Manchester at War, 1939-45

by Graham Phythian

  BRYANT ANTHONY HILL

  In Wythenshawe, I’ll tell you, there was one or two that got caught. They were slaughtering pigs, and leaving them in the bath, in brine! And I know of at least two episodes of that. That was illegal, you can’t go killing pigs and sticking them in Corporation [housing] … if you’ve ever read the regulations the Corporation had, you weren’t even allowed to own a motorbike and sidecar.

  They used to have pig clubs, you know, in the war. A group would get together and perhaps have a little pig, and you gave your bacon ration up, and you got a certain allowance to keep a pig, or two pigs, depending on how well off you were. And then as each pig came to be slaughtered, that was divided between the pig club. The government encouraged that.

  I know a customer of my father’s got caught dealing in cloth. She managed to get hold of clothes from somewhere, and sold them on the black market, for probably a bit more than they were worth. Where she was getting them from, she never said; in court she wouldn’t say. She got twelve months.

  JOHN PEARSON

  [The speaker’s mother ran a corner shop in Droylsden.]

  The butter came in a lump, and it all had to be cut up, and of course you would cut it in microscopic amounts of butter! I remember one lady came in and she had a butter ration on a slice of bread, and she said, ‘I had one good slice out of that!’

  I don’t think anybody really went hungry in the war, but the meals were a bit hard. I remember once at Audenshaw Grammar School, we had ‘bone pie’ [laughs], we only ever had it once. It consisted of bones and pastry, and there must have been some meat on the bone, but it was essentially bone pie.

  (Manchester Evening News, October 1942)

  You had the coupons for sweets. You could go anywhere with the sweet coupons, you weren’t registered; but for sugar and butter you were of course registered at a particular shop, and you had your ration book stamped. But with sweets you had coupons and you could give them in anyhow.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  ANON.

  During rationing I remember going in Duckworth’s, which was a grocer’s shop, and the sugar was in big bags ready to be weighed out into blue bags. The butter – I think you were allowed half a pound of butter, and 10d [approximately 4p] of meat. You got a small packet of tea, and I don’t think you got cheese every week. Flour you got, because my mum made my dad a pudding every day and I don’t know how she did it.

  ‘Did you ask that new girl at the grocer’s if they had any gelatine?’

  ‘I did, but she said, “You can’t kid me.” She said she knew all about the thing they used in the French Revolution.’

  (Manchester Evening News, 7 May 1945)

  Every week in the paper there would be a recipe so you could manage; Woolton Pie and Spartan Christmas Pudding. Woolton Pie was a vegetable pie and it was really very good. You had to make do and mend.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  Jam! You should hear what my husband calls it. It won’t stick two pieces of bread together and even the children don’t like it. When I see a bit of plum in the so-called plum jam they are selling, I’ll buy it. It’s all liquid.

  (Manchester City News correspondence, 19 May 1944)

  There came the era of substitutes – ‘egg’ powder which had never been near a hen, ‘gelatine’ which was practically industrial glue, ‘blanc-mange’ which was little more than coloured and flavoured flour, sweetening agents which owed everything to the coal from which saccharine is made, and owed nothing to cane or beet from which sugar comes, metal polish which wouldn’t, starch which didn’t.

  • The great cigarette famine brought the first ‘No …’ notices, which grew with the months to ‘No cigarettes … no matches … no beer … no chocolates … no saccharine.’

  • Paper became scarce and everything – or nearly everything – was brought home in string bags which revealed our most intimate secrets to any passer who cared to look twice. And – nearly the last straw – they took away our clothes!

  • Remember that Sunday morning when we woke up to find those margarine coupons stood for dresses … and coats … and shoes? Remember how everybody wailed, ‘Why only last week I was going to buy … but …’

  • Then began the everlasting search for fully-fashioned stockings, the beginning of the bare leg vogue and stains for them which brought to mind woadbedecked cave women. We went hatless, too, or wore those interminable turbans because millinery buying was such a financial embarrassment.

