‘Germany under Control’ exhibition

1st October 2006

On 7th June 1946, John Hynd, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the British Minister responsible for Germany, formally opened an exhibition in London called "Germany under Control."

The opening ceremony was held at the Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, in front of an invited audience of 3,000 people, including the mayors of the Boroughs of Greater London, sitting in the front row of the dress circle, wearing their full regalia, and wives, relations and friends of personnel serving in Germany.

Hynd’s speech at the event provides an interesting overview of what the British hoped to achieve, one year after the end of the war in Europe; their aims, achievements, and challenges still to come; in summary how they hoped to win the peace, after winning the war.

This is what he said:

"It is not inappropriate, I think, that this exhibition "Germany under Control" should be opened to the pubic today. For six long dismal and dangerous years we have fought desperately and stolidly against – what? Against a menace, the menace that threatened to overwhelm us as it has already overwhelmed the whole of Western Europe, but a menace which was only dimly understood by many of our people.

In that struggle we prevailed. The thing that once threatened to destroy us now lies shattered at our feet, and tomorrow the whole country will be celebrating our victory and our liberation.

But this is the second time in thirty years that our peace has been shattered and our security threatened, and in the midst of next week’s celebrations how many will be asking themselves if wars must always be?

We hope this exhibition will help in some little way to offer a glimpse of the reality of what our trials and struggles and sacrifices of the past six years have been for, and at the same time, show the work that is still being done and that still requires to be done if peace, security and prosperity are to be assured for our children.

For there is much still to be done. This time we must be sure. This time we must stay until we have finished the job.

The exhibition will no doubt give some indication of just how big that job is. It will show if only in miniature, but nevertheless graphically and effectively, the growth of the Nazi ideology. It will reproduce for you Germany under the rule of the Beast; her economic institutions destroyed; the voice of reason and humanity brutally suppressed wheresoever it sought to speak in that unhappy land; her children brutalised, as the sinister influences that had laid hold of her prepared to submerge, not only Germany, but the whole world, in dark misery.

You will see, too, the terrible price the people of Germany have paid for the mad ambitions of their rulers; the tangled mass of debris and destruction, and dazed, bewildered humanity that was once the Germany from which the boastings of Hitler and Goebbels used to din our ears and the vaunted Luftwaffe soared to bomb our towns and villages, now reduced to a scene of squalor and devastation unequalled in world history.

The plight of Germany is not, however, a matter we can ignore. It is a situation that involves not only the German People. but threatens Europe and the world unless it is controlled, with new tragedy, a tragedy of economic dislocation, with consequent disease and famine, and civil strife that might lead us again into another still more disastrous war; a situation that only wise, determined and courageous measures can now avert.

That, and no less, is the task we and our Allies have set ourselves. It is an enterprise of great magnitude and difficulty for which there is indeed no precedent in human history, but I think the exhibition will satisfy most people that it is a task which, despite its magnitude, is being carried our with no less credit by our men and women in Germany than was the military victory itself.

For the British Zone, with which the exhibition deals, represents a territory as large as England itself, with no Government, no local authorities, no established institutions – all these were Nazi and have fled or been destroyed; her industries wrecked, her transport in chaos, her food supplies exhausted. In this context our Military Government and the Control Commission have worked miracles, but miracles have still to be achieved before order is restored and the objective of the Potsdam Agreement, which is to create a democratic Germany that can take her place in the community of free peoples in a free and peaceful world, has been realised.

It is a costly business. Of that we are only too aware. But we are aware too, that peace is indivisible and that poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.

Europe needs German coal; that means transport must be restored and the factories must commence producing the mining equipment, locomotives and trucks; that means agriculture must be re-organised to produce food to feed the miners and the railwaymen, and the factory workers; that means, in turn the production of fertilisers and farm machinery and implements. But Man cannot live by bread alone, and the workers needs shelter and clothing and cooking utensils if they are to continue working. The organisation and administration of these activities requires public administration to replace the discredited Nazi institutions, and therefore the encouragement of democratic activities, political parties and trade unions must be part of our task. All that has to be achieved in circumstances of unimaginable difficulty, and our men are doing it.

We have to destroy the Nazi war industry and war potential. That means steel, and many of the products upon which Germany once depended for the exports with which to pay for her imported food. But if her steel production is to be reduced for security reasons, we must help to create a new import/export basis for her economy, for until we do there is no payment for the food that must be supplied to prevent mass starvation and the consequent destruction of all our hopes of security and peace.

It is therefore, in the beginning a costly job, but investment for peace is better, and infinitely cheaper than investment for war, and the work we are doing is no less than a great, perhaps final, effort to establish conditions in which the world may be freed from the menace of war forever.

In the light of this, I hope and believe that our exhibition will not only provide a fund of interest and instruction to our people, who have fought, suffered and triumphed in the big struggle through which we have passed since 1939, but will enable them to appreciate why and how we are now proceeding to finish the job.

(Hynd’s speech is in the National Archives, FO 945/533)

Humphrey Jennings’ film: A Defeated People

20 September 2006

The documentary film "A Defeated People" is remarkable both for its images of life in Germany immediately after the war, and for what it reveals of the attitudes of the British occupation forces.

The film was made in 1945, soon after the end of the war, by the Crown Film Unit, part of the British Ministry of Information, with the full support of the Control Commission for Germany. It was directed by Humphrey Jennings, arguably the greatest of the British wartime documentary film makers. His films include "London can Take It" and "Fires were Started," which has been described as "one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz. Those heroic figures silhouetted against the blazing inferno sweeping the dockside warehouse etched themselves into history, embodying the epic of the ordinary men and women who calmly and courageously took up the defence of their city."  (Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain can take it: The British Cinema in the Second World War. Oxford, Basil Blackwell 1986)

In 1940 Jennings wrote to his wife: "Some of the damage in London is pretty heart-breaking but what an effect it has had on the people! What warmth – what courage! What determination … Everybody absolutely determined: secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler. Certain of beating him: a certainty which no amount of bombing can weaken, only strengthen…"

Angus Calder in his book "The Myth of the Blitz" calls Jennings "Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films," and goes on to describe how "virtually everyone in Britain must have seen a fairish proportion of "London Can Take It" as the images from the film have been "recycled almost every time events in 1940 have been narrated on TV" (even if the source is not acknowledged) and in sequences in many feature films. (Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz. London, Jonathan Cape,1991)

Roger Manvell, a regional film officer during the war, responsible for arranging showings in factories, public halls and clubs, (and later to become a well-known film critic and writer), included a film by Humphrey Jennings in nearly all his programmes, and tells how "I do not exaggerate when I say that members of audiences …(especially during the earlier, more immediately alarming years) frequently wept as a result of Jennings’ direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain … going back to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, to Purcell and Handel."

What did this Englishman who created the "mythic image of the blitz", make of Germany after the war?

According to Nicolaus Pronay, the image of Germany presented in Jennings’ film "A Defeated People", is the same as that presented by the popular newsreels; that of a guilty people receiving their just deserts. This image could be summarised as: "The Germans were a guilty people with an inborn compulsion to war; it was they who were responsible for Hitler, just as they had been responsible for the Kaiser, and not the other way round. The German government merely represented the character and the aspirations of the German people: unless these were changed the Germans would start another war as soon as they felt strong enough." ("Defeated Germany in British Newsreels: 1944-45" in K.R.M. Short & Stephan Dolezel (Eds), Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness)

Pronay goes on to say that: "Perhaps the most illuminating demonstration of the extent to which there was a basic consensus in Britain about Germany – spanning both the intellectual and the class divisions – is to be found in the remarkable fact that, for once, the right-wing populist newsreels and the austerely elitist and left-wing documentarists presented an identical perception of Germany, in all essentials, for their both socially and educationally different target audiences."

It’s true that the script of Jennings’ film "A Defeated People" shows no hesitation in blaming the Germans for "the war they started," but it is possible to interpret the film as a whole in a very different way from Pronay.

While the script tells one story, the images show a very different picture; one that shows people as individuals, not as a collective guilty nation, that shows pity for their suffering and hope for the future.

At the end of the war, both the defeated Germans and British occupiers were confused, overwhelmed by the destruction they saw all around them, daunted by the magnitude of problems which seemed insoluble, but nevertheless prepared to try to do their best, to bring order out of chaos, and even, in their own way, make the world a better place, after the horrors of war.

This different picture is illustrated in the film, in, to take a few examples: A picture of a broken clock on a bombed out railway station with the commentary "at the end of the war, life in Germany ran down, like a broken clock." Vast numbers of people on the move, in all directions, looking for somewhere to live, or for lost friends and relatives. People leaping into cattle trucks as a train pulls into a station and the announcer saying over and over again "it is forbidden to ride on the bumpers." Bewildered refugee children huddled over suitcases. People living in cellars under the rubble of the cities, or in a room on the third floor of a building, with two of its four walls blown away and missing. Trains taking coal from the mines to the liberated countries, while German women saw up logs in the forest to take the wood home in prams to use as fuel because "for the Germans there is no coal."

While the script at one point warns ominously of children "growing up like their fathers," the film ends by switching between two sets of images which present a positive view of the future: a group of young girls holding hands in a circle and a group of German judges being sworn in, promising to uphold the constitution.

In summary, in Jennings’ own words it was "a hell of a tangle" and one thing only was certain: that we, (the British), can’t "leave them to stew in their own juice."

Jennings’ own mixed, complex and uncertain reactions, were expressed in a letter he wrote to his wife on 10 September 1945, while filming in Germany:

"At lunchtime today we were photographing a family cooking their lunch on campfires in dixies on the blitzed main stair-case of the Palace of Justice at Cologne – one of the few buildings still standing in the centre of the city – outside apparently deserted – surrounded by miles of rubble and weed-covered craters – but inside voices cries of children and the smell of drifting wood-smoke – of burnt paper – the sound of people smashing up doors and windows to light fires in the corridors – the smoke itself drifting into side rooms still littered with legal documents – finally adding to the blue haze in front of the cathedral. The cathedral now with all the damage round immensely tall – a vast blue and unsafe spirit ready to crumble upon the tiny black figures in the street below – permanent figures: Cologne’s Black Market … and then returning to Duesseldorf – much less knocked about – blitzed but not actually destroyed like Cologne and Essen and Aachen – still a beautiful city, returning here to tea we meeting sailing through the park-like streets a mass of white Sunday-frocked German school children standing tightly together on an Army truck and singing at the tops of their voices as they are rushed through the streets (where?) … In Essen they still fetch their water from stand-pipes and firehose in the streets and the sewers rush roaring and stinking open to the eye and the nose – seep into blitzed houses into cellars where people still live. Look down a deserted street which has a winding path only trodden in the rubble – above the shapes of windows and balconies lean and threaten – below by the front-door now choked with bricks you will see scrawled in chalk ‘IM KELLER WOHNEN:’… and the names of the families who have taken over the underground passages where there is no light (or once I saw one bulb crawling with bees – they too must live through this winter in Essen) no water – no gas – a ray of daylight from the pavement level airhole …"

"Once no doubt Germany was a beautiful country and still remembers it on summer evenings in the country. For the people themselves they are willing enough or servile enough or friendly enough according to your philosophy of History and the German problem. They certainly don’t behave guilty or beaten. They have their old fatalism to fall back on: ‘Kaput’ says the housewife finding the street water pipe not working … and then looks down the streets and says ‘Kaputt … alles ist kaput.’ Everything’s smashed … how right – but absolutely no suggestion that it might be their fault – her fault. ‘Why’ asks another woman fetching water ‘why do not you help us?’ ‘You’ being us. At the same time nothing is clearer straight away than that we cannot – must not leave them to stew in their own juice … well anyway it’s a hell of a tangle."

(Mary-Lou Jennings (ed), Humphrey Jennings: Film-maker, Painter, Poet. London. British Film Institute, 1982)

Winning the Peace

13 September 2006

After a gap of six months, I am re-starting this blog to write about my dissertation, which needs to be completed in 12 months time – in September 2007.

My area of interest is the British Occupation of Germany after the second world war. In particular, to what extent did the British and Americans succeed in ‘winning the peace’ as well as the war? And how did people, on both sides, become reconciled to the former enemy and even, in many cases, become friends, allies and partners?

The period between the end of the war in Europe, in May 1945, and the economic recovery of Western Europe from 1948 onwards, has been largely neglected by historians.

Those who have studied it, have looked at issues such as the Cold War, the division of Europe into two opposing blocs, the Marshall Plan and economic recovery in the West, and the influence of the occupying powers on the future development of German politics and society.

As a student of Contemporary British History, it seems to me that a significant gap in our knowledge lies, not in understanding the period of occupation in terms of international diplomacy, or the history of Germany, but in what it can tell us about British history, society, politics and culture.

For five years, and with reserved powers in some areas for longer, the British ruled an area half the size of their own country and had direct responsibility for a population of over 20 million. At its peak the number of people employed by the Control Commission for Germany, British Element, to give it its proper name, was 26,000.

With very few exceptions, this episode in British history is ignored in surveys of Britain, except in so far as it contributed to increased global tensions and the cold war, or was an economic burden on the British treasury.

My dissertation aims to show that the British occupation of Germany can tell us as much about how the British saw themselves, as about how they perceived Germany and the Germans.

It will focus in particular on how British policy and actions in Germany were presented by the government, to people at home. In this way, I hope it can shed some light on both the policies and attitudes of government, and on the concerns of the general population, during the critical period of transition from war to peacetime.

Bevan and the BMA

25 February 2006

The creation of the National Health Service
in 1948 has been described (by Peter Jenkins in ‘Age of Austerity’, edited by
Michael Sissons and Philip French, 1963) as: “the most ambitious and one of the
most successful pieces of Labour legislation.”

Sixty years later, the NHS seems to have
lasted better than other measures enacted by the post-war British Labour
government. Nationalisation of coal, gas, electricity, steel and transport have
all been reversed. Most of the 1,000,000 Council houses built between 1945 and 1951 have been sold under Right to
Buy schemes, the maintenance of full unemployment is no longer seen as an
obligation of government policy and the value of the basic old age pension has
steadily eroded in real terms.

Between 1946, when legislation to create
the NHS was first introduced, and the ‘Appointed Day’ on 5th July
1948 when it came into force, the British Medical Association (BMA) campaigned
vigorously, but entirely unsuccessfully, against the terms of service offered
to doctors.

A year later, most doctors had signed up.
41,200,000 people were covered by service – 95% of the eligible population. It
employed 34,000 people and cost nearly £400m per year. 187,000,000
prescriptions had been written by 18,000 medical practitioners (an average of
around 40 per day).

What really happened in the four years
between 1944, when Henry Willink, the conservative Minister of Health in the
wartime coalition, presented his White Paper on ‘A National Health Service’,
and 1948, when the Service came into being?

The 1944, the White Paper had the support
of all political parties. In a questionnaire issued by the BMA, a majority of
doctors approved of its major proposals.

The NHS is still seen as, in many ways, the
personal creation of Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health in the post-war
Labour government.

What changed between 1944 and 1948? Why did
the BMA first oppose the scheme, and then, reluctantly, accept it?

And what about Bevan’s own role? Did he
only succeed in the end because, in his own words, he “stuffed the consultants’
mouths with gold”?

It seems to me there are some unanswered
questions here which are worth researching further…

 

Dancing with Strangers

18 February 2006

‘Dancing with Strangers’ by Inga Clendinnen,
(Cambridge University Press, 2005), describes an encounter between two
different worlds, the first contacts between Europeans and native (aboriginal)
Australians.

Inga Clendinnen starts the book in South
America and retells the story of Charles Darwin meeting the native inhabitants
of Tierra del Fuego. She quotes Darwin saying, in contrast with modern
assumptions of a universal shared humanity: “I could not have believed how
wide was the difference between savage and civilised man; it is greater than
between a wild and domesticated animal.” Only after going ashore and
meeting the Fuegans face to face, did Darwin and his party establish some kind
of rapport, by dancing with the natives.

She then describes a similar event,
recorded by Lieutenant William Bradley, when the British fleet, of soldiers, sailors, settlers and convicts, landed at Sydney Cove in Australia on
29th January 1788 and met the local inhabitants: “these people
mixed with ours and all hands danced together.” Bradley later painted a
picture of Broken Bay, with the British sailors and native Australians dancing
hand in hand, reminiscent of children playing Ring a Ring of Roses, and his
picture is reproduced on the cover of the book. 

The theme of ‘Dancing with Strangers’ is
the experience of a common shared humanity and how two very different societies
tried, unsuccessfully, to come to terms with each other.

I was interested in this book, not only for
the subject, which is fascinating in its own right, but as an example of
historical sources speaking for themselves. Inga Clendinnen is no advocate of
‘scissors and paste’ history; writing, as she describes others in her field
have done, by: “piecing together snippets derived from a range of
narratives, perspectives and sensibilities in chronological order, and calling
the resulting ribbon patchwork ‘objective history.” Much of the fascination of her book is her
interpretation of the actions and motivation of the native Australians, who,
unlike the British, left no written records of their own. But she does tell a
story, she introduces the reader to the characters who have written the
accounts which have survived and she helps us see the events through their
eyes. Her reference to Darwin, her retelling of the two stories of Dancing with
Strangers, the contemporary illustration on the cover and the title of the book
itself, all help convey the vividness and reality of the past. As she relates
in the introduction, her own personal experience of a visit to a derelict
settlement at the northern tip of Australia first showed her “that the past
… had once been as real as the present, which is always an electrifying
realisation.”

As Graham Swift’s fictional history teacher
says in his novel ‘Waterland’:“what history teaches us is to avoid illusion
and make believe, to lay aside dreams, moonshine, cure-alls, wonder workings,
pie-in-the-sky – to be realistic.”

Bread Rationing (Conclusion)

11 February 2006

A New Year and a new term.

I have finished my first two essays on the
MA course in Contemporary British History.

One of the essays was on Bread Rationing in
the UK after the war. Earlier posts on this blog show how I became interested in the
topic, and here is my final contribution to the
subject on this blog:

Bread Rationing was introduced in the UK by the
Labour Government in July 1946 and remained in force for two years. Bread had
never been rationed during the war and at the time was seen as the height
of austerity.

The measure was vehemently opposed by the
Conservatives, including Churchill, who called it “one of the gravest
announcements that I have ever heard made in the House [of Commons] in the time of peace” and the Daily Mail reported on 3rd July 1946, that it was
“the most hated measure ever to have been presented to the people of this
country." 

However, in practice Bread Rationing turned
out to be completely ineffective in reducing the level of consumption in the UK and most
historians agree it was “probably unnecessary."

The question I tried to answer was: why did
the government not only impose a measure they knew would be unpopular and which
in practice proved to be ineffective in achieving its stated purpose, but
persist with it for two years in the face of significant opposition at home?

Here is my conclusion in the final
paragraph in the essay:

At first sight, the brief two year
period of bread rationing may appear as a minor issue; the government simply
followed the practice, well proven in wartime, of controlling demand for essential
supplies at a time when there was a potential risk of shortages. This is at
best a partial explanation. The Attlee government’s decisions on bread
rationing were directly affected by four of the gravest and most difficult
issues it faced during its first three
years in office. Firstly, the ineffectiveness and unpopularity of a policy of
direct controls, seen by the public as necessary in war but increasingly
superfluous in peacetime. Secondly, virulent opposition from some elements of
the public, spurred on by conservative politicians and the press. Thirdly,
total dependency on the United States for essential supplies and the means
to pay for them. Fourthly and finally, having won the war, having to decide how
best to win the peace, at a time of shifting allegiances among the victors and
vanquished.

It was a fascinating story. In the course
of the research for the essay I learnt about conditions of life in Britain
after the war, the desperate economic situation facing both Britain and the
rest of Europe, how close much of Europe, including Germany, but not Britain,
came to starvation and famine, the international politics of food supplies, the
emergence of cold war diplomacy and the division of Europe.

For a taste (!) of what it was like at the
time, I looked up British Pathe’s archive of cinema newsreels on the web http://www.britishpathe.com and was
amazed at what I found. (Search for “Bread Rationing”). Low resolution
downloads for private study are free.

The newsreels include the Minister of Food,
John Strachey, justifying the government’s decision, protests by the British
Housewives’ League and the Master Bakers’ Federation, plus a film called “Germany’s food – the Truth” which includes
pictures of a factory in Germany which converted tons of beech and pine
logs into fake liver sausage for human consumption.

Bread Rationing (Part 4)

21st December 2005

In my first posting on this subject I asked: why did the Labour Government go ahead with a measure they knew would be unpopular, and which in the end turned out to be “probably unnecessary”?

The answer to this question does appear to be in the article by Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska on “Bread Rationing in Britain, July 1946 – July 1948” in the journal “Twentieth Century British History.” (Vol 4 No 1 1993 P57-85)

It seems that bread was rationed in the UK “not primarily for economic reasons – in order to save wheat – but for psychological and political reasons” as part of extensive negotiations between the British government and the United States on the allocation of North American wheat and on the terms of US loans and Marshall Aid necessary to secure the revival of the British economy after the war.

Her conclusion at the end of the article is that bread rationing helped Britain to “retain its privileged position as the only food importing country which did not suffer a significant reduction in calorie consumption.”

Britain, the United States and Canada were the three members of the “Combined Food Board,” part of the wartime supplies machinery which took charge of world cereals allocations. Britain was in a favoured position as the only food importer on the board, in a sellers market.

In 1946, Britain was under intense pressure to justify its relatively high wheat and flour stocks and high allocation of wheat imports, while the Board cut allocations to others, including European importers, India, military authorities in Europe and Asia and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which looked after the millions of refugees in post-war Europe.

The British government were also trying to persuade the United States to assume responsibility for feeding the population in the British Zone in Germany, where there was an acute shortage of food. Rations had been cut in March 1946 to less than 1,000 calories a week, well under half the ration in Britain.

Negotiations at the Combined Food Board reached a head on 10 April 1946. In a debate on a UNRAA request for allocation of stocks, the UK government proposed that Britain would be prepared to ration bread, if the US and Canada did the same. This was a negotiating ploy, as it was obvious that the US and Canada would not agree to this, but they were prepared to introduce other measures, including a reduction in the amount of wheat fed to livestock. This amounted to a 25% reduction in their own domestic consumption and therefore released stocks for distribution to UNRRA and Europe (without requiring a reduction in the British allocation).

British consumption was relatively secure due to long standing trade relations with Canada. A new four year agreement was signed with Canada on 24th July 1946, three days after rationing was introduced.

Having make the offer to introduce bread rationing in April, the UK government found it was politically impossible to go back on it, even though there was, strictly speaking, no real need to introduce rationing in the UK, as the ration was set at more or less the same level as previous consumption, and resulted in virtually no savings.

A UK Cabinet minute on 18 July 1946, three days before rationing was introduced, said:

“We were bringing great pressure to bear on the United States government to provide enough to meet the minimum needs of the British zone … on the basis that we could not supply more for the zone ourselves; but, if we delayed the introduction of rationing in the United Kingdom, we should be conveying the impression that our own needs were no longer so urgent as had been represented.”

Rationing was also important to secure ratification of the US loans and Marshall Aid which were needed to keep the British economy afloat. The first post-war US loan to the UK was agreed in December 1945 but not ratified by Congress until15th July 1947. In a note to his cabinet colleague Herbert Morrison on 20th July, justifying the introduction of bread rationing, due to come into effect the following day, Prime Minister Attlee said:

“to go back now would have a bad effect on the United States Administration who would think that we announced rationing in order to influence the loan debate.”

Two months later, in September 1946 the Minister of Food, John Strachey, proposed lifting rationing, but the policy was reaffirmed in October on the basis that:

“no diversion from United Kingdom stocks could provide enough to make adequate provision for the British zone; and if any such diversions were made, the United States Administration would be led to suppose that our situation was less serious than it really was.”

As late as November 1947, when Strachey again proposed to end bread rationing, this was rejected on the ground that:

“in view of the acute wheat shortage in Europe and of the Marshall Plan discussions, this course is, for the time being, politically impossible.”

Bread rationing in the UK finally ended in July 1948 after Marshall Aid had been secured earlier in the year.

Bread Rationing (Part 3)

4 December 2005

It appears that the expert on  bread rationing is Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska who has written extensively on austerity and food rationing in the UK in the post-war period.

The first piece by her I found is the chapter on “Consensus and Consumption: Rationing, Austerity and Controls after the War” in the book “The Myth of Consensus” edited by Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah (Macmillan Press 1996). In this she says:

“…food was the most important single issue on the public mind during the late 1940s as a result of unprecedented shortages. Bread was rationed for the first time from July 1946. The policy was controversial because the entire system of food control depended on ample supplies of bread and potatoes, as well as restaurant and canteen meals. Labour justified bread rationing as a necessary step to guarantee the bread supply and ensure fair shares in the context of the world food shortage, which required sacrifice in Britain to prevent famine in continental Europe and elsewhere.”

“During the spring and summer of 1946 intense opposition to bread rationing was led by the Conservative Party, which doubted that the policy was really necessary and that substantial savings in wheat could be made. The Party leadership deplored the added burden placed on consumers and alleged that the government had mismanaged the supply situation. The Conservatives were backed by the right-wing press, which highlighted opposition to bread rationing among bakers as well as the British Housewives’ League. This episode was the first concerted campaign against the Labour government on a major policy issue and marked the beginning of the debate about postwar food policy.”

The Conservatives “argued that that austerity was largely due to Labour’s incompetence, mismanagement and socialist inspired policies, which were making matters much worse than they need be. Controls were imposed for control’s sake, while excessive bureaucracy stifled the economy and hampered recovery. The Conservatives claimed that for the majority of the population living standards under Labour were worse than during the 1930s, and that only a return to the free market and the abolition of wartime controls would restore living standards.”

The unpopularity of controls led to a swing away from Labour to the Conservatives, first apparent in the Bexley, Pontypool and Battersea North by-elections in July 1946.

A footnote in this article refers to an earlier (1993) piece in the journal “Twentieth Century British History” on “Bread Rationing in Britain, July 1946 – July 1948.” I must get a copy and read it.

More on Bread Rationing

26 November 2005

I have discovered more about the extraordinary story of bread rationing in the UK after World War Two, from “Snoek Piquante” – an essay by Susan Cooper in the book “Age of Austerity,” edited by Michael Sissons and Philip French (1963).

According to Susan Cooper: “Summed up in the abortive story of bread rationing there is all the frustration and worry and fiddling fuss of life in post-war Britain.”

“…the cumulative distortion of war, and the droughts and bad harvests of 1945, had brought every part of the world a food crisis which, Mr Bevin [the Foreign Secretary] grimly told the United Nations, was “really alarming”.

“The Minister of Food announced on February 5th, 1946 that the world wheat shortage would mean a cut in bacon, poultry and eggs. Rice, what there was of it, would vanish from the shops. The whaling season had been as poor as the harvest, so the fat ration would be reduced by an ounce. The Government appealed to farmers to sow grain promising them prisoner of war labour (there were still 400,000 Germans in British camps) to help with the ploughing.”

“An emergency conference on European cereal supplied met in London. By now many people in former enemy occupied countries were dangerously near starvation level; rationing there amounted to a uniform thousand calories a day.”

The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee said that: “‘people might feel impelled to send food parcels to Europe… but they would do more good simply by eating less.’ He backed this with a grand gesture by announcing that Britain was willing to ration bread.”

“Three months later, after much havering, the new Minister of Food, Mr Strachey, announced that bread was to be rationed. The size of the coming Canadian harvest was uncertain, and there had been a cut in grain supplies from America.”

“‘That we should have had to do such an unpopular thing,’” wrote Dalton [the Chancellor of the Exchequer] enigmatically fifteen years later, ‘illustrates vividly the urgent shortages of the post-war years, and the inescapable reasons for our gradual loss of backing in the country.’”

“‘Shops were besieged’ reported The Times, ‘by customers asking for six, seven, even ten loaves each – twice or thrice as much bread as their families could eat at the week-end. “The women have gone mad” said a baker.’”

“The bakers, faced with quantities of form-filling and extra controls were furious at the whole idea of rationing. ‘I shall go to jail rather than collect Bread Units from housewives’ said one master baker. ‘This country is getting worse than Germany under the Nazis.’”

“In fact there was never a bread shortage. The first day of rationing was quiet, and by the end of it bakers had loaves and cakes still unsold.”

“Bread rationing itself went on. It was not finally abolished until July 21st 1948. The ration, in practice proved adequate, no-one went hungry and there were no shortages – but nor was there any great saving of grain.”

In you are wondering what any of this has to do with “Snoek Piquante,” snoek is a fish, related to Barracuda, which was imported from South Africa after the war, in an attempt to improve food supplies.

According to Susan Cooper, in October 1947: “the hungry British first heard the word snoek … Ten million tins of it from South Africa were to replace Portuguese sardines, whose import was restricted by exchange troubles.”

But despite the best efforts of the government to promote it, including publishing recipes for “Snoek Piquante” people seemed to dislike the taste and never took to it.

And so, nearly 3 years later:  “…quiet among the junketings of the Festival of Britain, a mysterious quantity of tinned fish came onto the market, labelled: ‘Selected fish food for cats and kittens.’ It cost tenpence a tin, and its origins were left muffled in tact. One of the distributors admitted that it might be either snoek or barracuda. ‘Cats,’ he said, ‘are very fond of both.’”

Bread Rationing

21st November 2005

I’m intrigued to know why the Labour Government introduced Bread Rationing in July 1946. Bread had not been rationed all through the war, so its introduction is a powerful case study of austerity in post-war Britain – reinforcing the perception among many people, that things were getting worse, instead of better.

According to Paul Addison in “Now the War is Over” (Jonathan Cape, 1985), early in 1946 the food experts in Washington began to predict a world wheat shortage, aggravated by a shortage of rice. Famine threatened in Germany and in Asia where Britain was responsible for the welfare of India, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and Singapore, all of which were part of the British Empire. In February 1946 Ben Smith, Minister of Food, announced that in order to divert supplies to threatened areas, the British Government  would reduce imports of wheat for consumption in Britain.

Herbert Morrison was sent to the US to try to persuade the US Administration to adopt a more generous policy towards Great Britain, but “cabled the Cabinet with the astonishing news that he had agreed to a further reduction in supplies of grain for this country, on the understanding that the Americans would share the burden in Germany and India.”

Douglas Jay, who then worked in the Prime Minister’s office as an economic assistant is quoted as saying:

“What it amounted to was that when we were faced in the first year after the war with actual famine in three places in particular, with Germany, India and Malaysia, which has a huge population, you could keep more people alive out of a given ton of wheat by raising the  extraction rate from what I think it normally is, 60 per cent or 70 per cent, this is how the millers express it, to 95 per cent, with the limited amount of wheat we had in the world. That was done and I think as a result of that, probably famines in those areas were avoided.”

Paul Addison goes on to describe how the decision invoked storms of protest from the Conservative opposition.

And in conclusion he says that:

“Bread rationing was probably unnecessary. The threat to grain supplies proved less severe than expected and, since the rations allowed proved adequate there was little reduction in the consumption.”

Bread rationing controls were eventually lifted two years later in July 1948.

There seem to me be to be some unanswered questions in this account. For example:

Was the introduction of bread rationing in Britain really necessary to avoid famine in Germany, India and Malaysia? Were supplies of grain to these countries from the US increased as a result?

What was the attitude of the British public?

Why did the Labour Government go ahead with a measure they knew would be unpopular, and which in the end turned out to be “probably unnecessary”?