The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  By expanding the area under crops British farmers were able to increase their contribution to the British diet from 33 per cent of calories to 44 per cent and Britain was able to extend the number of days a year when it could feed itself from 120 to 160.6 These figures demonstrate that the reorganization of British agriculture by no means freed the island from its dependence on imports. Rather, the ploughing-up campaign enabled Britain to compensate for the fact that food imports fell by half from 22 million tons to somewhere between 15 and 11 million tons a year.7 Britain stopped importing non-essential foodstuffs. The most important saving was in the area of animal feed, which virtually disappeared from supply ships. Another 2.5 million tons a year were saved by severely cutting imports of sugar, fresh fruit and nuts. By growing more wheat to make bread, British farmers enabled the government to prioritize the import of condensed high-energy foods such as meat and dairy products, which filled the protein and calcium gap in the workers’ diets, and added variety and interest to a monotonous menu based on bread.8

  FROM MEAT TO BREAD AND POTATOES

  In the 1930s the only food in which Britain was entirely self-sufficient was liquid milk.9 Most of British agricultural land was under pasture and livestock products made up 70 per cent of the value of farming output.10 At the time it was calculated that while ten acres of grassland for stock-raising could feed twelve people, the same area under wheat could feed 200, while ten acres planted with potatoes could feed as many as 400.11 With the reduction of food coming into the country it made more sense to extend the number of people Britain’s farmland could feed and plans were made to reduce livestock and plough up pastures to plant with wheat, sugar beet and potatoes.12 However, the Ministry of Agriculture still hoped to maintain a meat reserve on the hoof, rather than in cans which would be stored in warehouses vulnerable to the German aerial bombing campaign.13 In the summer of 1941 the government realized that the shipping crisis was going to be much worse than they had expected and Cabinet Office economists protested that animals were being allowed ‘to eat shipping space … at a rate comparable with the rate at which submarines are destroying it. No more costly reserve could be devised … A reserve ought to be held against an emergency. But a livestock reserve creates an emergency.’14 In response the Food Policy Committee cut the annual import of animal feed to a mere 150,000 tons for the next three years. Dairy cattle were given first priority for imported feed as the government concentrated on maintaining milk production. Livestock farmers were required to become self-sufficient and grow their own feed grains.

  In order to achieve the feat of ploughing up the pastures the government encouraged farmers to use tractors. Before the war, horses pulling the plough were a common sight in British fields. In 1939 only one in six British farmers owned a tractor. By 1946 the number of tractors on British farms had quadrupled.15 It was also possible, via the county agricultural committees, to hire in a contractor who used government-owned machines.16 The tractors, made by the Ford Motor Company at Dagenham, or shipped in from America as part of the lend-lease agreement, were by no means cutting edge. The Ministry of Agriculture preferred to stick to the well-known and temperamental Fordson rather than any of the new and innovative tractors on the market at the time.17 But even the exasperatingly unreliable Fordsons made the task of ploughing up 2.5 million acres of pasture land a great deal easier. Although the tractors look antiquated to us now, the sight of a land girl using a tractor to plough pasture land was a powerful contemporary image of the modernity that the war was bringing in its wake.18 There were limits, however, to the mechanical revolution. During the war most planting was done using cup feed drill machines which had been in production since the nineteenth century.19

  In order to ensure the success of the ploughing-up campaign it was essential to increase the use of fertilizers, as much of the new land that was brought under cultivation was poor in phosphoric acid. One of Canada’s most vital contributions to maintaining Britain’s food supply was the expansion of its phosphate and nitrogen industry.20 Nitrogen was essential for both explosives and artificial fertilizers and four large synthetic nitrogen plants were set up in Canada with British financial assistance. In this way Britain protected its vital source of nitrogen from German bombs and Canada acted as a safe warehouse for Britain’s ammonium phosphate.21 Through the auspices of the Combined Food Board, Canada also compensated for the disruption caused to the global fertilizer trade by becoming the main supplier of ammonium phosphate fertilizers to the rest of the Commonwealth and Britain’s empire, which in turn also provided Britain with food.

  Soviet supplies of potash were also channelled through Canada and the United States. Rather than burdening with yet more cargo the already overloaded rail lines leading to the eastern front, the Soviets mined the potash in the Urals and then sent it on a journey almost all the way round the globe, through Siberia and across North America, before it finally arrived in Britain.22 Britain’s fertilizer supply was also periodically boosted with shipments of potash and phosphate rock from the United States, Chile, Palestine and, with the Allied capture of North Africa, Morocco.23 This enabled British farmers to more than double their use of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers and significantly increase the amount of potash and lime they spread on the fields.24

  The introduction of many more tractors and the increased use of fertilizers made the ploughing-up campaign possible but they did not amount to a revolution in agricultural methods. Tony Harman, a farmer in Buckinghamshire, recalled that a herbicide called Agroxone was tried out during the war and it wiped out the yellow mass of charlock flowers that had always accompanied the spring barley.25 However, it was not until after 1945 that British farms really began to benefit from the extensive use of hybrid seeds, pesticides, herbicides and selective livestock breeding which came into use in the United States during the war. The cereal varieties British farmers used between 1939 and 1945 had been introduced before the First World War and most milk cows were not high-yielding cross-breeds but more often than not old-fashioned Shorthorns and were milked by hand. That dairy herds were not fully modernized was, in fact, fortunate. The normal cows did well on the bulky home-grown feed that was available and produced a steady 300–400 gallons a year on their austerity diet, unlike the fine breeds of high-yielding cows who failed to produce much milk without a concentrated, protein-rich diet.26 It was not until after the war that the introduction of technological advances produced an immense leap in crop and livestock yields.

