Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  III

  Lloyd George’s protracted absences from the Commons, and the Northcliffe press’s useful habit of blaming the Asquith government for almost everything that went wrong in the opening months of its successor administration, helped the new prime minister to avoid confronting difficult issues directly and in public: notably the food shortage, the gravest problem to face the country in early 1917. Northcliffe, who perceptively told his staff the public did not realise that ‘the British and German empires are involved in a starving match,’ demanded rationing, and fed public unrest.71 Sir Henry Newbolt, who when not writing patriotic doggerel was link man between the Admiralty and the War Cabinet, toured the country with a lecture entitled ‘Patriotism, Pigs and Potatoes’, in which he urged people to exercise self-restraint, grow vegetables and to conserve food waste to feed pigs.72 It is easy to mock, but it was a deeply serious matter.

  The winter was intensely cold, with snow lying for much of January and February and London recording its hardest frost since 1895. Coal was scarce because of a transport shortage, and too few strong men to deliver it. Petrol was denied for the few with private cars, unless they could prove their motoring was for the war effort. The hardships were piling up. Labour shortages had left large acreages of land unploughed. Cows were sold because there was no one to milk them; horses were idle because there was no one to work them. The Army’s demand for skilled stockmen and other vital farm workers remained insatiable. Shortages were widespread: a few plutocrats were still guzzling five-course meals in West End hotels (and being publicly rebuked for it), but most people were hungry. Many public schools had days without meat, and, like the working class, schoolboys breakfasted on semi-edible bread, margarine and tea.73 A Tonbridge boy, Walter Oakeshott – later headmaster of Winchester – recalled: ‘We must have been hungrier than any generation at school ever was. We ate ravenously whatever we could, we cadged food shamelessly from the fortunate, we robbed orchards.’74 Oakeshott’s elders also suffered: by late February some of London’s leading gentlemen’s clubs – including Boodle’s, Brooks’s, the Travellers and White’s – had reduced portions and established ‘meatless days’: other clubs followed suit.75 Potatoes too had run out in parts of Scotland and the north-west by early February, and a month later were hardly obtainable in London. The London clubs, after another meeting of their secretaries at Brooks’s on 26 March, agreed to stop serving potatoes at meals. Orders were made to hotels patronised by the better-off to serve smaller portions and have meatless and potatoless days.

  By then there were hardly any fish at Billingsgate, and food shops in the capital had queues of shivering people outside from dawn onwards. Matters were so desperate that, to prevent their ‘predations’ on crops, it was agreed to allow the shooting of pheasants out of season.76 Horse thefts rose, it being believed Belgian refugee butchers were turning the animals into joints of meat and sausages and passing them off as beef or pork. Despite an improvement in Britain’s financial situation when America gave full backing to sterling, foreign exchange was short, and priority was given to using it to buy food rather than munitions: at one point it seemed Britain would not have the foreign exchange to buy Argentina’s grain surplus, on which it had been depending, nor extra meat and dairy produce from America.

  The King’s Speech ignored food production, causing Leslie Scott, a Tory MP, to move a motion for the Commons to discuss it. Scott claimed the new government had done nothing to improve production, although the difficulties farmers faced were ‘absolutely appalling’, with concern about prices unsettling them greatly.77 He also said talk of 1917 producing more food than 1916 was ‘chimerical’. Ninety per cent of the labour Neville Chamberlain would shortly offer farmers through his National Service scheme would be untrained. Scott pleaded for experienced agricultural workers serving with yeomanry regiments and based in England to be released for farm work.

  The government, nervous of public unrest, had put measures in place to try to alleviate the situation. Traders who sold regulated foods at above the controlled prices were prosecuted, notably greengrocers in breach of the Potato Order who claimed they could make no profit at the price dictated by the food controller. A greengrocer in Kentish Town was fined £5, with 5s costs, for refusing to sell potatoes to a woman unless she bought something else: it was his second offence. Nonetheless, it was clear even these measures were inadequate.

  The crisis brought out Lloyd George’s better qualities of energy and decisiveness. He delegated and intervened as necessary. He also showed a willingness to sack high officials who proved ineffective, and to take matters into his own hands – as with the enforcement of a convoy system to help secure food imports – where necessary. And he sought to balance the competing demands on manpower of fighting a war and feeding a nation. Such was his determination to get that equation right that he asked Rowland Prothero, president of the Board of Agriculture and a reflective man who had been a fellow of All Souls, to lead the task of increasing domestic food production.

  Other than manpower shortages, the main factor inhibiting large-scale food production was the state of the land. The long pre-war agricultural depression, dating from the 1870s, had left a legacy of uncultivated and derelict land that required serious, coordinated work to ensure it could be drained and brought back into production. For example, cultivated land had fallen from 836,000 acres to 780,000 between 1875 and 1915 in one predominantly arable county – Norfolk – alone.78 The county had 284,000 acres of grass, and for the 1918 harvest it would have to plough up 70,000 of these.79 The Board of Agriculture introduced a Bill to make it easier to expand the amount of arable land. Prothero announced that an increase from 19 million to 27 million acres would secure enough food to make Britain free of the ‘submarine menace’.80 However, a quarter of a million extra men would have to cultivate it, and these were not available. Some modest increase in land to grow cereals and potatoes had happened since 1916 – 330,000 acres – and even uncooperative Ireland had cultivated another 700,000 acres, proving its men were useful to the war effort even if they were not fighting. The process was, however, slow: the board expected in the first year of the new programme to get only about 400,000 more acres of land into production.

  Farmers in the east were directed to grow less mustard and use land for cereals instead; mustard was deemed not to be a ‘patriotic’ crop.81 It was estimated that 10,000 extra acres of cereal could be grown as a result of this in Lincolnshire and the Isle of Ely alone. Despite the shortages, Prothero saw it would now be essential to offer a state guarantee of minimum prices of wheat and oats for years ahead. This would make it worthwhile for farmers to undertake the investment necessary to resume larger-scale arable farming.

  He confirmed a minimum wage, of 25s a week: which MacDonald, on behalf of organised labour, dismissed as inadequate, being equivalent to only 16s before the war. Between 1914 and 1918 the cereal harvest rose from 1.706 million tons to 2.428 million. Britain never lost its reliance on food imports during the war, as it was forced to do after 1939; but from 1914 to 1918 net imports did fall from 16.7 million tons to 11.89 million.82 Also, a serious advance in agricultural policy under Prothero’s direction was the tripling of the use of sulphate of ammonia as a fertiliser, which hugely improved yields and moved British farming from traditionally organic to increasingly industrial.

  Prothero needed serious support in his task, and Lloyd George sent for Arthur Lee, a Unionist MP and former professional soldier who had worked under him in Munitions and at the War Office. Lee had been disappointed and surprised not to have been chosen for the administration in December – apparently vetoed by Law – but Lloyd George now made him director general of food production. Beaverbrook claimed he had turned the job down ‘on account of my bad health’ (he would die forty-seven years later).83 Prothero welcomed Lee and worked well with him in harness. Prothero had already announced that 260 tractors had been ordered from America and would be deployed by late March: they would be distributed o
ver the country, the Transport Service would ensure they could be driven and maintained, and their work rate would improve production. Eventually, Lee ordered 10,000 tractors from Ford in Detroit (which were slow to arrive and not always ideal for British conditions), and instituted an intensive ploughing programme that ensured vast, long-uncultivated tracts of Britain were once more growing food. He pleaded with ploughmen to think the unthinkable, and to work on Sundays; and the minister of munitions asked in March for ploughmen working in munitions factories to return to their farms for six weeks to bring as much land under cultivation as possible. To general astonishment, many of the legion of women volunteers soon proved they could operate a plough and team of horses, too. Thanks to Lee’s initiative, in 1917 an additional 4.9 million bushels of wheat, 5.1 million of barley and 36.7 million of oats were produced compared with 1916; and 42 million sacks of potatoes.84 Milner, whose role before joining the War Cabinet had been to lead a committee on food production, saw the problem was addressed in detail at the highest level, including introducing legislation where necessary. For example, he brought in a Corn Production Bill to set minimum prices for cereals, tantamount to protectionism and therefore anathema to many Liberals. It also set minimum wages and gave landlords the right to evict inefficient tenant farmers.

