Jambusters (14 page)

Never had the gulf between town and country life been laid so bare. Although the survey does admit that some young women were simply bewildered by the country and longed to get home to their husbands and the familiarity of their city lives. ‘Unlike the children they could not quickly adapt themselves and it was a surprise to nobody that within a week or two of the evacuation a large proportion of them had left the villages.’
²⁸

One WI wrote a long piece that was quoted in full in the report:

I know of four cases . . . where the mothers seemed to have no idea of how to train a baby in good habits. Something will have to be done to give girls before leaving school, practical knowledge of how to keep a baby dry, and that it is far less trouble in the end than washing napkins and blankets as well as essential for the child – not just telling them, but doing it themselves in a crèche. I don’t want to underrate what has already been done in this matter, but the problem of child training has been brought home to us by this evacuation, and we have seen the need for ourselves, and it is up to us to see that the next generation are given a better start.
²⁹

The focus of their ire was against the education system that allowed situations to arise where young mothers had no help in learning how to run a home and family. This went right to the core of what Mrs Hoodless in Canada had been anxious to address when she first set up the WI at Stoney Creek forty years earlier, namely recognition of the importance of domestic science. A final remark on the mothers concluded: ‘The best evacuee of all was an elderly woman who had not had the benefit of a modern and expensive L.C.C. [London County Council] education. After this experience I think England ought to be
proud of her country women for their cleanliness, good house-wifery and decent standards.’
³⁰

Today it is difficult to read criticisms of evacuee mothers and not feel that the authors were being harsh on them given the fact they had been uprooted from their homes, often unwillingly, and sent to the countryside to live with households who did not want them and with whom they had nothing in common. However, given the response to the report and the fact that these criticisms were taken up by Margaret Bondfield in her full report published eighteen months later in October 1941, it is clear that expressing what might seem to us judgemental views and opinions was acceptable at the time.

By early 1940 evacuation was less of a theme for village institutes. The vast majority of mothers and children, over a million, had returned to the cities. The only group that remained in force in the countryside were the unaccompanied schoolchildren. The government continued to lobby parents who wanted to bring their children back to the cities and urged them to leave them in the countryside, where they would be safe. An appeal went out from Miss Farrer in late 1940 for homes to accommodate bombed-out refugees from the cities. ‘In spite of all the hospitality already offered, more billets are still needed; and there is no greater service we can do than to offer room in our houses when we have it.’
³¹
For the majority of village women, however, the great influx of September 1939 was not repeated and other waves of evacuation had a less dislocating effect on life in the countryside, although individual stories both good and bad continued to appear in the press.

Rationing had been introduced early in 1940 and the focus for the WI was now on food production. In February Mrs Milburn was tussling with what this would mean for her WI: ‘We went to Coventry this morning and I spent 20 minutes in the Food
Controller’s Office getting a permit for butter and sugar for the Women’s Institute teas.’ The Phoney War was coming to an end and life would soon change for everyone in Britain. In June she was in contemplative mood: ‘How curious this life is. A sort of deep stillness comes over everything from time to time. There is not much traffic on the roads during the week and the village seems empty in the evenings. One misses the young life everywhere, particularly Alan coming in in the early evening.’

4

COUPON CULTURE

Now is the time to show what we are worth and it is up to us to try and smile through these worrying times. We must not sit down and think, but get going and do something to prove our worth as women!

Mrs Diggle, President, Barnston WI, 1940

Mrs Clara Milburn had begun her diary in February 1940. The first few pages were a summary of the previous five months giving a perspective of the way life returned to normal after the first three weeks of paralysis in September. ‘By Christmas the expected air raids had not occurred. Threats from Hitler about a “secret weapon” put the wind up a few people and the word “jitters” came into vogue. But the great bulk of the people refused to be “jittery” and got to work: air raid precaution exercises took definite shape, knitting got well under way, Red Cross sewing meetings flourished, plots of new land were turned over and people prepared for the coming year.’

On Friday 5 January she heard her son Alan’s voice on the phone for the last time in what would turn out to be five years
and four months. That morning she and her husband invited two friends round for a glass of sherry ‘because the blackout makes afternoons difficult. We all drank “to Alan” . . . and then “Oh my goodness! Cough! Splutter! Good heavens! We’re drinking neat whisky!” And so we were – it was the wrong decanter!’

In January the snow fell thickly and for weeks there was no traffic in Balsall Common near Coventry. In early February she wrote: ‘Along the road I hear a pleasing sound – the clip-clop of horses’ feet. After the dull quiet of snowstricken days it is good to feel that traffic is rapidly becoming normal again.’ That day the butcher’s boy delivered a small joint: ‘Such
little
joints, too, these days, conforming to the imposed rationing in a few weeks’ time. It is a good thing to get down to hard facts, though, and make everyone come under the same rule and help to win the war.’

After the evacuation it was the introduction of rationing that made the largest difference to women’s lives. Control of food had been foreseen by the WI at the beginning of the war and many column inches had been devoted to increasing food production. It had also, of course, been on the government’s mind and 50 million ration books were printed by the summer of 1939 in preparation. The Subcommittee on Food Supplies in Time of War, appointed in 1936, had heeded the advice given by Sir William Beveridge, who was the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Food during the First World War. He urged them ‘to think out in advance
and as a whole
, the civilian side of the next war is as important as to design measures of military attack and defence’.
¹

Rationing began on 8 January 1940 and became increasingly severe as the war progressed. Although only a limited range of foodstuffs, clothing and petrol were actually rationed, emergency legislation meant that all consumer goods were subject to comprehensive regulation. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, in her book
Austerity in Britain,
wrote:

As a result of rationing and controls, consumption of food, clothing, household goods, and private motoring were reduced dramatically as economic resources were channelled into the war effort . . . During the Second World War, Britain was transformed from an essentially free market economy into an economy distinguished by centralised control and economic planning. The reduction of civilian consumption played a critical part in this conversion of the economy to the war effort by facilitating the reallocation of resources necessary for mobilization in a total war.
²

The rationing system developed by Britain was intended by the government to be conspicuously egalitarian. In
The Taste of War
historian Lizzie Collingham described the thinking behind the government’s scheme: ‘The British food rationing system was designed to avoid deepening social rifts, and instead to foster social consensus . . . By allocating everyone the same amount of food it emphasized its purpose as the equitable distribution of food and scarce goods across the entire population. This distribution of food resources, which apparently privileged no section of civilian society, is one of the characteristics of government wartime policy which earned it the title of “war socialism”.’
³
All adults, regardless of occupation, had the same rations, with variations only for nursing mothers and those with babies, and children. This applied also to men and women in the forces living and working in Britain. This was at odds with systems in other countries that introduced a rationing hierarchy, and surprisingly the exact opposite of Russia, which allowed a free market to develop. Churchill had always been concerned about rationing. Even before he became prime minister he expressed his reluctance to limit people’s food and when it became clear that workers in heavy industry needed additional
food and ‘communal feeding centres’ were introduced, he baulked at the term which to him smacked of socialism. He suggested they were called ‘British restaurants’, not least because it sounded more patriotic.

At the outbreak of war, Germany had introduced rationing and the British government wanted to know whether this was having an effect on the German people. To that end a study was made in Cambridge on six men and women who were subjected to a very limited but carefully calculated diet. The scientists concluded that provided the diet was sufficiently bulky and that the staple, bread, comprised at least 92 per cent extracted flour, that is to say nearly wholemeal, then the physical and mental work which those living on rations could achieve proved that ‘the present German ration, provided it is in fact reaching the individual, is fully adequate for the vital needs of her population’.
⁴
The key fact they had established was the need for carbohydrates, which would be provided in potatoes and cereals.

Anyone who lived through the war and remembers rationing will recall how potatoes became an ever-greater staple in the diet. ‘Potatoes were used at every meal as far as I can remember. And not just as a side dish – boiled, baked, mashed or fried. They were used in baking, in bread making, in filling out pies,’ my mother recalled. East Hendred WI had a potato demonstration on 17 March 1942. The minute book reads: ‘Miss Cummings spoke of many ways of cooking potatoes & demonstrated them steamed in muslin tied on lid of saucepan; potato pastry on vegetable pie; potato scones; potatoes cooked and stuffed. She was rather hurried owing to Warship Whist Drive taking place immediately after.’
⁵

In 1943 Lord Woolton, the Minister for Food, appealed directly to the WI asking them for help and ideas about how to make potato dishes more popular. Every county responded by
suggesting that institutes hold a competition for recipes. The winning recipe would be put forward to a county competition and the winner of that sent to London, where recipes from all fifty-eight counties were gathered together into a potato cookbook. East Hendred rose to the occasion with a further cooking demonstration. This time there was vegetable flan with potato pastry and cheese sauce on offer. Then they had a potato omelette followed by potato Yorkshire pudding. They held a competition and the winning recipe, the vegetable flan with potato pastry, was sent to the Berkshire Federation for further judging. The overall winner was Mrs Biggs from Essex, whose recipe for potato suet was read out on the radio.

People recall the monotony of the wartime diet and the pressure on cooks to try to liven up dishes. WI recipe books and leaflets encouraged the use of spices but also offered practical advice such as cutting off bacon rinds to be used for flavouring soup or using Lea & Perrins to spice up a pasty. Record books constantly refer to wartime cookery demonstrations, tips on how to make rationed food stretch and above all on how to make dreary food taste better.

As Lizzie Collingham explained in her survey of the economics of food in wartime, the change in the quantity of fat in the diet had a very great impact on taste: ‘The British were used to a pre-war nutritional balance where fat made up 38 per cent of calorie intake. Although this dropped by only a small percentage during the war, combined with a shift from meat to wholemeal bread and potatoes as the basis of the diet, the less fatty meals became monotonous and tasted insipid.’
⁶
Mrs Ward in Bradfield reported on a fascinating talk by one of their members, Mrs Maddock, who was a vegetarian. ‘She told us how she fed a family of five children without any meat, suet etc and brought some appetising looking examples of lentil cutlets.’ At that same
meeting members were told that they need not worry about the shortage of onions for flavouring as there were ample quantities of wild chives growing in the hedgerows.

Before the war broke out, Britain imported some 20 million tons of food annually. Over half its meat, nearly three quarters of its cheese and sugar, nearly 80 per cent of fruit and 70 per cent of cereals and fats came from overseas. The outbreak of war saw an immediate drop off in food supplies coming into the UK. A newspaper reported on 4 October 1939 that: ‘Although Danish food exports to England stopped, because of German interference with shipping, I understand that Denmark believes that she can maintain in future an even flow of bacon and dairy produce. She is anxious to do so for economic and other reasons.’ Shipments of bacon, eggs and butter from Holland were affected and the UK missed a shipment of 12 million eggs the week before the article was published. When formal rationing began, the first things to be put on the cards were bacon, butter and sugar. This was followed by meat in March 1940, tea, margarine and cooking fats in July of that year and preserves and cheese were added in 1941. Bread was never rationed during the war, though it was in 1946. Elsie Bainbridge from Cumbria recalled how her parents used to complain that bread was no longer white: ‘Flour had been refined before the war but now it was grey and although I think we understood it was better for us it just looked so unappetising.’