Eggs or Anarchy

The remarkable story of the man tasked with the impossible: to feed a nation at war

William Sitwell

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781471151088
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Eggs or Anarchy is one of the great, British stories of the Second World War yet to be told in full. It reveals the heroic tale of how Lord Woolton, Minister for Food, really fed Britain. As a nation at war, with supply routes under attack from the Axis powers and resources scarce, it was Woolton's job to fulfil his promise to the British people, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in particular, that there would be food on the shelves each week. Persuading the public to not resort to the black market and to manage on the very limited ration was one thing, but Woolton had to fulfil his side of the bargain and maintain supplies in time of crisis. A grammar school-educated genius, he was a fish out of water in Churchill's cabinet and the PM himself doubted Woolton would survive due to the unstinting criticism he faced from colleagues, the press and public. This is the story of how he battled to save his own career while using every trick in his entrepreneurial book to secure supplies. He battled to outwit unscrupulous dealers on the black market streets of cities within the British Empire - such as Alexandria in Eygpt - persuading customs authorities to turn a blind eye to his import schemes. If Britain had gone hungry the outcome of the war could have been very different. This book, for the first time, finds out the real story of how Lord Woolton provided food for Britain and her colonies and discovers that for him there were days when it was literally a choice of 'eggs or anarchy'.

1

A NEW MAN AT THE MINISTRY

Late afternoon, Thursday 3 April 1940. Seven months into the Second World War and, in an office in London’s Tothill Street in Westminster, a grey-haired man in his late fifties, dressed in a three-piece pin-striped suit, with a watch chain, was placing the few remaining items left on his desk – a small framed picture and an ink pot – into a box. In an ashtray a pipe smouldered.

Fred Marquis, latterly ennobled as Lord Woolton, was leaving his post, an advisory position with the less-than-exciting title of Director General of Equipment and Stores. His new role had a simpler name and was a touch more glamorous: in a matter of hours he would be Minister of Food.

The previous day, Woolton had received a telephone call from the Prime Minister’s office, asking if he would visit Neville Chamberlain at seven o’clock that evening.

‘I understand that your department is running so smoothly that you are now unnecessary,’ were Chamberlain’s opening words when they met.

Woolton, in his memoirs, wrote that it was ‘said without a smile, in his rather cold manner, and I realized that for some reason or other he proposed to remove me’.

Woolton assumed that he would then be released to return to his actual day job, as head of the Manchester-based (and country’s biggest) department store chain, Lewis’s.

‘Am I now free to go and look after my own business affairs?’ asked Woolton.

Chamberlain replied that this was not his intention, instead he was making some changes in his Cabinet and he wanted Woolton to join the government as Minister of Food.

The task would see Woolton heading a ministry whose job was, in simple terms, to feed Britain and her colonies during the straitened times of the Second World War.

That meant 41 million men, women and children in Britain and Northern Ireland, with an oversight of the 532 million people of the British Empire. He would have to manage the purchase and importation of food, ensure its fair distribution across the country, tackle the very low productivity of home-grown sustenance, and, with the system of rationing that had begun on 8 January of that year, ensure that abuses of the system were kept to a minimum – and a black market thwarted.

Woolton left Downing Street, discussed the proposal with his wife Maud and then accepted the job the following day. At which point he immediately began to feel apprehensive.

‘I was embarking on a new life,’ he later reflected, ‘at the age of fifty-eight, with many fears about my own capacity to succeed in these new and unaccustomed fields of parliamentary responsibility, and with a profound sense of the dire consequences to the country if I failed.’

As he cleared his office he considered the challenges of the coming days. His new offices were just north of Oxford Street, physically some two miles away from the political machine of government in Whitehall.

He would get his feet under the desk and spend the days and nights reading to get on top of the subject. There was a large bureaucracy that supported the ministry and he wondered how immovable a beast it would be.

He pondered on the day he would be presented to the press as the new minister and vowed to be ready for the difficult questions that would be thrown his way.

Those first few days of reading and research would be invaluable; he was a stickler for detail and accuracy. He was also a man of firm mind and steely determination, and remained resolute that no decision, no public comment should ever be made without a very clear understanding of the facts.

There was a knock at the door and the secretary – who had served him well since he had taken up his post at the Ministry of Supply just days after war had been declared – announced a visitor.

‘Sir Henry French is here for you, Lord Woolton,’ the secretary said.

Woolton looked startled. He had heard about this man; a career civil servant, Sir Henry French was the Ministry of Food’s Permanent Secretary, classically implacable and solemn. Sir Henry had joined the Civil Service in 1901 at the age of eighteen as a second-division clerk to the Board of Agriculture; moving slowly but steadily up the ranks, he had built a reputation as a sound, if inflexible, administrator until joining the Ministry of Food at the start of the war. Fifty-six when war broke out, Sir Henry had spent thirty-eight of those years in the same department. He was, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘unapproachable and vain. He made up his mind about people and rarely changed it.’ He was known to wear the responsibilities of his job in the lines on his face, and there was no known evidence that he had a sense of humour.

