The Home Front
in the Second World War
by Kate Elliott, Carol Powell and John Powell
RATIONING
'If you are only eating what you need and not what you like and as much as you like, then you are helping to win the war.'
Lord Woolton, Minister For Food
Along with the war abroad came privations at home. As our merchant navy was so vulnerable at sea, it was
decided to ration the foods and materials, which were imported—bananas and citrus fruit all but disappeared from the shops.
In addition, wartime rationing of staple, home-produced foods began on 8 January 1940 and the allowances were meagre by today’s standards, but it is said that for many it was a better diet than they had had before and that those born during the war were the best-fed babies ever.
Everyone was issued with ration books containing coupons, which they had to exchange along with money for food, clothes and sweets.
All would then have access to the same permitted amount.
THE WEEKLY RATION
The weekly rations per person allowed 8oz sugar; 2oz butter; 3 pints milk; 2 oz cheese; 2 oz tea; 4oz margarine; 4oz cooking fat; meat to the value of 1s 2d and 1 egg a week.
12oz sweets were allowed every 4 weeks, although the quantities of all these varied throughout the war.
Bread was not rationed until after the war— 1946 to 1948.
Clothes were rationed from June 1941, to allow each person to have one new outfit per year. Utility clothing was introduced; best described as ‘fashion less’. Men’s trousers were all the same style and without turn-ups, women’s skirts were short and straight with no trimmings. After clothing came utility furniture, which was plain but serviceable.
Queuing became a national pastime and it became the custom that if you saw a queue, you joined it, regardless what was for sale. For many also those six years of making-do—re-knitting garments, mending clothes, cutting down garments for the children, saving string etc. remained with them for the rest of their lives.
These extracts from Mumbles Letters to the Forces show how the village maintained its good spirits and sense of humour despite the shortages.
February 1942: ‘Queues for kippers outside Reynold’s fish shop in Newton Road …
March 1943: ‘Flat fish and Whiting have apparently evacuated from Swansea Bay.’Later in 1943: ‘There is no sugar in Forte’s coffee … 3 or 4 orange queues made their appearance … and the chip shop is often closed although there are a few more eggs.’
September 1943: ‘Blackberries and nuts around Thistleboon and mushrooms from Langland Golf Links … the Home Guard manoeuvres attracted the pheasant and partridges, or vice versa!’
January 1944: ‘The shops are putting up a good show … Dried eggs, national milk, soya bean flour (grand for marzipan), saccharine etc. As for clothes! Mumbles is still a jolly smart little village.’
February 1944: Some oranges appeared but ‘no lemons for Pancake Day’.
Christmas 1944: ‘Shopkeepers suffered from under-the-counter lumbago, and customers from eye-strain and giraffe necks.’
(Mumbles Letters to the Forces, Harry Libby and Betty Howard)
To augment their diet, everyone was advised to ‘dig for victory’ by turning their flower gardens over to vegetables or renting an allotment, gathering ‘food for free’—blackberries or mushrooms or keeping hens or pigs.
The Government issued recipe suggestions, one of which was Woolton pie:
Woolton Pie
Take 1lb. each diced potatoes, cauliflower, swede and carrots, three or four spring onions—if possible, one teaspoonful of vegetable extract and one tablespoonful of oatmeal.
Cook all together for ten minutes with just enough water to cover. Stir occasionally to prevent the mixture from sticking. Allow to cool; put into a pie dish, sprinkle with chopped parsley and cover with a crust of potato or wheatmeal pastry.
Bake in a moderate oven until the pastry is nicely browned and serve hot with a brown gravy
It was obviously easier to ‘dig for victory’ in country areas, and Mumbles was in a good situation being close to both town and country, so there were ways of supplementing rations. There were thriving allotments at Oystermouth Castle, Thistleboon and Marespool, as well as plenty of wild fruit and nuts growing locally. Laurie Latchford and his wife collected hazelnuts in the autumn of 1940, burying them in a tin in their Newton garden to keep until Christmas.
