Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  One notable success of Rhondda’s first months in office was an expansion of factory canteens, whose existence helped regulate the supply of food. By the end of the war, one thousand industrial canteens were supplying a million cheap meals a day. However, as with much else that he did, these were not sufficient to solve such a widespread problem, and it was clear that an even more interventionist approach would be needed. Opening a communal kitchen in Silvertown, east London, on 3 January 1918, Rhondda conceded that compulsory rationing across the nation, and not just in urban areas, ‘had to come’.121 He warned the public that it would not eliminate queues, nor would it ensure ‘absolutely fair’ distribution. It was not fair as it was: despite the best efforts of the local food committee, 3,000 miners in Burnley went on strike in mid-January in protest at unequal food distribution, and demanded full rationing. Women protested in London suburbs when margarine ran out; 100,000 workers marched on a Saturday afternoon to Manchester town hall to demand better distribution.

  It would not, indeed, be until Rhondda grasped the nettle of rationing that any degree of fairness would be introduced into regulating how the British were fed for the rest of the war. On 22 December 1917 the Ministry of Food issued a plan to ensure the more equal distribution of meat, margarine, tea and butter; on Christmas Eve local food committees had been authorised to implement rationing, using a system of customer registration, in areas where food was scarce. No sooner were butter and margarine on the ration than the combined amount per person per week was cut from 10 ounces to 8 ounces: but by the new year queues were shorter. On 31 December, with prices rising again (especially in urban areas) because of shortages, it was announced that sugar too would be rationed, with 8 ounces allocated per person per week, and the manufacture of ice cream was banned. Rationing of two other essential items – meat (16 ounces a week) and butter (4 ounces) – was brought in early in 1918 more to calm people down than because of shortages. In July 1918 jam, tea and lard were rationed, and by the end of the war bread too, at 7 pounds a week for a working man and 4 pounds for a working woman.

  By February 1918 an estimated half a million people were regularly queuing for food, with the queues worst on Saturdays.122 Lloyd George, still fearing a public revolt, wanted a food distributor appointed, because he saw the shortages as ‘dangerous’.123 Distribution failures caused most shortages, and were usually the fault of the government interfering in the pricing mechanism. Controls were vigorously enforced: there were 50,000 prosecutions in the following year, as rationing persisted beyond the Armistice, though the amounts were generous compared with what Germans were enduring and with what would be necessary during Hitler’s war.124 The new system meant the end of queues and arrested the decline of morale, though Lloyd George received reports from Wales in early January about unrest there, especially among munitions workers. Rhondda’s proposed scheme was simplified to each customer registering with a retailer, and no retailer accepting more registrations than he could serve. Food was then distributed to shops in proportion to the numbers of their registered customers. The Labour Party and trades unions called for a universal scheme to ensure fair distribution of all foodstuffs.

  Rhondda instituted one ‘meatless day’ per week – on which no meat could be sold – from 1 January. It was as well, because after his department had fixed its prices at new levels the previous week, cattle markets emptied as few farmers felt it wise to sell their cattle. Sheep and pigs could still be had, but the government announced it would fix their live price as well. Farmers then stopped sending this livestock, too, to market. By the end of the first week in January many London butchers were closed for want of merchandise, and by the second week closures had spread across Britain: most days became meatless days. Middle-class areas were as badly hit as working-class ones. The position was not rectified for some weeks, despite the King’s ordering that cattle be sent from the royal farms at Windsor to the Slough market to set an example to other farmers. But in the second week of January 36.4 per cent less meat was sold at Smithfield than a year earlier, and queues and closures persisted around the country.125