  • And we got nearer and nearer to hysterics when shop assistants kept repeating that most maddening of all phrases, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

  (Manchester Evening Chronicle, 2 May 1945)

  JANE DAWSON ADVISES

  I have relatives in Ireland who are worried about me, and have sent me a gift of a hamper which contains some of our rationed foods. Am I in order accepting this, or ought I to send it back again?

  It is in order for you to accept this present, as it was unsolicited. If you were to ask for gifts of rationed food, or to offer payment for them, you would, however, be breaking the rules of the Rationing Order.

  (Manchester Evening News, 20 March 1941)

  FRANCIS HOGAN

  We were always short of eggs. My dad bought some little chicks, and we had a boiler in the kitchen, and he put these chicks in this box and covered it with wire netting. We had a dog – it was a hard dog – and I came home from work, and the wire netting had come off the top of the box, and our dog was in the middle of this box, with all these chicks sat on top of him. [laughs] Anyway, they grew up, and they were all cocks! [laughs] All the neighbours were complaining about the ‘cock-a-doodle-doo!’ So no eggs! I remember one afternoon my mum had been feeding them, and one of them must have flew at her, and she came in and she said, ‘I’m sure those are not hens.’

  MARGARET KIERMAN

  [At the outbreak of war the speaker lived as a teenager in her parents’ corner shop in Gorton.]

  They had to put blackout curtaining everywhere. And then of course things did become a bit difficult to get. Cigarettes were rationed, and fortunately we dealt direct with both Player’s and Will’s, so we were quite fortunate.

  And of course toys were limited; well virtually everything that you sold became shorter and shorter. But there were always newspapers and comics.

  There was some black marketeering – in fact, my father did from time to time get some leather goods, which he didn’t ask where they came from! He felt after rather guilty about it; nevertheless people were so pleased to get them, so I don’t know whether it was wrong or not [laughs], but it gave pleasure to a lot of people.

  (North West Sound Archive)

  ANON.

  We used to get our rations from the Co-op in Bridge Street [Ramsbottom] and I can remember the list started butter, sugar, tea, marge, cooking fat, matches, cigarettes. We were all right; we were never hungry, we made the most of it. As for clothing we had a lot of hand-me-downs and we were glad of them.

  With rationing I used to queue for hours with my mother. I remember once we queued for about three hours and my mother managed to get two bananas, which I’d never seen before. As a treat she gave one to me and I hated it – I’d eaten it with the skin on!

  (North West Sound Archive)

  BRIAN SEYMOUR

  On Great Clowes Street [Salford] they built an emergency kitchen, which was there after the war. Because when I went to work in education, before I did National Service, there was a department there, a school meals department, and the woman who was in charge of that department was also in charge of these emergency kitchens. People could go and for, I don’t know, a shilling, a couple of shillings, they’d get a two-course meal. That happened during the war for people who had been bombed out.

  I can remember my grandmother, when it got to the end of summer, storing apples in the loft in boxes with newspapers so they would last, and potatoes too. She used to keep them dark, in the loft.

 
; FRANK ELSON

  It was simply the normal way of living. I knew nothing else.

  For instance, my mother had a Mrs Beeton cookery book. In it were pictures of butchers’ shops with meat hanging up all around. I didn’t believe the book because I knew what a butcher’s shop looked like: an empty window and nothing hanging up. I asked my mother why the pictures were wrong and she said it was because of the war, but I don’t really think she explained what war was. Rationing was just a fact of life.

  … I remember tanks from the Beaumont Road maintenance unit parked in four rows from Wigan Road to Chorley New Road [Deane, West Bolton]. There was a hut for the people who worked there and we used to go to scrounge sweets and chocolate off them and there were barrage balloons in the sky, but then I don’t remember them not being there! [During the war the entire length of Beaumont Road was closed, and used as a storage depot.]

  … We had a food parcel once from America; maybe my mother got it because she was a widow, but I remember a huge block of Rockwood’s chocolate was in it. It had ridges across it, not squares.

  (From World War II – An Account of Local Stories)

  ANNIE GIBB

  I remember rationing: dried egg from America, and Spam.

  I’ll tell you a funny story about rationing. The bacon was so short, part of the war, that you got one ounce a week. So this family of five that I knew, they lived on Kirkmanshulme Lane, they got ten ounces of bacon for the family, just this one fortnight, and they had a greyhound, it had been on the trap but I don’t think it was a very good one, and it went in this cupboard and ate the bacon ration. My dad said, ‘I’d have ate the **** dog!’

  We’d have the odd egg, we got a little bit of butter – about two ounces of butter a week – sugar, so much a week. Bread was eventually rationed, but you just got like the main things, like bacon. Meat was rationed, everything was rationed. You got points for tinned food, and you got like stamps in a book, and when you’d gone through them, that was it. We seemed to do well for apples and plums, things like that. Children who lived near to where there were fruit trees were drafted in to collect the fruit.

  There were spivs, and ways of getting round the rationing. I did hear that somebody thought one night (it was late), ‘I’ll go in and I’ll drink some of that milk out of that churn.’ And when he went to open the lid, there was a side of bacon hidden in it! I don’t know if that’s true, but I can believe it.

  My dad used to bring stuff home, I don’t know if other people used to do it. He used to put rice pudding in a milk bottle and bring it home. He couldn’t let food be wasted.

  I’ve got some friends in Scotland, and he told me that they used to go on the tip looking for the clearance of the bomb sites. Now any food that my uncle found in the bomb site, he brought it home squashed and battered. So he used to eat anything anybody found in the rubbish.

  WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM

  Shortages were sometimes met with creativity. Mr Shaw’s wife was in a nursing home, and he had me cut up sheets of the tissue paper used for packing [at George Shaw’s hat material factory on Market Street, Denton] into small squares. These he would deliver to his wife for toilet paper. To put this into a proper context, many families were using torn up newspapers for that purpose. To them, the cut-up tissue paper would have seemed quite luxurious.

  (From Denton Voices)

  JENNY JOHNSON

  I remember rationing, oh yes, but there’s way and means, isn’t there? And my father was a seaman, you see, and when he was between ships he worked with an ostler, you know with horses, and of course they used to go in pubs and they’d meet all these people and so we were never really short of food or anything. This man he used to work at Sisson’s that used to be in St Anne’s Square, a very posh cake shop, and he used to bring the cakes. And my uncle used to work in the Grosvenor [former hotel on Deansgate], and he used to bring bits of food home, you know. We had lots of contacts, so we did very well really.

  MICKIE MITCHELL

  We weren’t so bad in the Fire Service, because we got our meals, you know.

  There was loads of black market. When we were on our second tour of duty we used to go to the Ritz, you know, you got two hours’ short leave; we went to the Ritz dancing. I don’t know where they got it from, I think America or somewhere, tins of butter, and my mother loved butter. So I got one like that and took it home, and she said, ‘Where’ve you got it from?’

  I said, ‘I’m not telling you!’ Because she was very very, you know, perfect, my mother, sort of thing.

  JANE DAWSON ADVISES

  Is there any way in which one can recover lost clothing coupons? My little boy got hold of my handbag, took out my new card which I had just got, and tore it into tiny pieces! My husband says that under no circumstances can lost coupons be replaced.

  Mrs. H.

  I hope you kept the pieces! You should take them to your nearest Citizens’ Advice Bureau – where they will give you the necessary form on which to make a statement of what happened to them, and what steps to take.

  (Manchester Evening News, 2 January 1942)

  Part of a clothing ration book, showing coupons and directions for use. (Philip Lloyd)

  She said, ‘Well, I want to know before I eat it.’

  So I said, ‘Well it’ll be gone, nobody’ll notice!’ [laughs] I said, ‘well, I can always take it and flog it somewhere else!’

  There was a lot of that went on at the Ritz, you’d go and sit upstairs in the balcony, and it went on like that.

  NORMAN WILLIAMSON

  There were some black market things, and I’m afraid it seemed to go on: my boss lived in Prestbury, and our drivers used to go into Prestbury, and quite often they’d come back with eggs, some currant cake which you couldn’t get, things like that. The driver was picking up things, and we didn’t do bad. And you could always get fish and chips! Always! So it was a bit of a standard diet.

  DIANE SWIFT

  On Saturday mornings my mother gave me a list to take to a shop in Walnut Street [Hulme] called Mrs Dore’s: ¼lb lard, ¼ special margarine (horrible), four eggs, dried egg, ¼ rody [streaky] bacon. It came to about 9s [45p]. I paid the bill one week behind.

  I used to go to Platt’s toffee shop on the corner of Preston Street and Longworth Street, Hulme. He had a good variety.

  The only thing I knew about the black market was in 1944. I was five. Father Christmas brought me a celluloid baby doll dressed in hand-knitted clothes: hardly any dolls knocking about in those days. I heard my mother tell the neighbour it was from the black market. My grandmother who lived at No. 128 Chester Road, Hulme, bought it for me. My father wouldn’t do anything illegal.

  I remember a house was empty, and there was coal in the cellar. But we couldn’t take any. Looking back I don’t think there was any black market in our street. There was no ready cash. We just struggled along quite happily.

  ROY MATHER

  My father had been a butcher; he knew plenty of butchers in the trade, he’d come out of the trade, but he used to come in with a tongue, no questions asked, like. You had to put this tongue in saltpetre to cure it, then my mother used to cook it hot and cut it up. So that was tongue sandwiches! [laughs]

  My father kept a pub in Longsight, and they’d come in – ‘Wanna buy this?’ – you couldn’t say too much, because walls had ears. They’d come in with cigarettes and other things. It was the Grove Inn, it’s no longer there now.

  The beer was frequent then, it didn’t go short until 1946. In ’46 we were closed two days a week, because the beer had run out. But in the war, you could get beer, it wasn’t rationed, they never rationed beer. Like the bread, they never rationed that until 1946.

  There were two chip shops near us, and you used to go and get fish, chips and peas, and they did beans in them days, you know like you get in Heinz beans? And then they’d shut up because the fat had run out. And then the other shop was open, the wire went round: ‘Oh they’re opening tonight!’ – on the bush
telegraph, you know.

  T. MARRIOTT-MOORE

  You have a look at the records for the butter or the margarine – what was it, two ounces a week? You had to spread it very carefully. My wife used to pull my daughter’s leg: ‘You’ve not got over the wartime habit of putting the butter on with a brush yet!’

  Eggs, what were they, about two a week, something like that? Tea …

  In the shops of course, a lot of things were under the counter. Now and again somebody would come up and say, ‘Do you want any sugar?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Don’t ask questions.’

  A friend of mine was in charge of building a big airfield, and he was told that the workers, they got an extra sugar allowance. One day the local grocer called him in and said, ‘Come here, I want to show you. I’m worried.’ He took him into a little store room; there were sacks and sacks of sugar. He said, ‘Your men have never claimed their sugar for six months. I’m worried.’

  My friend said, ‘Well, if you can continue to be worried until tonight, I’ll relieve you of your worry.’ He borrowed a big truck, and he loaded all the sugar and dispersed it. He did quite well out of it too.

  There was this campaign to get you to keep bees, as a matter of fact. There was a special allocation of sugar for beekeepers, I remember. That’s how I took up bee-keeping, because my wife said, ‘Well surely they don’t eat all that much sugar during the winter, and we could do with some of that to make jam with.’ [laughs] So we took up beekeeping and had a little extra sugar for the jam making.