Woolton wondered how they would get on. He was a man who liked to get things done, who would often circumvent the traditional channels to implement decisions. Since starting work for the government some six months previously, his battles with the Civil Service had already landed him in hot water. He was keen to start this new job on the front foot. He would be ready for Sir Henry French.

He would settle into his new office, take a puff on his pipe, having spent time studying the machinations of his new ministry. Then he would call upon his Permanent Secretary.

But, it seemed, Sir Henry was already a step ahead of him and had come to stalk Woolton before he had even left his old job.

Sir Henry entered the room, the two men shook hands and, before any platitudes were offered, the civil servant informed Woolton that he had come simply to inform him that the following day he was to address a meeting at the Queen’s Hall.

‘I was horrified,’ Woolton reflected.

This grand building, on Langham Place, was, before the war, a concert hall, but it now served as an ideal place for important political speeches, where the press and public could attend in large numbers (the building would later be destroyed by an incendiary bomb in the blitz of May 1941).

The speech, explained Sir Henry, would bring the press up to date with the Ministry of Food’s plans, schemes and tactics.

‘But I can’t make a speech about something about which I know nothing,’ Woolton exclaimed to Sir Henry. The Permanent Secretary looked surprised at this answer and Woolton quickly understood that this was exactly what one did in the upper echelons of politics.

‘There was no escape,’ he mused in his diary at the prospect of the following day’s event, ‘The meeting was widely advertised and a wide range of important people had been invited – from press to the Prime Minister’s wife, Mrs Chamberlain.’

The occasion had originally been arranged for his predecessor, William Morrison.

‘This meeting will be an excellent opportunity for you to make your mark with the public,’ said Sir Henry, who then handed him a few sheets of paper, adding ‘And here, Minister, is your speech.’

‘My trouble was that I had not formulated any policy,’ wrote Woolton, ‘but Sir Henry told me that there was no difficulty about that, because he had the whole statement most clearly laid out for me.’

It was, explained Sir Henry, officials who decided the policy and Woolton’s job ‘to expound the policy, to explain it to the public.’ Woolton did not like this. ‘That was not my conception of the function of a minister. There was a further difficulty in that I am incapable of making a speech that I have not prepared myself.’

It was now the early evening and, reflected Woolton, ‘there was no escape from this meeting. The Press indicated that they were anxious to hear my policy.’

There was nothing he could do. So he cancelled his evening plans, left his old ministry and resolved to work at home until the small hours.

‘I sat up all that night studying the papers and getting myself acquainted with the current position of food supplies,’ he recalled. ‘I felt like a barrister briefed to appear in Court. But what a Court!’

The following day, after just a few hours sleep, he found himself in the Queen’s Hall, on a platform alongside Sir Henry French and another ministry official, looking out at a full auditorium and a pack of pressmen flashing their cameras. Questions were shouted, he was asked to pose this way, then that, he felt almost blinded by the ceaseless flashing lights. Then, as the cacophony turned to a murmur and the room began to hush, he heard the whirr of the BBC news cameras, he saw the recording equipment of the radio teams.

As an official introduced the Ministry of Food’s new boss to the hall, Woolton considered his resolve that previous night. He would look out at the audience, but in his mind would see far beyond. ‘My audience is not the aggregate of the public who are listening but the detail of the individual in front of the domestic receiving set,’ he thought to himself, as he recalled in his memoirs. ‘In the front of my mind I keep a picture of a man in his cottage, sitting without a collar, with slippers on, at the end of the day’s work, with children playing on the rug, with his wife washing up in an adjoining room with the door open.’

If his talk was successful, Woolton allowed himself to imagine an additional moment in that scene. As his voice would come over the radio, ‘a visitor arrives in the middle of my broadcast. The man says: “Sit down and shut up; we are listening to Woolton.”’

On a table in front of Woolton was the stack of papers that contained the new minister’s speech, dutifully presented the previous day. To the right of that were some smaller sheets of writing paper, with notes scrawled across them.

Just before Woolton stood to command the microphone, he conspicuously moved the stack of papers to the left, effectively discarding them, and instead picked up his own notes. He nodded with a faint look of amusement in his eyes to Sir Henry, who could not conceal a look of intense alarm. And then Lord Woolton rose to his feet and uttered the first words of his new career.

2

INTRODUCING FRED

Frederick James Marquis was a particularly treasured child to his parents Thomas and Margaret. He was born on 23 August 1883. Fifteen months earlier, his parents’ first born, Ernest, had lived for only eleven days.

His mother Margaret thus cherished this baby, who remained the couple’s only child. As she cradled Fred gently as a new-born, so she held him tightly while he grew. She dreaded the day she would have to relinquish him to the care of teachers as school. Then would come the tortuous prospect of his teenage years, giving way to his early twenties, when he might spend nights and even weeks away if he was to satisfy her almost impossible dream that he could attain a university education.

And so as Fred grew up and did escape the nest, Margaret formed a metaphorical leash, as secure and strong as the force she used to hold him as a baby, except it now came in the form of a constant cavalcade of letters.