  In the end it was the attempt to rig the market, and not the institution of a meatless day, that reduced consumption. However, it created an impression of fairness, as there was supposedly an equality of sacrifice. On Friday 12 April, on a meatless day at the Savoy in London, diners could instead opt for Homard Cardinal at 12s (probably what a working-class family spent on food in a week) or, if not pushing the boat out, Turbot poché, sauce Génoise at 5s or Omelette aux Pointes d’Asperges at 3s. A Punch cartoon from February 1918 showed an elderly coroneted peer in morning dress looking in the window of a butcher’s shop with a working man; each clutches his ration card. The worker says to the peer: ‘What’s your fancy mate? Mine’s a couple of sausages?’ His lordship replies: ‘Well sir, I was wondering how much saddle of mutton I could get for fivepence.’126

  Rhondda had inevitably attracted criticism for his management of the food supply, despite having had an almost impossible task and having inherited a poorly run control operation from Devonport. He sought to defend his policies – especially his price controls, which had angered producers – in the Lords on 27 February 1918, two days after meat rationing had been introduced in greater London. By this time fish prices had been fixed too. ‘I took office in June last,’ he said, ‘when prices had been left to the free play of the laws of supply and demand, and when prices were soaring. They had continued steadily and heavily to rise for three years, although there was no shortage, until they were, in the case of imported foodstuffs, more than double the rate obtaining before the war.’127 He outlined some of the historic price rises: from July 1914 to January 1916, flank of British beef had risen in price by 45 per cent; by July 1916 it was 80 per cent; and by July 1917 was up by 132.2 per cent. However, he claimed the price had fallen back, having risen by just 101 per cent to that time. Mutton in July 1917 was 142 per cent up on July 1914; that had been reduced to a mere 92 per cent by February 1918. Such evidence persuaded Rhondda to risk saying that these were ‘two instances of the prices of British-produced food which have been brought under control.’128 Bread was up by just 54 per cent, thanks to government subsidy. However, uncontrolled foodstuffs were surging in price: fish had risen 217 per cent before it was controlled; and eggs by 245 per cent since July 1914. Rhondda admitted the rise in prices had caused ‘seething discontent’: but controls had reduced that discontent and, therefore, increased Britain’s chances of winning the war, by helping eliminate a major cause of industrial unrest.

  He was determined to explain that the tenets of traditional liberalism simply could not obtain during a time of total war.

  We are charged with offending against the laws of economics. Well, we are living in times of war. I think I explained pretty fully to your Lordships … [that] I intended to pursue the policy that we were going to set aside the law of supply and demand; and I gave your Lordships the reasons for that, one reason being that it was an established fundamental law of economics that a very slight shortage, below the requirements, of any article of prime necessity, leads, or may lead, to a several-fold advance in price. It was because of my knowledge of economics, and because of my knowledge that this law of supply and demand could not be allowed to operate in abnormal times such as these, that led me to take that definite line.129

  So long as he remained food controller, he said, the restrictions would stay: in food as in so much else, the public had had to learn there could be no exceptions at such a time.

  Cleverly, Rhondda soothed public opinion by producing statistics claiming to show the food shortage had improved rather than damaged the nation’s health – as would also be the case after rationing in the Second World War. Even though the youngest and fittest men were abroad, the registrar general had announced that there had been fewer deaths in the three months to 30 September than in any other such period in the previous fifty years. Full employment and higher disposable incomes for the w
orking class also helped. In ninety-six large towns the death rate had fallen from 13.5 per thousand in 1914 to 10.9 in the most recent period. Infant mortality had dropped from 128 per thousand to 91 at the same time.130 In March, based on what he had learned about deficient maternity and child health provision, Rhondda sent the War Cabinet a memorandum on the groundwork for a Ministry of Health, a project it decided to pursue on 5 April.

  In the late winter of 1917–18 dairy products, meat and game were all scarce, despite Rhondda’s efforts. When word reached the Western Front, soldiers complained that the least the government could do while making them risk their lives for their country was to ensure their women and children were fed. The potentially disastrous effect of this on morale was quickly recognised, and distribution was steadily improved. Later in 1918 a similar feeling in the German army was a powerful reason for that country’s capitulation, since almost every foodstuff there was severely rationed – by the late summer Germans were down to a quarter of an egg a week and an ounce of butter, fruit and cocoa were unobtainable and there was only ersatz tea and coffee. In London, as more merchant shipping came through and agricultural output improved, the queues disappeared. Rhondda worked himself literally to death in seeking to feed Britain: he was one of Lloyd George’s more inspired ideas, and richly earned the viscountcy (with special remainder to his daughter, unusual in peerages not awarded for military service, who had survived the Lusitania with him) which he received a fortnight before his death on 3 July 1918, aged just sixty-two.

  IV

  Ensuring sufficient manpower for agriculture – and in essential wartime industries – remained a challenge for the duration of the war. A resolution passed just before Christmas by the ‘triple alliance’ of the miners, railwaymen and transport workers, to resist the import of ‘coloured’, Chinese and other foreign labour into the country, made matters worse.131 Conscription further complicated the question. Lloyd George told Derby that shipping and agriculture now required such manpower, if Britain were not to starve, that ‘we were down to bedrock and “must be content with the scrapings”.’ In military terms, he admitted after April 1917 that it was now a question of holding out until the Americans arrived. A Military Service (Review of Exceptions) Bill was introduced in late March, to ensure the re-examination of those earlier rejected on medical grounds, and to review serving Territorials previously judged unfit for overseas service. The medical profession was blamed for ‘laxity’ in its examinations of men who were keen to serve but forbidden to do so: it was believed there were as many as 100,000.132 In April both Jellicoe and Robertson addressed a trades union conference about the urgency of more men coming forward, stressing the emergency in which Britain found itself.

  Men in exempted occupations – such as eight Nottinghamshire miners – who refused to work were fined and sent to join the Army.133 Being forcibly sent to the front for withdrawing labour was another weapon to suppress dissent, and for the duration the threat would be used against strikers. It had been announced in mid-March that another 20,000 miners would be urged to volunteer for the Army, and the ‘combing out’ of young, fit men in the mines proceeded, in the teeth of hostility from the MFGB. Then the government decided to re-examine not merely medically rejected men, but also those discharged from the Army because of the severity of their wounds. On 22 April a massed rally of discharged men was held in Trafalgar Square, some carrying a banner that read ‘Comb them out of funk holes and discharged men will go again. Gott strafe the Cuthberts.’134 The ‘Cuthberts’ were young, fit men in government employment exempted while the discharged were asked to return to the front; they were named after a Daily Mirror cartoon character used to satirise ‘shirkers’. One man’s call-up papers had the order written on them: ‘Bring your artificial eye with you.’ The men’s temper was not improved by some having been consigned to the workhouse on their discharge.

  Law claimed some men had escaped the trenches by ‘fraud’, and the courts heard cases of bribery of doctors who had given obliging exemptions. Ireland was said to be full of English ‘refugees’ evading service.135 Some exemptions were simply bizarre, given the criterion of work of national importance. The Essex tribunal in April 1917 granted, either temporarily or indefinitely, exemptions to a tobacconist, a licensed victualler, a shorthand clerk, an auctioneer’s assistant and a licensed hawker.136 There were cases of either the staff or families of local potentates – who themselves sat on the tribunals – being exempted, and despite the publicity about ridiculous exemptions others arose – a toffee-maker in Maidstone, a china merchant in Brighton and a tea-shop manager in Braintree.137 To compound problems, a shortage of women began to match that of men; in April an appeal was launched for more VADs, to staunch a shortage of nurses. Reports surfaced of the ill-treatment of young nurses, being used as skivvies by senior colleagues rather than caring for wounded heroes, which depressed recruitment.138

  War Office incompetence in chasing up men had led to their avoiding service on a technicality. Derby, who as war secretary found the weight of new bureaucracy increasingly hard to deal with, was feeling less and less supported by his cabinet colleagues, and his association with Lloyd George, who did not rate him, was turning sour. On 29 April 1917 the War Cabinet announced, with effect from 7 May, that fit men of military age in munitions factories would no longer be exempted unless their work was highly specialised. A schedule of such exemptions was drawn up: and unless a man’s work was included there could be no exemption. Now that combing-out was under way in the mines, the other trade with many fit young men in it was textile manufacture: it would be more affected than any other by the new schedule.139