Mary Colburn. Oranges distributed at school and the red, red apples from Canada. Cocoa powder mixed with sugar into which we dipped sucked fingers as if savouring sherbert. The friendly Underhill Park Americans who always responded to the tentative query, ‘Any gum chum?’ either with the requested, much prized, chewing gum, or a small tin of peaches. Rabbits sent by farming relatives in Newcastle Emlyn. Eggs preserved in isinglass. Collecting elderberries to make elderberry and apple jam. Bread crusts baked slowly in the oven at the end of a baking session. When nicely crisped they were allowed to cool and I was given the task of pulverising them in a folded tea-towel with the rolling pin to make golden breadcrumbs which my mother used to coat the delicious meat rissoles and fish cakes which formed part of our war years` diet.
Kirsteen Foster. At the Langland Bay Hotel our vegetables came from local suppliers, the fish from Carpenters in St Helens, bread from Strawbridge’s in Mumbles, and poultry from Howells in Swansea. Chicken wasn’t rationed so we ate quite a lot of it - that’s why I’m not that keen on chicken now. The biscuit store cupboard was kept firmly locked!
Every so often the Meat Inspector would call to check to see that we weren’t using black market meat.
Peter Howell. Uncle Gwynford, who never smoked, drank, swore or missed a Sunday in chapel, occasionally slaughtered a pig illegally on his farm … Some days later … father would open our front door just as Uncle’s van drew up outside after dark. He would hurry in with a side of bacon in a sack over his shoulder … the contraband would be taken upstairs and hung on a hook in a curtained recess in the corner of my parents’ bedroom. Over ensuing weeks, every time my mother needed some bacon my father would steal upstairs to slice off a few rashers.
Extract from Whess you come from, Boy? Peter Howell, 2004.
Malcolm Morse. There was a lot of bartering in those days to supplement rations. Butter and sugar ‘acquired’ via the docks would be exchanged for other items, so I heard.
There were allotments where Grange School is now. Everyone kept chickens or rabbits and of course some people kept pigs. You could hear them squealing when it was feeding time, they made such a noise. You also knew when one was being slaughtered!
During the war it was difficult to get cartridges for shot-guns, so people kept ferrets and lurchers to kill the wild rabbits as they were everywhere on the fields above Mumbles.
Mary Colburn remembers picking elderberries from the hedgerows and watching her mother make ‘wonderful elderberry and apple jelly. In addition, the family had a regular delivery of pairs of rabbits, fur intact, from relatives who farmed at Newcastle Emlyn. Both she and Jill Price remember, buying 1d sticks of carrot from George’s shop in Newton Road to eat instead of sweets (fruit was also scarce).
Being by the sea helped as well, especially once inshore fishing restrictions were lifted in June 1941. Maud Davies recalls a Mrs Webb from Gower who came every Saturday with baskets of cockles and mussels as well as fresh vegetables, which she sold from a stall in Chapel Street.
Both Dinah Parkes and Pat Parker remember making briquettes for burning on the fire to help out with the shortage of coal. They were a bit like papier maché—small pieces of paper soaked in water with wood chippings or sawdust added, and then pressed into a brick shape.
Of course there were queues outside the shops in Mumbles like anywhere else. ‘Any rumours of any luxuries in the village and we keepers of houses are out on parade!’ (Betty Howard in Letters to the Forces, March, 1942.)
David Spooner. Because I was so young I was not very aware of rationing, apart from not being able to get sweets. I knew there was something missing though. We had three greenhouses in our back garden and so we grew tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce in those. We had far too much for us so we gave much of it away. Mother shopped at a grocers shop in Newton Road—very small, only room for a few customers at one time. I do remember fights over cigarettes. Father only liked Players and when a shop got them in they had to ration them out to customers. He used to go to Bill Davies’s shop on the corner of Chapel Street and Gower Place for his cigarettes.
