In September 1941, R. L. Crimp found himself in an ‘austere and primitive’ forward camp in the North African desert, a couple of hundred miles behind the front line. Life was led entirely in the open air, ‘under the broiling sun by day, and by night in blanket beds made up on the hard desert surface, under the stars’.1 Crimp had been assigned to a motorised infantry unit, and the focus of the camp was the section area where the company’s thirty trucks were parked. His section’s truck – called Mabel after the driver’s wife – was surrounded by their gear and supplies: a Bren gun; a Boyes anti-tank rifle; several boxes of ammunition; a large Italian medical chest in which they stored their rations; a box full of tinned emergency rations and another for their plates, mess tins, mugs and cutlery; about half a dozen two-gallon water cans and another half a dozen supposedly ‘untouchable’ cans to be kept for an emergency; a tool box; a spare wheel and several spades. When they travelled, the brew pots and cut-down petrol tins that made the campfires were tied on to the side of the truck. In camp, these marked out the kitchen area next to the spaces where each man’s bed roll was laid out on the hard ground, with his personal kit of a haversack, webbing equipment, overcoat, gas mask and tin hat neatly piled at its head.2
At six o’clock each evening, one man from each of the sections was called to accompany the corporal to platoon headquarters to collect their rations. Equipped with sacks, canisters and empty water cans, they made their way over to the quartermaster’s sergeant, who had already laid out ‘basic’ piles on the ground consisting of four cans of bully for each six-man section, a tin of milk, a tin of cheese, and one orange per man. The men greeted him with the usual opening gambit, ‘Wot, no fresh meat?’ In fact, fresh meat only ever appeared ‘once in a blue moon’, but the men made it a habit to groan over their bully beef. This was the name sailors had given to those early cans produced by the pioneers of meat canning in imitation of Nicolas Appert’s beef bouillon. But the bully beef the troops ate in North Africa was, in fact, that compacted form of canned beef invented by William Vestey in Chicago in the 1870s. The chances were that the cans had been shipped all the way to North Africa from the Fray Bentos canning factory in Argentina, which supplied Britain with most of its corned beef during the war. ‘Anyone now for Cruft’s Specials?’ called out the sergeant.3 This was the hardtack the troops compared to dog biscuits. No doubt the 28 lb tins had been packed in Carr’s Carlisle biscuit factory, which churned out tons of hardtack for the army.
Corned beef, hardtack and, if they were fortunate, potatoes were the staple diet of the desert soldiers in this early part of the war. ‘Here’s two tins of spuds; you’ll have to toss!’ the sergeant continued.4 The tins contained familiar white potatoes, which the men preferred. Those who lost the toss were given fresh yellow Egyptian sweet potatoes and cursed their luck. So unpopular with the troops were sweet potatoes that later in the war the British army set up a scheme to encourage the cultivation of white potatoes in the Middle East. The merchant seaman Roy Bayly recalled bringing a shipment of seed potatoes to Cairo, a troublesome cargo as they needed constant ventilation to ensure that they did not start to rot. In the post-war years, when he saw Egyptian white potatoes for sale in British supermarkets, he used to regard them proprietorially as ‘descendants of “my” potatoes of 1943’.5 Margarine and jam in 7 lb tins were distributed next, amid vociferous complaints that the jam was strawberry rather than the much-preferred gooseberry. There were also a few rude comments about the tins of fish the sergeant had spare. Last, but certainly not least, the sugar and tea were carefully measured out. The men virtually counted every leaf as the sergeant ladled each section’s third of a mug of tea leaves out of his sack. The sugar was poured into German respirator cases. The British soldiers had adopted these as useful containers as they had hinged lids. Finally, two gallons of water were given out and, heavily laden, the men made their way back to camp.6
Here, Crimp suppressed his irritation with his NCO, who constantly felt the need to demonstrate his authority by choosing which rations should be cooked each day and allotting the men potato-peeling and tin-opening duties. His interference made food preparation into an irksome exercise when, in fact, left to their own devices they would have taken pleasure in the performance of these small domestic chores.7 As darkness fell, Crimp’s section prepared themselves a simple dinner of bully beef and sweet potatoes, followed by rice pudding with a dollop of jam and an orange. Oranges were virtually the only fresh fruit available in the desert. Cyprus, cut off from its peacetime markets by U-boats in the Mediterranean, had a glut and these were fed to the troops.
