Prakash Tandon’s landlady looked at her husband with satisfaction as he carved the roast leg of best New Zealand lamb. It was Prakash’s host family’s first Sunday in their new home. When he moved in with them, they lived in ‘a street of an unbroken row of houses with backyards and front steps’ in the centre of Manchester.1 His landlady’s bell-shaped hair would shake as she tossed her head defiantly and declared her determination to get away from this street as it symbolised her hateful slippage into the lower rungs of the working classes. ‘It may not have been posh where I came from’, she would pronounce, but ‘at least we had a little lawn and a couple of trees at the back’.2 The money their ‘Indian gentleman’ paid for board and lodging had enabled the family to move up in the world. They were ‘in raptures’ over their new council house with ‘its own gate and a wire fence’ on a named housing estate with ‘a shopping parade with a Co-op [and] a public house with a car park’ – all signs of class. The house had a small back garden where the husband grew vegetables, which was so much better than having an allotment ‘like a working man’. Instead of the privy in the yard, they now had a ‘proper bathroom with a tub and a separate water closet … two bedrooms and a small one for the children, a front room … a dining room and a kitchen … a tiny hall and a cupboard under the stairs’.3 The children went to a better school, where they wore a uniform. Prakash watched with interest as his landlady invested her new-found wealth in a half-moon rug, an easy chair and a dining suite in good wood. Whereas in the Punjab, where he came from, women would spend any extra money on gold ornaments and fine clothes, Prakash’s landlady channelled her energies into her home, which she scrubbed and polished with an enthusiasm that astonished him.4
Brought up on thick chapattis, chalk-white butter, curd and sharp mustard greens, Prakash had at first struggled with English food. On the voyage to Britain in 1929, he and his fellow Indian passengers had been revolted by the vast quantities of ‘ham and bacon, roast pork and beef, steaks and ribs’ that the British cheerfully gobbled. Having caught sight of a plate of sausages, they concluded that they ate every conceivable part of the unfortunate animal, from its head to its feet, including its stomach and ‘its most private part’. (Fortunately they did not encounter sweetbreads or lamb fries.)5 In Manchester, where Prakash studied chartered accountancy, the Indian students searched in vain for an Indian restaurant and cherished their landladies if they could conjure up a recognisable curry. After a while, Prakash broke out of his Indian circle and, despite the fact that his compatriots labelled him a traitor, ‘dropped all inhibitions, developed a liking for beer, fish and chips, hot-pot and parkin, smutty stories, soft aitches and broad a’s and generally got as close to the heart of Lancashire as one could’.6
Prakash joined in the life of his host family with enthusiasm and was as pleased as they were that the leg of roast lamb was a sign of their better fortune. That by the 1930s the Sunday roast was becoming an institution among the Manchester working class was an indication of just how much the lives of workers had improved since the hungry 1840s. The key to the rise in living standards was the import of cheap foreign food. The lamb that Prakash and his host family savoured that Sunday would have been fattened on New Zealand pastureland on the other side of the world, slaughtered in an abattoir at the port and transported to Britain in the freezer hold of a ship. From the butcher’s, the joint would have continued its journey to the Sunday dinner table in the bicycle basket of the butcher’s boy, as Prakash’s landlady could now afford the middle-class luxury of having her shopping delivered. Just as Prakash’s family were dependent on their Indian gentleman’s rent to fund their new-found rise in the world, the British working classes in the inter-war years were dependent on the Empire to feed them.
The influx of foreign wheat from the 1870s had ensured the workers their daily loaf of white wheaten bread. But as the population grew steadily and wages rose, the working classes’ desire to eat more meat put pressure on the supply. After the repeal of the Corn Laws, new imports of high-calorie oil-seed cakes had boosted meat and dairy farming. Farmers were producing prime Angus beef, Welsh lamb and full-fat creamy milk for eager middle-class consumers. But meat farming soon hit a ceiling. There was no new pastureland for farmers to extend their operations onto, and rather than stimulating supply, the increasing demand had pushed up meat prices.7 The cost of bread had been lowered by extending Britain’s farmland onto the American prairies; now the cost of meat could also be brought down if Britain were able to extend its pastures over the grasslands of the New World.