  Nevertheless, in 1943 British farmers produced a bumper crop of wheat. At the beginning of the war virtually all of the country’s wheat for bread was imported, but in 1943 Britain was able to cover one-half of its bread grain needs with home-grown wheat. Barley, oats, fodder crops and vegetables all showed significant gains and there was a modest increase in sugar beet yields, which were limited not by farming but by the processing abilities of the sugar factories.27 Potato production increased by a staggering 87 per cent. But the Agriculture Ministry’s policy on potatoes was probably one of the least efficient of its wartime food measures. It made sense to increase potato consumption as they are a simple and nutritious way of stretching meals when meat is in short supply. But the Ministry of Food treated potatoes as a substitute for bread and encouraged the cultivation of the maximum amount of potatoes rather than aiming for an optimum yield. The problem with potatoes is that they are a very unpredictable crop: ‘the paradox of potato policy [was that] … there must be at once a greater stimulus to consumption, in order to avoid waste, and at the same time more and yet more careful planning against a shortage that, should it occur, would be made worse by the consumption increase.’28 The end result was that Britain produced too many potatoes. While it is common for people to replace potatoes with bread, they rarely use potatoes instead of bread. Those who benefited were the privileged members of society who had the means to keep a pig, as they were provided with a plentiful and cheap feed.29

  The impressive harvest of 1943 was
the result of the doubling of the amount of arable land in Britain, and farmers also benefited from a good growing season.30 Even though the harvest was a success in terms of providing Britain with the food it needed to survive the war, it was not necessarily a success in the terms in which many historians have described it, as an indication that the productivity of British agriculture had increased. ‘There were no yield improvements, and output increases were the result of the change from pasture to arable and the increased inputs of labour, capital to pay for the mechanisation, and management.’31 More than anything else the good harvest was due to the long hours the farmers and their labourers had invested working on the fields, a regressive tendency, which indicates that productivity may even have declined.32

  Much of the back-breaking labour on British wartime farms was provided by the 80,000 land girls of the Women’s Land Army.33 The conditions were often miserable. Life was lonely and isolated, and cold bedrooms and a lack of bathing facilities made life particularly uncomfortable given the dirty nature of the work. Vera Campbell described washing on her farm in Scotland. After pumping water into pails it was heated in hens’ pots, normally used for boiling scraps for poultry and the pig. Having poured the water into the old zinc bath she would first ‘wash top half of body – dry – put on warm jersey and try to sit in the bath for the bottom half of body. Pretty grim in cold weather.’34 The farmers were often hostile and obstinate, at best taciturn, and the girls were sometimes sexually harassed by male farm workers. They were always hungry. Bread and butter and potatoes were the mainstays of the diet and it was common for the farmers and the girls’ landladies to keep the best foods, such as bacon or the land girls’ extra ration of cheese, for themselves, which meant that more often than not they ended up with beetroot sandwiches for lunch.35 The one-third of the Land Army who were organized into work gangs and lived in hostels were usually better off. The hostels were overcrowded, ‘the Old Girl [in charge of the hostel] was a tartar. The house was damp’ and cold but at least they had company and if ‘the food was rotten’ there was usually sufficient.36

  The Women’s Land Army was for most women an interesting, sometimes liberating, always exhausting, but ultimately rewarding way of contributing to the war effort. Anne Hall recalled that ‘work, eat, sleep was the daily routine [but] I loved the cows’.37 And Linda Shrigley, who joined as a shy seventeen-year-old who had ‘never even been on a train’, grew in confidence as she learned to handle an excavator and helped to clear the banks of the silted up River Skerne in Durham. The men she worked with were ‘amazed when I got out of the machine. I was only four feet nine and a half.’38 Once the women had proved their mettle, many farmers acknowledged that their help was invaluable. A farmer from Northamptonshire wrote to the Land Girl, in praise of Mary Hall, ‘I cannot speak too highly of her, as it has been no easy task for a girl to go through the wet and cold we have had this winter … [S]he has never missed a day or been late at any time through all the severe weather we have had … I am afraid I have thought of land girls as summertime workers, but Mary has proved to me I am wrong.’39

