Rebellion: No to Snoek!
Back in the forties, Labour’s idea of Britain was beginning to take shape. This would be a well-disciplined, austere country, organized from London by dedicated public servants, who in turn directed a citizenry which was dignified and restrained. Sanitation, reason, officialdom and fairness; it was a Roundhead vision, without the compulsory psalms and military dictatorship. Unfortunately for Labour, the real country was nothing like this. It was (and is) a more disordered, self-pleasuring, individualistic place. Labour’s ethic was about restraint and fair shares. Ministers viewed consumerism with disdain, a personality defect of Americans. Yet consumerism would soon erupt with a strength never known before. People were pleased with the free spectacles and the more generous insurance arrangements, and they took to the prefabricated houses, and accepted Indian and Pakistani independence without much problem. It was just that they loathed the restrictions, the queues and the shortages, and disliked being lectured about Dunkirk seven or eight years later. And so the British did what they always do, in their way. They rebelled. They did this not in the French fashion, violently, with flying cobblestones and wild manifestos, but quietly and stubbornly. As we have seen, they rebelled over housing shortages. They refused to wear the clothes they were told they should. And they would not eat what was put in front of them, either.
Diaries and letters of the time show a country utterly obsessed by food. There had been a general assumption that as soon as the war was over pre-war variety and spice would return to the shops. Instead rations were cut and the disappointment was bitter. One response was the rise in popularity of that wartime character, the spiv. The later BBC television comedy Dad’s Army featured in the fictitious platoon, one Joe Walker, played by James Beck (who was even wilder than his character, and died at forty-four from alcohol poisoning). Walker is a double-breasted-suit-wearing, pencil-moustached, perky villain with a heart of gold, forever upending the moral pretensions of his betters by slipping them an illicit bottle of whisky, a carton of cigarettes or a pair of stockings for the missus. Walker is the service economy in guerrilla form. He is a criminal but one whom everyone relies on. After the war the real-life spivs, the traders and dealers on street corners or in cafes, came out of the shadows and became a recognized part of life under Labour.
Moral confusion about people taking the law into their own hands features in two of the hugely popular Ealing comedies, both first shown in 1949. In Passport to Pimlico, the citizens of an area around a bombsite find out they legally belong not to the United Kingdom but to the Duchy of Burgundy. As Burgundians, they are free from the rationing and petty restrictions hemming in other Londoners. Almost as soon as they have finished celebrating their freedom, they are swamped by a plague of spivs, jostling, threatening and causing a breakdown of law and order. They represent the suppressed greed and wild consumerism that socialists feared was always present under the surface – as indeed it was. When the British State responds by cutting off Pimlico with barbed wire, the Burgundians hold out, in a comic mimicry of the country’s stand in 1940. The people of London take their side and throw them food to keep the ‘Burgundians’ from having to surrender. It seems clear that this was directly copied from scenes in the real-life squatting revolt eighteen months earlier. In a comic conclusion the tensions are resolved, just as in a Shakespeare comedy. The rebels reach an amicable agreement with the authorities and return to the ration-card Britain where everything is fair and ordered, if somewhat frustrating.
Whisky Galore!, shown a few months after Passport to Pimlico, comes down on the other side of the argument. It relates what happens when a cargo ship full of whisky, tellingly called the SS Politician, runs aground off the Hebridean island of Todday. The story is fictional, taken from a comic novel, but was based on real wartime events; the actual ship was called the SS Cabinet Minister. The islanders, like the rest of Britain, are whisky-starved and opportunistic. The film tells the story of how the island community steals and hides huge quantities of whisky which had been intended for North America, foiling the authorities in the shape of the English Home Guard commander Captain Waggett (played by Basil Radford; a precursor to Arthur Lowe in Dad’s Army). In the film, the puritanical British State is subverted by a tightly knit and determined island community who end with a great dance of celebration and liberation. In Todday, unlike Pimlico, the people’s yearning for good things triumphs. In real life, the rather heroic struggle of a lone exciseman to recover the whisky divided the islanders, led to convictions for theft and produced a poisoned atmosphere between families which lasted for many years. The fantasy, however, is remembered and the truth forgotten.