Crimp was glad to eat in the darkness, as during the day it was ‘the devil’s own job’ to keep the hordes of flies that plagued them with ‘malign persistence’ from landing on their food. It was only at sunset that the flies all simultaneously disappeared, ‘as at some secret signal’.8 With their dinner eaten, the men began the serious business of brewing tea. The brew can was filled with water and set over a cut-down biscuit tin with a few inches of petrol-soaked sand in the bottom. When the water had come to a rolling boil, a couple of handfuls of tea leaves were thrown in and the brew was set aside to strengthen. Meanwhile tinned milk and sugar were distributed among the mugs gathered on the ground next to the fire. Hot, sweet tea was as much of a comfort to the soldiers in the desert as it was to the working classes at home. ‘As long as there’s no lack of char or fags everyone’s happy’, wrote Crimp. ‘When there’s a shortage of either, morale slumps.’9
Before the war John Tonkin worked for the New Zealand Shipping Company in charge of their stores department, and as a consequence he acquired ‘an elementary knowledge of cooking’. Having originally been posted to an anti-aircraft battery that served in Norway, he retrained as a cook and was posted to Egypt and Crete, where he must have been one of the British army’s most inventive chefs.
HOW TO USE UP AN EXCESS OF MARROWS
‘Soldiers by and large will not eat vegetable marrow, with white sauce or without it.’ Have the butcher make up two hundred pounds of mince from fresh beef, onions and herbs (‘really hard graft in a hot climate’). Hollow out the excess numbers of vegetable marrows delivered to the unit. Fill said marrows with the mince mixture. Bake in Aldershot ovens. ‘A great success with the troops.’
THE FAVOURITE METHOD FOR COOKING CORNED BEEF ON CRETE
‘Cut the meat into slices and deep fry them in flour and egg batter.’
WELSH RAREBIT THE CRETAN WAY
First assign a fatigue party to undo multiple quantities of the miniature cheese segments enclosed in foil which the troops refuse to eat. ‘Prepare onions by slicing across them very thinly.’ Make a ‘quantity of thickening with flour and plenty of splendid Cretan eggs’. Evaporated milk makes an especially good addition. Place this and the cheese segments in Sawyer boilers and season. Detail cooks to stir the mixture while it bubbles over the fire. Finish with Worcester sauce. In the meantime have cook’s assistants line baking trays with slices of bread. Brown this bread off lightly in the ovens and butter the resulting toast. Cover generously with the cheese mixture and return to the ovens and brown. Serve to the eager troops.10
The British soldiers in North Africa were given the same ration that had fed the Empire’s sailors, explorers, cowboys, indentured labourers and pioneer settlers. As we have seen, over the centuries the British had become expert in processing and packaging durable foods and transporting them great distances to feed their colonists and settlers as they spread to virtually every corner of the globe. When war broke out in 1939, the British Isles sat at the centre of a complex trading web. Every day between 15 and 20 ships docked at British ports bringing the wheat, frozen and chilled meat, sugar, tea and canned milk that fed the nation’s working classes. At the same time, intercolonial trade took countless goods from one colony to another. After Britain, Australia was India’s biggest customer for tea, while Burmese rice fed colonial subjects not only in Bengal and Ceylon but as far away as East and southern Africa, the Gambia, Mauritius, Zanzibar and Fiji.11 This reliance on imports and dependence on sea trade could have been Britain’s Achilles heel if Hitler had decided to prioritise the building of U-boats as the head of the submarine arm of the German navy, Admiral Karl Dönitz, recommended. Although U-boats were a menace, however, and thousands of Empire seamen lost their lives when their ships were torpedoed, the German blockade never seriously threatened to bring Britain to its knees.12
The Empire was, in fact, the source of Britain’s strength. Britain was not a tiny island standing alone on the edge of Europe but the centre of a powerful network on which it drew for supplies of men, arms and ammunition, raw materials and, above all, food. As an Englishman, Crimp was in a minority in the Eighth Army that fought Erwin Rommel in North Africa. He was joined in the desert by troops from all over the Empire: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, India, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Ceylon, Cyprus, the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Palestine, Rodrigues, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanganyika and Uganda.13 It was a similar picture in the other theatres of war. Australian warships fought in the Mediterranean; South Africa supplied mine sweepers, bombers and fighter aircraft; the Indian air force fought the Japanese; and British airmen received their training in Australia, Canada, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.14 Nigeria’s supplies of tin and Ceylon’s provisions of rubber were vital after the fall of Malaya to the Japanese, while Cyprus produced silk for parachutes.15
In 1939, Britain imported from Canada virtually all the wheat it used to make bread. It also imported large quantities of grain as fodder for livestock, as British farms still produced almost half of the country’s meat supplies and all of its milk. However, the loss of calories involved in converting grain into meat meant that in wartime it made no sense to use scarce shipping space for bulky feed grains. And as the calorific value of wheat was also poor in comparison to that of meat, it made more sense to grow wheat and import meat.16 The wartime ploughing-up campaign, which turned pastureland into fields of ripening corn, would have warmed the heart of Robert Cecil, who had in 1601 identified the plough as the foundation of England’s stable society.17 As a result, in 1943, half of the wheat in the National Loaf was grown by British farmers.18
The farmers out on Canada’s western prairies adapted by cultivating coarse feed grains instead of wheat. These were fed to pigs on the east coast to make into bacon for Britain. New Zealand responded to Britain’s request for cheese, thereby packing twice as much energy and protein into a cubic foot of shipping space than was provided by frozen lamb. But when in 1942 the British discovered they were running short of cooking fat, due to the Japanese invasion of South East Asia, the New Zealanders obligingly introduced butter rationing and converted their cheese-making factories back to making butter. At the same time, Argentina supplied corned beef, which the British stored in warehouses as a reserve against meat shortages, and the United States provided deboned and telescoped beef – so as to fit as much as possible into ships’ holds – canned Spam and sausages, cheese and dried egg.19
It was not only the settler colonies and the United States that came to Britain’s rescue. ‘Crack for Victory’ became a slogan in West Africa, and schoolchildren throughout the region cheerfully broke open palm fruit stones while singing about winning the war by knocking Hitler on the head.20 They produced over 400,000 tons of feather-light palm kernels to be processed into margarine to supply British housewives with their ration of 2–3 oz a week.21 The tropical colonies mainly supplied goods that at the beginning of the war no one wanted. It appeared to be an act of benevolence when the British organised control boards to buy up West African cocoa and Mauritian sugar at low fixed prices. But as the war progressed, worldwide demand for food escalated and Britain found a market for cocoa beans in America, where they were turned into emergency K-rations for US troops. It was Britain that profited from the upturn in the fortunes of these commodities, not the colonial farmers.22 And if British civilians were well fed as a result of the policy of importing condensed, high-energy foods, this was because the country was able to draw on farms in the settler colonies, which extended the nation’s agricultural estate over vast tracts of the world’s land.
In order to reach North Africa, Crimp’s ship had sailed from England to Durban – where the infantryman spent a week ridding his nostrils of the cloying smell of the rotting vegetables kept in the store below his berth – before continuing up the east coast of Africa and into the Suez Canal.23 German U-boats had effectively closed the Mediterranean to Allied shipping, and all troops and supplies for the North African campaign were forced to make the long journey around the Cape. This caused chaos in the Red Sea ports, as they did not have the capacity to cope with the more than five million tons of imported goods that were needed for the military campaign alone. Matters were made worse by American businessmen, not yet in the war, trying to capitalise on the wartime shortage of consumer goods in the Middle East; incongruous piles of crates of stockings and underwear imported from the United States began to build up on the docks alongside tanks and military supplies.24
The Middle East was saved from chaos by the talented young Australian, Robert Jackson, who headed the Middle East Supply Centre. The Centre successfully co-ordinated the harvest collection, food stocks, industrial production and import needs of the region so that it remained stable despite the wartime disruption.25 Meanwhile, the military campaign was not going well, and in the summer of 1942, the Allies were driven back across the desert towards Cairo. On their diet of bully beef and biscuit, the troops fell sick with jaundice, dysentery, vitamin deficiency diseases and battle fatigue. Crimp displayed the symptoms of all these afflictions. He felt as though the barren desert had saturated his consciousness, making his ‘mind as sterile as itself’, and his whole being was so overwhelmed by apathy that he felt a ‘vast aversion to exertion in every form’.26 Large consignments of tinned fruit were brought up from South Africa in an effort to supply the men with vitamins, fibre and the will to fight.
