Meat rationing in Britain

On Monday 11 March 1940 the British bought meat on the ration for the first time in this war. It was the second step in food rationing after the January rationing of bacon, butter and sugar, and also the most unusual: meat, alone among the major foods, was rationed not by weight but by value. Everyone in the country aged six or over could spend 1s 10d (one shilling and tenpence) a week at their butcher’s, and children under six half that sum, 11d. The date and the rules had been announced in the House of Commons as early as 6 February by the Minister of Food, William Morrison.

Why by price

The idea of rationing meat by price arose from the nature of the product. Bacon or sugar was a fairly uniform commodity; meat was the opposite: sirloin and brisket, beef and mutton, home-killed meat and frozen meat from Argentina or New Zealand all had very different prices. A ration by weight would have meant either complicated tables for every kind of meat or unfairness to those who bought cheaper cuts. A ration by value left the choice to the customer: 1s 10d would buy a smaller amount of good beef or more cheap meat. On average it came to about a pound (450 grams) of meat on the bone a week. Prices were fixed by the ministry, so the butcher could not “eat up” the ration with a price rise.

Morrison made clear from the outset that the ration would not be fixed. A large share of the meat for the civilian population came from home slaughter, and the number of cattle and sheep reaching the market varied from week to week. The minister therefore intended, as he put it, to keep supplies under constant review and alter the ration as circumstances required. Coupons were valid for one week only. When MPs asked that childless couples be allowed to combine two weeks’ coupons and buy a joint now and then, Morrison, and later his parliamentary secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, refused: the distribution of supplies to the shops rested on the assumption that every coupon would be used in its own week.

What was rationed and what was not

Only “butcher’s meat” was rationed – beef, veal, mutton, lamb and pork. Edible offal, which Morrison listed by name – liver, kidneys, tongue and oxtail – remained off the ration, as did meat products such as sausages and meat pies. Also outside the scheme were poultry, game and rabbits, which did not count as butcher’s meat. Offal, however, was scarce, and the quantity depended on local slaughtering, so even before 11 March disputes began over who would get it; the ministry promised to distribute it “as fairly as possible”, including between town and country.

Restaurants, factory and school canteens and other catering establishments could at first serve meat without coupons, but they received only part of their former supplies. For the better-off this meant they could eat meat outside the home over and above the ration, which – as with the January rationing – caused resentment.

Bacon and ham had had a ration of their own since 8 January. The ministry had ordered registration with a butcher even before the January rationing, which had been heralded since the autumn, and until the coupons came into force a kind of trial run was in operation: from February butchers received roughly as much meat as they would be entitled to once rationing began, and customers were asked to limit their purchases voluntarily and to buy only at the shop where they were registered.

A winter of chaos

The ration books brought to an end several difficult weeks. On 15 January 1940 the Ministry of Food took control of the purchase of livestock and the meat trade: it bought animals from farmers at fixed prices, reduced the number of slaughterhouses and distributed meat through associations of wholesalers. The new system began working during one of the coldest winters of the century. Snowdrifts blocked roads and railways, cattle could not reach the slaughterhouses, and meat could not reach the shops. In the February debates MPs complained of weeks without meat in the small towns of Shropshire, of a protest by four hundred Sheffield butchers against supplies being routed through Leeds, and of lean Uruguayan mutton carcasses that had been sent to Exeter instead of home-killed mutton. Morrison blamed the weather and promised that the system would work once it improved.

Imports were a more serious problem. Before the war Britain imported more than half the meat it consumed, mainly from Argentina, Uruguay, Australia and New Zealand, and the refrigerated ships sailed in convoys exposed to U-boats and took up valuable cargo space. Frozen beef went first of all to the forces. On 11 March Morrison explained in the House of Commons that the shortage of imported beef in the shops the previous weekend was due to the needs of the armed forces and of the French army at the front, which were supplied almost exclusively with imported meat. A request to postpone rationing he rejected curtly.

The first weeks

Against the background of the winter chaos the introduction of the ration went off calmly. On 21 March Lennox-Boyd judged that the first week of rationing had gone “on the whole smoothly”, and that the few shortages had arisen because some butchers had reported the number of their registered customers too late. In April MPs returned to complaints about the rigidity of the system – childless couples found it hard to buy a joint, while large working-class families were often unable to afford their whole ration – but the rules remained unchanged. The ministry stated that all offal and unrationed meat was being released for sale, with the exception of corned beef, which was being held in reserve for the forces.

By way of comparison: in Germany meat had been rationed since the end of August 1939, together with other basic foodstuffs, and the “normal consumer” received a ration by weight, with supplements for heavy workers and increasingly reduced rations for Jews. In March 1940 the British ration was still relatively generous, and its main purpose was to ensure that meat reached everyone, not only those who could pay more or queue longer.

Place in the war

Meat rationing was a further step in building a system meant to allow Britain to survive a long war of attrition. During the Phoney War rationing still covered few products, but the mechanism – registration with a retailer, allocation of supplies according to the number of customers, controlled prices – was already working for all the most important foods except bread. On 3 April 1940 Morrison was replaced at the Ministry of Food by Lord Woolton (Frederick Marquis), under whose direction the meat ration changed many times, as had been foreshadowed in February. After the fall of France and the intensification of the U-boat war in the Atlantic it shrank: for most of the war it stood at about 1s 2d, and according to histories of the British home front it fell lower still in the hardest period of 1941, when part of the ration had to be taken in corned beef. Meat was also the last food to be rationed in Britain: rationing of it ended only on 4 July 1954, almost fifteen years after the outbreak of war.