Peter Aspell. I lived in Southend during the war. We used to go to Chambers in Newton Road for our vegetables. I remember queuing outside for potatoes—there were two people behind me, then my brother, with our mother at the back of the queue. I bought my lot of potatoes but when my brother got to be served he was told, ‘You were here yesterday.’ My brother replied that he hadn’t been, ‘No, it must have been someone who looked like me.’ So we got away with three loads of potatoes that day. Everyone spread themselves about, just so that they could get a little bit more. We did not have a garden to grow our own vegetables. I remember there was a banana in the window of Harry Libby’s place and we could pay one penny (1d) for a sniff! The money raised was sent to the armed forces. One day, my brother and I were playing with friends Joyce and Dorothy who lived in Rock Hill. We were behind the Antelope when their mother came out and opened up some little boxes - they were full of figs and dates. I had never seen such things before, and they were shared out between us. Their father must have sent them from abroad.
Pat Parker. I lived in Glenville Road during the war and we went to Pressdee’s shop in Queens Road to get our rationed goods. I remember they delivered—even during the war. We bought our bread from T & G Davies and our milk came from Boarspit Farm. It was delivered in a churn and scooped out for us. In the summer we had to scald it to stop it from going sour.
John Wright. My mother, being a Mumbles girl had always done much of her shopping in Mumbles and many delivered your goods. They usually used push-bikes with a wicker basket carried in a frame over the front wheel. We were registered for groceries with Tom Williams, who had a small grocery on the upper corner of William Street and Gower Place.
The basic commodities would have all been delivered to the grocer in bulk. Tea came in plywood tea chests, lined with foil. Sugar came in sacks, butter and other fats came in large lumps (probably 28 lb packs) and bacon came as a side of bacon. It was the grocer’s job to weigh it out for the consumer. Tea was sold in ordinary paper bags, sugar in special blue moisture-absorbing paper bags, butter etc patted into blocks and wrapped in greaseproof paper, whilst bacon was sliced. The bigger shops had sophisticated slicing machines, whilst smaller grocers used a large knife to cut slices off the side of bacon.
Our bread also came from Mumbles—T&G Davies of Gloucester Place operated a bread-round using a horse and cart. The big cart-horse named Captain was a magnificent animal. He knew his round, stopping unbidden outside customer’s houses and moving on to keep pace with the roundsman, as he went from house to house.
John Wright
Milk came direct from ‘Bowler’ John Owen‘s farm in the heart of Newton village. It was served by dipping a measuring jug into a small churn and pouring into the customer’s own jug. I do not remember him using any form of cart, so presume that he carried his churns on foot. Obviously this milk was not pasteurised. Domestic refrigerators were virtually unknown: we did not have one and I doubt that the farmer had one.
Mail was the only other delivery service. It was delivered daily Monday to Saturday by a postman with a mid 30s Morris 8 mail-van.
Malcolm Morse. I was brought up opposite what is now Grange School in Norton. During the war this was open fields and allotments. Liberty boats that had been mined were brought into Swansea Bay and, whilst they were waiting their turn for the dry docks in Swansea Docks, they were beached on the sands below Norton.
Although each ship had its own watchman, we boys used to find a way to get on board the wrecks. The great jagged holes in the hulls of the vessels could be reached by dragging ourselves up a load of sand and mud, and once inside we were able to look around. Most of the military equipment we saw wasn’t worth pinching, but one time, I must have been about 10 years old, rumour had gone round that there were tins of spam aboard one of the vessels.They were large tins of spam (for the American Army) and were about 2 foot long and very heavy to carry. Someone said that the local police sergeant from Blackpill came round asking if any of the kids had brought back spam. If they had, it was all eaten very quickly!
John Lythgoe. Towards the end of the war, during a very low tide, I remember getting into the Liberty ship off Oystermouth and ‘salvaging ’a spanner and a belt of 2mm shells. The belt was too heavy for a ten-year old to carry so I dragged it proudly all the way home to Budehaven Terrace, where my father was digging the garden. What followed was a clip across the ear and bed, with the total disappearance of my prize!
Pat Parker. Although I recall queuing outside Harry Davies’s shop for fruit, we had very long gardens in our road and we all grew our own fruit and vegetables. We grew potatoes and kidney beans, amongst other things. Everyone had a speciality and swapped—ours was blackberries, which we grew on a trellis on a sort of patio. These weren’t ‘Mumbles Hill’ blackberries—they were huge great things. We all had to help in the gardens. The lady next door to us grew soft fruit and her youngest daughter, Doris, was studying for her matriculation and used to pick the fruit with a book on her lap. Everybody pulled together.