The German advance was finally halted by the Second Battle of El Alamein in the autumn of 1942. At the other end of the desert the pressure on the Germans intensified with Allied landings in Morocco. Winston Churchill was determined to prioritise the needs of the troops fighting to push the Germans off the African continent, but at the same time the demands on British shipping were increasing. The United States was supplying less meat to Britain than it had promised, and the Ministry of Food was lobbying hard for extra ships to be sent to Argentina and Australia to replenish Britain’s depleted meat reserves. Preparations for an assault on continental Europe meant that yet more ships had to be allocated to the build-up of American forces in Britain.27 Churchill therefore decided to safeguard the supply of food imports into Britain, and cut the number of ships sailing to the Indian Ocean by 60 per cent.28 The consequences for the subjects of the Empire were severe.
The effects were immediately felt in Mauritius. The sugar-producing island had done its best to replace its usual imports of Burmese rice and Indian lentils with home-grown manioc, maize and peanuts. But drought, a cyclone, and the sinking of a ship bringing peanut-processing machinery confounded the population’s best efforts. When Indian Ocean shipping was cut, so was their lifeline of wheat imports. They only just managed to scrape through the war, malnourished but largely saved from starvation by mercy shipments of Australian wheat and manioc starch from Madagascar.29
In East Africa, forced conscription took many men off the reserves and into the army. Others were recruited to work as labourers in the ports and railways, on sisal plantations in Tanganyika, and as hands on white settlers’ farms in the Rhodesias and Kenya. When the short rains of September to November failed in some areas in 1942, the elderly, women and children left behind on the reserves struggled to break new ground so as to plant extensively in time for when the long rains began in February. Added to this, the colonial administrations were pressing for the peasants to sell as much maize as possible to the government; they needed it to provide the men working outside the reserves with their daily ration of 2 lb of posho a day. That this left poorer households without food reserves and vulnerable to famine simply did not enter into their calculations.30 When in some regions the long rains, which should have lasted until June, stuttered to a halt in March 1943, food scarcity led to a thriving black market. Maize brought in from areas where the rains had continued sold for four times the usual price. Wealthy families used their savings to get them through, but the poor were priced out of the market. They resorted to stealing green unripened cobs from their neighbours’ fields. And in many areas they began to starve. In mid February 1943, two ships scheduled for India were diverted to take grain to East Africa to ease the situation.31
The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, protested against these diversions, for in Bengal in 1943, the need for outside assistance was pressing. When in January 1943 the British government announced that they would cut shipping to the Indian Ocean, they were aware that a food crisis was brewing in India. Linlithgow had asked for 600,000 tons of grain in the coming year. But Churchill and his scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, were unsympathetic. Churchill regarded Eastern colonial governments as improvident, and pronounced that there was ‘no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done’.32 The cut in shipping did not cause the Bengal famine, but it meant that there was no hope of staving it off or, when famine did strike, of alleviating it. A mixture of a poor rice harvest, wartime measures that hampered the movement of rice from surplus to deficit areas, and the government’s incompetence when they fixed rice prices too low – causing what supplies there were to be channelled onto the black market – led to spiralling food price inflation. The poor and the wage-dependent – landless labourers and artisans, office clerks and teachers – who bought their food on a daily basis were priced out of the market.33
During the Durga Puja holidays in 1943, Bisewar Chakrabati, headmaster of a secondary school in the north, visited his home village of Munsiganj in the Ganges delta. He was shocked to find that the ‘whole population seems to be moving silently towards death’.34 When the villagers could no longer find the strength to walk to the community kitchen, they simply lay down on the cold ground and died.35 Desperate skeletons began drifting into Calcutta in the summer. Ian Stephens, editor of the Calcutta newspaper The Statesman, was struck by how quietly ‘famine comes … There was no shouting, no violence, no looting of shops.’ The starving simply wandered about ‘bewildered [and] finding no help … squatted in the by-ways and grew feebler and lay down and after a while died’.36
It took an eight-week campaign on the part of Stephens, who ran editorials attacking government indifference to the plight of the Bengalis, and published letters and testimonials and photographs of the dead and dying on the streets of Calcutta, before the British government in London finally acknowledged in October 1943 that Bengal had been struck by famine.37 And it was only when Lord Wavell replaced the incompetent Linlithgow as viceroy in September 1943 that any decisive action was taken to remedy the appalling situation. The military now escorted deliveries of rice to rural areas; boats that had been removed in order to deny their use to possible Japanese invaders were repaired and put back into service; price controls were enforced and rationing was introduced.38 People continued to die, but the starving and the destitute on Calcutta’s streets were rounded up to perish out of sight in special camps.39 While just over 31,000 Allied infantry died in the North Africa campaign, around three million Bengalis died from starvation and the effects of malnutrition.40
More than anything, India needed shipments of grain to stave off incipient famine in the rest of the country. There were reports of tensions among starving rubber estate workers in Mysore and Travancore. Wavell repeatedly asked London for shipments of food to be diverted to India, but a government committee set up to look into the question of Indian requirements decided that the priority for the limited shipping should continue to be British civilian food supplies. A Canadian offer of 100,000 tons of wheat was turned down for this reason. The Indian legislative assembly was prevented from applying to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, as the British feared the judgement of its officers. It was only when Wavell was able to persuade the South East Asia Command that the troops could withstand a reduction in supplies that he was able to secure a shipment of 200,000 tons of grain. Incompetence in India certainly exacerbated the situation, but Churchill and his War Cabinet deliberately chose to sacrifice India’s population to hunger.41 When Wavell heard of the airlifts of supplies to the Netherlands in March 1945, he remarked that they demonstrated ‘a very different attitude towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe’.42
The decision to divert shipping away from the Empire enabled the British to rebuild their stocks of food. While Churchill’s henchman, Lord Cherwell, was quite happy for India to ‘tighten its belt’, he became mildly hysterical when in March 1943 British food reserves fell below 50 per cent of their supposed minimum.43 In fact, the cut in Indian Ocean shipping had allowed an extra two million tons of supplies to reach the British Isles.44 Moreover, by 1942, the Ministry of Food had established a stable and satisfactory food distribution system that, to the great benefit of British civilian morale, the population perceived to be fair. The growth in war industries had also solved the scourge of unemployment. High wartime wages meant that the working classes could afford to buy enough food for their families, and the introduction of rationing ensured that everyone had equal access to the country’s supplies.45
The British civilian’s wartime ration was similar to the nineteenth-century working-class industrial diet, in that it was heavily dependent on bread and potatoes, both of which were unrationed. To the nutritionists’ satisfaction, however, from 1942, the National Loaf was wholemeal. The scarcity of shipping forced the government to use as much home-grown wheat as possible, and the extraction rate for milled flour was raised from 70 to 80 per cent. This meant that it retained the nutritious wheatgerm and produced a much-loathed beige loaf.46 In addition, British farmers produced so many potatoes that the public could not consume them all, and large amounts ended up as pig feed. In the inter-war years there had still been poor families in Britain for whom meat was a rare treat. Now rationing guaranteed every working-class person a shilling’s worth of meat per week, as well as 4 oz of bacon, 2 oz each of cheese and butter, 4 oz of margarine, three pints of milk, an egg or its equivalent in dried egg powder, 8 oz of sugar and 2 oz of tea. Apart from the fact that tea supplies were constricted, this was a luxurious version of the industrial ration. Sugar, once seen as a profligate working-class indulgence, had become so integral a part of the British diet and so essential a source of energy that even though it was nutrionally deficient it was included on the ration.47 In addition, the nutritionists on the sub-committee on food policy managed, with the co-operation of Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, to ensure a programme of free school meals, priority supplies of milk for pregnant women and nursing mothers, as well as milk, orange juice and cod liver oil for under-fives. Rickets and vitamin deficiency diseases all but disappeared in Britain, and maternal and infant mortality rates improved. The stubborn pocket of working-class deprivation was at last removed.48
During the war, the hierarchy of priorities that had always operated within the Empire became glaringly obvious. British citizens were prioritised; below them were the white settlers in the dominions; and last, and definitely least, came Britain’s colonial subjects. The Bengalis who died of famine in their millions, the East Africans forced to sell their reserves of maize and robbed of food security, the poor in Bechuanaland who were reduced to foraging for roots and berries, and the Gambians who ate the seed nuts intended for next year’s planting of peanuts were not simply suffering from unrelated wartime shortages.49 They were the other side of the coin that ensured that the British were well fed and maintained their health and energy throughout the war.50 The trading rules of the Empire had always been rigged in favour of Britain – the war both intensified the exploitation of colonialism and exposed the hollowness of its rhetoric.