Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (68 page)

While the eating habits of the upper and middle classes were levelled downwards, the working-class diet was levelled upwards. A friend of the journalist J. L. Hodson remarked, ‘our rationing of foods has, willy-nilly, achieved some levelling up of the nation; fewer folk have gone hungry and fewer have gorged themselves’.
⁴⁸
The idea, which was widespread at the time, that the war had brought about a social, cultural and economic levelling of society was largely illusory. The income gap between the working and middle classes remained as wide as ever.
However, reduced unemployment and higher wages greatly improved the purchasing power of working-class families. The real income of a man in industry rose by 46 per cent during the war.
⁴⁹
It was this rise in purchasing power, combined with price controls and the guarantee of the ration, which gave the working classes access to adequate quantities of meat, eggs (albeit dried), butter and milk products. More than any action by nutritionists or government-directed policy it was full employment and the fairer distribution of food brought about by the need for food rationing which had a revolutionary impact on the nation’s health and gave the poorest third of society access to animal protein, vitamins and calcium. The huge gap that had previously existed between the nutritional value of the diet of the wealthy and the poor was substantially narrowed during the war. Nutritionists delightedly pronounced that the bottom third of British society had been pulled out of misery and were finally eating an adequate diet.
⁵⁰

This nutritional levelling-up of the lower classes was a by-product of rising wages and planned food economies across the world. Throughout the 1930s nutritionists had argued that all it would take to improve the health of the lower classes would be for governments to step in and implement policies which gave people access to better food. They were vindicated by the positive effect of wartime rationing systems on the diet and health of the working classes across the globe. In Sweden a coupon system was introduced which ensured that the poorest could afford butter and milk.
⁵¹
In Australia, although per capita consumption of meat was cut by half, a greater share of the reduced total went to the working classes.
⁵²
In 1945 urban families were found to have increased their milk consumption by a third and their cheese consumption by a quarter.
⁵³
Although competition for fruit and vegetables was fierce between American army suppliers and Australian civilians, in 1944 the Australian working classes were eating 17 per cent more fresh fruit and substantially more fresh tomatoes than before the war.
⁵⁴
In Canada, where workers’ wages rose, they were found to be consuming increased quantities of protein, iron and calcium and, when the government discovered that the Canadian diet was hopelessly deficient in vitamin C, it imported, at great expense, oranges and grapefruit juice from the United States.
⁵⁵
Even in Iceland, work constructing camps, roads and airfields for the British and the Americans meant that the
urban working classes were finally able to buy adequate quantities of milk, meat and vegetables.
⁵⁶

CLOSING THE NUTRITIONAL GAP

The nutritionists’ influence on government food policy may have been restricted but a number of measures were introduced into the rationing system which, rather than aiming to increase the productivity of the working population, set out specifically to address the malnutrition and health problems of the deprived. This welfare policy was the result of the interests of specific personalities within the government.

In 1938 the Scottish Unionist MP Walter Elliot was appointed to the position of Minister of Health. His training as a doctor made him aware of the new research into the impact of diet on health and as Minister of Agriculture he had already introduced free school milk. In 1939 the rising cost of milk caused him great concern. For the poor, milk was already unaffordable. In the 1930s the dependant’s allowance for a man on the dole was 4
s
.11
d
. and the amount of milk recommended for a pregnant woman by the government’s own Medical Officer cost 4
s
.1
d
.
⁵⁷
Elliot began work on setting up a wartime scheme to provide nursing mothers and young children with subsidized milk. But before he could implement it he fell from favour in May 1940, along with Neville Chamberlain, and Churchill removed him from office.
⁵⁸

However, in April 1940 Lord Woolton had been appointed to the position of Minister of Food and he survived Churchill’s rise to the position of prime minister. He took over the departing Elliot’s milk scheme with enthusiasm. Like the government’s nutritional advisers, Woolton had witnessed the misery of urban poverty and in him the poor found an ally. Woolton was a businessman, formerly chairman of Lewis’s in Liverpool, and later to become chairman of the Conservative Party. But he and his wife were also philanthropists. As a young man he had lived among the poor as the warden of a philanthropic society for the poor and needy of Liverpool, and during the First World War his wife had helped to run a feeding programme for the distressed wives and children of absent servicemen.
⁵⁹
He was as aware as the
scientists that malnutrition took its greatest toll on women during their childbearing years, and that it was the inability of poor women to buy more and better-quality food to meet their greater nutritional needs during pregnancy which left working-class women and their children vulnerable to death, disablement and disease. Woolton’s timing was good. The sense that Britain was under siege was created by the British army’s withdrawal from France at Dunkirk in June and the Treasury was persuaded to be generous.
⁶⁰
Pregnant and nursing women were given priority access to a pint of milk a day at the cost of 2
d
. Their children were also allocated two pints of milk a day under the age of one, and a pint a day subsequently.
⁶¹
This was an extremely successful initiative. By September 1940, 70 per cent of those eligible were parti-cipating.
⁶²

The poor showed less enthusiasm for the Ministry of Food’s vitamin scheme, which was also designed to address the problem of poverty-related malnutrition. In December 1941 all children under two (all children under five from February 1942) were given an allowance of blackcurrant juice and Icelandic cod liver oil. When Britain ran out of blackcurrants the juice was replaced by lend-lease orange juice from the United States. But in January 1943 only one-fifth of those eligible were collecting their allocations. The lack of enthusiasm perhaps had something to do with the taste of the cod liver oil, which according to a Ministry official was ‘horrible’. An aggressive advertising campaign eventually pushed up the acceptance of orange juice to nearly half of those entitled to it.
⁶³
However, the children’s orange juice ration did not always find its way to its intended beneficiaries. The upper-middle-class Maggie Hay recalled mischievously that it tasted very good as a mixer with gin.
⁶⁴

Two further measures aimed to improve children’s health more generally. In October 1941
The Times
reported Woolton as having said, ‘I want to see elementary school children as well fed as children going to Eton or Harrow. I am determined that we shall organise our food front that at the end of the war … we shall have preserved and even improved the health and physique of the nation.’
⁶⁵
The Milk in Schools scheme was now extended to all schoolchildren. School dinners were also introduced, providing about 1,000 calories, or a third of the children’s daily energy needs. By the end of the war, more than 1.5 million
children, 40 per cent of the school population, were eating school dinners and 46 per cent drinking school milk.
⁶⁶
The circumstances of war removed the stigma of charity which had surrounded the school milk scheme in the 1930s. By 1945 it was considered perfectly natural that all children should eat school meals and drink free bottles of milk. It was only with the appointment of Margaret Thatcher as Education Minister that free school milk for children over seven was brought to an end in 1971.

Between 1939 and 1945 maternal and infant mortality rates among the working classes declined. The incidence of tuberculosis rose during the difficult early years of the war, but the disease went into decline again in 1942 and the rate of infection continued to drop. The School Medical Officer for the London County Council claimed that any height and weight differences between children of different social classes had virtually disappeared by the end of the war. A more nuanced picture emerged from Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle where it was still possible to differentiate between children at ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools, but the height and weight of the children at the ‘bad’ schools had improved. In the poorest pockets of Britain, such as Jarrow, the number of children who could be classed in the worst health category of ‘D’ had virtually vanished.
⁶⁷
Deficiency diseases such as rickets were essentially eradicated. The nutritionists concluded that besides winning the war with Germany, Britain had also won the war against malnutrition.

Throughout the western world the wartime introduction of planned economies, which accepted responsibility for the health and welfare of all a nation’s citizens, marked a decisive break with the past. In post-war Britain it would no longer be possible for a government, whether Conservative or Labour, to turn away from abject misery, declaring that it was the result of ignorance and, by implication, beyond the means of the government to rectify. The Ministry of Food had demonstrated that it was possible for the government to tackle these issues, and even if certain politicians were reluctant to accept that the state’s relationship to its people should change, the public’s expectations had shifted. This was demonstrated by the British people’s response to the Beveridge Report.

In 1941, William Beveridge was asked to chair a minor government committee on insurance benefits, but the report that he published in
December 1942 was more far-reaching and called for a comprehensive system of social security based on subsistence-rate benefits, a new health service, and measures to ensure full employment. The cabinet response to the report was divided. The Labour Ministers – Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton – were all in favour of reform, although not necessarily in the shape that Beveridge had suggested. But they were not in a position within the coalition government to direct social policy. For the most part the Conservatives maintained their pre-war attitude to the poor and remained resistant to welfare, which they insisted would reduce initiative. They had no desire to engage in any attempt to redistribute wealth. Lord Beaverbrook and Kingsley Wood – who had once tried to intimidate John Boyd Orr and who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer – were both unenthusiastic. Churchill himself ‘was said to be “allergic to post-war policy”’.
⁶⁸
The Conservatives did their best to tone down Beveridge’s recommendations and obstruct radical reform.

If the report did not exactly galvanize Churchill’s coalition government into action, it caught the imagination of the British public. Within two weeks of publication 635,000 copies of the report had been sold. One week later, nine out of ten people interviewed for a Gallup poll believed that its proposals should be adopted.
⁶⁹
The British public’s enthusiasm indicated that the war had stimulated the desire for a fairer society where everyone had work, a decent house and enough nutritious food to eat. The government could not completely ignore public enthusiasm and, in response, the Ministry of Reconstruction was set up in November 1943, headed by the popular Lord Woolton. Family allowances and educational reform were introduced before the war came to an end and the benefits of the wartime provision of school meals were extended into the post-war world by R. A. Butler’s Education Act (1944).
⁷⁰
By the general election of 1945 the British people were ready to vote for a Labour government, which they felt would strive to construct a fairer society.
⁷¹
Welfare was no longer seen as a special service for the needy but as a social service for all. Thus, the statutory fortification of foods, such as bread, which was continued after the war, applied a protective policy across society.
⁷²
However, the egalitarian notion that everyone should receive the same share, which Woolton had applied to food rationing, animated much of the thinking
behind the development of the measures introduced by the welfare state. The unfortunate result was that the fundamental inequality of the food rationing system came back to haunt post-war welfare measures and pensions, in particular, were set too low to really lift the most needy among the aged out of impoverishment. Nevertheless, the war marked a decisive break with the past in that, after 1945, ‘government … never recovered from the wartime expectation that it should continually “do something” in all spheres’, and that it was right and proper for the state to take responsibility for its citizens’ health and well-being.
⁷³