Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  All those three (aged between 35 and 50) were working-class; but a more middle-class woman of 30 did not disagree: ‘I think it’s simply disgusting, stabbing the whole community in the back, just at this moment too when everything is so difficult; food’s so short. The one way to stop it would be to take away their ration books!’

  The strike was eventually called off in early November, but the grumbling about food was unabated. ‘I had to hunt for bread,’ Gladys Langford in her north London hotel noted on Saturday the 3rd. ‘After mid day it seems well nigh impossible to get a loaf. Wandered around Seven Dials, also thro’ Chapel St. market where I saw two raddled old hags telling fortunes and a queue of working-class women waiting to consult each one of them.’ Five days later, another hotel resident, Henry St John in Bristol, went by train to Minehead and found that ‘a small sandwich which had a smear of sardine inside it cost me 3d at Taunton station.’ And the next day, in Birmingham, Mary King managed to get near to the car of the visiting King and Queen: ‘She looked a little too matronly for her age. Considering the rationing of the people she certainly looked well fed.’ In the House of Commons, meanwhile, the only meat on the menu was whale or seal steak – ‘both disgusting’, according to one new Labour MP, Aidan Crawley – while even a ‘white tie and tails’ banquet could disappoint. ‘Of course the meal was terrible,’ noted Raymond Streat in the New Year, down from Manchester for the News Chronicle’s big centenary beano at Dorchester House. ‘A speck of hot lobster: an impossibly tough and exceedingly small leg of chicken: a tiny bit of not very sweet, sweet and a cup of coffee.’10

  It is unlikely, though, that Streat or any of the other 424 guests often did the household shopping. Judy Haines did, and the third Tuesday of 1946 was probably no worse than most days:

  Got ahead with ironing and then felt I must go in quest of meat as that little chop left over from our Sunday joint will not make a very nourishing Shepherd’s Pie. Dyson’s very empty. I enquired tenderly if the van had called and they informed me ‘no’ and there should be some rabbits. I have had my hopes raised like this before, falsely. But I went home out of the cold, made myself a cup of cocoa and when half way through it saw the van. Hastily finished my drink and set off again. Yes, there were some rabbits but they weren’t ready just yet. O.K. I’ll come back again. Met Mother H. [her mother-in-law] who told me List’s had some nice Mince Tarts. I hardly liked leaving Dyson’s, but she said she would wait there, which seemed a help though Dyson’s would only let their registered customers have rabbits. Wondered if all the tarts would be gone, but I was lucky, and this will make a nice sweet with some custard. No sign of rabbits, so I went into the Post Office to draw my allowance, cash money order and buy National Savings Stamps. Crowds in there but I thought Dyson’s couldn’t sell out of rabbits very quickly. When I returned to the shop there was a queue and only about three rabbits visible. However, I waited and more came up. I was lucky.

  ‘This shopping!’ she added. ‘All housewives are fed up to the eyebrows with it.’

  Austerity took a new twist on 5 February when the Minister of Food, Sir Ben Smith, announced cuts in the bacon, poultry and egg rations – the last cut made much worse by the simultaneous decision to end the importing of dried eggs. The next few weeks saw a housewives’ revolt, fuelled but not initiated by the anti-government press and at its liveliest in the middle-class parts of Liverpool. Smith eventually agreed to reintroduce dried eggs into the shops, but by then the episode had given a major fresh impetus to the British Housewives’ League. In mid-March the appreciably more serious food shortage on much of the Continent prompted Mass-Observation to ask a cluster of working-class people, again in Chelsea and Battersea, ‘How do you feel about giving up some of your food for Europe?’ The replies of four men, followed by five women, were fairly typical:

  No. I don’t think we could do it at present, we’re about down to rock bottom.

  I’d be against it, myself. It’s Germany’s turn to go without.

  If it came to it, I suppose I’d do it as willingly as the next. But not to help Germany – only the countries that’s been overrun. I wouldn’t care what happened to the Germans – they’ve asked for it.

