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 the 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
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.
This discontent came to the ears of Lord Woolton, who roundly ticked countrywomen off in a radio broadcast in June, reminding them somewhat tactlessly of the rather greater sacrifices made by their urban sisters. Miss Walker was summoned by Sir Henry French, Woolton’s Permanent Secretary, to explain, but she told him that whatever was being said, the WIs were getting on with the work and producing the jam.
The editor of the WI magazine, Home and Country, wrote that autumn that the ‘momentary confusion’ had resulted from the fact that the centres were worried about their solvency if they could not sell their produce immediately, as they had done the year before. The incident was all rather embarrassing. However, this was the only time that the countrywomen’s patriotism was ever remotely called into question.
Despite the rumblings of discontent, more than 1,100 tons of fruit made 1,630 tons of preserves that year. The Queen – who was a member of the Sandringham Women’s Institute – made ‘surprise’ visits to a number of fruit preservation centres in Buckinghamshire in July, and Mrs Roosevelt, the American President’s wife, also visited a centre.37 ‘The Women’s Institutes help to make the wheels go round,’ she is reported as saying afterwards.38 As evidence that the quarrel between the NFWI and the Ministry had been patched up, Miss Walker received an OBE in recognition of her achievements.
The grants from the Ministry of Food and Ministry of Agriculture – £5,125 for the fruit preservation scheme and £3,800 for the produce guilds in 1942 – increased steadily during the war, a firm indicator that the Ministry continued to think the work useful. In 1944, there were 1,174 fruit preservation centres open, even though there were four consecutive nights of sharp frost in May, which damaged every kind of fruit crop in many parts of the country. It was only in 1945, when a late spring frost again damaged blossom, and war weariness overtook even the spirited women of the WI, that the numbers of centres dropped very sharply and the Ministries of Agriculture and Food were refunded some of their grants. The scheme, as overseen by the Ministry of Food, came to an end that year.
Between 1940 and 1945, more than 5,300 tons (about 12 million lb) of fruit was preserved, which was the equivalent, according to Sir Henry French, of a year’s jam ration39 for more than half a million people.40 When he announced this to an audience of 300 WI delegates, I have no doubt that his speech was met with hearty applause, since that sounds a great deal. However, in fact, all that hard work achieved less than half of one per cent of the national requirement for (rationed) jam in wartime, so the effort was largely symbolic. It was probably just as well that those five stout-hearted women of Hawkinge, hot and flustered from making jam in the boiling-hot weather of September 1940, with the Battle of Britain raging over their heads, did not know that.
In popular mythology, jam has threatened to obscure the true value of the Women’s Institutes during the war, which was their equally strong attachment to building ‘Jerusalem’ in England’s green and pleasant land. The making of jam was only one of many activities in which countrywomen used their organisational skills and their appetite for selfless hard work to further the war effort. It was the Institute member’s determination not to let her sword sleep in her hand that earned her the nation’s gratitude and respect.
Inevitably, the jam-making campaign was gently satirised in the pages of Punch, most notably by Mary Dunn, through her fictional creation, Lady Addle.
Nowadays people seem too apprehensive about wasting sugar to experiment, and hence some splendid ingredients wither in the fields and hedgerows for want of plucking. The common burr for instance, soaked overnight and well stewed, makes an unusual jelly with a sweetish taste not unlike plate41 powder. Acorns, boiled to a pulp, will help to eke out your quinces if they are scarce. Then potato jam, with a little cochineal and some very fine grass seed for pips, with a raspberry jam label on the jar, does splendidly for people who have, either temporarily or permanently, lost their taste. I find my evacuees always demand raspberry or strawberry jam, so I have been reduced to innocent little ruses such as I quote above, or sometimes to boiling up a pound jar of one of them with a pint of conker stock, which sets into two or three jars of a kind of jelly-ish jam, or perhaps more accurately, a jam-ish jelly.
I must stress the importance of your jelly cloth. Most cookery books recommend flannel for straining. I go further and say that old flannel is the best, especially some personal belonging such as an old flannel hot-water bottle cover or a beloved dog’s blanket, which seems in some strange way to give the jelly a very poignant flavour.42
An attachment to the home-made, the thrifty and the honest was admired even by sophisticates like Constance Spry. In Come into the Garden, Cook she wrote,
It is a good thing to live at the heart of an empire that rules the seas. It has been good to share the luxuries of other countries, but it is not good to neglect what we have ourselves, to lean back in a lazy dependence, or to forget the lore of the past.
Before the war, when luxury shops might fill their shelves with flavours and spices from the Orient, with rare honeys and exotic jams, tribute was still paid to the home-made. It would seem that the housewife continues to have something up her sleeve, which cannot be quite copied in a wholesale manner. Now we must depend on what is home-made to a degree that would have come perhaps more easily to our grandmothers.43
Abundant nature certainly provided ingenious cooks with ingredients which would not have been countenanced in kitchens before the war. But necessity was the spur. Fanny Cradock, who made her name as a television cook after the war, usually wearing a Norman Hartnell ballgown, recalled: ‘Our cooking used to amaze our friends. They thought we had black market supplies from Fortnum’s . . . Bracken shoots were asparagus and I used liquid paraffin for my pastry. We caught and cooked sparrows from the garden and often ate baked hedgehogs (rather like frogs’ legs).’44
A widely travelled Frenchman, le vicomte de Mauduit, was the great expert on this kind of natural scavenging. He had written a number of conventional cookery books before the war but, in 1940, he published a book about what could be harvested in the countryside, with a foreword by no less a personage than Lloyd George himself. ‘During the war,’ de Mauduit wrote, ‘it [searching for food in the countryside] will serve to relieve some of the strain on the nation’s food supply and will teach those of us who will turn to the country-side for immunity from direct war destruction how to maintain life in the case of difficulties with regard to the carriage and distribution of food.’45 Directing his remarks at rural dwellers, campers, caravanners, hikers and what he called ‘the necessitous’, he predicted that, armed with this book, they could live in comfort, plenty and health even if all banks, shops and markets closed for indefinite periods. This book would have been particularly helpful if Britain had been successfully invaded, and guerrilla bands formed, since he instructed his readers which wild birds’ eggs could be eaten, how to prepare a hedgehog, grill a squirrel, stew a starling, find an edible frog, dry fish, and use fennel stalks for fuel. He recommended soapwort as a substitute for soap for washing linens, which must have been very useful, since soap was hard to find in shops; this could be the reason why this rampant nuisance is still to be found in many country gardens. In order to cheer his readers, he also gave recipes for gorse wine, red beet port and hop beer. And if they should suffer from minor ills, there were instructions on how to make a parsley-water eye-bath for a bloodshot eye, or an infusion of dried red roses, violets, borage and anchusa flowers ‘for a sad heart’.
This story does not have a happy ending. Le vicomte travelled back to his homeland when war broke out, was captured by the Germans after the fall of France and died in Dachau concentration camp on 2 February 1945.46 This was a tragic end for a man with a curious mind, a cultivated palate and an obvious joie de vivre.
Scavenging for food in the countryside was on the whole a private preoccupation; searching out native drug plants, on the other hand, became institutionalised. Many medicinal drugs and nutritional supplements had been imported from abroad before the war and had therefore become scarce or even, as in the case of some tropical plant drugs like quinine, unobtainable. However, a surprising number of imported drugs were derived from plants also native to Britain. The obvious solution to any shortage, therefore, was to gather native-grown drug plants or suitable substitutes, and to this end the Ministry of Health assembled a Vegetable Drugs Committee. On it served a number of civil servants and experts, including a pair of scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Dr Metcalfe and Dr Melville.
There were four main areas of interest to this committee. One was the necessity to find native red seaweeds, which might be suitable for making agar, a jelly used in bacteriological research in the laboratory as well as an emulsifying agent, a food additive and a treatment for constipation. Before the war, it had been almost entirely imported from Japan, around the coasts of which Gelidium amansii and related red seaweeds grow. By 1941, this source was threatening to dry up, and did so entirely after Japan entered the war in early December. Algologists were therefore dispatched around the British coastline to study the various kinds of native seaweeds and discover whether any were suitable alternatives to Japanese seaweeds. Boy Scouts were encouraged to help, in what must have been a rather unenviable task. The scientists working in the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew did much of the research work on potential substitutes, in particular ‘Irish moss’, Chondrus crispus, which was already used as an emulsifier in cod-liver oil. It was thought that, if mixed with another seaweed, Gigartina mamillosa, it might make a suitable alternative to agar jelly. As things turned out, this was not the case, but the scientists did discover that this mixture made an admirable substitute for gelatine in food products like tinned tongue. Meanwhile, algologists at the Scottish Marine Biological Association station at Millport on the river Clyde discovered that there were British species of Gelidium, as well as another red seaweed, Ahnfeldtia, which were good enough to be used as agar substitutes. These were only available in small quantities, but that was better than nothing.47
The second area of research ‘of national importance’ was aimed at expanding the range of nutritional supplements. At the beginning of the war, there was already in production one syrup which was high in vitamin C. During the 1930s, as a result of a need to do something with periodic commercial fruit gluts, scientists at Long Ashton, led by Dr Vernon Charley, had investigated the possibilities of making syrups and juices for flavouring milk shakes. When the Bristol soda and mineral water manufacturer, H. W. Carter, showed an interest in the blackcurrant syrup, Charley authorised its trialling in the factory, with a Long Ashton technician in attendance. As a result, in 1936 H. W. Carter launched the syrup commercially, under the name ‘Ribena’, a word derived from the botanical name for blackcurrant, Ribes nigrum.48
Once the war started, the Ministry of Food considered that a palatable and ready source of vitamin C was particularly important for infants and small children, who would not eat enough green vegetables to receive the necessary daily intake of the vitamin. The distribution of Ribena was authorised for children, expectant mothers and others in particular need of vitamin C, although the Ribena trade name was abandoned for the duration. Lord Woolton believed its production to be so important that two ‘shadow factories’ were fitted out elsewhere, since Bristol was a likely target for air raids. Almost the entire national commercial crop of blackcurrants went into the manufacture of this syrup. Indeed, the quantity of fruit needed was so great that it could not all be processed in the short harvest period, so the Campden Research Station arranged for much of it to be canned at various canning centres, for processing later.
