Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  With the end in sight, they may have nursed dreams of bananas for all, or cornucopias of silk stockings. ‘I long for an excuse to wear nice clothes,’ was the cri de cœur of diarist Shirley Goodhart. But five years of war had virtually killed consumerism.

  In pre-war Britain, men worked, women shopped. Daily, wives like Nella Last buttoned up their coats and, basket on arm, trekked down the country’s high streets, ticking off their lists. Butcher, baker, greengrocer, dairy. To the grocer’s for biscuits, Quaker oats and tea-leaves; to the pharmacy for shampoo and liver salts; to the haberdasher’s for knitting wool and darning needles. With the exception of more serious acquisitions – houses, cars and three-piece suites – purchasing was what women did: it was who they were. As principal home-maker, the housewife was assumed to take an acquisitive interest in curtains, candlesticks, clocks and curios. Intermittently, the desire for cosmetics, a ready-made hat or a spring outfit saw her on a day’s outing to the city. The defining opening sequence of the classic wartime movie Mrs Miniver shows its heroine engaged in the most feminine activity its director could envisage. We see her hurrying for her train at the end of a shopping trip, laden with parcels, but delaying her return for one final extravagance: a frivolous beribboned hat decked with an artificial bird.

  But the wartime economy decreed an end to such fripperies. Mrs Miniver’s hat, so symbolic of pre-war indulgence, disappears into its lovely stripy box, never to be seen again. With her husband and son at risk, and raiders overhead, Kay Miniver has more serious concerns. But five years into the war, Mrs Miniver’s contemporaries might also have paused to reflect on how the ‘National Effort’ had stripped them of their consumer status, only to replace it with a new source of thrifty pride. For this generation of women – ahead of their time in environmental terms – acquisition, sufficiency and waste had taken on new meanings.

  In his comprehensive chronicle of the war years, How We Lived Then – A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War, the writer Norman Longmate demonstrates with immense detail the privations endured by the British public. What emerges from his book is that women were on the sharp end when it came to doing without and preventing waste.

  Cooking and heating homes meant fuel economies; here, the housewife was the target of pleas to try hay-box cookery, to try out recipes for raw foods, and never to use the oven for one dish at a time. She was also beseeched to cut back on coal consumption, to lag doors and windows against draughts, to share firesides with neighbours, to bank up the fire overnight and to sift ashes for unused lumps of coal, or reconstitute them from a mixture of coal dust and earth. In the cold winters of the war the kitchens of the land were full of buckets containing strange mixtures: tea-leaves, conkers, old wallpaper, cotton-reels, potato peelings, meat gristle – anything that would burn. In cold weather you piled on clothes. When it came to baths, everyone was encouraged to stick to the five-inch guideline. Helped by their strenuous efforts, by 1944 households were using three-quarters less fuel than had been consumed in 1938.

  Early in the war an order was made that no paper was to be thrown away. The habit of dropping litter in the streets was defunct. Households were encouraged to donate everything from newspapers to old love letters – minus the pink ribbons – to be made into cardboard for the packaging of war materials. Millions of unwanted books were donated to be pulped. Paper carriers and bags of every kind were banned outright; one smart lady who had forgotten her shopping basket was spotted walking down the Headrow in Leeds city centre nonchalantly swinging a lavatory brush from her finger. Women working in typing pools were told to reuse ribbons and to type ‘single spacing only’, while the fear of making a typing error was exacerbated by the worry of wasting paper. Their letters were sent in reused envelopes with gummed-on labels. The shortage of toilet paper – which, inevitably, affects women more than it does men – was universally depressing and undignified. And by the end of 1944 it was becoming hard to buy sanitary towels.

  Restrictions on petrol left many a family reliant on pony-carriages, pedal-power and their feet. ‘We were a lot fitter than people are today,’ remembers one woman. Public transport employed large numbers of women ‘clippies’, drivers and porters. ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ ran the slogan, and nobody used their car on a whim. Many of the one in ten people who owned one laid it up on blocks for the duration. Frances Faviell bicycled daily through the traffic-free streets of London to her first aid post, with Vicki the dachshund perched in her butcher’s basket on the front. If you were going somewhere, you always took someone with you, and hitch-hiking took off. ‘Don’t forget,’ says ex-WAAF Joan Tagg, ‘we could hitch-hike anywhere in the country, and if you were in uniform people would stop and pick you up. You just said ‘London’ and they’d take you if they were going that way.’

