Britain extends food rationing

At the end of December 1939, as the British spent their first wartime Christmas, the Ministry of Food announced the final rules for rationing, which was to begin on Monday 8 January 1940. From that day every inhabitant of the country could buy no more than 4 ounces (about 113 grams) of bacon or ham, 4 ounces of butter and 12 ounces (about 340 grams) of sugar a week – and only at the shop with which they had registered, on production of a ration book. Chronologies associate the announcement with the Minister of Food, William Morrison, and date it to 28 December. In reality it was the last step in a series of decisions taken since the beginning of November: Morrison had already announced the rationing of bacon and butter in the House of Commons at that time, and the main novelty at the end of December was sugar, until then subject only to voluntary restraint. Petrol had been rationed since September, so the “extension” of rationing mentioned in chronologies in practice meant the first food rationing in Britain since the First World War.

An island dependent on ships

In 1939 Britain was the world’s largest importer of food. It brought in some 20 million tons of food a year from abroad: about 70 per cent of its cheese and sugar, nearly 80 per cent of its fruit, about 70 per cent of its cereals and fats and more than half its meat. Domestic livestock farming also depended on imported feed. All of it came by sea, and in 1917–1918 German submarines had already once brought the country to the brink of hunger. On that occasion rationing had been introduced late and piecemeal, after months of queues and unrest; compulsory rationing of sugar, meat and fats covered the whole of Britain only in 1918.

This time the government had prepared in advance. From the end of 1936 a food (defence plans) department had been working at the Board of Trade, and it had ordered the printing of ration books – according to Morrison they were printed more than a year before the outbreak of war, some 50 million of them. When war broke out the department became the Ministry of Food, headed by Morrison, a Scottish Conservative who had until then been Minister of Agriculture. The national register of 29 September gave the state knowledge of how many consumers there were and where they lived, and in the autumn the ration books were sent out by post. Admiralty controls and the convoy system had also been in operation since September, but the first months of the Battle of the Atlantic showed that shipping losses would be painful. From the autumn the Germans had been intensifying the U-boat war, and on that very day, 28 December, U-30 torpedoed the battleship HMS Barham.

Rationing postponed three times

On 1 November Morrison told the House of Commons that the government would introduce rationing of bacon and butter “not earlier than the middle of next month”, at 4 ounces a week per person, “that is, a pound of bacon and a pound of butter for a family of four”. He explained that both products were perishable, that the government had no stocks of them, and that supplies from Europe – from Denmark among others – had dwindled before distant sources such as New Zealand and Canada could fill the gap. In the meantime every consumer was to register with a retailer of their choice.

The announcement caused an outcry. The press wrote of needless bureaucracy and an assault on civil liberties. Loudest of all was Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, which called rationing “unnecessary folly”. Public opinion, however, thought otherwise: according to a November poll by the British Gallup institute, some 60 per cent of those asked considered rationing necessary and 28 per cent were against. People could see that without rationing goods were in short supply anyway, and that the better-off bought them up first. In many shops there was simply no bacon or butter to be had.

On 28 November Morrison announced that rationing, planned to start before Christmas, would begin on 8 January 1940. He justified this by the requests of traders, who did not want to introduce a new system in Christmas week, and by the conviction that the public would prefer as few restrictions as possible over the holiday. At the same time he asked consumers to register for sugar as well and voluntarily to limit their purchases to a pound (about 450 grams) per person a week. On 13 December he repeated this appeal and declined to give figures for stocks, since publishing them was not in the national interest. The final sugar ration, announced at the end of December, was smaller than the appeal had suggested: 12 ounces.

How rationing worked

The system that came into force on 8 January was simple. Everyone received a book of coupons. Each customer was tied to a particular shop, and the shop received from the ministry as much of each commodity as it had registered customers. When a purchase was made, the shopkeeper cut out or cancelled the coupon and the customer paid as usual, at a price controlled by the state. Rationing thus gave nobody anything for free, but it guaranteed that everyone, rich or poor, could buy the same amount. That was the government’s main argument, and it was what won over most of the public: rationing was to mean fair distribution, not hunger.

In December 1939 two Cambridge scientists, Elsie Widdowson and Robert McCance, began testing on themselves and on volunteers whether Britain could survive if submarines cut it off from imports altogether. For several months they ate only what home production could provide: one egg, a pound of meat and 4 ounces of fish a week, a quarter of a pint of milk a day, a little margarine and unlimited quantities of potatoes, vegetables and wholemeal bread. The results, kept secret until the end of the war, convinced the government that even very strict rationing would not ruin the nation’s health.

More rationing

January 1940 was only the beginning. On 11 March 1940 meat was rationed – not by weight but by price: each person could spend 1s 10d a week, which bought on average about a pound of meat. On 3 April Morrison was replaced by the businessman Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton, who became the face of British food policy until 1943. In July 1940, after the fall of France, tea (2 ounces a week) and fats were rationed, and in the following year cheese, jam and eggs. From 1 June 1941 clothing was rationed, and from December 1941 many products were sold under a points system, in which consumers chose for themselves what to spend their allowance on. Bread and potatoes remained unrationed throughout the war.

Rationing outlasted the war. In 1946–1948 the British even had bread rationing, which had been avoided during the war, and the last rationing – of meat – was not lifted until 4 July 1954.

Significance

The rationing of 8 January 1940 was one of the first tangible effects of the war on the ordinary Briton during the Phoney War, when almost nothing was happening on the Western Front and the bombs everyone feared were not falling. It showed that Britain was preparing for a long war of attrition in which the country’s fate depended on ships crossing the Atlantic. Accepted in the end without much resistance, rationing became in the years that followed a symbol of the British home front: “fair shares” of scarcity, common to all. Post-war studies showed that thanks to rationing, food subsidies and free allowances for children, the poorest part of society was better fed during the war than before it, and infant mortality fell.

The Germans had introduced rationing as early as the end of August 1939, before the attack on Poland, and in the first years of the war their system relied increasingly on the plunder of occupied countries. The British system relied on imports from the Empire and the Americas. When in 1940 the Germans gained bases in France and Norway and their submarines began sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping a month, it was on rationing and on the convoys that Britain’s ability to carry on the war depended.