After a meeting of the Vegetable Drugs Committee in June 1941,49 Dr Melville wrote: ‘As the Ministry of Health has found it necessary to arrange for the preparation of a syrup from black currants for use as a Vitamin C concentrate, it may be worth while to consider the possibility of using wild rose hips in a similar manner as they are richer in ascorbic acid than blackcurrants.’50 Rosehips have a good flavour, like a quality plum or a guava, and also contain vitamin A, which children need to help prevent ‘night blindness’. So Dr Melville began to work on research into rose hips in collaboration with Dr Magnus Pyke, chief scientist at the research laboratories of Vitamins Ltd in Hammersmith.51 They soon discovered that there were two major difficulties: palatability and collection.
In September 1941, the Ministry of Health asked Dr Vernon Charley and his colleagues at Long Ashton to help. Rose hips turned out to be more problematic than blackcurrants, because of the prickly, irritant hairs that surround the seeds in the hip. The call from the Ministry came a mere three weeks before the picking season began; nevertheless, Dr Charley and his team set to work, using a number of unlikely bits of machinery, including domestic laundry mangles and lawn rollers, to extract the juice. They discovered that the best method was to mill the hips quite finely and put the resulting mash into boiling water to stop all enzyme activity immediately.
Collection was also going to be a problem, with the adult population otherwise occupied, so the Director of Kew, Sir Arthur Hill, led a concerted campaign in September to encourage Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, schoolchildren and WIs (as well as the Scottish Rural Institutes and Scottish WVS) to go out and collect hips. The idea was that the Women’s Institutes’ County Herb Committees would act as local organisers, since collection needed to be orderly and swift, with only a limited time between picking and processing. The advice from Kew was that the hips ‘should be weighed, invoiced and sent to your central depot where payment will be made for weight at the rate of 2/- per stone, with an additional 6d per stone for incidental expenses’.52 Scouts and other youth organisations supplemented their funds in this way, and war charities also benefited.
By experimentation, Dr Charley later discovered that wild rose hips had the highest concentration of vitamin C when they were just beginning to colour up but were still hard; and that the best hips, from the nutritional point of view, were to be found in hedgerows in the Lake District and county Durham northwards. They were therefore best collected in early August, which fortuitously coincided with the school holidays.
The Vegetable Drugs Committee wrote to the County Herb Committees, saying that the target figure was 1,500 tons; in other words, an enormous amount. It can have been no surprise that those hard-working children only managed to collect 220 tons in 1941. Nevertheless, rose hip syrup went on sale in chemists on 1 February 1942.
In 1942, 333 tons of hips were collected and in 1943, 492 tons. It was a great deal, but only a third of what could have been processed. All this highlighted the difficulties in wartime of mobilising a sufficiently large but partly juvenile volunteer force, whose effectiveness was often determined by the enthusiasm, or lack of it, of particular local education authorities. There was no doubting children’s willingness, but the scale of the task was simply beyond them. It is interesting to note that the northern collectors did best, probably because they had both Rosa canina and the later-ripening, downy-leaved Rosa mollis to choose from, so there was a longer season for collection.
The third area of interest to Sir Arthur Hill and his scientists at Kew was the quest for potential substitutes for rubber, the traditional source of which was cut off completely when the Japanese overran Malaya in 1942. The scientists tested the efficacy of a Russian species of dandelion, bizarrely, but nothing much came of it.
Kew was much more successful with the humble perennial nettle, which could be used for the industrial extraction of the green pigment, chlorophyll. The value of chlorophyll resided in its use as a colouring in fats and soaps, as well as camouflage paint. The stems of nettles could be made into high-class paper, and experiments were also attempted to see if nettle fabric was useful in the construction of aircraft. Yet again youthful collectors, together with the Women’s Institutes, were involved, gathering nettle leaves and drying them. Guidance to the Boy Scouts included the advice: ‘Unless the collector is more than usually resistant to nettle stings, leather gloves should be worn.’53 ‘Stingers’ were a fact of life to country children, but it would be surprising if many of them could cheerfully do without gloves.
As far as medicinal drugs were concerned, the most sought after were the leaves and seed of foxglove, belladonna leaves, dandelion roots, stinging nettles, colchicum corms,54 broom flower tops, male fern, valerian and thorn apple. Also valuable were sphagnum moss – a very absorbent material used as a dressing for wounds – and the conkers of horse chestnut trees, which were used for making the glucose-rich pick-me-up Lucozade, as well as a treatment for varicose veins and other inflammatory conditions. Ordinary culinary herbs were also required, but these were mainly grown in gardens and nurseries, for ease of collection.
In 1941, the wholesale drug company, Brome and Schimmer, published an explanatory booklet entitled ‘Herb Gathering’. Two herbalists, Barbara Keen and Jean Armstrong of the Valeswood Herb Farm, wrote the text. In it were descriptions of all the many and various wild flowers, roots and herbs that were needed by the Ministry of Health, and, crucially, how they should be treated and dried. Fortunately, it included drawings from Illustrations from the British Flora, so it is to be hoped that no one mixed up their belladonna with their broom.
The booklet was badly needed, because that year the collection of medicinal herbs by amateurs turned out to be rather haphazard and experimental. The minutes of the meeting of the Vegetable Drugs Committee on 17 December 1941 certainly indicate this: ‘It has been found that although enthusiasm was great, and interest widespread, throughout the country, there was serious lack of co-ordination and technical knowledge on the subject of drying the herbs collected. Nevertheless, medicinal herbs to the value of approximately £2,000 were collected, dried and marketed.’55
In order to encourage the opening of local drying centres to process the material in preparation for sending it to the pharmaceutical companies, the Vegetable Drugs Committee recommended that small loans be given to the WI County Herb Committees so that they could set up drying rooms in village halls and the like, and then recoup the cost of the loan by selling the dried material. Once dried, herbs were taken to the County Federation central collecting depots – where a trained person was needed to ensure that the drying had been done properly – whence they were mainly dispatched to Messrs Brome and Schimmer in Southwark. Brome and Schimmer paid for these culinary and medicinal herbs on a sliding rate according to their rarity and utility.
Each year, after consultation between the Vegetable Drugs Committee and the pharmaceutical companies, the list of genera required changed to some extent. Miss Elizabeth Hess, who sat on this committee for part of the war, recalled later that the government was very anxious that those people collecting poisonous plants should know exactly what they were doing.56 Children were not allowed to collect belladonna, for example. To try to limit the amount of misidentification of herbs, Kew also organised the distribution of forty sets of cigarette cards57 with colour illustrations of wild flowers; these were given to the volunteers from pharmacy colleges whose job it was to instruct WI members and other volunteers. There were short broadcast talks on the subject, as well as talks and demonstrations round the country by members of a panel of experts.
Miss Hess’s expertise as a trained horticulturist made her a very useful collector. In the spring of 1942 she was given the task of finding a ton of broom flowering tops. She knew that the native broom (Cytisus scoparius), which yields sparteine sulphate, grew in a particular ten-acre plantation near Brandon in Suffolk. She could not find any of the usual volunteers, so she made a personal approach to the senior pupils of the two Thetford grammar schools. Thirty teenagers agreed to give their time over the Easter weekend. They worked in teams, which became predictably competitive with each other, and in four days managed to pick and stack four tons of broom tops, earning themselves five shillings per hundredweight, or £20.58 Mr Allen of Stafford Allen, which processed the drugs, had written to the Acting Director59 at Kew in December 1941, saying that he did not have a great deal of faith in Boy Scouts and Women’s Institutes – in other words amateurs – as collectors. On this occasion, at least, he must have had to eat his words.60
A few potentially poisonous or unusual native plants – aconitum, belladonna, foxglove, henbane and thorn apple – could never be supplied in sufficient quantity by wild collection, so were specifically grown for pharmaceutical use in scientific institutions such as Kew and the John Innes Horticultural Institution, as well as in large private gardens like Exbury, which were overseen by expert owners and experienced gardeners.
The collection of herbs, both culinary and medicinal, continued throughout the war and just beyond, although the urgency diminished in the later years as foreign countries came back once more into Allied hands. Sir Arthur Hill had seriously overestimated the capacities of mainly amateur and untried volunteers, in particular to pick the right parts of the right plants, often in remote places that were difficult to get to, and to dry them efficiently in less than ideal circumstances. The sheer number of different plants required,61 some of them, like meadow saffron (Colchicum), quite local in their distribution, added to the collectors’ difficulties. Nevertheless, worthwhile work was done at a time of great need, and participation in such an obviously useful activity remained a source of pride to those involved; however young, they had contributed something valuable to the war effort, and they never forgot it.