Food rationing begins in Britain

On Monday 8 January 1940 British housewives went shopping with ration books for the first time in this war. From that day every inhabitant of Britain 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. Some chronologies give the date as 7 January, but that was a Sunday. Rationing came into force a day later, on the date that the Minister of Food, William Morrison, had announced back at the end of November. The decision had been announced in December, and January showed how the system worked in practice in its first weeks.

Book, shop and coupon

The basis of the system was the ration book, issued to everyone on the strength of the national register of 29 September 1939. Most adults and schoolchildren received the ordinary book with a buff cover, and small children a separate child’s book. Each contained pages of coupons for successive weeks, separate ones for bacon and ham, butter, sugar and meat.

Before 8 January everyone had to register with a retailer of their choice, separately for each commodity. The customer handed in a counterfoil from the book at the shop, and the shopkeeper wrote his name and address in the book. The counterfoils went to the local food office, and on that basis wholesalers allocated to each shop as much of the commodity as it had registered customers. When a purchase was made, the shopkeeper cut out or crossed through the coupon for that week. The coupon was no substitute for money: the customer paid in the normal way, at the maximum price fixed by the Ministry of Food. The ration merely guaranteed that everyone could buy the same amount. Meat was not yet rationed, but the government required people to register with a butcher straight away, which gave the ministry time to prepare the next stage.

Local supervision lay with food control committees appointed by the local authorities, with traders and consumers’ representatives among their members. They licensed shops, dealt with complaints and could permit a change of shop. Changing one’s retailer at will was not easy. When on 31 January the Conservative MP Herbert Williams asked in the House of Commons why the customer should be “the slave of the shopkeeper”, Morrison’s deputy, Alan Lennox-Boyd, replied that the whole system rested on each shop having a stable number of customers; if they changed shops frequently, distribution would break down.

The first weeks

Rationing came into force during one of the coldest winters of the century, but without major disruption. The government’s justification was simple: since the beginning of the war bacon and butter had been in short supply, and in the queues it was those with time and money who won. The answers to MPs’ questions in the second half of January, however, show what problems everyday life threw up.

The question that came up most often was price. Rationing did nothing to lower costs, and the prices of butter and bacon had risen in the autumn. Labour MPs warned that some poorer families were not taking up their butter ration because they could not afford it. On 31 January Lennox-Boyd admitted that a “moderate percentage” of the butter ration was not being taken up, though he denied that shopkeepers were sitting on large stocks. At the end of January the ministry doubled the bacon ration to 8 ounces a week. Officially this was because the government reserve was now complete and supplies were arriving well; critics noted that the more expensive cuts, which people did not want to buy, were piling up in the shops. In the process it emerged that the 4-ounce limit applied to bacon with the rind on, and that Scottish traders, who traditionally sold bacon without the rind, had been allowed to add 2 pence a pound for removing it. January was the season in Britain for making marmalade from bitter Seville oranges, so those who bought them were granted extra sugar; when MPs asked for the same for home preserving of English apples, Morrison replied that large quantities of sugar had already been distributed for that purpose in the autumn and that he would decide about the next season later.

There were also those for whom the ration was too small. Trade unionists demanded extra rations for miners and heavy manual workers. Morrison replied on 24 January that pre-war plans had provided for such supplements only in the event of very severe rationing, and the present restrictions were not severe. The same day he refused extra butter for diabetics, citing a medical committee of the Medical Research Council, which considered that margarine fortified with vitamins was sufficient. Meals in restaurants, canteens and hotels remained off the ration, which soon began to cause resentment, since the better-off could eat meat and butter away from home without restriction.

Butter from Denmark, bacon from Holland

Rationing stemmed above all from dependence on imports. Morrison told the House of Commons that in 1938 Britain had imported 169,000 tons of bacon and 118,000 tons of butter from Denmark, and 25,000 tons of bacon and 36,000 tons of butter from the Netherlands. Agreements for further deliveries had been concluded with both countries, but their size was not disclosed. Danish and Dutch ships sailed across the North Sea, where in the winter of 1939/1940 German submarines, mines and aircraft were sinking neutral vessels too. The ministry sold all butter under a single name, “National Butter”, whether it had come from Sweden, Denmark or New Zealand.

The British compared themselves with the enemy. The Germans had introduced rationing on 27 August 1939, even before the attack on Poland, and within the first weeks of the war had extended it to many more goods, including meat, fats, sugar, bread and flour, and in November clothing as well. The German system divided people into categories: normal consumers, heavy workers, children. Jews in the Reich received cards marked with the letter “J”, which excluded them from supplementary allocations and were progressively cut back over time. In January 1940 British rationing was far milder and covered only a few products. British propaganda stressed that it meant fair shares, not hunger.

Significance

The rationing of 8 January 1940 was one of the first changes to the daily life of the British during the Phoney War, when almost nothing was happening on the Western Front. The small rations and the arguments over the price of bacon show that the government was building a system for a long war before that war had really begun to bite. Registration with a retailer and control of deliveries to shops worked from the start, so further products could be brought into the scheme without any new organisation. On 11 March 1940 meat went on the ration, rationed by price, and in the spring, when the Germans occupied Denmark and the Netherlands, deliveries of Danish and Dutch bacon and butter came to an end. In the summer, after the fall of France, rations began to shrink, and rationing was extended to tea, margarine and cooking fats. From then on, what the British had on their plates was increasingly decided by the course of the Battle of the Atlantic. The last rationing in Britain was abolished only on 4 July 1954.