  Neville Chamberlain, the newly appointed director of National Service, was ordered on 12 January 1917 to draw up a report on the problem of too few men joining the Army, and on rationing the labour that was left for other essential work. Lloyd George enlisted Addison, his bureaucratically competent munitions minister, to keep an eye on Chamberlain, but Addison – who had a functionary’s zeal and fervour when it came to building a state machine – felt the new National Service director second-rate, and was of little help to him.

  Brigadier General Auckland Geddes, War Office director of recruiting since May 1916, was more helpful to Chamberlain, but both men encountered a civil service determined not to upset the trades unions. The growth of the state prompted the press to ask where the clerical and bureaucratic staff was coming from in the new offices along Whitehall and the Embankment. Young men were being combed out of the civil service, and women were needed on the land or in factories. The loss of men from one area of public service had an enduring effect: because so many London postmen were serving, and their replacements did not know the geography, the great postal districts – such as EC, SW and W – were divided into smaller segments, giving birth to EC4, SW3 and W1.

  The War Cabinet considered Chamberlain’s report on 19 January at a meeting attended by twenty-seven non-members, representing the services and various departments. The report advocated abolishing all exemptions for the 280,000 fit men born between 1895 and 1898 – aged between eighteen and twenty-two. Theoretically, this would preserve older and more experienced and skilled workers for industry. Robertson had entirely endorsed Chamberlain’s plan, which would nonetheless have meant taking 70,000 skilled men of twenty-two and under who had completed apprenticeships. Because of this potential loss of expertise the War Cabinet insisted the plan be hugely diluted by continuing exemptions for workers in munitions, metals, agriculture and shipbuilding. The rough rejection of his proposals angered Chamberlain. Robertson was also aggrieved: he had yet to grasp Lloyd George’s reluctance to pour more men into the Western Front, to be slaughtered in ill-planned offensives. Chamberlain had also sought responsibility for the War Office Recruiting Department, but that was vetoed, further poisoning relations between him and Lloyd George.140 However, the War Cabinet agreed that 30,000 farm workers should be called up, along with 20,000 miners and 50,000 semi-skilled and un
skilled men.141 It also decided to call up men the moment they were eighteen (hitherto it had been eighteen and seven months) and to send them overseas before the age of nineteen if trained and needed.

  Chamberlain’s report had also advocated asking all men aged between eighteen and sixty to volunteer to serve the country, and proposed to use labour exchanges and local authorities to help. He suggested they should be called ‘the Industrial Army’, which was rejected. The prime minister was happier with a terminology of National Service, which reflected that it was a national volunteering scheme, even if he did not want it unified with military recruiting; Chamberlain announced it in early February 1917. Henderson, removed from the day-to-day rough and tumble of herding his party together, had to defend the new Directorate of National Service – and the director, Chamberlain – in the Commons. In a refusal to comply with Lloyd George’s dictatorial methods, MPs complained that this scheme to recruit civilian workers had been foisted upon Britain without parliamentary discussion about its potential expense and effect on industry.

  Meetings to encourage volunteers were being held around the country, after a grand launch at Central Hall in Westminster; application forms to join the scheme were stocked at post offices. At the launch – flanked by Chamberlain, Henderson and Hodge, the minister of labour – Lloyd George emphasised that if the voluntary system failed, compulsion would follow. Chamberlain, alluding to the U-boat war, warned the public that ‘Germany means to starve us out before she herself is starved out.’142 A ‘blow straight between the eyes’ was required against the enemy, and ‘national service can deal that blow.’ To set the tone, the government ordered all state officials aged between eighteen and sixty to volunteer for National Service; which gave Chamberlain’s department the chance to review all existing exemptions of public employees. Chamberlain stressed that no professional man who volunteered would be expected to do manual labour, but would be found something making better use of his abilities.