The meat trade was still reliant on old-fashioned methods of meat preservation. Whenever American meat packers had a surplus of pork, they would rub salt on it and pack it loosely between layers of dry salt in the hold of a transatlantic ship. By the time it reached its destination, the meat had cured into bacon.8 Dr Edward Smith recommended American bacon to the poor in his Practical Dietary (1864) as it was less than half the price of English bacon, but British customers disliked its fattiness.9 Sensitive to the needs of their market, the Americans brought meat packers from Cork and Liverpool to Cincinnati and Chicago to show them how to cut and cure pork to satisfy British tastes, and American bacon eventually became popular.10 Another source of extra meat supplies was the Argentinian dried beef peddled by the South American Beef Company, but Dr Smith drew the line at recommending this to the poor. The stuff was so dry and fibrous, he complained, that even slow boiling for 12 hours could not make it palatable and certainly did not render it, as the promotional literature claimed, ‘perfectly tender’.11 Given that in many parts of Britain the poor only had sufficient fuel to cook warm food once a week, he thought it a ridiculous proposition to try to persuade them to buy the awful stuff, which at 4d a pound was no cheaper than cuts of fresh meat. The idea that it might be fed to workhouse inmates he pronounced ‘a cruelty’.12 Dr Smith did, however, reiterate that if a way could be found to bring Argentinian beef to Britain in a moist state, it would indeed ‘be a great boon to the masses of the people’.13
The physician Andrew Wynter identified canning as the technology to defeat distance and allow ‘every man [to] have a slice of good [colonial] beef sandwiched between his free-trade bread’.14 The British public disagreed, however. Emigrants had taken canning know-how to Australia and begun turning the thousands of waste sheep carcasses that the wool industry produced into canned mutton. Tins of Australian mutton may have won a prize medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851, but after the debacle with the Admiralty over Goldner’s spoiled Moldovan tins, the British remained unimpressed.15 In the 1860s and 1870s, Daniel Tallerman, the Australian industry’s agent in London, conducted a vigorous campaign of mass demonstrations of how to cook with canned meat, and set up dining rooms around the country where working men and women could buy 3d dinners of pies and stews, puddings and dumplings, all made with Australian canned meat.16 Despite the workers’ apparent enthusiasm for the cheap dinners – more than a thousand people a day ate in ‘Tallerman’s Hall’ in London – tins of Australian mutton did not fly off the shelves.17 Tinned meat was only bought by workhouses, gaols and hospitals, whose inmates had no influence over the decision – although in a Cardiff lock hospital, one dinner too many made of the ‘nauseous’ stuff caused the patients to protest by pelting a nurse with spoons, bread and other missiles and disporting themselves in the garden like lunatics; the troublemakers received 21 days in gaol.18
It was only with the invention of tinned corned beef that canned meat gained any traction in the British market. In 1876, Samuel Vestey, a provisions broker from Liverpool, sent his son William out to America to look for new lines for his business. In the Chicago slaughterhouses Samuel realised that the trimmings from the better cuts were going to waste. He borrowed money from his father and set up a canning factory, where he applied a recently invented American technique: packing the meat tightly into the can and cooking it quickly, which produced a more appetising product.19 His tapered rectangular cans, which allowed the meat to slide out, became the distinctive hallmark of corned beef.20 The canners streamlined the production of tin cans with machinery and mastered the art of boiling them in a solution containing calcium chloride. This reduced the length of the process from five hours to thirty minutes.21 But canned meats never secured a dominant positon in the kitchen cupboards of the urban working classes, and tins only ever accounted for less than 6 per cent of British meat consumption. It was clear that canning would not solve Britain’s meat crisis.22
The United States shipped thousands of live animals to Britain every year, but the expense of installing special decks increased the cost of shipping, the animals suffered from the stress of the voyage and lost weight and a large percentage of them died. It was an emigrant farmer from Croydon who first succeeded in finding a way of shipping meat rather than cattle across the Atlantic.23 Timothy C. Eastman owned a ranch in Ohio and a slaughterhouse in New York City, where in 1875 he prepared 36,000 lb of beef to be sent to London in an experimental refrigerator known as a ‘Bates’ tank. Steam-driven fans drew air through a box of ice and then blew it onto the carcasses hanging from hooks so that the cold draught could circulate freely around them. Eastman’s beef was a hit. Fed on the blue-stem grass of the prairies, it was juicy, full of flavour and appetisingly streaked with solid lines of fat.24 New York’s ‘Cattle King’ was soon joined by other enterprising American businessmen, who discovered that they could transport mutton virtually for free by hanging sheep carcasses in the spaces between the sides of beef.
In response to the threat of American competition, English and Scottish cattle farmers opened their own ranches in the United States. By 1882, British-owned ranching companies had invested more than $30 million in transforming the Great Plains, once thick with herds of buffalo, into ‘cow country’.25 British consumers were not particularly keen on the lean meat from the predominant Texas Longhorn cattle, so stockier British beasts were imported to improve the stock. The cattle were bred on the ranges and then sent to specialised feeder farms in Iowa and Illinois, where they were fattened on maize to produce the fat-marbled beef popular with the British.26 From Chicago’s stockyards they were railroaded to slaughterhouses on the East Coast.
Gustavus Swift, a partner in a Boston wholesale meat business, thought that it would also make more sense on this journey to transport the cattle as meat. However, having invested in stockyards and livestock wagons, the American rail companies were unwilling to reinvest in refrigerated railroad cars. In 1880, Swift turned to the Canadian Grand Trunk rail line, as its northern route was too cold for live cattle. He built refrigerated facilities at the railheads in Chicago and Boston, as well as a fleet of refrigerated rail cars. Chicago now became a centre for huge slaughterhouses cum meat-packing factories, handling thousands of animals each day.27 The more traffic on the rail lines, the more cost-effective this mode of transport became, and by the end of the 1880s, freight rates had fallen by 90 per cent.28
In 1881, America shipped 106 million lb of dressed beef to Britain.29 One in four joints of meat on British dinner tables now came from abroad; in the 1860s, it would have been one in twelve.30 Industrial-scale American meat processing had solved the problem of Britain’s meat supply. But hearty joints of roast beef were integral to British national identity, as they were seen as the source of the Englishman’s vitality. The nation’s increasing dependence on the United States to supply its beef was therefore something of a blow to national pride. A Punch cartoon for Christmas Day 1907, entitled ‘Alien Cheer’, has a despondent John Bull eyeing his plate dubiously, for the roast beef has been ‘killed and chilled in Chicago’.31
The Antipodes were keen to follow America’s example and gain access to Britain’s meat market. But while chilled meat could withstand the short journey across the Atlantic, a more radical preservation method than a Bates tank was needed for a voyage of 13,000 miles, passing through the tropics. Initial experiments with freezing meat were unsuccessful. In 1873, £2,500 raised by subscription from Australian pastoralists was wasted when the shipment of frozen meat became so rank on its way to Britain that it had to be thrown overboard.32 The Australians watched French attempts to transport frozen meat from Argentina with great interest. In 1878, the Queenslander Thomas McIlwraith sent his brother to France to investigate when it was reported that a cargo of frozen beef had successfully been shipped to Le Havre from Buenos Aires. Based on his brother’s investigations of the ammonia compression refrigerators the French had used, McIlwraith put in an order with the Glaswegian firm of Bell and Coleman for air compression and expansion refrigerators to be fitted on his own ship. The SS Strathleven collected her cargo from Australia in December 1879 and arrived in London two months later with all 40 tons of beef and mutton in excellent condition. Butchers in Smithfield market claimed it was impossible to tell the difference between the Australian and fresh British meat.33
The New Zealand newspapers were filled with reports of the British reception of Australian mutton, and from 1882, New Zealand began exporting frozen sheep carcasses.34 At first, British consumers had been reluctant to eat the flesh of animals that had been killed as long as nine months ago. The liquid that oozed out of frozen meat as it defrosted led people to think it lost its nutritional value during the thawing process.35 And there were fears that, like canned food, frozen food might be the source of food poisoning. But the price soon overcame any prejudices. Australian beef undercut American beef by a halfpenny per pound, and New Zealand lamb was at least tuppence cheaper than British lamb. And once they had tasted it, the British relished the meat of the carefully interbred New Zealand Corriedale sheep, preferring it to the rangy mutton derived from Australia’s hardy Spanish merinos, bred to withstand the hot, dry climate.36 ‘Prime Canterbury’ soon became associated with good-quality meat.37 British farmers expressed fears that they would be driven out of business. The American prairies had already been brought to their doorstep; now they had to contend with the new proximity of the Australasian grasslands.38