Marion Garnett. My mother used to make chocolate out of cocoa and powdered milk, it was absolutely delicious, but that might have been because we didn’t have much chocolate during the war. We also had dried egg-powder—I think it was quite nutritious but nothing like the real thing. My grandfather had an allotment in St Thomas, and so for tea in the summer we would have fresh salad— lettuce, radishes, spring onions. In a greenhouse he grew black grapes and tomatoes. We were very lucky.
Peter Howell. One evening in 1941 my father came home from work carrying a hessian sack from which he upended a dozen or more cans of food onto the scullery floor. A food warehouse near his workshop had been gutted by fire during the previous night’s air raid and, somehow, he had come by these cans. Their labels had been burnt off by the fire but he maintained, they contained tinned fruit—a luxury scarcely available in the shops and something to be kept at the back of the pantry for special occasions.
Shortly afterwards, on a summer Sunday, we went to Caswell for a picnic. My mother packed one of the unlabelled tins as fruit as a treat. But, much to our disappointment, when she opened the tin, the contents turned out to be stewed steak! From then on the opening of each of the unlabelled tins took on the air of a lottery and an occasion for speculation and surprise. ‘Whess come from, Boy?’ Peter Howell, 2004
‘Tons of work going on in the allotments’, as Harry Libby wrote in his March 1940 letter to the Forces. He also mentioned that somebody ‘nicked’ potatoes from the school kids’ allotment in Newton Road. Allotmenteers were ‘lugging o’weed out Plunch or up Dick Slade’ in the winter months (December, 1941) and by the spring of 1942: ‘More civilians than ever are mixed up with spades and spuds.’ It was the digging of ground for allotments in the castle grounds that prompted the phrase: ‘Pioneer gardeners qualifying as quarrymen!’ (April 1942) The allotments there proved to be very productive and there was talk of setting up a pig club.
Later in 1942 Harry Libby wrote: ‘hardly a garden in Mumbles does not boast of some tomato plants, and the fruit and veg. at the Harvest Festivals were a mouth-watering proof of local efforts in the Dig for Victory campaign.’ (September 1942) The best fire-watchers were those with apple trees! By 1944, the Mumbles Allotment Society was ‘a jolly well organised affair. (February, 1944)
Wartime rationing of fuel
John Wright. Bus companies were given an allocation of fuel, which was somewhat less than their pre-war usage. The South Wales Transport Company took all their coaches … out of service for the duration. Some of these coaches were stored in Clement’s Quarry. Because Mumbles was well served by the Mumbles Train, all bus services to Mumbles were withdrawn apart from Service no. 6, which ran a shuttle service between Oystermouth Station and St Peter’s Church in Newton. This connected with most trains to Swansea in the morning and [again] in the afternoon and evening. Every two hours or so, the trip was extended down to Caswell Bay.
In hot summer weather during the war, huge queues used to form at Rutland Street for the Mumbles Train. The trains were filled to bursting and there was no way conductors could collect all the fares. Therefore, they collected fares from intending passengers as they joined the queue at Rutland Street. Season ticket holders and known regular passengers were usually invited to jump the queue. Because of the extra time taken to board and to detrain at Mumbles the timetable was soon in chaos!
John Pressdee. Two of our cars were commandeered from the family business, Alfred Pressdee, in 1939 when the war began. The only payment was £25 each, which was eventually received at the end of the conflict. This was in contrast to the market value when new, for just one car, of at least £500. The cars were never returned. One was destroyed by enemy action at Pembroke Dock, and, as for the other one, we never found out what happened to that! Half the garage was also commandeered for use as a fire station, with living accommodation above and an air-raid siren was fitted just outsi
John Wright. I do not think that coal was formally rationed, but stocks were very limited and of very variable quality. As I remember it, coal merchants shared their available stocks amongst their regular customers, virtually all domestic premises using coal for heating. Mumbles coal merchants collected their coal from rail trucks in the Mumbles Railway siding near what is today the Dairy Car Park. They weighed it out into hundredweight bags for delivery by lorry to the customer’s coalhouse or bunker.