One can see the tension between the Burgundians returning to ration books, and the islanders of Todday beating the authorities to keep the stolen whisky, as a filmic version of the political tension between wartime-style controls championed by the Labour government; and the frustrated hostility exemplified by pro-free market Tories. Eventually the controls would be partly dismantled, rationing would end and the first great consumer boom would begin, more or less in parallel with Labour’s loss of power in 1950-1. In the meantime, however, a surprising degree of petty criminality was tolerated in an otherwise law-abiding country, not just on the part of spivs but the shopkeepers bending rules to help old customers, or the people who filched a little from work, or the ordinary men in pubs who would buy an extra pair of stockings for their wives. This criminality, however, would not have existed without the privations of the time, and the impertinence of officialdom. A novelist looking back a decade later caught the mood:
Ludicrous penalties were imposed on farmers who had not kept strictly to the letter of licences to slaughter pigs; in one case, the permitted building was used, the authorised butcher was employed, but the job had to be done the day before it was permitted; in another case, the butcher and the timing coincided, but the pig met its end in the wrong building. Never had a bureaucracy so flaunted its total failure to comprehend the spirit of the times, which was low and resentful…So really, almost everyone participated; it was a sort of pale, hangdog spivery in back kitchens and the rear of shops.
There were other ways of rebelling. The British Housewives’ League, formed in 1945 by a clergyman’s wife to campaign against rude shopkeepers and the amount of time spent queuing, helped remove the hapless food minister Ben Smith over the withdrawal of powdered egg. Other foods brought into the country and foisted on consumers were regarded as disgusting. Horses were butchered and sold, sometimes merely as ‘steak’. Whalemeat was bought from South Africa, both in huge slabs and in tins, described as ‘rich and tasty, just like beefsteak’. It was relatively popular for a short while, but not long. Magnus Pyke, later a popular television scientist, explained that though it tasted fine to the first bite of a drooling mouth, ‘as you went on biting, the taste of steak was quickly overcome by a strong flavour of – cod-liver oil’. Then there was snoek, a ferocious tropical fish supposed to be able to hiss like a snake and bark like a dog.
One of the odder vignettes of wartime Britain has the young Barbara Castle, then Betts, working for the fish division of the Ministry of Food. She was quartered in a grand London hotel, the Carlton, which boasted large bathrooms and generously sized baths. These were filled with fish, to be observed for experimental purposes. Barbara Castle, in short, lived with a snoek. Her report on its behaviour must have been favourable because in October 1947 the government began to buy millions of tins of snoek from South Africa. Protein was in short supply. South Africa would take pounds, not the scarce dollars. So ministers tried to persuade the British that, in salads, pasties, sandwiches, or even as ‘snoek piquante’ with spring onions, vinegar and syrup, the powdery, bland fish was really quite tasty. The country begged to differ and mocked it mercilessly, buying very little. Snoek became a great joke in the newspapers and in Parliament. Eventually it was withdrawn and sold off for almost nothing as catfood.
The Conservatives would later put out pamphlets showing pictures of a horse, a whale and a reindeer to show ‘the wide choice of food you have under the Socialists’. Labour tried hard to keep the country decently fed during a grim few years, when much of the world was at least as hungry. But between the black market organized by the spivs, which spread very widely across Britain in the forties; the British Housewives’ League, whose rhetoric would be remembered by a young Conservative student called Margaret Thatcher; and the spontaneous boycott of snoek, the public showed that it was fed up to the back teeth with rationing. Fair or not, as soon as they could, Labour from 1948 and then Tory ministers began to remove the restrictions and restore something like a market in food. American aid began to flow again and spiritually the mildly anarchic island of Todday trumped goody Pimlico.