Fuel rationing in Britain

On 17 March 1942 the House of Commons heard two announcements that affected every British household. At question time the new President of the Board of Trade, Hugh Dalton, announced that the clothing coupon allowance would be cut. In the evening, winding up a day-long debate on the state of the coal industry, he declared that the government had decided to introduce “as soon as possible” a “comprehensive scheme of fuel rationing” covering coal, gas and electricity. He entrusted the drafting of the scheme to the economist William Beveridge, who during the First World War had helped to create Britain’s food rationing.

It is sometimes said that on this day Britain introduced the rationing of electricity, coal and gas, and cut the clothing ration. The second part is correct; the first needs qualifying. On 17 March fuel rationing was only announced. The only measure to take immediate effect was a temporary restriction on domestic coal deliveries, and Beveridge’s comprehensive scheme, ready in April, provoked a revolt among Conservative MPs and was never introduced. Household coal had in any case already been rationed earlier through delivery limits, but gas and electricity were never put on the ration in Britain during the war.

The coldest February in half a century

The winter of 1941–1942 was exceptionally severe. Dalton could speak of it only after the event, because the weather was a military secret, but on 17 March he revealed that February had been the coldest since 1895, and that in the first eight and a half weeks of the year there had been frost for seven and a half. Coal stocks, though higher than a year earlier, had proved too small. London went through a fuel crisis: some districts ran out of coal, the government opened 17 emergency dumps, and local authorities lent merchants lorries and men to deliver fuel to homes.

The causes went deeper than the weather. In the same debate the Secretary for Mines, David Grenfell, admitted that more than 80,000 of the “youngest and strongest” miners had left the pits for the forces and some 60,000 for other occupations. In the competition for manpower, in which the state was already calling up further age groups of women, the mines were losing out to better-paid factories and to the armed forces. Output per man at the coalface held up, but there were between ten and twenty per cent fewer men at the face. At the same time consumption was rising: power stations were burning three times as much coal as during the First World War, and the armaments industry needed ever more of it. According to figures cited in the House of Lords in May, before the war Britain had mined about 280 million tons a year, and in 1942 just over 205 million. MPs argued over the causes: the miners spoke of poor pay and working conditions, some Conservatives of absenteeism in the pits, and Labour demanded that the state take over the mines.

Dalton’s announcement

Dalton had been at the Board of Trade for less than a month. At the end of February, in the major government reshuffle after the fall of Singapore, Winston Churchill had moved him from the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where he had also been in charge of secret sabotage operations. The Board of Trade was responsible for supplying civilians with manufactured goods, including the clothing coupons introduced in June 1941, and, through the Mines Department under it, for coal as well.

Dalton, a Labour man, decided that the time for appeals was over. Our production, he said, was insufficient, grossly insufficient; our present consumption was excessive, and our stocks were far too low. He recalled that propaganda had long urged people to burn less and switch off the lights, but “exhortation alone is not enough”. The government had to take “firm and fair decisions” and enforce them, and if the House did not like it, it “can change the minister”. Beveridge was to be assisted by Sir Stephen Tallents, a colleague from the days of wartime food rationing in 1914–1918.

To prevent the announcement from causing a run on the coal yards, Dalton at the same time announced a restriction on deliveries in force from midnight on 16–17 March. For three weeks no household with more than 10 hundredweight (about half a ton) of coal in its cellar could receive a new delivery without special permission from the local fuel overseer. Those with less than half a ton could receive at most 6 hundredweight, and in the south-east and the northern Midlands even less. From 6 April a new, revised system of restrictions was to apply.

Fewer clothes

The announcement on clothing was shorter but bit harder at once. Because of the shortage of shipping in the Atlantic, where one of the hardest phases of the Battle of the Atlantic was under way, and the war industry’s growing demand for labour and raw materials, the government concluded that the existing level of clothing purchases “could no longer be justified”. Coupons from the first card, due to expire on 31 May, were extended to 10 October so that people would put off less urgent purchases. For the new period, from 1 June 1942 to 31 July 1943, that is fourteen months, everyone was to receive 60 coupons, of which only 20 could be used before 10 October. Children under 17 and many groups of industrial workers were to get 10 extra coupons each. The coupon values, that is the number of points for a dress or a coat, remained unchanged. Contemporary tables usually reckon this as about 48 coupons a year instead of the original 66.

Other restrictions were tightened in the same weeks. Soap had been rationed since February, and in March the abolition from 1 July of the basic petrol ration for private motorists was announced; from then on petrol went only to drivers with a justified need. In 1942 the Board of Trade also issued “austerity” regulations for the clothing industry, banning unnecessary trimmings, turn-ups and excess cloth.

The Beveridge scheme and the Conservative revolt

Beveridge worked fast. According to accounts given in the debates, the first version of his scheme was ready in mid-April and the final one a few days later. He proposed rationing all fuels together on a points system: each household would receive an annual allocation of units, depending on the number of rooms, the number of occupants and the region, and would decide for itself whether to use them on coal, coke, gas, electricity or paraffin. Scotland and the north of England were to receive more than London and the south. The scheme was intended to save about 10 million tons of coal a year for industry. The government argued that it was fair because it did not reward past extravagance, and thrifty people could come out of it better off.

The scheme, however, met fierce opposition. Its opponents argued that rationing coal in a country that had it under its feet was absurd and proof of the incompetence of a government that had allowed the miners to drain away from the pits. They counted the costs: Beveridge himself estimated the staff needed at 10,000–15,000 officials, and the electricity industry added thousands of meter readers. The loudest protests came from the Conservative backbenchers of the 1922 Committee, who saw in the scheme a foretaste of post-war bureaucracy; in a proposal by a Labour minister, entrusted to Beveridge, whom one peer called a “distinguished academic socialist”, they saw something more than a temporary economy. On 7 May Dalton defended the scheme in the Commons as an urgent necessity and wanted to introduce it by 1 June. The Cabinet was divided: Bevin and Stafford Cripps supported the scheme, while Churchill, who disliked it and did not want a split in the coalition over coal rationing, came down in favour of postponing the matter.

At the beginning of June the government published a White Paper on coal. The rationing scheme was shelved in case it should become necessary, and the government undertook not to introduce it without a further debate. Instead, voluntary economy backed by a propaganda campaign was to suffice. In the debate of 10 June, when the Lord President of the Council, John Anderson, defended this change of course, Members on the left shouted that the government had “run away” from the 1922 Committee. Anderson denied it: in his view the scheme had always been meant to be held in readiness in case of need, but to succeed it had to have the support of the public.

Place in the war

The coal crisis changed the organisation of the British economy. In June 1942 fuel and power were taken away from the Board of Trade and entrusted to a new Ministry of Fuel and Power, headed by the Liberal Gwilym Lloyd George, son of the Prime Minister of the First World War. The mines were placed under so-called dual control: the state directed production and its distribution, while the owners kept the mines and their finances. Lloyd George relied on appeals for economy, and through the following winters the country managed without ration books for gas and electricity, although domestic coal deliveries were restricted by limits. The shortage of miners, however, could not be overcome: from the end of 1943 some young conscripts were directed by ballot to the mines instead of the armed forces.

The March announcement also had a sequel in Beveridge’s career. A few months later, in December 1942, his report on social insurance was published, and it became the programme of Britain’s post-war welfare state. Clothes rationing lasted until 1949, and in 1943 the allowance was cut further still. The fuel rationing of which Dalton spoke on 17 March 1942 stayed in the drawer, but the debate over it showed how far Churchill’s coalition was able to go in regulating the everyday lives of the British.