Her missives were as frequent as today a worried mother might send an email. The letters came daily – sometimes there were two a day. More often than not, her main subject was laundry. She would sit at home fussing about exactly which clothes he had, which socks he might have on his feet, which shirt on his back. She felt she knew for sure every item of clothing he had in his drawers; each pair of shoes on the floor of his wardrobe, the suit hanging up, the pyjamas under his pillow.

Invariably, the direction of traffic with the letters was one way. It meant Margaret would have to imagine her son’s response and so follow it up with another missive that scolded him.

‘My Dear Boy,’ she started one morning, when Fred was in his late teens, her fraying nerves rendering her just a little cross: ‘I told you [sic] would require a clean shirt before the end of the week but you thought not.’ Washing had become an obsession. ‘I wonder if you have a shirt ready,’ she continued, ‘you said you are going out to dinner on Thursday.’

Knowing exactly the number of shirts he had, her calculations had raised the dreadful possibility that his evening shirt, if not dirty, was certainly not pressed.

There was further horror in her mind about those items resting under his pillow.

‘Bring your pyjamas with you, really they must be awfully dirty, it is ages since you had clean ones,’ she implores of him, wondering when his next trip home would be. Indeed, it was vital he bring back home a large bundle of laundry. ‘If I were you,’ she writes, ‘I would put all of them in a bag and then once carrying would get all the dirty things home so that I can see to them and have them ready by the time they are wanted.’ Now, anyone casually browsing through the life of Frederick Marquis, first Earl of Woolton, might have been surprised to learn that his mother Margaret didn’t just fret about her son’s laundry, she actually did it herself.

For when Woolton died at the age of eighty, in 1964, his home was a large pile in Sussex, he had been chairman of the Conservative Party, his son had been at the leading English public school Rugby, and one of his grandsons was down to attend Eton College with two others destined for Harrow School. He spoke with the clipped tones of the elite aristocracy and, as he recorded privately himself, Walberton House, where he lived near Arundel, had ‘an adequate staff and a lift’.

Yet Woolton’s origins were not just humble, they were emphatically working class. Whereas today the modern politician would barely let an interview pass without eulogising on their near poverty-stricken roots, Woolton never mentioned his very real unassuming origins, indeed he rather buried them.

The house where he was born was on a terrace, long since demolished, in Salford, Manchester. While his mother’s letters betray a well-educated woman, his father, Thomas, was an itinerant saddler; his only two surviving letters are written in pencil and reveal just the bare bones of literacy. A note to young Fred (thanking him for a gift of some kind of personal item with his name embossed upon it), reads, free of grammar: ‘I am so pleased with it I would not have wished for anything else it is fine and fancy the initials are great.’ In another letter, penned on Fred’s eighteenth birthday in 1901, his father says: ‘it does not seem long since you were only quite a little kid but we must not look back in what you are now one of the rising lights and I hope you may have health to continue to rise with love from Pa.’

Thomas’s family had been smallholders, farming in Lancashire. Their small acreage was on the Fylde plain, a flat piece of ground jutting out to the Irish Sea. His father, James, was the second son and had been given none of that modest patch of land to manage; so he found a job as landlord of a pub called the Black Bull Inn in nearby Kirkham. The town was familiar territory for the family, and among the stone tomb chests and monuments in the graveyard of St Michael’s Church are several gravestones that bear the family name of Marquis.

James married his barmaid Harriet, apparently to save having to pay her a wage, and, so goes the family story, he threw his newly-wed’s bonnet into the fire on returning from their wedding, saying: ‘You won’t need that for working.’

His son Thomas received the same scant generosity and found a role as a saddler to service the horses and coaches used by those staying at the inn. On his father’s death in 1879, the inn fell into new hands and Thomas found himself unemployed. He moved to Liverpool, the big city that was then a magnet for the rural dispossessed; but presumably he was unsuccessful in his quest to find work as, by 1883, he had moved again to Salford, although he had at least found a wife in Margaret Ormerod.

In fact he never did seem to find a constant occupation, his early skills as a saddler finding diminishing custom as the motorcar began to outsell the horse-driven coach. The impression is of a man more often morose and inactive. ‘Our Da is not much better but no worse,’ writes Margaret on several occasions. News of him in her letters includes his fixing a wardrobe, visiting the bank and putting down rat poison.

Margaret, meanwhile, clings to Fred. It appears she doesn’t enjoy good health, is generally lonely and has few, if any, friends. Any family back in Kirkham are never mentioned with any warmth, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• 1 A New Man at the Ministry
• 2 Introducing Fred
• 3 Stepping Stones to Government
• 4 The Ministry of Food
• 5 Spring-Summer 1940
• 6 The Secret Life of Colwyn Bay
• 7 Autumn 1940
• 8 The Battle of the Atlantic
• 9 The PR Battle
• 10 The Black Market
• 11 Regulation and Austerity
• 12 Demand Runs High
• 13 A Spoonful of Sugar
• 14 Churchill, Milk and Job Offers
• 15 The Health of Britain
• Epilogue: The Shopkeepers’ Story
• Postscript
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Credits
• Index
• List of Illustrations