Clothes rationing in Britain

On Sunday 1 June 1941, Whit Sunday, the British read in their morning papers that from that day on clothes, shoes and cloth could be bought only with coupons. The news came as a surprise, and it was meant to. The President of the Board of Trade, Oliver Lyttelton, had signed the order on the afternoon of Thursday 29 May; on the Friday he briefed the editors of the leading newspapers in confidence, and on the Saturday morning he sent the press a statement embargoed until Sunday. The shops were shut that day, so nobody had time to stock up. When they opened their doors again, customers were paying not only with money but with coupons as well.

Why clothes

Food had been rationed in Britain since January 1940, and meat since March of the same year. Clothing had long remained outside the system, even though Germany had introduced clothing cards as early as November 1939. In the spring of 1941, however, Winston Churchill’s government decided that it could wait no longer, for three reasons.

The matter fell to the Board of Trade, and so to Lyttelton. He was not a career politician but a businessman who between the wars had run large firms trading in non-ferrous metals, and in September 1939 had become the government’s Controller of Non-Ferrous Metals. He entered the House of Commons at a by-election in 1940, and in October that year Churchill gave him the Board of Trade. Britain had not rationed clothing in the First World War, so officials had to build the system from scratch – and in secret, since any advance warning would have caused a run on the shops.

The first reason was manpower. The textile and clothing industries employed hundreds of thousands of men and women, and their factories, machinery and floor space were needed for war production. Curbing civilian purchases would free labour for the munitions works and for making uniforms. Lyttelton later explained that the difference between rationed and unrationed clothing amounted to 450,000 workers.

The second was shipping. Britain imported its cotton and much of its wool from overseas, and every ship carrying raw materials for civilians took up space that was badly needed for food, fuel and weapons. In the spring of 1941 German U-boats, aircraft and raiders were sinking more tonnage in the Atlantic than ever before – the Battle of the Atlantic was in one of its hardest phases.

The third was prices. Since the autumn of 1940 clothes had been subject to purchase tax, goods were becoming scarce and prices were rising fast. The well-off could buy in advance; the poorer were left with less and less. Rationing was meant to spread the shortage more fairly: everyone received the same number of coupons, however deep their pockets.

How the system worked

Every inhabitant of the country received 66 coupons a year. By contemporary reckoning this was roughly two-thirds of pre-war clothing consumption. Because there had been no time to print separate clothing books, the unused margarine coupons in the food ration books served at first – margarine had been rationed since the summer of 1940, and its coupons were still in the books. Proper clothing books were issued later. The shopkeeper cut out the coupons at each purchase but did not throw them away: he handed them to the wholesaler to obtain fresh stock, and the wholesaler passed them on to the manufacturer. The coupons thus travelled back up the whole chain, and it was they, not money, that determined how much clothing could reach the shops.

Every garment had its “price” in coupons, depending on the amount of material and labour it required. A dress cost 11 coupons, a pair of men’s trousers 8, a pair of women’s shoes 5 and men’s 7, a pair of stockings 2, and an overcoat a dozen or more. It was said that the annual allowance was enough for roughly one new set of clothes. Coupons did not replace money but came on top of it, and they took no account of quality: as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, Charles Waterhouse, admitted in the House of Commons on 11 June, a £7 suit cost the same number of coupons as a £4 one.

There were a few exceptions to the rule. Second-hand clothes could be bought without coupons, though at controlled prices. Hats were not rationed at all. Clothing for the youngest children required fewer coupons or none, and some working clothes were exempted or had their points value reduced. Soldiers in uniform were in practice unaffected, since the army clothed them. Tailors and shoemakers could fulfil orders taken before 1 June without coupons until 14 June – extended after protests to 21 June.

The first weeks

The very first days showed how much still had to be settled. In the House of Commons members asked about miners, steelworkers and stonemasons, for whom one pair of boots a year could not possibly be enough; about pregnant women; about servicemen who needed civilian items; and about groups of women knitting jumpers for the forces. Lyttelton said that the needs of particular occupations were being examined, and agreed “in principle” to extra coupons for expectant mothers.

The most urgent case was that of people who had been bombed out. After a winter and spring of raids, which had only just ended with the May bombing of Liverpool and the great raid on London of 10 May, tens of thousands of families had lost their homes along with everything they owned. Bomb victims received extra coupons through the public assistance offices so that they could replace essentials without eating into their normal ration. Anyone who lost clothes in a fire, through theft or at the laundry applied to the Customs and Excise office; Lyttelton promised that such claims would be dealt with within four days, with the proviso that the state would not restore anyone’s former wardrobe, only the bare minimum.

For all the objections, most Britons took the coupons calmly. According to a remark of Lyttelton’s quoted later, people were “glad to be a little shabby”, because a worn coat had become a badge of wartime solidarity rather than of poverty. A black market sprang up at once, however, in which coupons were sold, forged and stolen, sometimes in whole batches of unissued books.

Place in the war

Lyttelton did not stay long at the Board of Trade. At the turn of June and July Churchill sent him to Cairo as Minister of State Resident in the Middle East, and rationing passed to his successor, Sir Andrew Duncan. Clothes rationing, however, proved more lasting than many had expected. Since the same number of coupons could buy either something durable or something shoddy, the government began in the autumn of 1941 to introduce “Utility” clothing, made to strict standards of cloth consumption, sold at controlled prices and marked with the CC41 symbol. In 1942, under Hugh Dalton, the regulations even banned unnecessary pleats, turn-ups and trimmings. The coupon allowance was cut several times: according to figures from the period, to 48 a year in 1942 and to 36 in 1943. In 1943 the government launched the “Make Do and Mend” campaign, which taught people to darn, remake old garments and sew with whatever they had at home. Curtains became dresses, men’s suits became women’s costumes, and when stockings ran out women painted their legs and drew a line down the back of the calf to imitate a seam.

Clothes rationing outlasted the war and was abolished only on 15 March 1949. For the British it was one of the most everyday signs that the war with Germany was being fought in their wardrobes too: every new coat, dress or pair of shoes depended on ships sunk in the Atlantic, on workers moved to munitions factories and on the cost of keeping an army in the field.