  If you were young and setting up house, or bombed out, equipping your accommodation (whatever it might be) with furniture, linen, hardware, crockery and other essentials was difficult. If the teapot broke, you might be the lucky one in three who, in 1943, managed to find one in the shops. When household linen was rationed in October 1942, it was simply assumed that the coupons would be allocated to the mother of the household. If you wanted a carpet, you paid a high price, or bartered; if you wanted a rug you made your own out of rags. Many regretted donating their aluminium kitchenware to the 1940 ‘Saucepans for Spitfires’ appeal. Launched by WVS chieftainess Lady Reading, it had seemed at the time to offer a specially feminine kind of sacrifice: a home-front echo, perhaps, of that made by the heroic young fighter pilots.

  For the houseproud woman, life was hard. Fly-papers, floor polish, matches, commercial detergents, black lead and cleaning fluids were in short supply. Such women had standards and, as usual, they improvised: with vinegar, salt and beeswax. Soap was rationed from 1942, and a cake of Palmolive became something to treasure, eked out to the last fragment. ‘The public has been asked … to try washing clothes in the peasant French manner, with wood ash and water instead of soap,’ Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in London War Notes. The public to which she refers did not, evidently, include men.

  There were salvage schemes, many of them organised by women. As self-appointed salvage stewards they all wore a special badge with an ‘S’, and there was a pecking-order running from chief steward, responsible for 12,000 houses, down to the strictly local monitor – ‘Mrs Next-Door’ – in charge of just eight neighbours. Housewives were urged not to throw away aluminium milk bottle tops or cans. Rubber could be recycled in tyre manufacture, or even to make jumping boots for paratroopers. Leftover bones gathered at ‘bone drives’ went to produce glue, used in ship-building and shell cases. Battledress fabric could be made from wool remnants, while the nation’s pigs benefited from every scrap of food waste that could be collected.

  Often, the ladies of the WVS were the heroines of such initiatives. Over cups of tea they gathered in church halls and outhouses, to dismantle used electric light bulbs and batteries. They pulled old tyres from ponds and pounced on the contents of office waste-paper baskets. That legendary character the rag-and-bone-man was, in wartime, as often as not, a rag-and-bone-woman from the WVS. The grandes dames of society played their part; following the example of Stella Reading, Lady Beit invited the beau monde to a Thrift and Salvage Exhibition held at her home in Belgrave Square.

  Paper, metal, bones! Herbert Morrison’s salvage campaign set out to make every housewife feel she could do her bit for victory.

  As we have already seen, clothes rationing was one of the most depressing aspects of the war to women who loved to be pretty, but were forced, instead, to be patriotic. When it was introduced in 1941 the President of the Board of Trade told the nation: ‘When you feel tired of your old clothes remember that by making them do you are contributing some part of an aeroplane, a gun or a tank.’ It was hard, at times, as you patched your underwear or shivered in a threadbare pullover, to appreciate the relationship between your frayed exterior and, say, the victor
y of El Alamein. The 1938 generation were already accustomed to shopping for quality not quantity; the throwing-away of clothes and purchasing of wear-it-once items were not part of the mid-twentieth-century female mentality. This made it easier to take a long hard look at your coupons, save them – often for months – buy the best quality you could afford and make it last, while doing your best to persuade yourself that it was smart to be shabby. Skill with a needle paid off, if you could find one to buy. Most women still made their own clothes; it was also a time when every daughter learned at her mother’s knee how to knit, darn and take up a hem. Sheets, curtains, blackout material, parachute silk, butter-muslin, coffin-linings were converted into pinafores, blouses, bras and skirts. Constance Galilee obtained an army surplus blanket for just £1, dyed it and made a ‘surprisingly dashing’ winter coat. When Dilys Ormston’s coat got shabby, she ‘turned’ it, which meant unpicking the lining, washing it, then taking the entire garment apart, seam by seam, and sewing it back together again inside out, before replacing the lining: ‘almost as good as new’. Worn-out jerseys were unravelled. The wool was steamed to take out the kinks and reknitted into new jerseys. Women trimmed, dyed and remodelled their old dresses, attended WVS-run clothing exchanges, foraged at jumble sales or bought ‘Utility’, the guarantee of unadorned, cheap affordability. ‘I’ve hardly anything respectable left to wear in bed,’ bemoaned diarist Shirley Goodhart. Suppose she was bombed out at night? ‘My stockings have just given out too. I was hoping that they would just last until I considered it warm enough to go without, but they haven’t.’