  No, I definitely wouldn’t – I think it’s up to America – when you read in the papers about what they eat – and it was just the same when they were over here – they’re the biggest gluttons in the world now.

  I wouldn’t go short on half a loaf to benefit Germany.

  Yes. Provided we still get something for every meal.

  No, definitely not – if they were in our position they wouldn’t help us, so why should we help them?

  I think the Germans ought to go short, after all they’ve done.

  I suppose we’d do it if we had to. I hope it won’t come to that.

  There was the occasional silver lining. The day after those interviews, on the 13th, Marian Raynham – middle-aged, living in Surbiton, mother of two – recorded a long-awaited moment: ‘Bananas. Yes, bananas!! The first for 6 yrs. They are Robin’s [her son’s] really, as they are only allowed for under 18’s . . . Robin says the boys are bringing the peel to school & putting it down for others to slip on. The monkeys.’ Two days later, ‘Robin came in to room with banana & wanted to know which end to start peeling it from!! . . . We told him from stem end, & later I wondered if that was right.’ In early April things got even better: ‘The milkman brought mustard, semolina, & sultanas asking if I wanted them!! “Do you want” not “you can’t have”! War is over.’11

  But overall, the food situation was becoming a source of considerable and understandable discontent. An authoritative British Medical Association report in the late 1940s, based on studies between 1941 and 1948 about the availability of food for a family comprising a husband, wife and three children suggests a significant deterioration:

  Throughout the war the ‘housewife’ of the ‘standard’ family would have had little difficulty in obtaining the ‘human needs’ diet . . . The picture changed somewhat in Spring 1946, for although the diet could still be obtained without much difficulty, the shortage of fats made it difficult for adults to obtain a sufficient calorie intake without considerable strain on the digestion, this being the cause of the ‘recurrent complaints’ that ‘people have not enough to eat’ . . .

  After the end of the war the difficulties facing housewives in obtaining a sufficient and appetising diet for their families were increased, owing not so much to an actual shortage of food as to an insufficiency of the more palatable foods. Those especially affected were families who could not afford to spend much on food.

  There was also an increasing concern about bread – in terms not only of quality (Panter-Downes referred in early March to the recent ‘reversion to the darker, more nutritious, but obstinately disliked loaf’) but also of quantity, given that bread had never been rationed at any point during the war. The war itself was still sufficiently recent for the principle of food rationing in general to be widely accepted – fair shares, etc – but a Gallup poll found that half of the public disapproved of the prospect of bread rationing; accordingly, bread and its waste now became something of a national obsession.

  It was an obsession fully shared by Florence Speed. Aged 50 and unmarried, she had at various times worked as a commercial artist and also for her family textile business in the City before it was destroyed in the Blitz, as well as having had two novels published. By 1946 she was living with a sister and brother in a solidly middle-class part of Brixton (59 Vassal Road) and struggling with the twin problems of ill health and genteel poverty. A real writer, albeit in a sometimes indecipherable hand, her diary has a particular vividness:

  7 April. Took a book into the walled garden at Kennington Park but had only read a couple of pages when a chatty lady came and sat down beside me. ‘Disgusting that children are allowed in here. They’re so noisy & destroy everything.’

  10 April. A pleasanter day than usual as we [her sister Ethel and herself] spoke to
one or two strangers. First as we passed a hotel at Victoria, a girl on the bus. Outside was a van loaded with buns, piled high with crusts cut from sandwich loaves. Ethel exclaimed at the waste & the girl joined in. ‘Good crusts, fresh crusts. It’s wicked, they should be eaten.’

  11 April. Going thro Kennington Park this morning, I saw three parts of a loaf thrown down under a tree. What sort of mentality have these food wasters?

  26 April. Owing to wheat shortage the 2lb loaf is to be cut to 1¾lbs, but price is to be 4½d just the same!12

  The Ministry of Food seems to have hoped, in a flash of Baldrickian cunning, that people would continue to consume the same number of loaves, even though those loaves were now significantly smaller.

  It is not fanciful to argue that within a year of VE Day there had set in not only a widespread sense of disenchantment – with peace, perhaps even with the Labour government – but also a certain sense of malaise, a feeling that society, which broadly speaking had held together during the war, was no longer working so well, was even starting to come apart. To an extent it was an inevitable reaction. ‘No one feels well or happy just now,’ the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, living in Dorset, wrote to a friend in January 1946. ‘No one in wartime can quite escape the illusion that when the war ends things will snap back to where they were and that one will be the same age one was when it began, and able to go on from where one left off.’ Hauntingly, she added, ‘But the temple of Janus has two doors, and the door for war and door for peace are equally marked in plain lettering, No Way Back.’ A few weeks earlier, more prosaically, the Barry Dock News had identified a mood of ‘anti-climax’ in the South Wales town and described how Barry, like elsewhere, ‘struggles on, a little bit war-weary and depressed, but accepting the situation with stoicism’. Few felt the anti-climax more keenly than Quentin Crisp. ‘The horrors of peace were many,’ the defiantly open homosexual recalled in The Naked Civil Servant. ‘Death-made-easy vanished overnight and soon love-made-easy, personified by the American soldiers, also disappeared . . . Even mere friendship grew scarce. Londoners started to regret their indiscriminate expansiveness. People do when some moment of shared danger is past. Emotions that had been displayed had now to be lived down.’13

  How much of an oppressive cloud, post-Hiroshima, did the atom bomb cast? ‘There is no sense of stability,’ Dr David Mace of the Marriage Guidance Council observed in a September 1945 analysis of why the war was a key factor in accelerating family disruption and marriage breakdown. ‘We are forced to live in the “here and now” because we just do not know about tomorrow. That mood still prevails. The atomic bomb “question mark” means that it is no good planning.’ Two months later, after the government had announced that the Civil Defence Services would be merely suspended and should ‘keep together’, Panter-Downes overheard on a bus ‘a seedy cockney matron’ talking to a friend: ‘It ’asn’t ’arf put the wind up people. They can’t seem to settle to things, and no wonder. Funny thing, even though I’ve taken every stitch off me back every night since VE Day, I can’t seem to feel easy, either. It’s peace, I tell meself, but some’ow it don’t feel like peace ought to feel.’ Panter-Downes reckoned that this woman ‘spoke for most disturbed Londoners’, but it is at least equally possible that most Londoners and their fellow-countrymen fairly soon learnt to put to the backs of their minds such cataclysmic thoughts – as people usually do about the great unpalatables.

  Almost certainly a bigger source of oppression, on a day-to-day basis, was the unattractive mixture, certainly in peacetime, of not only a ceaseless preoccupation with ration books, vouchers and ‘points’ but also enforced exposure to frequent displays of petty authority. The writer Rupert Croft-Cooke, demobilised in the spring of 1946 and returning to what was still bombed-out London, was struck by how often he saw ‘the feelings of gentle people, of naturally timorous people being trampled on by loud-mouthed bullies, frequently in uniform’, such as policemen or public-transport officials or cinema commissionaires. Such behaviour was hardly the result of the new political dispensation but in difficult times could not but stimulate anti-government feelings. Happening in April 1946 to catch Workers’ Playtime (the radio variety programme that began during the war to boost production in the factories and continued long into peace), Vere Hodgson, a welfare worker in west London and, like many Londoners, much disgusted by the peacetime determination of bus conductors not to allow standing passengers, was ‘amazed’ by the programme’s criticism:

  I do not listen very often, so it was all fresh to me. Much at the expense of Aneurin Bevan [the minister responsible for housing as well as health]. One comedian was going to Wales because a house had been built there last year! Then the song that struck me as being very remarkable was one called ‘I’d Like To Be A Refugee From Britain’. All in rhyme it was . . . we were under fed and over taxed, and spent our lives in queues, etc, docketed and ticketed. But the most remarkable lines were the end . . . about they say they can do without Churchill, so they can do without me, I want to be a refugee from Britain.

