Aside from their careers and family responsibilities, Alleyne and Margaret threw themselves into Bath’s public life, too. Both were determined to make as big an impact as possible. Very quickly, they climbed the social ranks and became pillars of the city’s affluent, middle-class community. Alleyne became a councillor before the Second World War, serving on all the council’s main committees, including Town and Country Planning. He was also the founding chairman of the Bath Round Table, and the founding member of the Bass Assembly, which would later become the Bath International Music Festival. To this day the festival continues and has become an annual event. Lasting 12 days, usually from late May to early June, it brings together an eclectic variety of music. This includes orchestral and classical virtuosi, and jazz, folk and world musicians playing individually and in groups. Alleyne’s dedication to civic duties paid off. He later went on to become Mayor of Bath between 1953 and 1954 and, as a result, Margaret was made Lady Mayoress. The couple were at the heart of Bath’s civic community and were invited to every important dinner party, event or function going. However, their relationship would always come first.
When Alleyne was invited to America while he was Mayor, he insisted that he couldn’t go unless his wife came too. Her son (Mary’s brother, William) told the Bath Chronicle: ‘Father was asked to go to America, but said he never went anywhere without his wife – so they told him to bring her too. When they were in America they were given the president’s bodyguard to look after them.’
After finishing his tenure as Mayor, Alleyne was closely involved in establishing the University of Bath at Claverton Down. The institution went on to become one of the world’s most respected for teaching sciences and modern languages to degree level. Years later, in 1979, Alleyne was awarded an honorary degree (an MA) to thank him for his tireless work for the university and the city.
This stern and serious public persona was evident in his home life, according to Mary. ‘My father was a very strong person,’ says Mary. ‘He was not affectionate towards us. He was very strict. But he did things with us. He was a great man; he was very involved with Bath. And he encouraged Bath to have a university. He was a surveyor and he was chairman of planning. So he found the land for Bath University on Claverton Down and persuaded the powers that be that there should be a university.’
By no means did Margaret take a back seat when it came to public duties. She was the founding chairman of the Friends of the Royal United Hospital in Bath, a charity which supported the work of doctors and nurses. Later she was appointed chairwoman of the Townswomen’s Guild and the Inner Wheel. Her local standing and popularity were such that her 100th birthday in 2005 was covered prominently by the Bath Chronicle. The celebrations were held at the city’s Guildhall by the then Mayor of Bath, Peter Metcalfe, who hosted an afternoon tea in the Mayor’s Parlour, along with past and present dignitaries from Bath and North East Somerset Council. Margaret and her family then moved on to the plush Priory Hotel for a family celebration. At the celebrations, Margaret said: ‘I’ve had a great deal to be thankful for.’
The gratitude Margaret expressed at her birthday doubtless included a reference to her family. Aside from all the work to build up the business and to fulfil their public duties, Margaret and Alleyne soon set about expanding their family. After Roger came William, before Mary was born on 24 March 1935.
Mary recalls growing up on a sprawling estate in the Avon countryside, where life was always an adventure. She recalls her earliest memory as being a fishing trip with her father. She told the Scotsman: ‘I think it’d be catching a mackerel with my dad when I was around four years old.’ Other memories were perhaps not so idyllic, but nevertheless show how the family threw themselves into rural life. She said in another interview: ‘When I was five or six years old, we had baby chicks. A lamp caught fire and they all died. It was a horrible shock, which I suppose is why I remember it.’
And as Alleyne’s business interests went from strength to strength, he was able to splash out occasionally on luxuries other families couldn’t afford. One was a boat – something very few middle-class families had in the 1930s.
‘Dad always had a hobby of something,’ Mary said in her interview on Desert Island Discs. ‘He built a boat that we kept near Bath when we’d moved and it was on the river and we used to go every weekend. We didn’t sail; we had oars. And you know, that was great entertainment. We’d arrive and there would be a Primus, which usually didn’t work too well, and you’d make tea and you’d have sandwiches. It was a great way of being amused. But in those days, you know, the seasons you had “primrosing”, we used to go and pick primroses and take a picnic. Then we would go and pick blackberries and again there were picnics.’
Mary and her brothers would often while away the days in the acres of land surrounding their home, building secret dens where they spent hours on end.
‘And can you imagine health and safety nowadays?’ said Mary. ‘We lit a fire, made with bricks at the side, and then there was a pipe, a curved pipe that went through and we poured water from the top and it came out into a bucket. I mean, I don’t even know if our parents knew about it! You could get into corners of the garden where you wouldn’t be found. Or the goat pen would be a great place to go and hide.’
And although she didn’t discover her love of cooking until much later in her teenage years, Mary admits that family meals during her childhood helped form the basis of what would become her future career. Her mother Margaret was a keen cook … and Mary freely admits that she herself had a voracious appetite. Mary and her brothers were often encouraged to get involved with the preparation of meals, which were very much family affairs. ‘I was a chubby child and loved my food,’ she said in an interview. ‘And no wonder – Mum made such good things: boiled salt beef and carrots, steak and kidney, and a delicious bread-and-butter pudding. We didn’t have many toys, but loved helping round the house, chopping vegetables and laying the table.’ Mary added, in an interview with the Daily Mail: ‘My mother wasn’t a cook by trade, but we always had home-cooked everything.’ It also appears possible to trace Mary’s love of desserts, puddings and cakes back to her mother’s habits in the kitchen. Mary recalls the precise recipes that her mother used. ‘Her bread-and-butter pudding brings back such memories; her secret was to add the grated rind of a lemon and half a teaspoon of mixed spice and to let the pudding stand, sprinkled with demerara sugar, for an hour before baking.’ Mary admits that there are other foods that, if she tastes even today, bring back vivid memories of her mother’s cooking. ‘When I have the first fresh taste of the season’s marmalade that I have made, it takes me back to the days of my mother making marmalade,’ she said in an interview with the Financial Times. ‘I minced the peel for her – she was always very busy. She had a big kitchen in our house in Bath, with a huge scrubbed wooden table, a gas stove and a temperamental hot water supply. There were few gadgets – mincers, sharp knives – so it was simple, but a lot went on in it.’
The deep sense of routine surrounding mealtimes was something that would live with Mary for the rest of her life. Even today she regularly speaks about how she believes it is important for families to value mealtimes in order to bring them closer together. ‘All our meals were round the table, and I think that’s perhaps what’s missing now,’ she has said. ‘Even now when we all sit round, the tummies are full, and then the children begin to tell you a bit about their life when they’re happy, and I think it’s very sad that so many people have meals every day by the television. It is not at all easy. But it is nice to plan an occasion, once a week, when you are all together. I think it’s a great way of communicating.’
Yet Mary was also a child of the Second World War. Children growing up during that time had a very different childhood from those today. Lessons at school were supplemented by classes about how to put on gas masks, and punctuated by air-raid drills. People were encouraged to be thrifty and to save everything – even bath water was restricted to five in
ches per family per week. Many children living in rural areas found themselves with new playmates, as evacuees from the cities were billeted in any home with room to spare, and gardens were dug up to provide air-raid shelters for their owners.
Perhaps the most noticeable change in lifestyle for the Berrys would have been food rationing. This was a key part of Mary’s childhood, with Margaret and Alleyne issued with booklets for everyone in the family – beige for the adults, and pink for each child.
As the Second World War began, Britain was importing 70 per cent of its food. That meant that boats bringing supplies to the island were a prime target for Axis attacks. So Britain needed both to become more self-sufficient, and to make sure that, as supplies dropped, price rises didn’t leave the poorest members of society unable to eat.
Food rationing was introduced in the UK in January 1940, with restrictions covering more and more items as the war progressed. Wasting food became a criminal offence. Each person had to register at their chosen shops and take their ration book with them, which contained coupons for certain amounts of food. A typical ration for one adult per week was 2oz butter, 4oz bacon and ham, 4oz margarine, 8oz sugar, meat to the value of 1s.2d (about 6p today), 2–3 pints of milk, 2oz cheese, 1 egg and 2oz tea. They could also have 1lb of jam every two months, a packet of dried eggs every four weeks, and 12oz sweets every four weeks.
Although the menu seems restricted to modern appetites, some nutritionists say the diet actually improved the nation’s health. On average, children became taller and heavier than before the war, and incidences of anaemia and tooth decay both dropped.
Some things were simply unobtainable – lemons and bananas all but disappeared from Britain’s shops, and oranges were generally reserved for children and pregnant women. These limitations meant that everything had to be made from scratch – an approach still dear to Mary today. And people became ingenious at creating substitute items for products they missed. Children might be given a raw carrot on a stick in place of ice cream, and ‘cream’ was mocked up by mixing margarine, milk and cornflour. If Mary had been older, perhaps she would have been on the wireless dishing out cooking tips like Marguerite Patten, whose show on the Home Service attracted 6 million listeners a day.
It was not just food that was rationed. Clothing was issued on a points system, with the allowance initially covering approximately one new outfit a year. By the end of the war, buying a coat would cost almost a year’s coupons. Women would paint gravy browning on their legs in place of silk stockings. Petrol was also rationed, and from 1942 it was restricted to ‘official’ users such as the emergency services, farmers and bus companies. Like all families, this affected the Berrys, which made getting around – to and from work, on shopping trips with their books of coupons, to visit friends – a tricky process.
Rationing even continued beyond the end of the war, partly to help feed people in European areas under British control. In some cases it became stricter – bread had not been formally rationed, but it was between 1946 and 1948, while potato rationing began in 1947. Rationing was gradually withdrawn from 1950 onwards, finally ending on 4 July 1954, when meat became freely available again. Alongside rationing, the Ministry of Food launched a pioneering campaign called Dig For Victory. This was meant to promote self-sufficiency, with people being encouraged to grow their own fruit and vegetables and even keep domesticated pigs, chickens and rabbits for their meat. With their large garden, the Berrys were keen adherents to a self-sufficient lifestyle, keeping goats and a pig. ‘The pig would be fattened and then it would go to be slaughtered, and come back to us. I think we shared it with a neighbour,’ Mary remembered on Desert Island Discs.
Irrespective of the trials and tribulations of the war, it’s fair to say that family life was nothing short of blissful, though Mary also had a rebellious streak. On one occasion she uprooted dozens of carefully tended flowers from the family garden before trying to sell them for profit. Unsurprisingly, Alleyne was not impressed when he returned home from one of his civic duties.
‘I remember, we had lovely flowers in the garden and I was at home in the school holidays and I picked flowers from the garden, did them in bunches, and set up a stall outside with no permission whatsoever,’ she recalled. ‘Then Dad came back on his motorbike, because you weren’t allowed cars in the war and we had no petrol, and I was scolded and Dad said, well, this afternoon you go across to Miss Jackson, who raised money for the Red Cross, and you give all that money to the Red Cross.’
Hardly the crime of the century, but her aptitude for being ‘naughty’ as she described it in later interviews seemed to be getting in full swing by the time she was ready to start attending secondary school at the age of 11. Mary’s parents enrolled her in Bath High, the local all-girls public school. Other high-profile pupils who have attended the school include suffragette Mary Blathwayt, stage actress and singer Joan Heal, Elizabeth Hallam Smith, who was made the Librarian of the House of Lords in 2006, Marguerite Bowie, who organised the evacuation of children to the USA and Canada in 1939, and Elspeth Howe, Baroness Howe of Idlicote CBE, wife of Geoffrey Howe and Chairman from 1997 to 1999 of the Broadcasting Standards Commission.
It is an impressive pedigree by anyone’s standards. But while Mary’s name now sits at the very top of the school’s list of famous alumni, her teachers at the time would never have predicted that would be the case. It’s safe to say that Mary was not a model student – in fact, quite the opposite. Despite her parents’ best efforts to send her to a good school, Mary freely admits she just wasn’t interested in her studies. Her work ethic was somewhat lacking, to say the least; so much so that her teachers went as far as to describe her academic abilities as ‘hopeless’. She shirked homework, was rarely on time in the morning and was consistently bottom – or very near bottom – of the class. Mary freely admits she often got preoccupied. ‘I was a real monkey, hopeless at academic subjects. I was quite naughty – don’t tell my children!’ She says she’s never been a regular smoker, but that she did try it once, with her brothers in the goat shed.
Considering he was a man of great achievement and social standing, Alleyne was somewhat disappointed by Mary’s lacklustre performance at school. He had always been an academic high-flyer and expected the same of his children. Looking back, Mary admits she should have been more focused.
‘To be honest, I think he was immensely disappointed that I wasn’t academic,’ says Mary. ‘He was just, really just sad about it. Didn’t do anything about it, and I didn’t work at school, which I think is really sad that I didn’t, and I regret it. But I have worked very, very hard since.’
However, Mary’s aptitude for making things was clear at that young age … even if it wasn’t cakes at that point. While she may not have been the most academic girl, she had a flair for creativity at home. ‘I do remember when I was about 12 I made a rag doll, and I made it beautifully,’ she says. ‘And dad said, where did you get that from, and I said, “I made it.” And he gave me a shilling, 5p, and I can’t ever remember being rewarded for doing something and I was really chuffed about that.’
While it soon became apparent she was no good at the more traditional academic subjects, one teacher, Miss Date, noticed her flair for cooking. Her mother had always loved baking and cooking at home, but Mary rarely got involved beyond the most basic food preparation tasks to help out Margaret. She only discovered it while she was picking subjects at school to take to examination level. Little did rebellious, work-shy Mary realise that this was to become the start of a long and highly successful career. ‘My first cooking really was at school. It came to the choice of subjects for school cert,’ Mary explained on Desert Island Discs. ‘And those clever people did Latin and Maths, and the dim people did Domestic Science. But from the moment I did Domestic Science I absolutely loved it.’
Mary experienced what she describes as a ‘eureka moment’. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, she added: ‘It was all “could try harder” until I gave up
Latin and Maths and went to the Domestic Science department. Miss Date was the teacher and she was wonderful! Miss Date praised me, she helped me, she encouraged me.’
Mary’s success in the subject was almost immediate. She appeared to be a natural, standing head and shoulders above the other students. She vividly remembers the first thing she cooked in the school kitchen. It was treacle sponge pudding – and it went down a treat with Miss Date. Not only was this the first bit of praise she had received from a schoolteacher, but, most telling of all, it got the seal of approval from her usually stern and standoffish father, who suddenly realised that his daughter wasn’t a lost cause. The feeling of acceptance Mary finally felt from her father about something relating to her schoolwork has stayed with her to this day.
‘I can remember bringing home the first thing I made there – a treacle sponge pudding,’ says Mary. ‘I reheated it, turned it out and the golden syrup poured down the sides. Dad tasted it and said, “That’s really good, as good as Mummy’s.” Well, what did I feel like? Wonderful!’
However, it was ironic that her love for cooking started at school, Mary would later say … because the school dinners were nothing to write home about. ‘You didn’t notice too much what it was,’ she told the Financial Times. ‘You stopped at one o’clock for lunch and you just accepted it and ate it. I can always remember the sliced meat and gravy, and one enjoyed the classic, proper puddings. The home economics lessons at Bath High School were absolutely brilliant, however. That’s the whole reason I am where I am today.’
Mary Berry Page 3
