Ahoy! Welcome on board - great timing because I've just set the tea to brew and tea is
a really good place to start for this week's Adventure in History which is all
about food shortages and a scheme called rationing which ran in the Second World War.
My name is Ngaire and I work at the
Imperial War Museum where usually I'd be welcoming you through the doors to talk
about how real people's lives have been affected by war and conflict.
But currently the museums doors are closed - you're at home, I'm at home. My home is a
boat but imagine that we were inside the museum. There's a wooden boat there about
the same age as my one and if we were stood there and we look just around the
corner deeper into the Second World War gallery we would see a model of a ship.
Of course we couldn't fit the whole ship inside the museum - it's a really good
detailed model of a cargo ship. Underneath that ships model is a torpedo -
a real torpedo which would have been deadly to ships in the Second World War.
My tea that I'm brewing has come from India
and that would travel on ships during the Second World War
and these ships were very vulnerable to attack by enemy submarines who would
fire torpedoes at them. With more ships sinking and less food getting into
Britain it meant that we had to still ensure that people got a fair share and
that's where rationing came in. So by the time tea was rationed this two ounces
would have to last a person for the whole week. Now accompanying every good
cup of tea is a biscuit. I wonder what your favourite biscuit is.
Unbelievably in Britain before the Second World War 350 different varieties of biscuits were
available. By 1939 and 1940 however when you went to
the shops it was harder to find your favourite because the varieties of
biscuits have been reduced to just 20. Why? Well making biscuits was not seen as
a war winner and so many of those biscuit factories were converted to
producing other things that were going to win the war, so there was just less
choice. So with food shortages and fewer varieties of foods available the
government still had to make sure that everyone was well fed and also that
there was a fair share of what was available - and that's where rationing
comes in. On Monday the 8th of January 1940 everyone was issued and went
shopping with their ration book - even children had one and inside were your
coupons that told you how much of each item you were allowed to buy. Some of the
first things to be rationed were sugar bacon and other types of meat and milk.
Dairy products, butter was to go on to ration as well. So when you've gone and
bought your food with your ration book, how did you know how much you could use
each week? Well on the boat I have this incredible piece of advice, it's 80 years
old and it was produced by the food Commissioner for the West of Scotland as
some helpful advice on how to make rations go further. So for butter it
suggests that whoever is cooking the family meals for one day would need 6
balls of butter roughly the size of a child's marble. Talking of children, I'm
very lucky that many of my friends were once children during the Second World
War and they have told me lots of their memories over the years which I would
really like to share with you. One of them is Graham. Graham is 90 years young
and comes to the museum every single week and Graham remembers that food
shortages were a big problem in the Second World War but mostly for
his mum who was trying to make sure that Graham was fed and his dad. He says she
did wonders. The reason that dad was still living at home was because he was
a key worker - he drove the trams in the city of Birmingham where they lived.
Whenever there was a shortage of meat or fish or eggs, Graham remembers that mum
would top up their dinner plate with plenty of vegetables and apparently, she
knew at least a dozen different ways of preparing potatoes!
Why vegetables? Well they were never rationed and lots of vegetables grow in
this country and going back to our advice from the food Commissioner of the
West of Scotland, he says that vegetables can be used
extensively. I wonder if you grow any vegetables at home in your garden or on
your windowsill because not everyone has a garden and that was true in the Second
World War as well. John Allpress lived in southeast London with his family and
their house only had quite a small yard at the back. It was big enough for them
to have built an Anderson shelter, a bomb shelter, and to make it extra safe you
could pack soil on top over the curved roof of the shelter and in that soil you
could grow vegetables. Carrots, cabbages perhaps some potatoes, some beetroot... and this
encouragement to grow your own was all part of a campaign called Dig for
Victory which was run by the Ministry of Agriculture and this is another 80 year
old chart and inside this one, is a very colorful list of all the different
varieties of vegetables that can be grown in the UK, all through the year, so
that you always had a plentiful supply through across the year. Now the Ministry
of Food was another government Department that was helping people to
cope with food shortages and rationing and they knew that it's a good idea to have
some characters to get your message across. So rather than just showing
people carrots or potatoes and encouraging them to eat them, they made
them into characters - so there was Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot. And Doctor
Carrot not only claimed he was good for your health but that he was a great
substitute for sugar - remember, sugar was one of the first things to go on to
ration. And another of my friends who shares her memories of the Second World
War is Jill. Now Jill was an evacuee out of London, into the countryside for
safety and she still comes to the museum with a little bag of dolly mixtures to
show people how few sweets you got in your weekly ration. How few sweets?
Well this is my supply of mints on board my boat. If I was to follow the rationing
of the Second World War, I'm afraid I could only allow myself
or would only be allowed to buy six mints. That's the equivalent of two ounces or
50 grams and that wasn't a day, that was a weeks ration of sweets and so for
Jill, that was really tough she really really enjoyed sweets and to be
restricted to just a few was a real challenge for a child in the Second
World War. Another person who found her sweet tooth
a bit of a challenge to cope with but who relied on carrots to do so was John
Allpress' sister, Betty. Remember, they grew vegetables on the
roof of their Anderson shelter and Betty would eat carrots and save her coupons
for sweets and chocolate and still spend them but then she would parcel up the
chocolate and send it to her boyfriend who was away fighting in the British
Army. So for her carrots were a way of coping with a lack of sweets in the
Second World War. So what did people really miss?