DIRECTIONS FOR COOKING NEW ZEALAND AND OTHER FROZEN MUTTON ISSUED BY THE NEW ZEALAND LOAN AND MERCANTILE AGENCY CO., 1880s
Frozen meat, like English, improves by hanging. The hindquarters will keep a week in cool weather, the forequarters may be cooked sooner. As there is a tendency for the juice to run from the mutton while thawing, it should be hung in such a way to check this. The hind-quarter, haunch, and leg, should be hung by the flaps, the knuckles hanging down, the loins and saddles also by the flaps, giving them a horizontal position. This meat should not be soaked in water for the purpose of thawing (as some suppose), but hung in the larder or other dry, draughty place, and wiped occasionally with a dry cloth in damp weather. Flour should not be used, as it is apt to turn sour. When put down for cooking, the chump part of the leg or loin should be exposed to the fire, or hottest part of the oven, for a few minutes, to toast the part cut and so seal it up, thus keeping the gravy in the joint.39
Argentina was a latecomer to the British meat market. It built its first frigorifico (meat freezing plant) in 1882, but Argentinian beef and mutton were too low in quality to compete with American corn-fed beef cattle and New Zealand’s Corriedale sheep. It was only during the Boer War of 1899–1902 that the Argentinian meat industry was given a boost as British-owned firms spent millions constructing new frigorificos in response to the rise in demand for beef to feed the troops. This made the Argentinian cattle ranchers aware of the potential of the meat trade, and they started to improve their stock, bringing in pedigree bulls from Britain to interbreed with their own animals; they also began to fatten them in specialised finishing farms. By 1910, Argentina was producing quality beef. By now, refrigeration technology had advanced and the cargo ships were equipped with sterilisers and dehumidifiers, which kept chilled beef free of mould.40 This made it possible to ship chilled as well as frozen meat from South America to Europe. These developments also attracted American investment to Argentina. The American domestic market was beginning to absorb almost all the meat produced in the United States, and the huge meat-packing companies needed an alternative source for their exports to Britain. A vicious price war ensued as British, Argentinian and American meat companies fought for dominance of the industry. The beneficiaries were British consumers, as beef prices fell to all-time lows.41 Argentina’s beef exports doubled, then tripled, until beef came second to wheat as the country’s most valuable export. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Argentina was transformed from a small South American backwater into the ninth richest country in the world.42
The technological revolution that made it possible to bring ‘fresh’ meat to Britain from around the world was indeed the ‘great boon to the masses of the people’ Dr Edward Smith had predicted.43 By the 1890s, Britain absorbed 60 per cent of the meat that was traded globally. A fleet of steel steamships equipped with Glaswegian Bell-Coleman patented refrigerators unloaded at Britain’s docks huge quantities of lamb from the Antipodes, chilled beef from Argentina and ham and bacon from America.44 While the middle and upper classes continued to buy the more expensive home-produced meat, imports allowed the working classes to eat a roast once a week.45 In 1913, an Oxfordshire labourer with a wife and four young children living on a miserable wage of 8s. a week – a wage that in the 1840s would have condemned his family to a diet of bread, tea and treacle – was able to buy 5 lb of frozen brisket for 2s. and 28 lb of bread for 3s. 2½d, as well as Quaker oats, condensed milk and margarine.46
