Both potatoes and carrots could be grown in great quantities on British farms and in market gardens; indeed from time to time there were substantial gluts of them, which prompted frenetic publicity campaigns intended to cut the surplus. Outrageously, the public was also told that eating a lot of carrots was the reason why RAF personnel such as Group Captain John ‘Cats Eyes’ Cunningham were so successful as night fighter pilots; in this way the government hoped to hide from the Germans the fact that a sophisticated airborne radar system had already been developed. Lord Woolton was fond of saying that ‘A carrot a day keeps the blackout at bay.’
These two vegetables were promoted vigorously quite as much for their versatility as their food value. Cooked, mashed, dried potatoes could be used in recipes instead of flour12, while carrots were an adequate substitute for sugar in a number of sweet dishes and even carrot jam. Whether children ever ate carrots on sticks to make up for the lack of ice lollies, except when posing for publicity photographs, is a moot point.
The Ministry of Food’s propaganda efforts concentrated partly on the output of a five-minute wireless programme, The Kitchen Front,13 which was broadcast at 8.15 a.m. six times a week from June 1940 until the end of the war. This often light-hearted programme was aimed principally at housewives, and was transmitted at a suitable time before they went out to shop. It consisted of a mixture of seasonal recipes, nutritional facts and rationing information, delivered by broadcasters like Freddie Grisewood and S. P. B. Mais14; cookery writers such as Marguerite Patten and Ambrose Heath; Mavis Constanduros, who played a charwoman, ‘Mrs Buggins’, and ‘Gert’ and ‘Daisy’, a comic double act by two sisters, Elsie and Doris Waters.15 Mrs Buggins' humour relied partly on that old comedy standby the malapropism, as in: ‘Well, if you don’t care about the nice recipes I bring you, I might as well go to Russia and fish for surgeons in the vodka!’16
The programmes were popular, attracting 15 per cent of the available audience, with an average of five million listeners. This number always went up on the one day in the week when the Radio Doctor – Charles Hill – was on the air. He would describe special diets for invalids, or talk about the harm that too much sugar could do; one Boxing Day he discussed indigestion.17 Fifty-five per cent of housewives listened to The Kitchen Front, and unlike many other worthy radio programmes, this one attracted working-class women. Grisewood was particularly popular when he developed the persona of amiable incompetence as ‘A Man in the Kitchen’, presumably because he reminded so many housewives of their husbands.
Since meat was so strictly rationed, The Kitchen Front not unnaturally emphasised the value of vegetable dishes. The most prominently plugged of these was ‘Woolton Pie’, created by the chef at the Savoy Hotel in the spring of 1941. This dish consisted of diced root vegetables, such as swedes and carrots, together with spring onions and a small amount of oatmeal and vegetable extract, put together with potato as a pie crust, and baked in the oven. A friend of Lord Woolton referred to it as ‘steak and kidney pie without the steak and kidney’.18
The ingenuity of both professional and amateur cooks was impressive; in addition to Woolton Pie, they invented a number of ‘mock’ recipes, such as ‘mock goose’, which used lentils, ‘mock oyster soup’ – with fish trimmings and Jerusalem artichokes – ‘mock venison’, which used cold mutton, and ‘mock apricot flan’, which mixed carrots and almond essence to approximate to the flavour of apricot. ‘Mock cream’ was made with cornflour, milk and margarine.
The Kitchen Front strongly encouraged the preserving of fruit and vegetables. Housewives were taught how to bottle fruit without sugar, dry apple rings, salt runner beans for winter and make pickles, chutneys and even rose-hip syrup. Wasting any kind of food was portrayed, at least subliminally, as unpatriotic. A popular poem of the time ran:
Those who have the will to win,
Cook potatoes in their skin,
Knowing that the sight of peelings,
Deeply hurts Lord Woolton’s feelings.
