The Matchbox Ration

On the afternoon of Thursday 8 February 1951, Captain Harry Crookshank rose in the House of Commons and tried to describe the British meat ration to the government that had set it.

It was eightpence a week. Spent on the best steak, at 2s 8d a pound, it bought about 4oz. Crookshank put it at roughly the size of a matchbox. Spent on what he called “fat and antique ewe mutton”, a description that has aged a good deal worse than the ewe, it stretched to perhaps 6oz.

Britain had won the war five and a half years earlier.

From July 1941 to November 1945, with U-boats in the Atlantic, the ration had been held at 1s 2d a week and left there. In the five years of peace since, Crookshank had counted 27 changes to it. Two months before he stood up, it had been roughly twice what it was that afternoon.

The day before, the women had come to Westminster to say so themselves. One deputation arrived by lorry, carrying figureheads comparing the meat ration then and now, and placards, some of them in rhyme. A coachload of housewives from Teddington had decorated their coach with a dummy of a plump pre-war housewife, and a skull to stand for the post-war ration.

Somebody had decided that a free country, at peace, would eat less meat than it had eaten while fighting. In British history the somebody has usually had a title, ever since the forest law. In 1951 he had a ministry.

Rationed by the penny

Meat went on the ration on Monday 11 March 1940.

It was the only food rationed by money. An adult got 1s 10d worth a week and a young child 11d, spent at the butcher you were registered with. What the money bought depended on the cut and the price, and the price was set by the state.

Some meat needed no coupon at all. The notices that week listed liver, kidney, tripe, heart and oxtail as free of the ration, along with poultry, game, and any sausage or pie that was no more than half meat.

That April the Ministry of Food went to Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton, a working-class boy from Salford who had made his name running Lewis’s department stores. In his notes for his first speech as minister he wrote: “He who touches the Nation’s food is courting trouble.”

He also lent his name to a pie. It was devised at the Savoy by the head chef, François Latry, and on 26 April 1941 The Times printed the official recipe: potatoes, cauliflower, carrots and swede under a crust of potato or wheatmeal pastry. There was no meat in it at all. Woolton let himself be photographed eating it at public luncheons, and The Times later recorded that he did so with every sign of enjoyment.

From July 1941 the meat ration was held at 1s 2d, and Woolton and his successors kept it there until the war was over.

The case for the ration

The strongest argument for wartime rationing was made four years before it started, by a man who had spent the late 1920s giving Scottish schoolchildren extra milk and measuring how much they grew.

In 1936 John Boyd Orr published Food, Health and Income. He divided the country by income and asked what each band could afford to eat. His answer was that a diet adequate for health was out of reach for half the population, and that for the poorest tenth it fell short in every respect he measured. The foods they went without began, in his account, with milk, eggs and butter.

Woolton used it. From the summer of 1940 every expectant mother, nursing mother and child under five could have a pint of milk a day, at 2d or free, depending on what the family earned. The meat ration gave a docker’s family the same share of the joint as anyone else’s, at a price the Ministry held down. For the households at the bottom of Boyd Orr’s tables, the ration put a floor under the week, and the floor was made of milk and meat.

Labour members who had lived and worked among those households were still angry about it in 1951. David Kirkwood, the Labour member for Dunbartonshire East, told the Commons that while the Queen Mary lay as a bare skeleton in John Brown’s yard, the unemployed on the Clyde went two years without fresh meat. Richard Winterbottom of Sheffield Brightside, who had spent his working life in food distribution, offered to take the Conservative member for Colchester round hundreds of homes that never saw a pound of meat a head between the wars. “The nearest they got to meat was bones.”

It is an honest case, and a strong one. The ration shared out the cow.

The peace

The war ended in 1945 and the ration carried on.

The American Lend-Lease aid that had sent over everything from dried egg to Spam stopped within weeks of the Japanese surrender. Britain was the biggest food importer in the world and short of the dollars to pay for it. The Ministry of Food kept the role it had taken at the start of the war, as the only buyer of meat in the country, bargaining with whole governments in Buenos Aires, Wellington and Canberra.

In May 1946 a new Minister of Food arrived: John Strachey, an Old Etonian who had spent the 1930s writing books from a communist point of view. Within two months he had done something the war never had. From 21 July 1946, bread was rationed.

Irene Lovelock was ready for him. She was the daughter of a London ironmonger and the wife of a Church of England clergyman, and in June 1945 she had founded the British Housewives’ League, which went on to claim more than 100,000 members. That July the League rallied in Trafalgar Square, and a newsreel caught Lovelock at one of its meetings declaring the housewives of Great Britain “in open revolt against bread rationing”.

They lost. Bread stayed on the ration for two years, and the meat kept slipping. By 1948 the meat ration was a shilling’s worth a week, twopence below the wartime figure.

On 30 November 1948 a petition reached the Commons signed by 530,000 housewives. They asked for a fuller ration of fresh meat, sausages with more meat in them, and “a larger share of unrationed meats, such as liver“. The offal that had escaped the coupon had not escaped the queue.

The government’s own figures, read out in the House of Lords in 1951, put the slide in three numbers. Before the war Britain ate 109.6lb of meat a head a year. In 1941, at war, it ate 85.6lb. In 1949, four years into the peace, it ate 74.6lb.

Britain, having won, was eating less meat than it had while fighting.

1950 looked better, at a provisional 94.1lb, but Pakenham admitted that some of it had come out of stocks, about 200,000 tons of the 2,300,000 eaten that year, and Lord Hawke said the Ministry had run its stocks down “to a most alarming extent”. The stores were running low just as the Argentine ships stopped coming.

Something else instead

When the Ministry could not find the meat, it found something else.

In 1947 it was snoek, a bony, oily fish from South African waters, sold in tins. Asked that December how much he had bought, Strachey told the Commons about 2,400 tons, with 1,450 more to come from the next season’s pack, at a price it would be “contrary to the public interest” to reveal. The useful purpose, he said, was “to have the fish to eat”.

He had eaten some himself. When an MP reported that the head of South Africa’s own fisheries department had called the fish inedible, Strachey said that was not in the least the case. When another said the tins were sitting unsold in the shops, Strachey replied that if the fish were unsaleable the Ministry would not be buying it.

In February 1948 the Ministry’s own experimental kitchens tried it. The testers found the flesh dark, the skin unattractive, and the fish breaking into pieces as it was turned out of the tin. The snoek sandwiches went down well, and the report recorded why: the fish lacked flavour, and “the joy of the sandwich was in the mustard and cress”.

Whale meat had its turn, off the ration and heavily promoted. By 1951 the British Food Journal observed that most people who had fallen for the official boosting of whale meat and snoek wished they had not. The search went further afield. Cargoes of goats were reported landing at Hull, and reindeer meat arriving from Lapland. A West Country newspaper carried an advertisement wanting live, fat, healthy horses for human consumption. In the Lords, Lord Hawke said he had heard of a large white billy goat hanging in Leadenhall Market. “He died for his country’s good.”

The grandest substitute of all was never eaten, because it barely grew. In 1946 Frank Samuel, head of Unilever’s United Africa Company, put a plan to the new government: clear millions of acres of Tanganyika and plant groundnuts, the oilseed that goes into margarine. Strachey’s Ministry took it on and ran it like a military campaign, with army-surplus tractors and old Sherman tanks refitted to clear the bush. After two years it had harvested 2,000 tons of groundnuts, fewer than it had shipped in as seed. Its abandonment was announced in January 1951, and £36.5 million was written off.

A state that could not put a lamb chop in front of the British had spent four years trying to grow them seed oil in East Africa.

Twopence a pound

Before the war about half the meat Britain ate came from abroad, and about half of that came from South America, almost all of it from Argentina and Uruguay. Chilled beef from the River Plate was a large part of the British Sunday joint.

In July 1950 the Argentine meat stopped. Juan Perón’s government wanted a higher price, backdated to January to make up for the devaluation of the pound, and the Ministry of Food, now under Maurice Webb, would not pay it. When talks in London were suspended in January 1951, Argentina was asking an average of £120 a ton. The Ministry would go no higher than £104.

The gap was £16 a ton. A ton is 2,240lb, so it came to a little under twopence on a pound of meat.

On 26 January Webb told the Commons that the carcase meat ration, the butcher’s beef, lamb, mutton and pork, would be cut from tenpence to eightpence from 4 February. It was the smallest meat ration Britain had ever had. The day before, he had told the House: “We just cannot believe that we can go back to the ordinary system of trading in meat.”

That was the ration Crookshank held up on 8 February, when he moved that the House had no confidence in the government’s capacity to deal with the meat problem. Before the war, he told the House, the average Briton ate 26oz of carcase meat a week. In 1936 Seebohm Rowntree had found an unemployed man in York, keeping a wife and four children on 36s a week in benefit, buying them more than 9oz of meat a head, and half a pound of liver besides. In 1938 the inmates of the London County Council’s workhouses were allowed a pound of carcase meat a week each, with corned beef on top, which Crookshank reckoned at three times what any free citizen could buy in 1951.

He sat down on the motto of an old London club. “Beef and liberty,” he reminded the House: two things the country was rapidly losing.

Webb answered with twopences. Newspapers and the Opposition kept saying it was only twopence a pound and the country could afford it. It was these twopences, he said, that added up to the heavy burdens in the housewife’s budget.

At which point Frederic Harris, member for Croydon North, called across the chamber: “What about the £36 million on groundnuts?”

Webb carried on, and finished on the line he seemed proudest of. The government’s only fault, if it was one, was believing that Britain was “prepared to stand up to Argentina”.

The man deciding how much meat a free country could eat was a minister weighing twopences against the cost-of-living index, inside a system of state buying his party would not give up. Outside, the butchers had nothing to cut. In the Oxford area, five of them closed for good within weeks of the eightpenny ration, and the authorities were warned there was not enough meat for the school canteens.

Better fed than ever

The argument moved to the House of Lords on 7 March, and there the government made its best case.

It fell to Lord Pakenham, who was Minister of Civil Aviation and had drawn the job of defending the food. Pakenham admitted a meat shortage and denied a food shortage. Calories were back to about 3,000 a day, the pre-war level. Fat was the same. Protein, even on eightpence of meat, was 45 grams a head a day against 43 before the war, and if anyone doubted it, “the explanation lies in the greatly increased amount of milk”. Averages, he allowed, did not tell the whole story. Food, like the national income, was now far more fairly shared out than before the war, and “in that all-important sense”, he said, “we are better fed to-day as a people than ever we were in the pre-war days.” Infant deaths, he went on, had fallen from 53 per thousand in 1938 to 32 in 1949.

Lord Woolton was on the benches opposite, by now chairman of the Conservative Party, and he had heard enough statistics. Their lordships, he said, could discuss all this in a somewhat detached manner, having canteens to go to. There were more calories in gin than in most things, he pointed out, but it would not be a good thing to make it part of the staple diet. If the country was so well fed, why had it eaten more meat during the war, with American troops to feed as well?

During the war, Woolton admitted, he had never managed to establish whether meat was really necessary to the nation’s physical health, and there were times he was “almost tempted to tell them that it was not quite so important”. He had no doubt, though, that people felt better for it. He took a swipe at Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s wartime scientific adviser and a vegetarian, who could get along very well on the present diet because he had trained himself to it. The British, Woolton said, treated the Sunday joint as something close to religion, and liked it “large enough to last well into the following week”.

This from the man whose name was on the pie.

Woolton had haggled with the Argentines himself during the war. He told the House he understood the talks had broken down over about £5 million a year, while £23 million was going to Britain’s butchers to compensate them for meat they had nothing to sell.

Earl De La Warr gave Pakenham’s figures the only answer that counted. Calories, fats and proteins were all very convincing, he said, but let the noble lord go down to any constituency in the country “and try to fight a by-election on that.”

What the ration actually did

The history of the British table on this site says that the wartime Ministry of Food, “for all its talk of sacrifice, presided over the most nutritionally dense national diet Britain has ever eaten.” In March 1951 Pakenham made much the same claim from the government benches, in defence of eightpence of meat a week, and he rested it on three supports.

The protein held up because of milk, as Pakenham said himself. Webb had already told the Commons there were a million more cattle in the country than before the war, and that concentrating on milk was the considered policy of the country, the farming policy of the day. The density in the 1951 diet came from the cow, by way of the milk float instead of the butcher.

The infant deaths fell whatever happened to the meat. In England and Wales the rate was 60 per thousand births in 1941 and 46 in 1945, and it kept falling, to 30 by 1950, through the leanest meat years of the peace. A number that improved through the war and went on improving through the meat famine that followed is moving for reasons of its own, and the ration has no claim on it either way.

The floor was real, and it was built of animal food. What Boyd Orr found missing from the poorest tables in 1936 was milk and the protective foods, and the wartime state put them there, along with a guaranteed share of the joint. The peace showed what the same machinery did with less meat to share. It went on sharing with perfect fairness, and by February 1951 the fair share came to less meat than Rowntree had found on the table of an unemployed man in York.

So the line on this site needs a sharper edge. The wartime diet was dense where it came from an animal, and fair because the state shared it out. The Ministry of Food presided over it the way a waiter presides over a good dinner: it carried the plates. When the plates started coming back with less meat on them, the same government told the House of Lords the nation was better fed than it had ever been before the war.

Midnight

Labour lost the general election in October 1951. Webb left the Ministry of Food, Major Gwilym Lloyd-George took it over, and rationing was taken apart one food at a time. Meat came off last of all.

At midnight on Saturday 3 July 1954, fourteen years of food rationing in Britain came to an end. Smithfield, which had opened at six in the morning since 1939, opened its doors at midnight, and the butchers warned that prices would run high for a couple of weeks while supply caught up with the queue. The London Housewives’ Association held a ceremony in Trafalgar Square. Geoffrey Lloyd, the Minister of Fuel and Power, set fire to an outsized ration book at a meeting in his constituency.

The Minister of Food, speaking at Bebington in Cheshire, said he would keep his as a souvenir.