  Prisoners of war also made up for the labour shortage on the farms. British farmers preferred the work ethic of German prisoners and complained that the Italians could not be persuaded to work without bribes of chocolate and cigarettes. But 50,000 Italian prisoners of war were eventually mobilized for agricultural work and they reduced the need for the motley crew of ‘soldiers, the publican, the postman’, schoolchildren, and even townspeople spending their summers at agricultural holiday camps, who in the early years of the war had joined the land girls in the fields at harvest time.40

  In contrast to American farmers, who came under relatively little government control, British farmers were controlled by the County War Agricultural Executive Committees, which mixed an anachronistic feudalism with war socialism. These hierarchical, class-based committees, appointed from the local gentry, exercised complete control over the farmers in their areas, who had no right of appeal against their decisions. The War Ags, as they were known, were responsible for ensuring that government directives were carried out on the ground and, most importantly, they administered the ploughing-up campaign which transformed pasture into wheat- and potato-growing fields. The majority were helpful, reasonable and effective but, as in the United States, their prejudice in favour of large and supposedly more efficient arable farms created an atmosphere in which industrial-style farming was favoured over small-scale family farms.41 The official histories of the ploughing-up campaign, and many later historians, have ignored those farmers who expressed doubts about the wisdom of the government’s policy and resisted the orders of the War Ags. However, more recent research shows that their fixed view of arable farming as sup-erior led to some grave injustices. An example of this is the Hampshire War Ags’ attitude to Rex Paterson, a dairy farmer with a large modernized milk herd. Despite the fact that the Ministry of Food had prioritized milk and was desperate to increase milk production, in a counter-productive order Paterson’s committee placed him in the second class of farmers and forced him to plough up 800 acres of his pasture to grow potatoes. There were also cases of corruption. Farming was a protected occupation and a number of War Ags evicted farmers unfairly, wrongly accusing them of negligent farming practices, in order to replace them with relatives or friends who could then evade conscription. By 1945 farmers’ organizations held details of at least 300 cases of dubious eviction.42

  AMERICAN DRIED EGG ANDARGENTINIAN CORNED BEEF

  The British restructuring of agriculture was a modest success. However, if the government had been forced to rely solely on the food grown in Britain to feed its people then it would have been forced to impose upon them an eighteenth-century peasant-style vegetarian diet.43 The introduction of lend-lease in March 1941 came as a great relief as it allowed Britain to import large quantities of American frozen and canned meat, especially luncheon pork and sausages, canned fish, dried egg, canned and dried milk, dried fruit, fats and oils, as well as wheat for bread flour.44 Most of these foods were distributed not through the rationing system but through a morale-boosting points system which allowed shoppers more choice. The American imports enabled people to inject variety and flavour into their monotonous meals based on bread and potatoes. ‘The outstanding buy was generally agreed to be the large tin of American sausage meat which cost a whole sixteen points, but besides providing enough meat for several main meals contained a thick layer of nearly half a pound of fat.’45

  If American farmers benefited from Britain’s need for protein and fat so too did Iceland’s fishermen. The requisitioning of much of the British fishing fleet for mine-sweeping and the closure of fishing grounds led to an acute shortage of fish, and provided Iceland with a fine opportunity to reverse its economic decline. In the 1920s Icelandic fishing had been a growing industry. Farmers moved off their sheep farms and into the coastal towns to take up a life at sea. The catch of cod was dried and salted and sold to Spain. Then, in the 1930s, the Depression and the Spanish civil war wiped out the market for Icelandic salt cod. By 1939 the fishing fleet was decrepit, and the economy was in poor shape. As an island dependent on imports, with only mutton and fish as its exports, Iceland’s balance of payments deficit was an insoluble problem and the country was deeply in debt.46 British wartime demand for fish revived the industry. Icelandic ships would put out from harbour, put their catch on ice, and take it straight to the British ports. Often the vessels would then fill up their empty holds with as many black market consumer goods as they could lay their hands on, and sail back to Iceland. While in 1933 about three-quarters of Icelandic fish exports were salted, ten years later only 10 per cent were salted and about half were iced. Salting and drying factories disappeared from the Icelandic coastline, to be replaced by freezing plants, which mushroomed from two in 1930 to eighty by 1949.47

  By the end of the war, Iceland’s balance of payments problem had been reversed. Indeed, the British government constantly com
plained that it was being fleeced by the Icelandic fishing industry. The Ministry of Food was also charged high prices by British trawler owners, and fish, having been relatively cheap, became very expensive. Pam Ashford, a secretary in a coal-exporting firm in Glasgow, frequently complained to her Mass Observation diary that ‘fish is beyond our purse. Haddock is today at 4/- per lb’.48 By 1945 the Icelandic government had built up a healthy reserve of foreign currency which it promptly invested in British and Swedish fishing trawlers and additional freezing plants. Private entrepreneurs then used their savings, hoarded from the high wages and high prices paid for fish during the war, to set up small fishing and fish-processing businesses. Modern Icelandic prosperity rested firmly on the back of the post-war development of the fishing industry.49