  In the short to medium term, though, these steps in themselves were not sufficient to cope with the huge challenges the country faced. That year’s harvest was still several months away, and despite increased wheat imports, Britain was down to nine weeks’ supply by mid-April, having fallen from fourteen weeks at the change of government the previous December.85 Food reserves would never be so low again during the war as in April 1917. Since Britain was so dependent on imported food, any gains in production were, during the U-boat war and beyond, cancelled out by the loss of food-carrying merchant ships. In the first six months of 1917 U-boats sank 2,136,126 tons of British shipping, 545,282 tons in April alone, representing 169 British ships: by comparison, in August 1916 Britain had lost just 43,254 tons. In those same six months only 631,000 tons of replacement shipping were produced in British shipyards.86 It was estimated that food imports by March 1917 had fallen by a third compared with a year earlier. In the whole of 1917, despite the situation improving after April thanks to the adoption of the convoy system, 3,729,785 tons were lost.87 Between February and June 85,000 tons of sugar went down, as in the whole of 1917 did 46,000 tons of meat.88 The human toll was depressing: 6,408 members of the merchant marine.89 The government allowed the press to print statistics of the shipping losses, which was either a commendable act of candour or a further means of urging the public to amend its eating habits.

  To release shipping for essential food supplies the government restricted imports of commodities such as timber and paper: but sourcing more wood from home placed stresses on manpower. Newspapers shrank – The Times down from its usual sixteen pages sometimes to ten by April – there were restrictions on the use of paper for posters, and some magazines suspended publication. The Navy had to accept a slowdown in ship production, with five light cruisers stopped altogether, to allow the faster replacement of the merchant fleet. Sensibly, the production of anti-submarine craft was stepped up. It was decided to order forty merchant ships from America, but these would take time. Northcliffe, who prided himself on having intelligence sources in Germany, based on contacts made on frequent visits there before the war, believed even more lethal and stealthy U-boats were being developed, so things would get worse. He did not believe that Carson, whom he knew well and respected, was being entirely frank about the extent of the shipping losses and the effect on food supplies: he urged the government to introduce rationing immediately, an idea ministers abhorred because of its potential effect on morale. Carson did, in fact, warn Riddell on 10 March that Britain faced ‘a serious shortage of food’, with just three months’ grain supply left and losses mounting.90

  As soon as he became prime minister Lloyd George had brought in Lord Devonport, proprietor of the grocery chain that evolved into International Stores, as food controller.91 He endured a baptism of fire with the recommencement of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the consequent losses of essential food. He issued the first food control orders in mid-January, which included the state requisitioning land it considered inadequately cultivated – provided it could find the labour to do it: the Women’s National Land Service Corps launched a new recruiting drive. The prices for cereals from the 1917 crop were set in advance, and Devonport issued recommendations for the weekly consumption per head of staple foods – four pounds of bread, two and a half pounds of meat and three-quarters of a pound of sugar.

  Such state interference in the lives of the people prompted predictable opposition. A Times correspondent contended that the guidelines meant quantities ‘are considerably less than those allowed to German prisoners and paupers in workhouses, neither of whom are presumably very actively employed?’92 He continued: ‘If so, will you or the Food Controller supply me with reasons to induce my household, who all work hard, to consume one-third less than they ever did before?’ Conscientious objectors in Dartmoor were indeed getting over twice the recommended meat and bread allowances, and more generous quantities of other food. Their diet, and the already meagre one in the workhouses, was cut. (Within weeks, in response to complaints that Dartmoor was a place of undue leniency, a Home Office inspection took place. Discipline was made harsher and the warders – known as instructors – were given more power. Local people were especially hostile to the inmates; some wanted them kept permanently in chains, believing convicts who worked on the moor before the war were morally preferable and less prone to ‘slackness’.)93

  In response to complaints about the use of sugar and yeast, to conserve barley and maize and to save on transport, even beer output was restricted from late March, to 10 million barrels a year, compared with 26 million in the year to 31 March 1916. A reduction of 8 million barrels a day was the equivalent of freeing up thirty trains.94 There was a rise in price of 1d a pint for light beer and more for heavier ale, and the non-beer-drinking classes were disobliged too: the amount of wines and spirits that could be taken out of bond was reduced by 50 per cent. The government instructed poulterers to rear hens for eggs and not to fatten them for the table; and for pigs to be fed on beechnuts, acorns and waste. By May 1917 retail prices were around 102 per cent higher than pre-war.

  Much reliance was placed on public-spirited acts to improve the availability of food. At Eton, boys cultivated one and a half acres during 1917 and produced 15 tons of potatoes, which they sold for £100, a profit of £45 19s 8d. The dividend went to a local hospital for convalescent soldiers.95 On 2 May the King issued a proclamation urging better economy in the use of food, and to counsel the more careful feeding of horses, avoiding using oats or other grains that could provide human food; the proclamation was ordered to be read by clergy at Sunday services for four weeks. Strict rationing had been in force in royal palaces since February. Nothing like it had happened since George III, in the Napoleonic Wars, had in December 1800 issued a similar proclamation. Devonport had his department issue a recipe for what became known as ‘War Cake’, with the noble English tradition of afternoon tea branded a ‘needless luxury’, and with a threat to prohibit the opening of new tea-shops.96 The Times took great pleasure in pointing out that even work at the Ministry of Food was daily interrupted by afternoon tea. However, the public chose not to listen, so in mid-April Devonport banned the manufacture of fancy cakes altogether.

  Voluntarism and exhortations were not enough to prevent problems flooding into Devonport’s office throughout the first half of 1917. Questions were asked in Parliament, as the convoy system reduced shipping losses, about large quantities of food going off before it had been distributed. In May and June the London County Council’s sanitary inspectors condemned tons of bacon, because of a failure to work out the logistics of transport or cold storage; though the government alleged that much of the rotten meat
had been unfit before reaching Britain. Shipments of Danish bacon were taking ten days to get to London, and a further six to reach Portsmouth. This was precisely the sort of problem the food controller was supposed to prevent. Nor had the controller managed to stop profiteering and speculation, a point about which the government, requiring the public’s continued cooperation, remained highly conscious.

  Fleet Street, led by Northcliffe, rounded on Devonport for his alleged inaction, demanding rationing and denouncing profiteers. Sadly for the food controller, some of his well-intentioned policies failed because they had not been properly thought out. On 22 March Devonport announced that it would become an offence punishable by imprisonment for any retailer to sell more than a fortnight’s supply of sugar to any customer; and anyone with more than a fortnight’s supply at home would be charged with hoarding, the police having right of entry to any house where this was suspected. However, many domestic jam-makers had stored sugar for that purpose, and there was outrage that they could be prosecuted: so the order had to be altered. As there was too little sugar to supply to fruit farmers for jam-making, a main purpose of growing fruit – which thanks to the tastes of the times was consumed in infinitely higher quantities in jam than in any other way – was negated. Cereals were then grown instead of strawberries. The chocolate supply was similarly blighted, and joined fancy cakes as something largely of memory. Also, the massive bureaucracy of the state, in its thirst for regulation, was often devoid of common sense and blind to how some of its directives conflicted with others, notably in the cultivation of fruit where the land could have been used for other foodstuffs.