  ‘The factory girls,’ she added, ‘cheered to the echo.’

  Crucial to the sense of malaise were the corrosive effects, in peacetime if not in war, of the overriding context of rationing, price controls and production controls. ‘It’s very easy to spot people who buy things without coupons in Barrow,’ reflected Nella Last as early as September 1945. ‘They have the Jewish stamp, over decorated & doll eyed bits & pieces of fur & tucks.’ Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, historian of austerity, makes it abundantly clear that the black market and all its devices – including off-ration and under-the-counter sales as well as tipping and favouritism – were at least as extensive after the war as during it. Food orders, the Minister of Food noted in May 1946, were ‘generally being ignored and evaded more flagrantly now than at any time during the war’, while soon afterwards his ministry found that a ‘substantial section of the agricultural community habitually disregard the Food Orders, adopting the attitude that they are just more regulations to be “got round” – at a profit – and not that such avoidance is fundamentally dishonest and unfair to the whole community’, with farmers and dealers in Wales identified as the worst offenders. No doubt some of them had been partly responsible for the scandal that had done much to spoil the first peacetime Christmas (at least in London), with Panter-Downes reporting that ‘most butchers refused to pay more than the legal prices for fowl and consequently had nothing but a nice row of empty hooks to show their customers’.14

  It was about this time, moreover, that the black-market spiv really started to emerge as a well-known type: coat with wide lapels and padded-out shoulders, tight collar on shirt, big knot in tie, hair parted in middle with wave on either side, pencil moustache, he was grudgingly admired, essentially disliked. Yet the fact was that a significant part – perhaps even the majority – of the respectable middle class, and indeed of the respectable working class, simultaneously condemned and used the black market, without which they would have been hard pressed to maintain an even barely recognisable quality of life. Some even found themselves succumbing to the temptation of coupon fraud. ‘I suspect there’s more dishonesty in this country today than for many years,’ Hodson reflected in May 1946. ‘Rationing, controls of material, very high income tax [9 shillings in the pound], a feeling of despair at the state of the world – all these contribute to it.’ Returning servicemen could, in this as other ways, find it particularly difficult. Thomas Hanley, 28 and just married, decided to try his luck in Devon. Half a century later, his memories were still sharp and painful:

  I found business, even in a small seaside resort [probably Paignton], was run on chicanery and spivvery. I found that men, some not much older than myself, who had managed either by reason of age or health to miss a call-up, controlled all aspects of public life. In an atmosphere of rationing and shortages, interlopers like myself had a hard time. Helping hands were weighted by self-interest. Even persons of the utmost integrity, a
fter six years of war, were motivated by self-preservation. It wasn’t so much of ‘dog eat dog’, rather to make sure that no opportunity of easing one’s existence was missed. I doubt if a single Englishman did not avail himself of the help of the ‘black market’. Expedience was the name of the game.

  In such a situation, Hanley reflected in retrospect, a returned serviceman’s ‘main attribute was the stoic acceptance of the inevitable, so much a part of his service life’. His formative years may have been taken from him, but ‘at least he was alive’.15

  There were plenty of other signs, big and small, of a society apparently out of joint. ‘The trains are lighted now,’ the headmaster Ernest Loftus conceded in October 1945, ‘but the lighting is not always good & it is not easy to read unless one is lucky & manages to get a compartment with single lights behind the seats. People are awful vandals & some compartments are in darkness through the bulbs being pilfered – the window straps are also cut off – war disease – little sense of honesty.’ That month was the busiest that Scotland Yard had ever known, and shortly before Christmas the Independent MP W. J. Brown considered in his diary the ‘vast crime-wave in Britain today’: