he continued the established policy, namely never rationing any foodstuff that could not be continuously supplied, in however small an amount, to the entire population. Meat had been put on ration on 11 March 1940, in this instance by value rather than weight, to take account of the many kinds of cuts there were, some cheaper than others. The move was very unpopular, since all classes ate meat and there were few vegetarians. The fuss over meat rationing was the reason why Woolton waited until the following July before he ordered the rationing of tea, cooking fats and margarine.

  His watchword was ‘Fair shares all round’ and it was this simply expressed, fair-minded attitude which earned him the respect, even affection, of the population. Considering what an extremely dull diet was imposed on people, this was some achievement. Those items for which the Ministry could not guarantee a continuous supply were put on ‘points’: the scarcer the product – say, tinned salmon – the greater the number of points needed to acquire it. This was a flexible system: the points could be varied, depending on supply. Potatoes and bread were never rationed at all in wartime, since Lord Woolton considered them vital ‘fillers’: sufficient of these would ensure that people did not actually starve. Even if the gritty wheatmeal National Loaf was unpopular with a people firmly attached to white bread, at least it was nutritious and satisfying.

  In his memoirs, published in 1959, the (by then) Earl of Woolton wrote:

  By the time the war ended we were importing less than one-third of the amount of food, measured by weight, that we brought to this country in 1939, but that did not mean that we only had available these drastically reduced food values – otherwise we should have been in desperate straits: the scientific assessment of our needs, coupled with much ingenuity in securing concentration of the foods we bought, helped us to get through . . .6

  There was particular pressure brought on me to reorganize the sale and distribution of vegetables. I had some prejudgement in this matter; as a retailer I had been anxious to bring down prices of vegetables. I knew there was a consensus of public opinion, much encouraged by the market-gardeners and the farmers, that there was no justification for the prices of lettuces or cabbages or apples sold in the shops being so much higher than the prices that were paid to the grower . . . The truth is that the cabbage in the field is not very much use to anyone except the farmer, and by the time it has found its way, amidst all the jostling of other cabbages, to arrive at the ultimate reason for its existence, it has travelled through many commercially dangerous processes.7

  The public disquiet at what The Times called the ‘long-standing scandal’8 concerning the disparity between the price paid to growers and that paid by consumers turned out to be a most intractable one in wartime. There were too many intermediaries and Covent Garden in London was far and away the biggest distribution centre in England, so transport costs could be high. It is small wonder that Woolton was as keen as Robert Hudson that householders should grow their own fresh produce.

  An important initiative of Woolton’s was the singling out of particular groups to receive food supplements not available to the general population. Farm workers received an extra ration of cheese, while workers in heavy industry, such as mining, enjoyed a larger meat allowance. As a result of the Lend-Lease agreement with the United States, both orange juice and cod-liver oil were imported in sufficient quantities for children under five to be given both free, while they and expectant mothers – and later older children, adolescents and invalids – also received a larger ration of milk than the two pints a week standard for adults. This enterprise was called the Welfare Foods Scheme, and it came into being in December 1941. Lord Woolton wrote later:

  . . . we worked out a diet for the nation that would supply all the calories and all th
e vitamins that were needed for the different age groups, for the fighting services, for the heavy manual workers, for the ordinary housewife, for the babies and the children, and for pregnant and nursing mothers. That was large-scale and all-embracing planning, and I determined to use the powers I possessed to stamp out the diseases that arose from malnutrition, especially those among children, such as rickets. The health of the children of to-day is the reward of that policy.9

  This initiative convinced the public that the government cared about the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. It is just a pity that the take-up was not as good as it should have been. In August 1942, a survey disclosed the shameful fact that only 38 per cent of mothers gave their entitled children cod-liver oil, and only 54 per cent the orange juice.10

  Lord Woolton said that he soon learned that the way to get the public’s co-operation was not by preaching at them, but by telling them which foods were valuable, and providing them with recipes to use those foods successfully. He fully understood the importance of publicity and education, but he also knew that it had to be done in a way that would stick in the minds of a harassed, distracted population.

  He thought it useful to harness humour to get a serious idea across and enlisted the help of a couple of jolly cartoon characters, Potato Pete and Dr Carrot, to be used in ‘Food Flashes’ and other material published in newspapers or shown in cinemas. Potato Pete was usually portrayed with a stalk of wheat sticking out of his mouth, and wearing clothes and a hat. One cartoon of him bore the legend: ‘Good taste demands I keep my jacket on’. Dr Carrot was carrot-shaped, bright orange, bespectacled, and carried a top hat and a case emblazoned with the words ‘VIT A’. Lord Woolton even sent a telegram to Walt Disney in Hollywood asking him to create cartoon carrot characters, which Disney did by return: Carroty George, Pop Carrot and Clara Carrot.11