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, besides corned beef and frozen meat, the diet of the working classes began to include three Dutch imports: margarine, condensed milk and cocoa. In the 1880s and 1890s, the temperance movement gave cocoa consumption a boost by opening ‘cocoa rooms’ or ‘coffee palaces’ where workers could read the newspapers or play board games while sipping a non-alcoholic cup of tea, coffee or cocoa. The social reformer Charles Booth described how these establishments encouraged custom by allowing those men ‘who drink the cocoa … to eat the dinner or breakfast they have brought from home, or bringing the bread and butter … they can add [a] sausage or whatever completes the meal’.47 For the best part of the nineteenth century cocoa powder was heavily adulterated with lentils, tapioca or arrowroot in order to counter its fattiness, and the bowls of cocoa the early cafés served were more like chocolate soup or gruel than a drink.48 But as they evolved into more commercial enterprises, the cocoa rooms began to serve a better-quality beverage made with drinking chocolate powder. In the 1860s, cocoa producers had greatly improved the product by adopting the Van Houten cocoa press. By extracting the cocoa butter from the mass of pressed beans, it allowed for the manufacture of a light and digestible powder.49 ‘Pure drinking chocolate’ was transformed into a superior drink and gained the edge on coffee, which remained a heavily adulterated product until well into the twentieth century.50
A plethora of advertisements now proclaimed that cocoa was a nourishing and wholesome addition to the diet. Most of the cocoa the British drank in the late nineteenth century was made by the Dutch company Van Houten, although Cadbury’s began making drinking chocolate in 1866 and Rowntree’s followed suit a decade later.51 But possibly the most successful brand in establishing the drink in the working-class dietary repertoire has long since been forgotten. In his 1898 budget statement, the Chancellor of the Exchequer attributed the fact that ‘people are turning their attention to cocoa … to the remarkable success of a certain well-advertised article which, in gratitude to the manufacturer, I am half tempted to name’.52 He was referring to Dr Tibbles’ Vi-Cocoa. Between 1895 and 1910, this blend of cocoa, hops, malt and kola nut was so popular that the Chancellor thought the brand was responsible over the last year for a 25 per cent increase in government duties on imports of manufactured cocoa. Vi-Cocoa was half the price of Cadbury’s drinking chocolate, and while Cadbury’s aimed to capture the attention of the middle-class housewife looking for a nourishing drink for her family, Vi-Cocoa was promoted as a powerful alternative to tea for the working man. Advertisements claimed that it was by chewing kola nut all day that West Africans were able to endure arduous labour and that Vi-Cocoa would likewise improve the stamina of the British worker. In a typical testimonial, a Mr T. Cox of Trowbridge, who worked a 14-hour day as a roller man in a flour mill, asserted that it was ‘a first-class cocoa to work by’ and that (no doubt due to the caffeine content of the kola nuts) he felt ‘no fatigue with one and a half pint of Vi-cocoa per day in place of 2 pints of tea’.53
Margarine had been invented in 1869 as a butter substitute for the French navy, and tinned condensed milk was created in the late 1860s for the troops during the American Civil War. Both were manufactured by the Dutch in large quantities using the leftover skimmed milk that was a by-product of the butter-making industry. Cheaper than both butter and strawberry jam, margarine became the working-class spread of choice, while by 1914 Britain imported more tinned condensed milk than the combined total of canned beef and fish imports. In the days before refrigeration, tinned milk appeared to be a convenient alternative to fresh. But both margarine and condensed milk were lacking in vitamins A and D, as well as fat, and tinned milk was dangerously detrimental to the health of the numerous working-class infants to whom it was fed.54 However, working-class nutrition changed for the better when New Zealand dairy farmers realised that they could take advantage of the advent of refrigerated ships to capture the world market for butter and cheese. In 1883, a New Zealand dairy inspector wrote enthusiastically, ‘We have only to make the prime article in butter and cheese, then no power on earth can stay the flow of gold in this direction.’55 The farmers organised themselves into co-operatives and brought in a Danish butter expert to help them crack open the British market. On his advice they built up herds of Jersey cows, producing rich milk high in butterfat. Rather than making the butter on the farm, they sent the milk to factories to be processed into a uniform, high-quality product.
The influx of imported foods into Britain gave rise to a new form of retailing. The main stumbling block to the sale of imported meat was the lack of cold storage at Britain’s ports and in the butchers’ shops. Unwilling to aid and abet foreign competitors, butchers were reluctant to install the new technology. Initially, the meat had to be sold direct from the shipboard refrigerators, and inland markets therefore remained out of the importers’ reach.56 Not so easily defeated, American meat-packing companies set up their own chains of shops. This enabled them to carefully stagger the arrival of meat-bearing ships in British ports, as chilled meat had only a limited shelf life of about 10 days once it arrived after a 40-day voyage.57 Not far behind the Americans were the New Zealanders, who set up James Nelson & Sons, and they were followed by the Argentinian River Plate Meat Company, which by 1914 had established the largest chain, with over a thousand branches.58 In 1929, the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company followed the meat-packers’ example and opened the Empire Dairies chain of stores as the sole sales outlet for New Zealand Anchor butter.59
As the butcher’s chains moved into the working-class districts of the large industrial towns, they were joined by a new breed of specialised grocery store. Lipton’s, the Home & Colonial stores, the Maypole Dairy Company and the Co-operative stocked a limited range of working-class staples, most of them imports. They set themselves apart from small corner shops as they did not offer credit: all goods had to be paid for on the spot in cash. Moreover, rather than selling a pennyworth of tea here, a screw of sugar there, they sold their goods in pre-weighed and sealed packages.60 The chain stores of the colonial meat companies had been set up to distribute a particular product; the new grocery stores reversed this process, establishing their own factories and buying colonial plantations to supply their stores with the goods they wanted to sell. The Home & Colonial Stores set up a company to buy groundnuts in the Gambia and processed them into vegetable oil at the firm’s refinery at Erith in Kent.61 Thomas Lipton went from setting up an egg-packing station in Ireland and a jam factory in London to purchasing a tea estate in Ceylon in 1890.62 He proudly proclaimed that his teas went directly ‘from the tea garden to the tea pot’ and pictures of the Tamil tea pickers featured prominently on the packaging.63
Combining the roles of producer, buyer, packager, distributor and retailer within one firm allowed these companies to take advantage of economies of scale that they then translated into reasonable prices for their customers.64 At the same time, the chain stores anticipated demand and transformed high-class goods into items of mass consumption.65 This now brought biscuits within the reach of ordinary people. In 1873, the Co-operative Wholesale Society opened a biscuit-making factory in Crumpsall, Manchester, while Lipton’s, the Home & Colonial Stores and the Maypole Dairy were catered for by the mushrooming number of small, independent manufacturers. A survey conducted in 1936–7 by the William Crawford London advertising agency found that workers had added biscuits to their evening meal of a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter.66
As the working classes’ disposable income increased and more firms pre-packaged their goods, the selection of items for sale in the chain stores widened. In 1885, Tate & Lyle began to pour their golden syrup into tins. Pre-packaged pudding rice, custard powder, shredded suet and pickles, once the preserve of the middle classes, now found their way onto the shelves aimed at working-class consumers. The only colonial import that remained out of reach for the working classes was fruit. Refrigerated shipping allowed Tasmania and the Cape to take advantage of the southern hemisphere’s reversed seasons to supply Britain with apples and pears during the winter, but these ended up largely in middle-class fruit bowls.67 Even Hawaiian tinned pineapple was too expensive for working-class budgets until an enterprising Chinese Malay set up a pineapple canning factory in Singapore.68 As a result, in the 1920s, thousands of cases of affordable tinned pineapple were imported from British Malaya. The British prejudice against Chinese foods meant that the tins were not stamped by the Malayan factories but were sold by various British companies under their own brand name.69 In addition, tins of apples and pears, cherries, grapefruit, loganberries, peaches, apricots and fruit salad began pouring in from Canada, Australia and the United States. Sunday high tea at six o’clock was another of the rituals associated with prosperity in Prakash Tandon’s host family. It consisted of tinned Canadian salmon with bread and butter, and ‘instead of the cheap fresh fruit in season’, canned Australian pears with tinned Carnation milk.70
Thanks to food imports, the working-class diet had substantially improved. However, in the 1930s, the British government became concerned that too many of these foods were imported from outside the Empire.71 Most of the cocoa consumed in Britain was grown in Portuguese West Africa, and more than half of chilled beef imports came from Argentina. Amid the atmosphere of protectionism during the inter-war years, the government worried about its dependency on unpredictable foreign partners outside its sphere of official influence. The Empire Marketing Board was duly founded in 1926 and ran a vigorous campaign of press and poster advertising in which the white settler colonies were cast as Britain’s siblings and the colonies as her children. The public were urged to ‘keep your money in the Empire’, ‘drink Empire grown tea’, ‘buy Jaffa Oranges’ and ‘smoke Empire tobacco’.72 Trade agreements favouring Empire suppliers over foreign competitors reinforced the campaign. Consequently, by 1939, the Empire supplied more than half of Britain’s agricultural imports.73 Britain depended on overseas sources for more than 50 per cent of its meat, about 70 per cent of its sugar and cheese, and 90 per cent of its fats and cereals.74 This was the culmination of Britain’s quest for food that had begun with West Country fishermen going in search of cod in the sixteenth century. By the 1930s, Britain had transformed itself into the world’s manufacturing centre and its working classes were fed by its empire.75