The Home Front

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.

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.

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)

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