Feeding the People in Wartime Britain

Bryce Evans

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350259737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte der Neuzeit

While the history of food on the home front in wartime Britain has mostly focused on rationing, this book reveals the importance and scale of nation-wide communal dining schemes during this era. Welcomed by some as a symbol of a progressive future in which 'wasteful' home dining would disappear, and derided by others for threatening the social order, these sites of food and eating attracted great political and cultural debate. Using extensive primary source material, Feeding the People in Wartime Britain examines the cuisine served in these communal restaurants and the people who used them. It challenges the notion that communal eating played a marginal role in wartime food policy and reveals the impact they had in advancing nutritional understanding and new food technologies. Comparing them to similar ventures in mainland Europe and understanding the role of propaganda from the Ministry of Food in their success, Evans unearths this neglected history of emergency public feeding and relates it to contemporary debates around food policy in times of crisis.

1

British food and feeding up to the First World War

Introduction

The wartime public-eating schemes discussed in this book stemmed from a variety of policy and ethical impulses that can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: female voluntarism, faith-based and humanitarian initiatives, nutritional science and the new wave of municipal liberalism in Victorian and Edwardian England. There were flashes of patriotic conservatism too, and pangs of socialism. As this book goes on to explain, wartime public feeding presents a pronounced break with these earlier trends in a number of ways; however, in order to properly assess the phenomenon, it is necessary to contextualize British food and feeding prior to the First World War and in the early stages of the conflict.

Faith and consumption

Although distinct from its Victorian antecedents, wartime public feeding owed a debt to the pioneer faith-based efforts of the nineteenth century. The Salvation Army is of particular relevance. The organization was founded in London’s East End in 1865 by William Booth, a former Methodist minister who argued that the Anglican church, and his own Methodist congregation, ought to intensify their mission to the poor in urban Britain. As will become evident, traces of the Salvation Army’s approach are visible in First World War feeding: from the communal feeding model of the ‘soup kitchen’, to the emphasis on discipline and organization, the absence of alcohol and the central role of women.¹ Female initiative was conspicuous in the Salvation Army, with Catherine Booth (William’s well-educated, articulate and radical wife) doing much to define the interventionist ideals which her daughter, Evangeline, would carry on in practice.

The influence of that nineteenth-century Christian yearning for authenticity of experience and the purposeful public life can be seen in wartime society, too. Alongside the statist measures of the First World War, voluntary and philanthropic effort, which was often led by faith groups, was mobilized beyond state boundaries with 18,000 new charities founded during the conflict.² Many of these charitable endeavours centred around food, whether in the form of food parcels for soldiers or soup kitchens for the poor. The volunteers of the Salvation Army in the Edwardian era continued to follow the idea that the organization’s founder Booth had established: Jesus had called on the faithful to redeem public life; this redemption would be achieved first through soup, then later salvation. Soup, as the first step, meant addressing material needs and Salvationists viewed taking care of people through feeding as a basic expression of faith in public life.

As the next chapter makes clear, amongst the civil servants of the wartime Ministry of Food there was a disdain for any feeding models considered out of date and Victorian, and this included any suggestion of food as an instrument of proselytization. Many would have concurred with the spirit of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith when he told the Commons, at the introduction of the Licensing Bill in 1908, that in the new century ‘paramount supremacy’ lay in ‘public over private’, in ‘general over particular interests’.³ Although Asquith was referring to big business and the established social order, here was the essence of the ‘New Liberalism’: the state, not the private individual or charitable concern (however well meaning), ought to function as the ultimate guarantor of the public good.

At the same time, questions of consumption in wartime retained some of the tinges of late nineteenth-century faith-based radicalism. The millennial optimism of the Edwardian period, even if expressed in secular terms, often struck the tone of the physician, campaigning for a healthier body politic and linking better nutrition with abstinence from alcohol: an established trope of religious radicals. Moreover, much discussion around consumption habits still focused on the supposedly wayward and feckless working man.⁴ This was emphasized in the early stages of the war when teetotal government minister David Lloyd George, who was of a Welsh nonconformist background described as ‘excessively puritan’ by the contemporary press, told a crowd in Bangor, North Wales, that intemperate working men were to blame for poor productivity.⁵

Although Lloyd George’s concern was armaments, and although he was subsequently pilloried by large sections of the press, the Bangor speech was a signal of the greater government controls over everyday life that would typify Lloyd George’s ministry from 1916 onwards. Of relevance to this study is the subsequent growth of the Central Control Board, a government body which tightened wartime controls over industry and which was responsible for establishing ‘industrial canteens’. These were large facilities within factory sites across the country where hot food was served as an alternative to a ‘liquid lunch’ in the pub.⁶ Industrial canteens are not specifically addressed in this book because they were institutional (that is, based in factories) rather than public, and as such targeted directly towards improving British industrial output. Nonetheless, in scrutinizing wartime feeding, the legacy of the nineteenth-century temperance movement is of note here; even if historians disagree over the extent to which Lloyd George’s Baptist upbringing shaped him, there is consensus over the longer term influence of the broader temperance movement on early twentieth-century policy and policymakers.⁷ It is also of interest that industrial canteens occasionally served weak beer in moderate quantities whereas National Kitchens, as discussed below, were completely ‘dry’ sites.

Female voluntarism, class and gender

Social eating, or public feeding, represents the mixing of a normally private activity with a public act. For this reason, it chimes with the historiographical layers of complexity that have been added to the well-worn Victorian gendered dichotomy between public sphere (male) and the domestic, or private sphere (female).⁸ As well as female involvement in wage labour, which implicitly challenged this ‘separate spheres’ ideology, studies have shown how women of all classes battled against these restrictions and into the public arena.⁹ Yet women’s emergence into the public sphere was accompanied by sexist assumptions. It has been argued, for example, that the relationship between thought and action that emerged in the early twentieth century was itself gendered, with the pursuit of academic knowledge considered male, and the pursuit of social work female.¹⁰ Despite social work’s supposedly female emotional traits such as empathy and care, feminists were integral to the development of social work as a profession in the early twentieth century.¹¹ Female visibility in turn-of-the-century feeding ventures thus constituted a potentially subversive act: one in which women, unusually, were visible in the public sphere. Viewed in this way, it represented a radical challenge to established notions of a ‘woman’s place’, echoing currents of thought from Owenism to suffragism which critiqued the nuclear family and urged for greater female participation in public life. Even when stripped of any radical or revolutionary connotations, female philanthropy represents a critical site for the development of women’s agency within the public sphere, with influential legacies in both the wartime feeding discussed in this book and the later development of the welfare state.¹²

On the other hand, late Victorian and Edwardian public feeding was often championed by upper class, and upper middle class, women and as such sometimes adhered to the domestic ideology of anti-suffragism. Women of a more conservative political bent felt that females ought to operate within the realm of parochial charity. Feeding the poor and needy of the community and the locale, they considered, was a more appropriate – if no less valuable – function for a woman than that of active participant in the masculinist affairs of state and empire.¹³ Although the popular image of what may be termed the ‘Lady Bountiful’ has undergone revision, this type of female figure was a fixture of pre-war voluntary feeding, whether administered from a soup kitchen or door to door.¹⁴

Historians of female philanthropy have rightly cautioned that the condescending stereotype of the ‘Lady Bountiful’ – sympathetic to the poor while benefiting from the separatist social structures that kept her at the top of the pile – has haunted both scholarship and popular parlance, to the detriment of a fuller and fairer understanding of the phenomenon.¹⁵ Accordingly, this book seeks to consider such women in the wartime context. In doing so, it is first important to acknowledge their predecessors. One such was the aristocrat and later acclaimed humanitarian Muriel Paget. Paget was a patron and organizer of the Southwark ‘Invalid Kitchen’, a charitable feeding centre in the London borough which provided cheap and nutritious food to young mothers, the sick and the convalescent. Paget’s ‘invalid kitchens’ were a form of targeted feeding (which is outlined in greater depth below); with the target of this charitable relief loosely defined as the ‘invalid’, potential recipients were assessed according to their income or professional medical referral. The number of ‘invalid kitchens’ in the capital expanded in the years prior to war and attracted the royal patronage of Queen Mary.¹⁶ Paget’s war work would take her to Eastern Europe, where she used her London experience to organize emergency feeding centres¹⁷; significantly, these were feeding centres ‘for all’: as in many national contexts, the wartime necessity of mass feeding had trumped the targeted approach and Britain, as we shall see, was no exception.

A contemporary of Paget, the acclaimed Suffragette and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst was also highly influential in early wartime feeding initiatives. Sylvia Pankhurst’s left-wing political trajectory had caused a rift with her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel and prompted her to found the socialist East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) in 1914. Sylvia, who was opposed to the war but alert to its effects, established a milk distribution centre in London’s East End and a medical clinic where patients were treated without charge. In the early stages of the conflict, in the autumn of 1914, Sylvia lobbied Walter Runciman, the President of the Board of Trade, to introduce food price controls to combat the price inflation and panic buying ushered in by the war. Importantly, in a striking pre-echo of the government’s National Kitchens scheme, the ELFS also opened a small chain of cost-price restaurants. By 1915, Sylvia Pankhurst’s cost-price restaurants were serving around 400 meals a day.¹⁸

Describing her motivation for public-feeding efforts in the East End, Sylvia Pankhurst recalled ‘we had good families of people coming to my house without a penny and with six or seven children, and I opened two penny restaurants where you could get two penny meals … But I know it is all palliatives; it will not do any good really; I want to change the system.’¹⁹ As the quote suggests, as well as her militant direct-action Suffragettism, she was a revolutionary socialist and conceived of public feeding as a radical act.²⁰ A founder member of the Communist Party in Britain, Sylvia’s pioneer social work was of the radical or ‘popular’ type, and as such was distinct from the reformist early professional social work of the English Settlement Movement, in which middle-class ‘settlement workers’, often attached to universities, situated themselves within poorer communities.²¹ When it came to state action versus voluntarism, Pankhurst was unequivocal, agonizing about the risk to ‘affectionate comradeship’ if her feeding scheme was perceived as an exercise in ‘patronage or condescension’ and insisting that such measures did not signal a preference for ‘private effort’ over collective action. Rather than a smugly charitable hobby for affluent women, her desire to transform the state itself was clear: ‘our main duty was to bring pressure to bear on the government to secure the needs of the people’.²²

Female voluntarism around food in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to the gradual erosion of gendered notions of public and private, albeit often within an ‘acceptable borderland area’.²³ During the First World War, the middle-/upper-class woman would remain influential in public feeding and historians like Peter Grant are right to caution against the corrosive spirit of condescension towards voluntary and philanthropic contributions to the war effort, many of which were run by middle-and upper-class women.

However, as the war ground on, working-class women themselves would prove the real pioneers of emergency commensality and the ‘National Kitchen’, providing a clear break with earlier patterns of elite benevolence by bureaucratizing, professionalizing and universalizing the notion of public feeding. On the one hand, then, state-supported emergency feeding was more in keeping with the feeding efforts of Pankhurst – who was always at pains to avoid the taint of charity and to maintain focus on the greater goal of systemic change – than the aristocratically endorsed activity of Paget. On the other, the patriotic rebranding of communal feeding as the ‘National Kitchen’, which is discussed subsequently, would frustrate what Pankhurst viewed as the radical potential of commensality. But whatever the political implications of the state assuming a public-feeding role, the National Kitchen provides a striking example of what Derek Oddy memorably termed ‘the failure of voluntary restraint’ in food consumption in Britain between 1916 and 1917, examples of which included King George V and his household solemnly pledging, in May 1917, to reduce their consumption of bread by a quarter. By the end of the war wider ranging statist measures – price-capped public feeding followed by full rationing – had supplanted the voluntary when it came to food control. As Pankhurst hoped, the ‘pressure’ on government had been brought to bear.

Scientific advance, class and nutritional reform

The technological improvements of the nineteenth century transformed the British people’s relationship with food. Imperial trade was enhanced through quicker and more extensive rail and sea routes, while mechanization led to the mass production of food and new products. As Britain’s share of overseas trade grew, sugar became an everyday commodity and new sugar-based foodstuffs became increasingly popular; chocolate, for example, went from an expensive drink to an affordable solid bar.²⁴ Britain’s pre-eminent global trading position, coupled with advances in food preservation techniques such as canning and refrigeration, ensured that by the turn of the century the British consumer was able to avail of a greater range of meats, fish, fruit and vegetables than ever before and, most significantly, Britons of all classes were now able to avail of food at cheaper prices. For those towards the top of the nation’s class hierarchy this meant a greater variety of luxury foodstuffs; for those towards the opposite end it translated as the cheap white loaf of bread: a tangible symbol of national pride illustrating how the nation, through its empire, was delivering affordable food to its people.

On the wave of the scientific progress of the late century came the development of food science and better understanding of nutrition and bacteria and, as a corollary, educational institutions dedicated to food science began to appear. The growth of cookery schools in nineteenth-century Britain provides another example of how late Victorian trends underlay First World War feeding. The National Training School of Cookery in London, which opened in 1873, established cookery education as a science, and cookery schools subsequently sprung up in other British cities. For the first time, the preparation of food was recognized as impacting public health and...