How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (22 page)

After some scraping, a flaring match broke through the blackout while this fearless guard scrutinized our armbands. We could then see he was a long-faced youth with two prominent teeth.
‘Yeah, that’s right, you got armbands on,’ he conceded. ‘Bit late, ain’t you?’

‘We’ll be a bloody sight later before you’ve done,’ complained Arthur.

What a pantomime!

Harold Richardson, Derby

I
n 1944, Archibald Brown of Tower Hill, Bruton, in Somerset, was fined £4 plus £6 costs for wasting butter, margarine, cheese, lard,
bread, bacon, pickles and preserved plums. His crime? He threw them at his wife. The solicitor representing the Ministry of Food told the court at Wincanton: ‘If there is any acrimonious
debate in the home or any breach of connubial bliss, rations must not be used as weapons of war.’

Archibald Brown obviously didn’t keep calm and carry on. And neither did John Jackson, a miner from Low Valley, near Barnsley, who was sent to prison for one month after throwing eggs and
bacon on the fire and sugar and tea on the floor after his wife refused to lend him five shillings (25p). The chairman of the magistrates said: ‘Wasting food in wartime will not be
tolerated.’

Each case summed up one of the great issues of the Second World War: the shortage of food, the rationing of which gave rise to plenty of examples of how the people of Britain set about to
‘make do and mend’. There must have been thousands of Second World War wedding cakes that comprised no more than an iced cardboard shell.

Of course, food wasn’t the only commodity to be rationed. From September 1939, petrol was available only for business or essential purposes. Furniture became utilitarian. Clothing too:
pleats and turn-ups disappeared from trousers, and garments were mostly plain. Women painted gravy browning on bare legs as a replacement for silk stockings, then recruited the services of a small
child to draw a ‘seam’ using an eyebrow pencil. Eventually, when eyebrow pencils themselves were in short supply, a spent match had to suffice.

But it was food shortages that dominated the nation’s thoughts. And Archibald Brown and John Jackson weren’t the only Britons to be fined for wasting it. In January 1943, for
instance, a Hertfordshire woman was fined £10 with £2 costs for ‘permitting bread to be wasted’. The court in Barnet heard that her servant – who was also fined five
shillings (25p) – was twice seen throwing bread to birds in her employer’s garden. ‘Miss XYZ’, as she was identified, admitted that she put bread out every day. ‘I
cannot see the birds starve,’ she told the court.

Indeed, there were many unusual legal battles surrounding wartime food regulations. A man appeared at Tavistock Petty Sessions charged with selling eggs to unregistered customers. It was alleged
that he kept twenty-five hens and four cocks when the law stated that only twenty-five head of poultry was allowed. The Ministry of Food claimed that this counted as ‘poultry’ according
to the Oxford English Dictionary, but magistrates threw out the case, declaring that only laying hens counted.

Food rationing began in January 1940, with bacon, ham, butter and sugar the first to be restricted. It wasn’t long before meat, tea, cooking fat and cheese were also rationed, and by 1942
almost everything else was too. Imagine: a grown adult was allowed only one fresh egg per week. Unless they were pregnant, of course, then they could have two.

The Ministry of Food, under Lord Woolton, was responsible for overseeing rationing. Every man, woman and child was given a ration book with coupons that had to be produced before rationed goods
could be purchased. Housewives had to register with particular retailers, which lessened the need to queue (as people did in the First World War when rationing wasn’t introduced until 1918)
but as shortages increased, so long queues for unrationed goods became commonplace. Word would spread: ‘Mr Brown has had a delivery of onions.’ And housewives would rush to his shop.
Sometimes, though, they joined queues without actually knowing what reward would be at the end of it. There are few reports of disturbances. When it came to food rationing, people seemed to have
kept very calm.

They also carried on. The Ministry of Food’s ‘Dig For Victory’ campaign encouraged self-sufficiency, and the number of allotments rose from 815,000 to 1.4
million. The BBC’s
Radio Allotment
grew twenty-three kinds of vegetable, with weekly wireless reports on progress. Pigs, chickens and rabbits were reared domestically for meat;
vegetables were grown anywhere that could be cultivated. By 1940, as we have seen, wasting food was a criminal offence, whether you were feeding bread to the birds or aiming jars of pickles at your
wife.

Meanwhile, the Second World War lifted the status of the humble carrot to an almost mystical level. It became the food that Britons believed could win the war. Curried carrot, carrot jam, carrot
pudding, and a homemade drink called ‘Carrolade’ – they were new culinary delights to lift the spirit of a war-weary nation.

Most of all, though, it was the carrot that apparently won the air battle against the Luftwaffe. Therefore, so far as civilians were concerned, it was the veg that could help you ‘see in
the dark’, which was quite useful in blacked-out Britain.

It started when the government responded to an oversupply of carrots by hinting that the RAF’s exceptional success in night-flying operations was due to pilots being fed
high-carotene-content carrots. Even Walt Disney lent a hand, creating a carrot family that included Carroty George, Clara Carrot, and Dr Carrot, for British newspapers to promote the eating of
carrots.

The propaganda worked. The nation flocked to buy or grow carrots. Whether the Nazis also bought the notion, or whether they rightly assumed that the RAF’s success was due
more to the increased sophistication of radar, is not clear. It didn’t matter. The problem of too many carrots was being solved.

Besides its
Radio Allotment
, the BBC also broadcast a daily five-minute programme,
The Kitchen Front
, that advised on new food sources and creative recipes – not all of
them sounded too appealing.

And then there was the ‘Black Market’ which actually prospered further when peace was declared because, in the early post-war years, food rationing became more severe. My mother had
already made a huge compromise with her morals. Despite being scrupulously honest almost to the point of eccentricity, after war was declared, the Black Market was one area where she soon became
happy to dabble on the wrong side of the law. Down our street lived a busy little woman who I knew only as Mrs Potter. She could often be seen scurrying about the neighbourhood after dark, lugging
a huge sack on her back. One winter’s evening, I answered the door to her furtive knock, to be told in an anxious whisper: ‘Go and see if your mother wants any tea.’ Naturally my
mother did want some tea – or sugar, or butter, or anything else that was on ration – and money and consumables changed hands on the darkened front step. The goods had been stolen, of
course, but even otherwise law-abiding housewives desperately wanted to put a little extra on their families’ tables. Keeping calm and carrying on, you see.

Actually, it was all too easy to break the law. A soldier posted to the Isle of Man took the advice of Lord Woolton and saved up his sugar ration for jam-making. When he was posted back to the
mainland, he found that he could not take the sugar with him. In fact a law blocked his every alternative. He could not take it with him because the Ministry of Food refused him a permit. He could
not sell it because he had no licence to trade in sugar. He could not destroy it because that was against food regulations. He could not give it away because it was illegal to allow another person
to obtain sugar from his ration coupons. A Manx government official stated: ‘We cannot allow all and sundry to take sugar away from the Isle of Man.’ What eventually happened to the
soldier’s sugar hoard is not recorded.

People were desperate for certain items and a lot of bartering went on. One newspaper advertisement read: ‘Swap peach bedlinen for nylon stockings or honey Victorian cheese dish for 1
dozen new handkerchiefs.’ Another said: ‘Set of frying pans for suit for 1 public schoolboy.’

Some food items became a national joke. In December 1944, solicitors acting for the American company that marketed Spam, the canned pre-cooked meat product first introduced in 1937, complained
that a joke by Sonnie Hale in the pantomime
Aladdin
at Manchester Hippodrome, referring to the smell of burning Spam, implied that Spam was not a suitable food. The Americans obviously
thought jokes about Spam had gone too far.

Then there were pets to think about. At a Home Guard post near the Admiralty, the men adopted a large black cat. It was put ‘on the strength’ and drew a daily allowance of half a
pint of milk. Then it was discovered that the cat was already drawing rations from the Royal Navy. The matter was brought to the attention of the Admiralty, and the cat was withdrawn from Home
Guard rations

Of course, if food was in short supply, cosmetics most certainly were. Yet women were still encouraged to maintain a groomed look, even though this took a fair degree of ingenuity. In 1940, a
book entitled
Technique For Beauty
told women: ‘The stress and strain of war can easily make you lose interest in your personal appearance. But it is up to you to take care of
yourself for the sake of other people.’ There were also practical considerations. For instance, Pond’s Cold Cream was promoted as a way to prevent women working outdoors from developing
ruddy complexions and chapped lips.

There was also something called ‘day lotion’ produced by Cyclax, one of the oldest cosmetic companies in Britain. The lotion came in wartime shade choices with bewildering names such
as Peach, Light Rachel, Rachel, Deep Rachel, Dark Rachel, Sunburn No 1 and Sunburn No 2. Cyclax also produced a burns cream and a camouflage cream, and the company also suffered badly in the Blitz
when its factory on Tottenham Court Road was destroyed by enemy action. Surely Hermann Goering wasn’t targeting the cosmetics industry in a bid to ruin British morale?