The programme lasted for more than a thousand editions, and its audience size increased rather than diminished as the war went on. The Ministry of Food retained a substantial influence on the programme’s contents. All the recipes were tested in the kitchens at the Ministry offices in Portman Square. There was a running battle between the Ministry of Food and the BBC over who should have most control, the Ministry frequently overstepping the bounds that the BBC Talks Department thought appropriate, especially over the matter of the drafting of speakers’ scripts.19 That said, when the Ministry of Food withdrew in January 1945 and left the programme to the BBC, the Director of Talks had to admit that the Ministry scriptwriters had been masters of the skill of getting over enough information in five minutes. Despite the programme’s popularity, there may not be much concrete evidence that The Kitchen Front itself substantially changed the way the nation ate; rationing self-evidently had already done that. In the opinion of Siân Nicholas, ‘the programme’s capacity to influence behaviour was immaterial to its success; its simple willingness to be helpful was probably its greatest asset to morale’.20
Reinforcing what was said on the wireless, food advice centres in every town provided information to citizens on both rationing and cooking. Food facts were published in newspapers every week and longer articles could be found in women’s magazines and the weekly The Listener. Leaflets were printed on subjects such as ‘How to Eat Wisely in Wartime’, with phrases like ‘The greener the leaf, the greater the food value’, or the less than tempting ‘Salads can be the principal part of a meal’.
Cinemas21 also played their part, screening information films and ‘Food Flashes’, devised by the Ministry of Food. The Food Flash22 was fifteen seconds long and made a single, unequivocal point. For example, one Food Flash consisted of a shot of a civilian tucking into potatoes with apparent relish, with a snappy voiceover: ‘There’s plenty of potatoes around at the moment. And at pre-war prices too.’ (The camera panned to a pile of potatoes at a greengrocer’s, with the legend ‘9d for 7 lb’.) ‘That’s the boy. Have a second helping. Here’s spud in your eye.’
These Food Flashes were meant to work as a ‘carrot’, but Lord Woolton did not shrink from also carrying a big stick. He issued statutory orders dealing with waste, and those found to be wastrels were prosecuted with severity. The prohibition against putting usable food waste in rubbish bins was a great impetus to householders to put it in pig swill bins instead (see Chapter Eleven). ‘We had created a moral atmosphere,’ Woolton wrote after the war, ‘but we had also shown people how they could use their food to the best advantage, and even how they could use waste food by arranging for it to be collected and subsequently made into food for pigs and poultry.’23 He also made sure that there were stringent penalties for anyone caught selling food on the black market.
Lord Woolton did not get everything right. In particular, he – and Winston Churchill – underestimated the effect that their requests to the American government would have on the US economy. Lend-Lease had been introduced in 1941, the first goods arriving at the end of May. This was the way America ‘loaned’ military materiel, food and other supplies to Britain, and other allies, at a time when Britain had few dollars to spend. The loan was to be paid back after the war. Lend-Lease introduced British children to the delights of Spam and powdered egg but the fifteen million tons of food imports annually asked for put a strain on farmers, and caused bad feeling between food officials in the United States and their counterparts in Britain.
Wartime surveys on the subject of the impact of government food information made quite depressing reading, for both the officials of the Ministry of Food and the BBC. Three years into the war, one investigation revealed that most of the respondents did not understand which were the most important foods for health. The great majority of housewives served green vegetables ‘regularly’, but that was defined as at least once a fortnight in season.24 It seems that, despite all the exhortation, encouragement and information,
a great many cooks fell short of the ideal – or so the Ministry thought. Woolton’s Parliamentary Secretary, Mr William Mabane, announced at the launch of the 1943 Dig for Victory campaign: ‘Fundamentally men are better cooks than women, but this is no reason why women should cook as badly as they do. Many people in this country have never really tasted vegetables. All they know is the sodden pap produced by over-boiling unprotesting vegetables in a bath of water.’25 He urged people to study the Ministry of Food recipes to improve their cooking, although he may not have chosen the best words to achieve that. Robert Hudson, the Minister of Agriculture, then piled in by saying that, while spending a weekend in a pub in Lincolnshire, he had had to send back his plate heaped with vegetables as they were too badly cooked to be edible.