  Wedding dresses were handed down from bride to bride. The thoughtful Barbara Cartland started a pooling scheme for women to have their dreamed-of fairy-tale white wedding, coupons or no coupons. Over a thousand such gowns did the rounds of countless more girls – each of them cleaned, ironed and packed by Barbara; ‘We got heartily sick of wedding dresses in my house before I had finished … The brides, however, were pathetically grateful.’ But their guests were less than glamorous. One diarist described a February wedding party gathered in a chilly hotel reception room, all huddled in ‘drab and rather cheap fur coats’. The guests’ buttonholes might have been assembled out of garden flowers and carrot tops, the magnificent iced cake a sham, made from cardboard to conform with ‘The Sugar (Restriction of Use) Order, 1940’.

  Today’s footwear obsessive would shrink at the reality that faced the seeker-out of ladies’ shoes in 1944. Supply was so short that she might have to queue for the right to join a shoe queue. Cobblers were kept in business repairing and resoling, often with wood instead of leather, since hide was in short supply.

  Unsurprisingly, the burden of child- and babycare fell entirely on mothers. The green ration book entitled them to jump queues and receive cut-price milk and orange juice. But once the baby came the mother had the additional headache of equipping her newborn. Nappies, cots and cot mattresses, baby baths, prams and pushchairs, even potties were all hard to come by. Toys and Christmas decorations were improvised from buttons, cotton reels, rags, pipe-cleaners. Clothing growing children was a struggle. Here as elsewhere, hand-me-downs and swap-schemes took the place of brand new. Some mothers agonised about their children’s deprivations, from sweets to birthday candles, but most of the kids were resigned. They knew no other way.

  Rationing had brought with it a low-protein, low-fat diet; healthy, if boring. Looking for ways to liven up family meals, the nation’s cooks (i.e. women) turned to non-imported, locally grown, off-ration sources of food. They uprooted their bedding fuchsias from the front garden and replaced them with cabbages and beans. The ‘Grow More Food’ campaign brought neighbours together, exchanging recipes and gardening hints. Fridges were owned by few, so bottling, preserving and jam-making dealt with gluts; Phyllis Noble’s mum spent much time giving away her surpluses of marrows and mushrooms. Subsistence smallholding flourished as many of these growers also started to keep hens, ducks, rabbits, goats, pigs and bees. Frances Partridge was one who, in March 1942, took delivery of ‘two good little pigs … dear little grunters with soulful eyes’. Seven months later the grunters, now vast, were ‘executed’. The Partridges sat up till midnight making brawn out of the entrails and trotters (‘everything except the squeal’, as people said), stirring them in a cauldron ‘like the witches in Macbeth’. The hard work was rewarded with pork, ham and bacon. The woods and hedgerows, too, were a glorious source of free food. In September 1943 Florence Speed went nutting in Effingham, and ‘came home … with eight pounds of blackberries not having seen a single nut! Lovely smell of jam-making.’ For Sheila Hails, foraging took on a different meaning after D-day, when a torpedoed American ship yielded a rich haul on Lulworth Cove: ‘An amazing amount of stuff was washed up; there were crates, broken or lying around on the beach. One was full of grapefruit, and another had instant coffee. It was wonderful! And we had a crate of ship’s biscuits which kept us going for ages … But awful that all those people drowned.’

  It took the war for Nella Last, and thousands of other women like her, to realise ‘what a knack of dodging and cooking and managing I possess, and my careful economies are things to pass on, not hide as I used to’. Mixing up hen food, extracting the maximum goodness from a bone of mutton, stuffing a toy rabbit with leftover scraps of winceyette, hoarding bottles of fruit were sources of great pride, to them and to their daughters: ‘Our mums could cook, they could sew, they could do anything. They had to!’ says ex-WAAF Joan Tagg. ‘Nothing was wasted.’