Make-do-and-mend
Pat Parker. We didn’t throw anything out! We unpicked old sweaters for new ones—you’d wrap the wool around the back of a dining chair, then wash and dry it to get out the crinkles. You can’t do that with modern yarns. My mother was a great knitter and used to make me Fair Isle sweaters, and things to send to my father who was in the Merchant Navy. Because of rationing, I only had one new dress a year, probably a Whitsun treat. It was always long so it would last me. We used to buy the dresses upstairs in the Co-op in the village. They had a central window display with entrance doors either side. Once you were in the shop there were stairs which divided left and right and that’s where we bought my annual dress.
Marion Garnett. We ate rabbit from Swansea market and corned beef quite a bit. We had chicken at Christmas—it was quite a delicacy. I remember that every scrap of that chicken was eaten. Nothing was thrown away. Sometimes, now, if I throw something away I feel almost guilty! My Bampa worked on the docks in Swansea and so he was able to collect scrap wood. With this he made me a desk and chair. The desk even had a drawer beneath the top for my pencils and there were little compartments down the side. When it was finished he varnished it dark brown—lots of things were varnished dark brown then, I don’t think there was any paint easily available. Grandfather also made little wooden aeroplanes.
SalvageSaucepans for Dorniers!
Poems such as this one appeared:
My saucepans have all been surrendered,
The teapot is gone from the hob.
The Colander’s leaving the cabbage
For a very much different job.
So now if I hear on the wireless
Of Hurricanes showing their mettle.
I see in a vision before me -
A Dornier chased by my kettle!!
‘The saviours of our nation’ was how Herbert Morrison (the Home Secretary) described Rag- and-Bone men. Mary Colburn remembers, ‘the man announcing his presence with a raucous cry of ‘Rag ‘n’ bones, any ole iron, rag and bones …’, as he sat sideways on his flat, horse-drawn cart, with his feet dangling just above the ground.’
Pat Barker. You didn’t throw anything away. We collected newspapers for school, where there was a competition to see who could bring in the most and we got a paper badge afterwards. One of the teachers used to bring a 2lb jam jar in to the school canteen and take home all the lunchtime scraps in it. I have no idea what she wanted them for.
Barbara Fisher. Mother and I had gone to visit Grannie and Grampie in Mumbles and I had run on ahead. I reached No. 19 [Gloucester Place] and halted in amazement. Where were the railings and the gate? I looked at Woodland Villa [next door] and my eyes met the same sight—no railings or gate! What could have happened? I turned and ran back to my mother shouting, ‘Come quickly! Someone has stolen Grannie’s railings!’ Of course, as was explained later, they had been taken for the war effort and thus it was that the war became very real to me.
Mary Colburn. Our beautiful ornamental cast-iron railings were ripped from the front wall of our house in Victoria Avenue for the war effort. I realised many years later that it was impossible for them to have been used.
In April 1940, Harry Libby wrote that iron railings had begun to disappear in Mumbles. In July a big campaign was launched to collect pots and pans, and a couple of empty shops in the village were used for dumping aluminium, whilst there was at least one scrap iron dump as well. The South Wales Evening Post reported that the Great War tank and two Crimean War guns on public display in Swansea were to be scrapped for salvage.
Two years later, in February 1942, each street in Mumbles appointed a steward for collecting salvage. Although there were still lots of railings which might be scrapped including the Southend bridge’, by October ‘tons of gates … and all the railings’ had gone from Southend and around the Parade gardens and Harry Libby added the hope that children would restrain themselves from ‘despoiling … lawns and flowerbeds.’ Libby’s letters to the Forces
Rationing formally ended on 2 July 1954, when meat products became freely available.
On 3 July large crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square to ceremonially tear up their ration books in celebration.
Text previously published inMUMBLES Memories of the Second World War 1939-1945by Kate Elliott, Carol Powell and John Powell