John, Betty's younger brother who was 10 when the war started, really missed
having a proper egg. After the war he would say that that that was the big
thing that he missed the most. Eggs were quite scarce paticularly in cities and
so there was an ingenious solution but it wasn't quite the same. From about 1942,
eggs came powdered - so dried, dehydrated in a grey tin and what you would do is
take a teaspoon of the powdered egg, mix it with some water -the right amount of
water- and make a liquid egg and for making pastry and baking that was absolutely
fine but John's mum would attempt to make scrambled egg with it and John
describes it as tasting like cardboard and being quite rubbery and chewy. So he
really, really missed his eggs.
Graham particularly remembers when plums were
in season one August. He got on his bike and he cycled out to Evesham, a village
outside of Birmingham and he bought a big paper bag of plums. He put them
carefully into the saddlebag of his bicycle and began to cycle back home to
share them with his family. But remember Graham has not had a plum
for 11 months and so he couldn't resist stopping and having one plum and of
course it was delicious, and so he had a second plum and then a third plum until
none remained in the bag. Of course Graham remembers that that made him very sick.
Next day he had a really upset tummy because he just wasn't used to eating
that much stone fruit in one go. Graham also remembers that he would actually
help harvest in those seasonal fruits, so with school or with youth groups he would
go to harvest camp. One year, he remembers he was digging up potatoes.
Another year he was picking apples and on his third year, when he was a little
bit bigger he was actually helping a farmer to collect in the wheat into
sheaves that would then be taken to factories to be turned into bread and
bread was never rationed during the Second World War. So if you could buy it
you could eat as much of that as you wanted. Now if you were someone living in
the country, conditions were a little bit different to the city. Rose was an
evacuee from Finsbury in North London. She was only nine when she had to say
goodbye to mum and dad and leave London for the safety of the countryside.
And the billet, the place of safety the home that she ended up living in was on a
farm and so that meant that Rose had plentiful supplies of milk from the cows
on the farm. The family actually made their own butter, their own cheese and
clotted cream from the milk that they produced and in fact even when Rose was
still in her 80s and would come to the museum, she was still admit that she had
a real weakness and love for clotted cream because they just had clotted
cream with everything when she was an evacuee. She also still remembered some of
her wartime cooking lessons and two Christmases ago, she made her very own
version of mince pies with less butter in the pastry - because remember butter
was rationed - and also using apples instead of currants and raisins and they
were absolutely delicious. So people were really inventive and creative, they used
things that were in plentiful supply in Britain or they substituted things that
were available for things that weren't so readily available. Really really
remarkable use of resources. There were some things that were not rationed at
all and one of them was ice cream. Not that it was always very good quality, a
grocer's shop might make their own ice cream but it was often very powdery, very
poor quality with great lumps of ice in them. Graham knew of
an ice-cream shop that made its own ice cream
that was really high quality. So high quality and in such demand they only
opened at weekends and only for the summer. And one day Graham gets on his
bike and he cycles 10 miles - that is 16 kilometers away - to this shop and buys an
ice-cream and he said it was absolutely delicious. Probably no better than the
ice-cream he could buy today he says - but because it was a treat and because he'd
had to make a real effort to go and get it, it tasted like the most delicious
ice cream he had ever had. So after all that tea drinking, food preparing and
cooking and eating then as now there was the washing up to be done. But unlike now
there was a shortage of soap! You were only allowed from 1942 onwards three
ounces or 75 grams of soap for four weeks, so you had to make that soap last
of month before the next month's coupon was valid. To overcome that challenge, one
lady wrote a helpful suggestion to a magazine. Now I don't know if you've
noticed with all your hand washing, that a bar of soap gradually gets smaller and
smaller and then you end up all the scrappy ends that are really quite
fiddly. Well this was what she suggested placing inside an empty tin - maybe one of
those dried egg tins that were now empty. You'd pop all the scraps inside she said,
punch some holes in the lid and then when you've got a hot bowl of water
solution swish the tin around the soap inside would create lots of suds and
you'd have some soapy water to wash up the dishes. Or she went on to write, you
could wash your hair in it. I don't know if I would take up that suggestion
however, I do have a suggestion that maybe you would take up. Remember Potato
Pete and Doctor Carrot? Why don't you think of your favorite vegetable, fruit
or other food item. Go and find it, give it a character, a
name, a slogan and put all that together to create your very own campaign poster
encouraging people to eat more of your chosen food item. And you can always
share them with us at the Imperial War Museum we'd love to see what you come up with!
That's it on our history adventure for this week. Next week you will be with
aviation expert my friend Craig who works at the Imperial War Museums'
airfield in Duxford. Until then thank you very much for joining me on this week's Adventure in History