Women also criticised other women. As Constance Spry put it in Come into the Garden, Cook, published in 1942:
Vegetables can be food for the gods, though you may think this an over-statement if you have just had a spell of pot-luck in provincial hotels up and down the country, or if, perversely, you throw your mind back to train dining-cars or to the smell that hit you as you passed the open door of a seaside boarding house at lunch time one summer’s day. I cannot think how even experienced cooks find it possible to turn nice material into such nasty food.26
Nevertheless, despite the less than total co-operation of the population, and their inability always to learn the lessons so assiduously taught, the Ministry of Food’s achievements were substantial. It is generally agreed that the population was healthier during the war than before it. In particular, the health of the poor benefited from both the equitable nature of rationing and the restraint provided by price controls.
On 12 August 1942, Clara Milburn wrote in her diary:
An American professor visiting England is amazed at the health of the people after three years of war, and says the children are splendid. The health of the nation is better than before the war, says our Ministry of Health. There is no malnutrition. We shall probably have to tighten our belts a bit more this winter, but it is wonderful what has been done in the way of food-growing.27
That was the achievement of Robert Hudson and Lord Woolton.
As we have seen, Lord Woolton certainly understood the value of food and food production for boosting civilian morale, and in the members of the Women’s Institute he found willing allies, whose good-heartedness and practical common sense could generally be relied upon. In 1940, he granted the National Federation money28 to organise a network of fruit preservation centres in villages; these would make surplus fruit and vegetables into jam or chutney, as another means of boosting home food production. There had been such a scheme in the First World War, but this time it was on an altogether bigger scale. The result of this activity was to identify Women’s Institutes for ever after as champion jam-makers,29 something they have found it difficult to leave behind in more peaceful times.
In the late summer of 1940, there was a substantial glut of plums in country gardens, which threatened to go to waste since plums are notoriously liable to spoil in transit, because of the juiciness of their flesh and the thinness of their skins. This overproduction plainly had to be dealt with locally so, in a matter of weeks, 2,600 fruit preservation centres were set up in village halls and other public buildings. The WI members dealt with only that fruit that could not be transported to a jam factory or used in the kitchen; they received a fixed price for their collected fruit but were not paid anything to make it into jam.
According to the historian of the WI, Cicely McCall:
Here was the longed-for piece of war service . . . Jam. It seemed the perfect solution. Jam-making was constructive and non-militant . . . It accorded with the best Quaker traditions of feeding blockaded nations. For those dietetically minded, jam contained all the most highly prized vitamins . . . And for the belligerent, what could be more satisfying than fiercely stirring cauldrons of boiling jam and feeling that every pound took us one step further towards defeating Hitler.30
A professional gardener and WI inspector, Miss Viola Williams, recalled:
A lot of what I would call the non-Ladies of the Manor came into their own with the jam centres, because they were the ones who knew how to make jam. You would start at the crack of dawn, probably on primus stoves, and go on all day with great cauldrons of jam, and then bottle it. It was like a small factory.
I was inspecting. I had to check on cleanliness, on packaging, on labelling, and although we weren’t in a position to (because we didn’t have saccharimeters), we were supposed to check on sugar content, too. A ‘selling jam’ has to have 60% sugar in it . . . and this is one of the things we had to check out. You can work it out by quantities: if you knew how much sugar was available to make into a jam, then you could work out – almost to an ounce – how much jam should have been produced with a 60% sugar content. The reason for checking was that we were given the sugar on trust. There was utter and complete honesty, but it was a temptation to siphon away the sugar and use it for yourself during those days of high rationing. I think people did used to go home with a saucer full of scum, which is almost as good as jam but which you couldn’t possibly have put into the bottles. But I would say that there was almost 100% honesty in those jam centres.31
In 1940, 1,631 tons of fruit and vegetables were preserved or canned32 in the fruit preservation centres, calling forth a letter of congratulation from Lord Woolton himself to Lady Denman on 31 December 1940:
I have been greatly impressed both by the quantity of preserves made and by the enthusiasm and determination with which the members of these centres . . . undertook the formidable task of saving the exceptionally heavy plum crop . . . This was work of national importance, demanding administrative ability of a high order at the Headquarters of your organization, and local initiative and co-operation which are a fine example of democratic action at its best . . .33
It is perhaps hard for us now to appreciate just how important jam was to the morale of a nation with a notable sweet tooth – a nation that had eaten prodigious quantities of cakes and biscuits before the war – at a time when all sugar products were severely rationed, and when there was much less emphasis than now on the harm sugar can do to teeth.
The Ministry of Food left the administration of the scheme to the NFWI headquarters, in particular to Miss Edith Walker, the Agricultural Secretary. She recalled years later that:
People [by which she meant country housewives] felt that in the larger War effort they were of no use to anybody and were not important. The number of WIs decreased. It was in this situation that the Preservation Scheme was particularly important in boosting morale in the countryside. The foundations of this had been laid from the earliest days, and WI [market] stalls and Village Shows provided a nucleus for it. Most County Federations had always had an Agricultural Sub-Committee . . . The Scheme undoubtedly helped to keep the WIs going during the War. One of the advantages they had was a Literature Department, which could provide labels, leaflets and recipe books. The Scheme also gave a great boost to the Markets.34
One useful facet of the Women’s Institute movement was that it had worldwide connections, so when the National Federation executive approached the Americans for help, through the agency of the Associated Country Women of the World, the result was a delivery of 500 Dixie canning machines and a complete fruit preservation unit. These made it possible for some WI teams to go from village to village, canning the produce that had been collected locally, in village halls, farm kitchens or private houses. In east Kent, canning machines were hired out for three shillings a day. The resulting produce was taken to wholesale depots, sold to local shops or bought by the women who made it.
Surely the most heroic Women’s Institute was the one in Hawkinge, a Kent coastal village which was badly hit by bombs, since it was close to an RAF station. So many people were evacuated that the Women’s Institute was reduced from 108 to five members, yet they still managed to produce 784 lb of jam in September 1940
and 14 cwt in 1941. A hundredweight (cwt) is 112 lb, which makes that 1,568 lb. Mention should also be made of the WI in Rosedale, on the North York Moors, whose members made over 3½ tons of jam during the war in the village reading room, which had no water supply, electricity or gas. The water had to be brought in buckets from a quarter of a mile away.
In March 1941, Blisworth WI in Northamptonshire passed a resolution that it would form a centre for fruit preservation ‘in response to an appeal by His Majesty’s Government’, and in June, £6 was loaned from WI funds to help set it up, as well as £5 from Mrs Clinch, who was Madam President of the Blisworth WI all through the war.35 In that year, 333 lb of jam were made and sold. The fruit preservation centre was opened again in the village the following year, but as no surplus fruit had been handed in, it did not operate. Perhaps a late frost did for the blossom?
Marguerite Patten, the cookery writer, who was an adviser to the Ministry of Food, recalled being responsible for a food advice centre in Ipswich and overseeing jam-making sessions in fruit preservation centres.
The sessions were not entirely peaceful, for most ladies were experienced housewives, with their own very definite ideas on how jams should be made; some wanted to use their own recipes and addressed me firmly. ‘Young woman, I was making jam before you were born’ – quite right – but my job was to ensure that every completed pot of jam contained 60% sugar and was carefully sealed to ensure it really would keep well under all conditions, so I had to stand firm.36
Four and half thousand fruit preservation centres were open in 1941, which meant that three-quarters of the 5,700 WIs had volunteered for the scheme. Housewives were encouraged to take their fruit to these centres, as that year there wasn’t any sugar available for home preserving. There were mutterings from some countrywomen that they were not allowed to buy the jam that they had made that year at wholesale prices, as jam rationing had been introduced; moreover, the price they received for any fruit they collected was not generous. As a result, some were not inclined to help out in the preservation centres.
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 29