  Never since the war has Britain been so sustainable, so prudent and thrifty, so community-minded, so self-sufficient – or so green.

  Bombs, and the immensely real threat to the lives of loved ones abroad, gave an urgency to measures which women at home could perceive as making a real difference. Contemplating the bottled raspberries on their larder shelves, or wearing their refashioned coats made from army blankets, Nella and all those other women gained a sense of value, a satisfying awareness that their contribution had tangible meaning. And, somewhere inside themselves, they knew that the Spitfire pilots and tank crews had much to thank them for.

  Back-room Girls

  Scaling down on consumption is not a heroic or courageous activity. Heroism was for men. The majority of home-front women in the Second World War gratefully fell back on the more prosaic virtues of frugality and good housewifery. As we have seen, woman’s function as auxiliary, provider of tea-and-sympathy and generalised faithful sidekick extended across the fields, the factories and the forces. For every fighter pilot, paratrooper, submariner or commando, there were legions of women drivers, technicians, cooks, censors, plotters, administrators, wireless operators, coders, interpreters, clerks, PAs, typists, telephonists and secretaries. One of them was Margaret Herbertson.

  Fifty years after the war was over, Margaret decided to respond to a wartime friend who suggested she write a record of their work as ‘back-room girls’ in the FANYs. Both of them had been struck that, while much had been written about their glamorous fellow FANYs who had been parachuted behind enemy lines into occupied France, enduring, in some cases, capture, imprisonment and death in concentration camps, nothing had been said about the auxiliaries who worked behind the scenes. And yet the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was hugely dependent on their work giving aid to resistance movements and launching missions into occupied territory. As educated women from privileged backgrounds, Margaret and her friend had joined the FANYs because of its reputation as an elite volunteer service. Though nominally under the umbrella of the ATS, the FANYs had little to do with that branch of the forces, which was perceived as largely plebeian. Instead, the FANYs’ semi-autonomy made it adaptable to a wide range of purposes. Thus during the Second World War the SOE deployed a large number of its clever, confident, hard-working young volunteers both as agents in the field and as coders, wireless operators or signal planners. Between 1942 and 1944 over a hundred FANYs – most of them bright girls under the age of twenty-two – were tr
ained by SOE and posted to the Mediterranean.

  At twenty-one Margaret Herbertson was a gifted, practical but, in her own words, ‘terribly naive’ young woman. She joined SOE as a coder in late 1943. In London, she was trained in the complexities of communicating between base stations and agents in the field, using coding systems considered unbreakable, and she was told how to use bluffs, or ‘checks’, to confuse the enemy. Once she had been briefed on the clandestine nature of her work and inoculated against yellow fever, she was sent to Cairo, and thence in June 1944 to Italy – on the very day before Rome fell to the Allies. Based near Bari, her first task was to participate in a complex signals deception, designed to persuade the enemy that Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and his HQ were still in Bosnia, when in fact they had decamped to the Croatian island of Vis. An operator was despatched to a partisan base in Bosnia, from where a two-way signals traffic was set up. ‘[We] were required to encode quantities of bogus messages … I seem to remember that this included nursery rhymes.’ The operation worked, successfully decoying hostile aircraft to the site of the false transmissions. Meanwhile, there was the added glamour of contact with field officers in the Balkans, some of whom sent coded flirtatious messages to the Bari FANYs, or ‘dolls’; from time to time they arrived in person, with tales of their manly exploits. For Margaret, these secret activities resembled life in a thriller.

  In autumn 1944 Margaret joined the staff of ‘I’ branch: the Intelligence Department. Here, her new responsibilities were to learn everything she could about the location and intentions of the German forces. In addition, she was expected to conduct thorough research – garnered via reconnaissance and agents’ reports – into the terrain occupied by the enemy: its topography, politics and indigenous dynamics. This vital information was distilled daily into a fifteen-minute ‘situation report’. Such was Margaret’s responsibility in this process that her superior proposed that she be awarded a commission. But this was turned down ‘on account of my age … The disparity of treatment accorded to women, as opposed to men, still required the shake-up it was to receive in the next generation but one,’ she wrote philosophically. Eventually, Margaret herself was required to make the daily presentation, and after this the ‘brass’ caved in, and the commission was forthcoming: