12

Between the wars

The First World War demonstrated more clearly than any previous conflict the importance of adequate food supplies. Although the dietary needs of armies had long been recognized, the ‘Kaiser’s War’ was the first to involve civilian populations no less than armies and the first to depend importantly on the civilian population’s industrial efficiency and morale. ‘The food question ultimately decided the issue of this war,’ wrote Lloyd George at the end of the conflict. It was a justifiable exaggeration, for military experts regarded as one of the major causes of the Italian rout at Caporetto the reduction in the cereal ration of the Italian soldier some months earlier, and knew that the collapse of the Central Powers in the autumn of 1918 was due in part to the sheer hunger and fatigue of German workers and fighting men.

For another reason, too, the war had given a new importance to diet as a factor in national health. When in 1917–18 conscription involved the medical examination of two-and-a-half million men of military age, the results were summed up as follows:

Of every nine men of military age in Great Britain, on the average three were perfect, fit, and healthy; two were on a definitely inferior plane of health and strength, whether from some disability or some failure of development; three were incapable of undergoing more than a very moderate degree of physical exertion, and could almost (in view of their age) be described with justice as physical wrecks; and the remaining man was a chronic invalid with a precarious hold on life.¹

Altogether 41 per cent of men, supposedly in the prime of life, were graded C3 and unfit for service. By contrast a sample of 1,000 Cambridge undergraduates drawn from the middle classes showed 70 per cent to be above ‘full stature’ and only 10 per cent in Grades III and IV, equivalent to C3.² In the desire of politicians at the end of the war to construct a new world and a Britain ‘fit for heroes’ there was implicit, therefore, the recognition of a responsibility for adequate nutrition: for building health as well as houses and schools, and for raising the general standards of comfort of the generation which had suffered so much.

Food policy was also significant in 1918 for another reason. During the war British agriculture, after years of neglect, had been suddenly called upon to raise output in order to reduce precious carrying-space for essential imports; under government subsidization and price-fixing, the production of wheat and meat, as well as of potatoes, vegetables, and dairy produce had been greatly expanded to raise total food output by a third. What was to be the future of farming in peacetime? Was it to be allowed to return to the decay of pre-war days, which would inevitably follow the reestablishment of a free import policy, or should the government, for strategic, economic, and nutritional reasons, now accept a responsibility for the maintenance of a healthy home agriculture? This, it seems, had been in the mind of Lloyd George when he delivered his famous address on ‘The Future of England’ in November 1918:

Agriculture was almost completely neglected by the state. During recent years very, very little was done – more, perhaps, than used to be, but very little. It was just like feeding a giant with a teaspoon. In 1913, £300,000,000 worth of the products of the soil were imported from abroad which could have been produced here.

In the post-war conditions of declining foreign markets for British manufactures, the burden of paying for food imports became an added reason for increasing domestic production. To farming enthusiasts like Sir Charles Fielding, the possibility even dawned of producing at home

practically the whole of our food requirements. We have the area; we have the good land; we have the suitable climate; we have ample population, and, after we get into full swing, we can produce as cheaply as other countries. All that is needed is the enterprise, organization, goodwill, work, and inducement to get such a production from our own soil that this island will be independent of other nations, safe against submarines, and with a foreign trade balance in its favour.³

Britain’s food supplies had, as we have seen, come to depend mainly on imports, and any hopes of returning to a policy of self-sufficiency were now Utopian. Already by 1870 farmers had taken almost as much land into cultivation as was profitable under a free-trade régime; after the agricultural depression of the 1880s, the area had begun to shrink. Fortunately it had not been merely more of the same kinds of food that the consumer demanded, but different foods. If the diet of the mid-nineteenth century had remained unchanged, the growth in numbers would simply have meant an increased demand for wheat and the coarser foodstuffs, which English agriculture was ill-adapted to supply, but the rise in real incomes per head caused important changes in the type of food consumed. Over the whole period from 1866 to 1936 it is likely that real wages rose between 70 and 90 per cent,⁴ a rise not uniformly distributed over the period, but concentrated into the years 1870–96 and those after 1924. Increased purchasing power resulted in a growing consumption of the ‘protective’ or health foods at the expense of, or in addition to, the cheaper cereals or energy foods: meat, butter, eggs, fruit, and vegetables were the foods for which demand increased most rapidly and these were precisely the foods which the British farmer could produce more easily in competition with agriculturists overseas. He enjoyed a clear advantage in producing meat of high quality; he had a similar advantage for most vegetables and temperate fruits. Even liquid-milk production proved capable of great expansion because, although per capita consumption grew only slightly, the total amount required almost doubled with population increase.

The other important feature of the food market between the wars, in addition to the change towards a more varied diet, was the improved service demanded by the consumer, particularly in respect of regularity and quality of supplies. The fruit-eating season, for example, was first extended by the importation of cheap tropical fruits, and later by the shipment of refrigerated apples and pears from the southern hemisphere. Eggs now came from an increasing number of foreign countries, which helped to relieve seasonal fluctuations in price. Such developments tended to make the consumer more critical in his demands for regular delivery and stable prices. He also came to expect supplies of uniformly high quality. Here, too, imports, because they were more easily graded, helped to educate the public, while the distributors, both wholesalers and retailers, who came to handle a far larger proportion of total food supplies than formerly, learned the convenience of dealing in dependable brands, of being able to repeat orders and receive the exact quantity and quality desired.

After the war a new phase of competition set in, more intense than before. In Canada, Australia, and the Argentine a vast expansion of wheat acreage occurred, while the invention of chilling now made it possible for the Argentine to export beef of a quality only slightly inferior to the finest British meat. New Zealand similarly expanded her lamb and butter exports at ever lower prices, while Denmark competed with butter, eggs, and bacon. The British farmer was forced to specialize, even more than before, on milk, eggs, fruit, and vegetables, where he could still enjoy a market protected by distance: if he continued to grow crops or rear stock in competition with imports he was forced to become more efficient, to economize labour, and to fertilize and mechanize far more than in the past.

The financial crisis of 1931 finally brought the policy of agricultural drift to an end. In the next year Britain abandoned free trade; tariffs and quantitative restrictions were imposed on a wide range of agricultural imports, while at home subsidies and marketing schemes helped the British farmer to survive a period of acute world depression. Imperial preference

Table 28 Annual average net imports into the United Kingdom (thousand cwt)

Table 29 Index of volume of food imports

was also introduced to favour imports from Colonial and Commonwealth countries. These changes had important effects on the value of Britain’s food imports, and on the sources from which they came (Table 29). It is clear that the tariff changes and the adoption of a policy of agricultural protection were, by 1939, having a steadying effect on the level of imports, at least preventing a flooding of the British market and noticeably increasing the proportion of imports coming from the Empire at the expense of foreign countries.

The British farmer’s growing concentration on what were described as ‘health protective’ foods, aided by government subsidies and grading and marketing schemes as well as by the commercial development of canning and refrigeration, resulted in marked increases in the consumption of these foods between the wars. Between 1922 and 1936 the area under vegetables (not including potatoes) increased from 126,517 to 226,815 acres, the poultry population rose from 47 million in 1924 to 90 million ten years later, while the dairy herd increased by 36 per cent between 1913 and 1937.⁵ Paying less than ever for his primary foods the consumer could devote more and more to the ‘luxury’ items – in fact, eggs at 1s a dozen and milk at 3d a pint were no longer luxuries for most people; at the same time technology made it possible to buy fresh apples and canned peas all the year round. No doubt the publicity given to ‘the newer knowledge of nutrition’ and the propaganda campaigns such as ‘Eat More Fruit’ helped in the process, though it is likely that the public would have eaten more of these foods, even before the discovery of the vitamins, had they been able to afford them.

The foods the British farmer produced were no longer the staple and bulky ones. For these, our reliance on imports was greater than ever: immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War we imported considerably more than half our total food supplies, providing more than two-thirds of the calories consumed. Between ten and fifteen food ships docked in English ports every day, bringing some twenty-two million tons of food and animal feeding-stuffs in the course of a year. Table 30 shows the totals of food consumed before the war and the proportions home-produced and imported.

In the manufacture and distribution of foodstuffs the most important change between the wars was the development of large-scale concerns which absorbed a growing share of the market. Tate & Lyle, for example, came to control a very high percentage of the sugar refining of the country; Marsh & Baxter by 1939 cured some 40 per cent of the bacon consumed in the country; milling firms and tea-blending firms, few in number, controlled their respective trades almost completely; in milk distribution United Dairies controlled, directly and indirectly, a large share of London’s trade, while a few importers handled all the meat imported from South America. It is likely that food control during the First World War assisted the early growth of these large, semi-monopolistic enterprises⁶ – certainly such firms as Lever Bros, Joseph Rank Ltd, and Spiller Ltd (flour millers), and Union Cold Storage (meat importers) all showed remarkable expansion in the years immediately after 1918.

Despite what was by now a steady decline in per capita consumption, bread still held a sentimental place as the staple of English diet, and flour-milling was an outstanding example of increasing industrial concentration in response to changes in the economic climate and in consumer demand.

At the end of the First World War 300 large mills, mainly situated at the ports, produced 90 per cent of flour while 375 small mills were responsible for 10 per cent; one-third of total output was produced by the ‘big three’ millers – Rank and Spiller, each with 10–12 per cent of the market, and the Co-operative Wholesale Society with around 10 per cent. Rationalization of the industry was further encouraged by the establishment of the Millers’ Mutual Association in 1929, and by the outbreak of the Second World War a series of mergers had given the ‘big three’ 66 per cent of total output: Rank was now the clear leader with 24–30 per cent of the market.⁷ The mass-produced factory loaf, mechanically wrapped from the 1920s and sliced from the 1930s, was already on the way.

Large food manufacturers could also benefit from vertical integration, controlling their own supplies of raw materials and their own retail outlets. By 1939 Vestey’s meat combine controlled more than 2,000 shops run under a variety of names; but it was in the grocery trades that concentration went furthest. In 1914 three chain grocers – Thomas Lipton Ltd, the Home and Colonial Stores, and the Maypole Dairy Co. – each had more than 500 branches, but at least 70 per cent of total retail trade was still in the hands of small shopkeepers. The inter-war years witnessed intense competition for the mass market of consumers, most of whom were enjoying increased purchasing power and able to afford a wider range of food-stuffs. The family firm of Sainsbury, aiming at the growing lower middle class of southern England, expanded from 123 branches in 1919 to 244 twenty years later: a typical publicity campaign in 1932 offered ‘Back bacon, tea and Australian butter all at 8d a pound’.⁸ The battle for the working-class customer was fought out between giant multiples to the accompaniment of mergers and takeovers. Ultimately, Lipton, the Home and Colonial, Meadow Dairy, and the Maypole all merged to form the Home and Colonial group, with over 3,000 branches, though each continued to trade under its own name. Its chief competitor was the International Tea group formed from mergers of a number of smaller companies. These inter-war multiples now dealt in a much wider range of foods than formerly – in fact, became distinguishable from the traditional family grocer mainly by their cut prices and aggressive salesmanship. Even the ‘conservative’ co-operative societies adopted some of the new marketing techniques, expanding their membership to eight-and-a-half million by 1939 and holding over 20 per cent of total retail trade in groceries and provisions. By then, they and the multiples controlled almost half of the nation’s grocery business.⁹

The retail of food had become one of the biggest aspects of the nation’s business, absorbing, according to Colin Clark, £1,305,000,000 a year, or nearly one-third of the national income.¹⁰ Despite the growing share of the chain stores, there was still room for 80,000 grocers, 40,000 butchers, 30,000 bakers, and 30,000 greengrocers, the great majority of whom were single-shop owners: in the retail of fish, fruit, vegetables, and bread, the little shop was still all-important. The function of the small man was changing, however. He had less independence than formerly: more and more he was merely an agent selling the branded, packeted goods supplied by the large firms, often at a price which he was powerless to determine. Most small grocers, for example, no longer blended their own teas or weighed out sugar, butter, and salt. Instead they took their supplies from the tea blenders, the manufacturers of breakfast cereals, or the sugar refiners: only with eggs, bacon, and a few other articles could they now fix their own prices, and here the tendency was to sell at a low margin (sometimes, in the case of sugar, below cost) in order to attract custom for branded goods on which the margin was higher. A similar change was noticeable in the role of the meat retailer, who often ceased to be a butcher in the proper sense of the word and became a mere retailer buying joints from an importer or jobber. Many dairymen became agents of United Dairies, bound contractually not to sell above UD prices: bakers found their selling prices fixed by local agreements enforced by heavy sanctions. In these circumstances of declining price competition, retailers tended to concentrate more on advertisement, on ‘modern’ shop fronts, and on services to the customer such as roundsman delivery and orders taken out in response to telephone calls.

All this made provisioning for the housewife very much easier. The advertising of branded goods meant that she could count on standard quality, while the growing sale of foods ready for the table or near to table-readiness simplified cooking problems and brought wider variety. The complicated processes of making custard, caramel, blancmange, jellies, and other sweets were reduced to a single short operation by the use of prepared powders. Porridge, the almost universal middle-class breakfast dish, could now be made in two minutes according to the Quick Quaker Oats recipe, but even so American-style cereals, taken with milk and sugar, soon rivalled the traditional food. The early products ‘Force’ and ‘Grape-Nuts’ were followed by a wide variety of ‘corn flakes’ and grains of wheat, rice, and barley ‘puffed’ by being fired at high velocity through a sort of air-gun. The range of canned foods introduced by Heinz, Crosse & Blackwell, and others also expanded enormously. When the war ended soup, salmon, corned beef, and Californian fruits were the only choice, but by the 1930s almost every kind of domestic and foreign fruit, meat, game, fish, and vegetable was available in tins at prices which many people could afford, at least occasionally. Canning provided a good outlet for English growers of peas and soft fruits, but what most people wanted was imported salmon and peaches for Sunday tea. Another sign of change, and of the improving standard of living, was in the enormous increase in the amount and variety of chocolate and confectionery sold to children and adults: before the war bars of chocolate had been ‘plain’ or ‘milk’, but subsequently a bewildering variety of creams and fillings appeared in 2d bars and 6d boxes, widely advertised and continually changing in order to sti-mulate demand. Potato crisps, at first merely a novelty, also became an important addition to the range of ‘snack’ foods; they were originally imported from France, but were now made in England and over a million packets were sold in 1928. People were also increasingly disposed towards foods which could claim some special ‘health’ property, especially when the now-fashionable ‘vitamins’ were invoked. Health-food shops (often connected with Theosophy, New Thought, or middle-class Socialism), selling exotic nuts, dried fruits, herb teas, breakfast cereals, grated carrots, vegetable cooking-fats, and so on came to be seen in the larger towns from about 1923 onwards. But the English public never became as nutrition-conscious as the American. Most people thought that ‘health foods’ and their advocates were slightly ‘cranky’ and were content to supplement their diet with a nourishing drink such as Bovril, which had a great success after its advertising campaign picturing historical giants from Julius Caesar through Michelangelo to Cecil Rhodes: their secret, apparently, was that they were never tired – hence ‘Don’t get tired – drink Bovril’. If one still awoke fatigued in the morning, one was suffering from ‘night-starvation’, which could be remedied by taking a cup of Horlick’s malted milk as a nightcap. It was a reflection of the increasing well-being of the nation, as well of changes in women’s fashions, that the cult of ‘slimming’ appeared as a new phenomenon in the 1920s; some people began to cut down their consumption of bread and potatoes, and to eat a ‘roughage’ breakfast food which would give the vitamins full play.¹¹

The sale of branded goods at fixed retail prices probably helped rather than hindered the co-operative societies between the wars, since the ‘stores’ customer still received dividends on the packet of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or the tin of Heinz Baked Beans. The societies continued to expand their share of total retail trade until, by 1939, they controlled 25 per cent of milk distribution and 40 per cent of the butter, 20 per cent of the tea, sugar, and cheese consumed in the country. Of other foods their share was not so great – 10 per cent of the bread and bacon, 8 per cent of the eggs, and 5 per cent of the meat eaten – while their share of vegetables, fruit, and fish was negligible.¹² Co-operation was losing something of its earlier social purpose, and for many members simply represented a convenient alternative to dealing at the local chain store; middle-class wives accepted the Co-op’s milk delivery service but would not have entered the ‘stores’. The fact remains that a growing section of the working class drew its food supplies from the societies, benefiting from both the high quality and the dividend which they received there.

Another important development was the growth, among all social classes except the lowest, of ‘eating out’. Hotels and restaurants had suffered from wartime rationing and it was some years after 1918 before they revived. Writing in 1929, Andre Simon said, ‘We are happily approaching the greatly to be desired stage when the art of good living is again receiving proper attention. Today, barely ten years after the Great War, we are not yet back to the pre-war level, but on our way there.’¹³ Gourmets would doubt whether the heights of Edwardian cuisine were ever recaptured.

Not until some of the DORA restrictions were removed in 1921 did restaurant life really begin again. The Licensing Act of that year, permitting drinks to be served after 11 p.m. provided a sandwich was ordered with them, was seen as a concession to gaiety by a war-weary population, for many of whom war had at least brought higher profits and earnings than they had ever enjoyed before. The jazz atmosphere and the financial boom of the early 1920s were conducive to public entertainment and display, and one thing which many people wanted to do after years of austerity was to dine and wine lavishly. Restaurants like the Savoy were quick to see the advantage of combining eating with the dancing craze by installing a dance-floor in the middle of the crowded tables. Such attractions as dancing and cabaret turns made fashionable the habit of dining out, which had still been unusual for Englishwomen before the war. ‘Private’ drinking at bottle-parties and night-clubs was another popular way of evading the licensing restrictions: night-clubs like the ‘Kit-Kat’ club and Kate Meyrick’s group – the ‘43’, the ‘Manhattan’, and the ‘Silver Slipper’ – achieved an international fame partly from the distinguished and even royal clientele, and partly from the frequency of police raids and closures. All were expensive and essentially metropolitan; their middle-class, provincial counter-parts were the ‘road-houses’ which appeared in the suburbs and on the by-pass roads in the 1930s. They were elaborate inns which provided meals and drinks, dancing, a night’s lodging, and an absence of awk-ward questions; in summer, tennis and swimming were alternative attractions. Every few miles on the Great West Road notices invited motorists to ‘Swim, Dine, and Dance’, but road-houses were also to be found on the outskirts of northern industrial towns, built in the contemporary concrete idiom and shrouded in an aura of local mystery and rumour. Many had a brief existence and were already shut down by 1939. The motorcar which had called them into existence also enabled people to drive out in the evenings and at the week-ends to village inns and the large, new public houses which dotted the arterial roads and roundabouts. Their bright, mock-Tudor or ‘Modern Movement’ lounges brought a new standard of comfort to the retailing of beer, which contrasted favourably with the Victorian gloom of most town pubs. In fact, beer consumption, which had been strictly controlled as part of the war effort, never returned to its high pre-war level. Heavy drinking in a single-sex, ‘spit and sawdust’ environment was increasingly uncommon or restricted to certain regions or occupations, many of which became casualties of depression and unemployment: at the worst time, in the early 1930s, national beer consumption was little more than one-third that of the late nineteenth century.

London restaurants may never have recovered quite the extravagance of Edwardian menus, but still provided very high standards of cuisine at prices which were not impossible for middle-class diners. In 1924 a ‘good food guide’ by Elizabeth Montizambert categorized London restaurants into four groups by price. The most expensive, offering table d’hote menus at 5s to 10s, included the great hotels such as the Ritz, Savoy, and Carlton and famous restaurants like the Café Royal, whose luncheon cost 5s 6d and dinner 7s 6d. The second category (luncheon 3s 6d-5s) was represented by the leading restaurants of pre-war days – Frascati’s, Gatti’s, Hatchett’s, the Trocadero, and the Criterion. Four-or five-course menus for 2s 6d were available at category three restaurants (Reggiori’s, the Chantecler) and eatable meals at 1s 6d in category four – ‘very cheap’.¹⁴

The spread of eating out to the lower middle classes was one of the important social phenomena of the time. It was due largely to the development of ‘popular’ catering by Lyons, the ABC, and others, at whose cafés a well-cooked meal could be had in comfortable surroundings, often to the accompaniment of a ‘palm court’ orchestra and for little more than a shilling. The London ‘Corner Houses’ set a more exotic standard in their ‘Brasseries’ with continental dishes like kebab and moussaka on the menu, while the ‘Popular Cafe’ was probably the first to allow its customers unlimited helpings on its famous 1s 6d teas. In 1929 J. Lyons and Co. declared a record profit of £909,000, and served seventeen-and-a-half million customers in its three London Corner Houses: there was little evidence here of the depression which had overtaken other regions of the country. The most expensive item on the Corner House tariff was lobster mayonnaise at 2s 6d, but hors d’oeuvres ranged from 4d-9d, soups were 5d, whitebait 9d, mutton cutlet 8d, roast beef 1 Id, ices from 3d upwards, and meringue Chantilly 5d.¹⁵ These were not exorbitant prices for an occasional treat in what passed for luxurious surroundings, but for daily fare with a more limited choice the ordinary Lyons’ tea-shops were cheaper still. By the 1930s waiters and ‘nippies’ were giving way to the cafeteria, an American self-help idea which speeded up service and allowed the customer to see exactly what he was getting: big stores like Woolworth’s installed them as a convenience for shoppers, although it was some time before they were generally accepted. Milk bars, on the other hand, were an immediate success. They were introduced during the ‘Drink More Milk’ campaign, and their chromium-plated interiors, high bar-counter stools, and glamorously named ‘shakes’ appealed particularly to the younger generation who could even find milk manly when served in this way. Milk bars and snack bars, cafeterias, cinema restaurants, and dance-hall buffets all contributed to a significant growth in eating outside the home for people whose horizons had previously been bounded by the public house and the fish-and-chip shop.

By contrast the dietary standards of the wealthier classes probably declined somewhat between the wars. This was partly a consequence of choice and partly of necessity. The taste for the solid, endless repasts of Victorian days was changing in favour of shorter, lighter meals more suited to the accelerated pace of life and to the new knowledge of nutrition which was beginning to influence people’s tastes. The traditional dinner tended to be reserved for Lord Mayors’ Banquets and similar survivals from a more leisured age, but at home the better-off now ate a mere three-or four-course lunch and dinner, and a breakfast on which the American influence was beginning to be noticeable. Grapefruit or breakfast cereals were increasingly popular alternatives to porridge, and not always followed by bacon and eggs; later in the day salads and fruit were displacing boiled vegetables and baked puddings, often with good effects on digestions and waist-lines. But the change was also partly one of necessity. The middle class of the inter-war years, swollen by the growth of professional, executive, and clerical functions, was larger than it had been in 1914, but relatively poorer. The main growth came from the lower end of the class – from the so-called ‘white-collar’ workers who increased from 18.7 per cent of the total labour force in 1911 to 23 per cent in 1931; by 1939 they comprised at least a quarter of all employed people.¹⁶ Wartime and post-war inflation had hit hardly those living on fixed incomes and salaries, while greatly increased income tax cut earned incomes and profits substantially. Many middle-class families were having to economize on domestic service, private education, and other luxuries which had for-merly characterized the class. Changed expenditure patterns were resulting in a larger proportion of income devoted to food and other necessities, less to the luxuries which had once made bourgeois life so pleasant. The gulf between the classes was less wide and more easily bridged than it had been, but the differences in standards of comfort had narrowed also.

Perhaps the greatest change was for the middle-class housewife who, with the growing scarcity and cost of living-in domestic servants, now had to do her own cooking and at least some housework. Mrs C.S. Peel, the doyenne of writers on domestic economy, believed that the Great War had brought great changes in the role of women both inside and outside the home:

During the years of the Great War many of us became very clever, and learned much which will be of permanent value to us…. Not only have we learned to use food with more care, but we have learned to economize fuel and labour…. Women are so disinclined to become domestic servants, and demand such high wages when persuaded to do so, that householders find themselves obliged to adopt labour-saving apparatus.¹⁷

Mrs Peel then proceeded to discuss ‘the house of the future’ where there would be no basement kitchen and meals would be served through a buttery hatch directly into the dining-room. The kitchen would be tiled or bricked so that it might be entirely hosed down:

the floor being very slightly slanted and furnished with a gutter to take off the water. In the servantless house the scullery is abolished and replaced by a double sink in the kitchen: a ‘cook’s cabinet’ such as is used in America takes the place of the open dresser, and all cooking is done either by gas or electricity.¹⁸

At the top of the social scale the pattern was still set by the monarchy. Buckingham Palace had experienced ‘austerity’ during the war like every other catering institution – meat could not be served at lunch, though there were omelettes, scrambled eggs, rice and asparagus dishes and vegetable pie for the staff; mock cutlets of lamb and chicken deceived guests by their size, but were made up of whatever scraps could be found. Edwardian plenty never returned to Court. The big banquet given for President Wilson at Christmas 1918 comprised ten courses instead of the usual fourteen, and this became the pattern in subsequent years. In any case, George V was no epicure. Breakfast was a standing order – on five days a week egg, crisp streaky bacon and fish (trout, plaice, or sole); on Saturdays and Sundays he had grilled sausages as well, except when Yarmouth bloaters were in season. The menu never varied except in sickness. The wedding breakfast of the Duke and Duchess of York in 1923 was more ambitious, though still only eight courses – half what it would have been twenty years earlier. This meal lasted an hour. When the present Queen was married in 1947 the wedding breakfast consisted of only four modest courses, such as any suburban hotel might have provided, and was all over within twenty minutes.¹⁹

If the dietary standards of the few tended to decline between the wars, there is little doubt that those of the many rose. As Table 31 shows, a comparison of per capita consumption before the war with 1924–8 and 1934 shows substantial increases in practically every food, greatest in the case of fruit, vegetables, butter, and eggs, least in that of potatoes and wheat flour. In each case the rate of increase between 1924–8 and 1934 was greater than in the previous fifteen years. In nutritional terms, the average diet of 1934 showed an increase in total calories of 6 per cent compared with pre-war: carbohydrate and vegetable protein fell, but animal protein rose slightly, and there was a 25 per cent increase in animal fats. This, together with the increased consumption of fruit and fresh vegetables, represented a substantially increased intake of essential vitamins and mineral salts. On these grounds, the ‘average’ diet of the 1930s was ‘better’ than ever before.

Another cause for optimism was that it was not only ‘better’ but cheaper. In 1934 the nation spent on food £1,075 a year out of a total national income of £3,750, or 9s per head per week out of an average income of 30s. Not only did food expenditure absorb less than one-third of personal income but, compared with the nineteenth century, the proportion of income devoted to the carbohydrate foods was far less, and that to protein foods substantially more. In 1934 meat and fish accounted for 32 per cent of food expenditure, eggs, milk, and cheese for 18 per cent, while bread and cereals accounted for only 9 per cent. That twice as much was now spent on fruit than on bread was a remarkable comment on the generally improved standard of living (Table 32).

The ‘average’ consumer was, however, still a statistical abstraction in the years between the wars. How widely wages could vary was demonstrated

by a Ministry of Labour inquiry in October 1935: although it did not cover all trades it showed a range of average weekly wages for adult males from 83s 8d in printing and book-binding down to 49s 9d in the clothing industry.²¹ Below these were agricultural labourers (34s), the unskilled and casual trades and, in this period of acute depression, the unemployed. After a brief post-war boom the slump had begun; at the end of 1920 there were 850,000 out of work and in 1921,1,500,000, and at the height of the crisis in 1931–2, 3,000,000, or 22 per cent of the total labour force. When the Second World War broke out over a million were still out of work, despite the employment which rearmament had already created, and over the whole period 1921–39 unemployment averaged 14 per cent. More-over, the unemployed tended to be heavily concentrated in the ‘depressed’ or, as the government preferred to call them, ‘special’ areas – Glasgow, Tyneside, Lancashire, and south Wales – which were mainly dependent on one or two staple industries like cotton, coal, and shipbuilding. In these areas half or more of the entire population might be workless and wholly dependent on insurance benefits which in 1936 allowed 17s a week for men, 9s for a wife, 6s for juveniles, and 3s for children under fourteen.²² Their poverty contrasted sharply with the relative prosperity of workers in the midlands and south, where the new light industries and consumer trades were often experiencing a boom.

Any estimates of dietary sufficiency in the inter-war years must take account of these variations in working-class income. John Boyd Orr in his investigation into Food, Health and Income, published in 1936, was the first to attach full importance to this comparison. His survey began by classifying the population into six groups by income, indicating the size of each group and the average expenditure of each on food (Table 33). His classification gave full weight to the size of family; thus, a man and wife earning £2 10s Od a week with no children or dependants would fall into Group 4, with one child into Group 3, with four or more children into Group 1. The poorest 10 per cent of the population in 1934 consisted in the main of families in which there was a disproportionately high number of children or other dependants per earner – in fact Orr estimated that between 20 and 25 per cent of all children in the country were in the lowest income group.

Orr next constructed, on the basis of the best nutritional knowledge of the day, a diet which would give optimum requirements for health. Instead of discussing minimum requirements, about which there had been much controversy, he based his calculations of adequacy on a physiological ideal – ‘a state of well-being such that no improvement can be

effected by a change in the diet’. He found that his standard of perfect nutrition was realized only at an income level above that of 50 per cent of the population. The meagre diet of Group 1 was inadequate for perfect health in all the constituents considered (calories, protein, fat, calcium, phosphorus, iron, and vitamins A and C); Group 2 was adequate only in proteins and fat; Group 3 in calories, protein, and fat; Groups 4 and 5 were deficient only in calcium; only in Group 6 were the standard requirements exceeded in every case. Of course, the absence of the requirements for perfect health in the three lower groups did not imply that half the population was starving or suffering from such a degree of ill-health recognized as clinical malnutrition. But there was abundant evidence that it was particularly in the lower groups that physical underdevelopment, predisposition to rickets, dental caries, anaemia, and infective diseases such as tuberculosis were most marked, and that their incidence was due – at least in part – to the inadequacy of protein and vitamin intake. In the poorest group the consumption of milk was 1.8 pints per head a week, in the wealthiest 5.5 pints; the poorest consumed 1.5 eggs a week compared with 4.5 in the wealthiest, and spent only 2¹/₂d on fruit against 1s 8d.²³ Despite the general improvement in standards the nutritional inadequacy of the poorest in the 1930s was still vast and alarming.

Boyd Orr was only one among numerous workers in the early 1930s, who were investigating the extent of poverty, ill-health, and malnutrition, and the relationships between them. In an age of increasing affluence for some sections of the working class the condition of the unemployed excited particular concern, especially when visibly recorded in demonstrations and hunger-marches. Evidence of disease and malnutrition was forthcoming from a number of quarters. In the last year of the war 41 per cent of the men medically examined were in C3 condition, although in the prime of life. This might have been put down to wartime rationing, nervous strain, or other temporary causes, but these did not obtain in 1935 when no less than 62 per cent of volunteers were found to be below the comparatively low standard of physique required by the army. Were so many of the population living, if not in actual disease, at least ‘below par’, unable to lead wholly full and useful lives and always a potential liability to the community? The investigations carried out at the Peckham Pioneer Health Centre tended to confirm that they were. The centre was a social and recreational club restricted to entire families living within a limited area in south London, where the population was mainly artisan. On joining, each member of the family was given a medical overhaul and a series of laboratory tests. In a survey of 1,666 members it was found that only 144 adults and children and seventeen babies had no diagnosable disorder, and that although so many had something wrong with them, very few were under the care of a doctor.²⁴ In 1934 experiments by Lady Williams in the depressed Rhondda Valley showed that no improvement in ante-natal service reduced the high maternal mortality rate until food was distributed to expectant mothers – when this was done, it fell by 75 per cent. Again, despite the onslaught on the slums which many local authorities made in the 1930s, overcrowding and bad housing conditions remained a major cause of disease and ill-health. The Report on the Overcrowding Survey in England and Wales, published in 1936, revealed conditions which would have horrified Engels and Chadwick a century earlier; although the figure (on the basis of two rooms for three adults and three rooms for five) was only 3.8 per cent for the whole country, Durham had 12 per cent of over-crowding and Sunderland 20.6 per cent. In such areas a high infant mortality rate and a high death rate from pulmonary tuberculosis still went hand in hand with poverty and insanitary living conditions: immediately before the Second World War Barrow-in-Furness had an infant mortality rate of ninety-eight per thousand while Hastings had one of thirty-five.²⁵ Nor did the solution simply lie in transferring slum-dwellers to model council-house communities. Dr G.C.M. McGonigle found disquieting evidence in Stockton-on-Tees that however good and sanitary the new houses might be there was no improvement in health if higher rents and travelling expenses involved a reduction in the income available for food: the death rate in the new housing estate went up while in the town as a whole, including the slum areas which still existed, it went down.²⁶ Malnutrition could be found in council houses as well as slum tenements.

For the first time in the 1930s the subject seriously occupied the attention of government departments, local authorities, and the press, both serious and popular. In discussions of a term so inexact there were inevitably widely differing views. After the publication of Boyd Orr’s researches, The Times had said, in February 1936, ‘One-half of the population is living on a diet insufficient or ill-designed to maintain health.’ Orr’s calculations had, as we have seen, been concerned with a standard of perfect diet. Three years earlier, the British Medical Association had undertaken an inquiry ‘to determine the minimum weekly expenditure on foodstuffs which must be incurred … if health and working capacity are to be maintained’. This minimum diet in 1933 worked out at a cost of 5s 1 Id per man and 4s 1 Id for a woman. For a man there was not sufficient food for him to carry on moderately heavy work, and for a child, insufficient for proper development: it represented a bare minimum on which it was just possible to exist without very obvious deficiency. On this calculation Orr’s Group 1 (representing 10 per cent of the population) and part of Group 2 (representing 20 per cent of the population) were below the minimum, and could be considered undernourished – some-thing under one-third of the whole population of the country. By 1939 there had probably been some improvement in this position. More milk was being drunk, and various health and welfare services had raised the standard of living of the very poor. But on the evidence of later surveys made between 1937 and 1939 Boyd Orr still estimated that on the out-break of the Second World War ‘The average dietary of about one-third of the population is above the standard required for health, the diet of about one-third nearly right, and the diet of the remaining third below the standard.’²⁷

Even more revealing than national averages were the results of investigations into particular groups and regions. For example, a report for the Pilgrim Trust on Men Without Work in 1938 showed that 44 per cent of the families of the unemployed were existing on or below the bare subsistence level calculated on the BMA standard: in many cases parents, and particularly mothers, were literally starving themselves in order to feed and clothe their children reasonably. In Bristol, a city with a high standard of living and at a time (1937) of business revival, only one in ten families was below a ‘poverty-line’ approximately the same as the BMA standard, but of the families with four or more children, slightly over half were below it, and of families with three children a quarter were below. One child in every five in a prosperous city was living in poverty.

Three regional surveys, all carried out in 1936, are also iluminating. In Cardiff the Medical Officer of Health’s Department investigated the nutrition of 9,467 schoolchildren, finding that of 2.7 per cent excellent, 90.6 per cent normal, 5.1 per cent slightly sub-normal, and 1.6 per cent bad. A detailed comparison was next made of the economic position and diet of families of children at the extremes of the nutritional scale. In Group A (excellent) the average size of the family was 5.4 persons and the gross weekly income S3 9s, while in Group D (bad) the average size was 6.1 and the income £2 13s 8d. Group A spent on food each week £1 10s 9d, Group D, £1 3s Id. The important comparison, however, was between the amounts spent on different items of food (Table 34). The two groups spent almost identical amounts on cereals and bread, butter, fat and margarine, sugar, tea, and coffee, but Group A families spent practically twice as much on meat, fish, milk, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. The pattern of the nine-teenth century was hardly changed. Poor families first satisfied their hunger with the cheap carbohydrate foods washed down with innumer-able cups of tea, and only after this did they turn to the protein and veg-etable foods high in vitamins, if money allowed.²⁸

The nineteenth-century pattern had also survived in another respect. It was tempting to think in the 1930s that poor diet and malnutrition were essentially urban problems associated with unemployment, overcrowding, lack of fresh air, and other disadvantages of life in towns. A survey of nutrition in Cuckfield Rural District Council, a rural area with no unemployment problem, completely disproved this belief and showed

that in 1936, as a century earlier, the agricultural labourer was among the worst-fed of English workers. Ninety-nine children out of 304 examined were of sub-normal nutrition – a proportion of 33 per cent. In the lowest income group with a weekly expenditure on food of from 2s to 2s 1 Id per head, 40 per cent of the children fell into the category. The average size of family in Cuckfield was 5.5 and the average income £2 4s 7d, with a range from SI 6s to £5 2s. Fifty-two out of the 120 families examined had less than £2 a week. The inquiry showed that the average consumption of fresh milk per day was 0.3 pints – well below the national average in a dairying county. Only 56 per cent bought fish, and only 54.4 per cent fresh fruit.²⁹ No doubt some families grew vegetables and kept hens, but it is certain that many rural families were very inadequately supplied with the health-protective foods.

Finally, in Newcastle upon Tyne, a rigorously controlled investigation into the diets of sixty-nine representative working-class families disclosed huge variations in the consumption of nutrients. The intake of calories per man-value varied from 1,846 to 5,261 a day, protein from 51 to 161 g, iron from 7.2 to 28.9 g. It was noticeable that the average diet of unemployed families was lower than that of employed, and that the average diet of the unemployed living on new council estates was lower than that of the unemployed in old houses. The amounts of energy and protein obtained per penny of money spent on food were 23 per cent higher in the unemployed than in the employed families – a fact which goes some way towards disproving the commonly made assertion that the poor allocated their resources extravagantly. But only 66 per cent of the unemployed bought fresh milk, and their average consumption was only 1 1/3 pints per week. Nearly all families in Newcastle baked their own bread, and consumed 10 oz a day, providing over one-third of their calories. An average of 6 oz of potatoes and 2 ½ oz of sugar were eaten. Finally, an estimate of the extent of anaemia was made using the haemoglobin test: 5 per cent of the men, 21 per cent of the women, and 27 per cent of the children were found to be anaemic, and of the wives of unemployed men one-third were in this condition.³⁰

Much the most wide-ranging dietary survey carried out at this time, however, was the investigation undertaken by Sir William Crawford in 1936–7 and published under the title The People’s Food. Boyd Orr’s survey had examined some 1,200 family budgets, with an undue proportion from the north of England and from families of low earnings: Crawfprd’s was more fully representative, covering all social classes from wealthy business executives to the unemployed, drawn from 5,000 budgets of families in seven principal cities. The five-fold grouping used for marketing inquiries was adopted (Table 35). The survey was on a house-to-house interview basis and extended over six months from October to March, excluding the weeks preceding and following the Christmas holiday. The statistics were all related to a per capita figure in order to obviate differences in the size of family; the average weekly income and food expenditure of the five groups was found to be as in Table 36.

By the house-to-house method a great deal of hitherto unknown information about the composition and time of particular meals was assembled, so that the survey became not only one of nutrition but of eating habits generally. It was found that breakfast was now eaten by almost everyone before leaving home, whereas before the war many working

Table 35 Income classification of the population

	Approximate annual income	Estimated percentage of total population of Great Britain in each group
Class AA	£1,000 and over	1
A	£500 to ?999	4
B	£250 to ?499	20
C	£125 to ?249	60
D	Under £125	15

Source:

Crawford 1938.

Table 36 Weekly food expenditure by income groups

	Estimated weekly per capita income	Estimated weekly expenditure on food	Food expenditure as a percentage of income
	S d	S d
Class AA	159 6	18 9	11.8
A	88 4	16 2	18.3
B	43 0	12 6	29.0
C	20 3	7 11	39.2
D	12 6	5 10	46.6

Source:

Crawford 1938.

Table 37 Foods eaten at breakfast

Source:

Crawford 1938.

men had often compressed breakfast into a short break two hours after starting work: shorter working hours now made it possible to eat at home in most cases. The time of breakfast was earlier in scattered cities like London where there was often a considerable journey to work, but even

Table 38 Breakfast drinks

Source:

Crawford 1938.

here the surprising fact emerged that between a third and a half of London husbands lived sufficiently near their work to be able to go home for their midday meal. The peak breakfast-time was 8 a.m. – somewhat earlier in the poorer classes, somewhat later in the richer. The main foods eaten are listed in Table 37.

Bacon and eggs were by no means universal, especially in the lower groups, and ‘other cereals’ were now rivalling porridge. Marmalade, fruit, and fruit juice were evidently marks of social grading, as was the inclusion of fish, but butter consumption rose towards the bottom of the scale to go on the increased amount of bread eaten. Breakfast drinks also indicated social class, coffee declining rapidly below Class A (Table 38).

The midday meal – ‘dinner’ in all social classes except AA where ‘lunch’ was preferred – was concentrated around 1 p.m., again rather earlier in the lower groups and later in the higher. The foods eaten were as in Table 39. Several points are interesting: the fact that only one in five had roast beef for dinner, the steady decline in green vegetables, fish, salads, and fruit as the social scale descended, and the popularity of ‘other meat dishes’ (sausages, stews, meat pies, and ‘pieces’) in the lower groups. Clearly, the pattern of the British dinner was stereotyped and traditional – meat, potatoes, and sometimes ‘greens’, followed by pudding and helped down with a cup of tea or, more rarely, coffee. Additional items appeared in the upper income groups – soup and fish before the main course, fruit and cheese after the sweet. Although the American influence was noticeable on the breakfast menu it had had practically no effect on the midday meal. It is also noticeable that only a minority of husbands took lunch away from home (Table 40). Restaurant meals were not typical of the British public and in all social classes a majority of husbands ate their dinner with their families.

The next meal of the day, tea, was complicated by the division into ‘afternoon tea’ and ‘high tea’, two essentially different meals linked only

Source:

Crawford 1938.

Table 40 Place of husband’s midday meal

Source:

Crawford 1938.

Table 41 Foods eaten at tea

Source:

Crawford 1938.

by the consumption of a common drink. ‘Afternoon tea’ was taken mainly by the AA and A groups at around 4 p.m., a light snack consisting of cakes, biscuits, and perhaps bread and butter. ‘High tea’ in the other classes was a substantial meal eaten on the return home of husband and children, usually between 5 and 6 p.m.; it usually included meat, potted meats, pies, or fish and chips, as well as a pudding or sweet. The wide variety of items eaten at tea is shown in Table 41. Cakes, buns, and pastries declined as ‘afternoon tea’ became ‘high tea’, giving way to meat, fish, potatoes, and vegetables in the more prosperous working-class homes (C); in the poorest grade (D), bread, margarine, and jam were most heavily consumed as the cheapest ‘filling’ foods. Regional variations were also noticeable. ‘After-noon tea’ was more popular in London and the south, ‘high tea’ in the north, while, in particular towns, cooked meats, fish, or cheese held pride of place.

Table 42 Foods eaten at evening meal

Source:

Crawford 1938.

A similar difficulty of nomenclature arose over the evening meal. In the upper-income groups this was ‘dinner’, the principal meal of the day, an expanded luncheon eaten between 7 and 8 p.m.: in the other groups ‘supper’ was a mere afterthought to ‘high tea’, eaten later in the evening between 9 and 10 p.m. Crawford’s inquiry found that only in the AA class was ‘dinner’ in a clear majority, although in London most of the A class also used the term: elsewhere, even in the middle classes, ‘supper’ was the usual term until in the D group 94 per cent used it. The foods eaten indicate this variation (Table 42).

In the ‘dinner’-eating classes soup and fish were considerably more popular than at lunch, meat and vegetables less so: in the poorest classes bread and cheese was easily the most common supper dish. In the AA group 26 per cent took alcohol with dinner and 58 per cent coffee after it: in group D cocoa (37 per cent) rivalled tea (39 per cent) as the last drink of the day. Surprisingly, perhaps, very little alcohol was consumed with the last meal of the day outside the AA class. In the C class only 2 per cent and in the D class only 1 per cent included beer with their supper, an indication that the pre-war habit of bringing home draught ale from the ‘Jug and Bottle’ department had all but disappeared. One reason for this was probably the increased attractiveness of public houses and working men’s clubs, where women could be entertained in more comfort than formerly.

The tables quoted above also indicate something about food tastes and preferences. It is evident, for example, that tea was still the national drink, that beef was almost twice as popular as mutton and lamb, that, as a sweet, puddings had the highest percentage of preferences in all five social groups for men, women, and children alike. Fruit fell rapidly in popularity with social grading. The extent of variety in foods is, of course, not only a question of taste but of cost: the poorer classes in the 1930s were still unable to afford wide choice in their diet even if they had had the opportunity of acquiring preferences. This was borne out clearly by Crawford’s findings (Table 43). But tradition was still an extremely powerful influence in English diet. Crawford’s investigators asked housewives whether they were ‘interested’ in newspaper and magazine articles dealing with food, recipes, and diet generally, and the results were illuminating (Table 44). In the highest social classes only one-third of women were prepared to acknowledge even an interest in dietetic subjects, and this usually referred to slimming or the feeding of young children. ‘Vitamins’ and ‘nutrition’ were rarely mentioned.

On the question of dietary adequacy, the Crawford survey closely confirmed Boyd Orr’s findings. In the C and D classes considerable numbers were spending less than the BMA minimum (Table 45). On this calculation

Table 43 Number of items in meals

	Midday meal	Evening meal
Class AA	4.15	4.52
A	3.97	3.74
B	3.70	2.54
C	3.21	2.02
D	2.53	1.76

Table 44 Housewives interested in dietetic subjects

Source:

Crawford 1938.

Table 45 Families with food expenditure below BMA minimum

	Homes visited	Below minimum	Percentage
Class AA	415	—	—
A	458	—	—
B	962	4	0.42
C	2,121	361	17.02
D	996	480	48.19

Source:

Crawford 1938.

17.52 per cent of the population, or nearly 7,880,000 people, spent less on food than the figure regarded as minimal by the BMA. This does not necessarily mean that these people could not have raised their food expenditure to the minimum – only that they did not – but since the avail-able income in the C and D classes was so small it allowed little scope for improvement. Moreover, this calculation presupposes that everyone able to spend the BMA minimum did so in the most nutritionally economic way – this was probably not the case. On the Crawford statistics of the actual kinds and quantities of foods purchased by the population, the numbers listed in Table 46 were found to be receiving inadequate amounts of different nutrients. Approximately one-third of the whole population was short of calories and protein and half or more than half was deficient in vitamins. For many millions the problem was not so much a financial as an educational one: a nutritionally adequate diet was probably possible in the 1930s for five-sixths of the population, but because of ignor-ance or prejudice, lack of time or lack of facilities, only half the population was actually receiving it.

Table 46 Number of people consuming inadequate quantities of nutritive constituents

	Compared with BMA diet (in millions)
Calories	15
Protein	18
Calcium	25
Phosphorus	20
Iron	33
Vitamin A	37
Vitamin Bj	24
Vitamin C	21

Source:

Crawford 1938.

Table 47 Weekly per capita bread consumption

	Weekly expenditure on bread	Quantity purchased	Flour equivalent
Class AA	7.6d	48.0 oz	36.9 oz
A	7.6d	48.2 oz	37.1 oz
B	7.8d	49.6 oz	38.2 oz
C	8.1d	54.9 oz	42.2 oz
D	8.7d	62.4 oz	48.0 oz

That there were wide variations in the amounts of different foods eaten by the five social classes was all too obvious. Bread, the cheapest energy-food, was consumed most heavily in Class D, where it represented 12 per cent of food expenditure, least in Class AA, where it accounted for only 3 per cent (Table 47). On the other hand, meat consumption showed the opposite trend, rising as income grew (Table 48). Forty per cent of the total meat consumption was of beef and veal, the rest being divided almost equally between mutton and pork. The consumption of fish also rose with income, from 4.8 oz per head in Class D to 10 oz in Class AA. Crawford’s figures referred to domestic consumption, and took no account of what was eaten in fish-and-chip shops or in the street, but it is very unlikely that most of the population reached the 9 oz per week recommended by the

Table 48 Total weekly per capita meat consumption

	Amount spent per week	Quantity purchased per week
Class AA	58.4d	53.3 oz
A	51.Id	49.5 oz
B	38. Id	43.1 oz
C	23.6d	34.6 oz
D	16.7d	30.4 oz

Advisory Committee on Nutrition. Milk was an even better example of the fact that consumption of the nutritionally desirable foods varied inversely with income: in Class AA consumption (including condensed milk) was 5.3 pints per week, falling to 2.1 pints in Class D. For the whole population the figure was 3.26 pints per head a week, less than half of what nutritionists considered adequate. By contrast, the consumption of sugar was higher in all social classes than dieticians would approve. It had quadrupled over the preceding hundred years to reach an average of 110 lb per head a year, the highest of any country except Denmark. The Advisory Committee on Nutrition was concerned that a food of such little value was dulling the appetite and leading to a diminished consumption of more desirable foods, while other experts condemned its effects on children’s teeth. Crawford’s survey found that the weekly amounts purchased for home use by the five social classes were remarkably uniform – 17.6 oz in AA falling to 15.2 oz in D, with an average national figure of 16.7 oz. To be added to this was the sugar consumed indirectly in confectionery, cakes, biscuits, jam, syrup, and other forms, making up 11.9 oz per head per week, and a total consumption of 28.6 oz. Rising sugar consumption was certainly no indication of improving nutrition, nor was it necessarily a sign of a rising standard of living. It was so high in the poorer social classes partly because of their heavy use of cheap jams and syrups and the quantity that went into endless cups of tea: these, together with white bread, margarine, and an occasional kipper, were the hallmarks of the poverty-line diet which George Orwell observed in The Road to Wigan Pier.³¹

The judgement of historians on this period has inevitably been coloured by the Depression and mass unemployment. Hunger-marches and the dole seem inconsistent with a rising standard of living, yet probably the truth is that the proportion of very poor fell between the wars and that of the moderately prosperous increased. It is also true that the problem of poverty had changed – that although the numbers of the ‘old poor’, of miserably paid unskilled and casual workers, had diminished, there had arisen a ‘new poor’ of skilled workers whose skills had been made redun-dant by the processes of industrial change.³² Unemployed and under-employed miners, shipyard workers, and cotton weavers made up the new ‘submerged tenth’, and their plight was all the more pitiful because it contrasted with the relative prosperity they had once known. But none of the numerous inter-war surveys disclosed a scale of poverty approaching that at the turn of the century when Rowntree and Booth had estimated 28–30 per cent of the population to be in that condition. The New Survey of London Life and Labour (1930) believed only 8 per cent to be below the poverty-line; Caradog Jones’s Social Survey of Merseyside (1934) put the figure there at 14 per cent, while Ford’s Work and Wealth in a Modern Port (1934) calculated that Southampton had 16 per cent in poverty. In 1936 Seebohm Rowntree carried out a second survey of York, this time using a somewhat more generous ‘human needs’ standard rather than one of ‘mere physical efficiency’, but even on this more liberal scale his estimate of poverty was 17.7 per cent of the population. No one could seriously doubt that the working classes on the eve of the Second World War were better fed, better clothed, and better housed than their parents had been a generation earlier.

This improvement was not wholly, or even mainly, a consequence of higher earnings. At the end of 1937 the average wage of an adult male was around 70s, though a London engineering labourer averaged 50s 3d, and his counterpart in Manchester 45s. Rowntree’s new ‘poverty-line’ budget for a man, wife, and three children came to 53s (food on the BMA standard 20s 6d, rent 9s 6d, clothing 8s, fuel and light 4s 4d, household sundries 1s 8d, and miscellaneous expenses 9s).³³ This was still well ahead of the Unemployment Assistance Board scale which provided 37s 6d for an equivalent family. It could be argued, however, that the worker in the inter-war years benefited substantially from the growth of state and municipal wel-fare. Council housing rescued millions from the misery of industrial slums; medical services and insurance benefits gave a hope of better health and greater security, while the development of public utilities and recreational amenities was beginning to add to the richness of enjoyment of life. The state was at last beginning to provide for the working classes the conditions of civilized life which the middle classes had provided for themselves.

Not least important was the official recognition which the problem of malnutrition at last received from central and local authorities. A remark-able development of experimental research by such bodies as the Medical Research Council and the Food Investigation Board of the DSIR brought together invaluable empirical evidence about nutritional needs and the physiological effects of inadequacy, while at a local level the statistics assembled by Medical Officers of Health and others provided the necessary information on which the nutritional needs of particular areas and categories could be based. A survey of families in Hammersmith in 1931, for example, showed that there were many unemployed who had as little as 1s 7d a head to spend on a week’s food, while even among those in work many could afford less than 4s: such findings made the BMA’s minimum look Utopian. They also underlined the need for remedial action by local authorities, especially so far as children and expectant mothers were concerned. By 1939 health departments were providing milk, cod-liver oil, iron, and vitamin products at low costs or free for clear cases of malnutrition in mothers and infants. The ‘Milk in Schools’ scheme which started in 1934 was supplying a third of a pint of milk daily to 50 per cent of elementary schoolchildren, either at half cost or none at all, and increased their consumption from nine to twenty-two million gallons a year. Necessitous children, and those clearly in need of extra nourishment, were provided with midday meals at school, 5 per cent of elementary school-children benefiting from this.³⁴ By 1939 there were three thousand infant welfare centres under the supervision of the Ministry of Health. The results of these policies were already impressive. Twelve-year-old boys attending elementary schools in London were three inches taller and eleven pounds heavier than their fathers had been twenty years earlier: equally important, an experiment sponsored by the Milk Nutrition Committee in 1938–9 demonstrated that schoolchildren receiving supplementary milk not only showed a general improvement in health but derived greater benefit from their lessons.³⁵

By 1939 the government was coming to recognize, at least in part, the need for a nutritional policy as an essential part of personal health services. Dieticians were urging that, just as the state in the nineteenth century had accepted responsibility for sanitary measures, it now had a similar duty to ensure nutritional adequacy for the population as a whole. Agricultural economists saw a greatly increased consumption of ‘protec-tive’ foods, subsidized by the state, as the only way to restore the prosperity of British farming, while at the same time rescuing the health of the nation. What steps might have been taken in the next decades towards a nutritional policy is debatable. What no one foresaw in 1939 was that a unique opportunity for the improvement of national diet was to be afforded not by a continuance of peace, but by the outbreak of war.

Contemporary observers and subsequent historians have both been divided in their judgement of the inter-war years. Optimists can point to certain well-attested indicators of improvements in the standards of health – the general mortality rate fell from 14.7 per thousand in 1906–10 to 12.0 per thousand in 1936–8; infant mortality, widely regarded as a sensitive indicator of standards of living, fell from 105 per thousand in 1910 to 60 in 1930 and, less rapidly, to 56 by 1940; the great killer diseases of the past like diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, and measles were now on the retreat, while the proportion of schoolchildren diagnosed as suffering from malnutrition showed a dramatic improvement from 15–20 per cent before 1914 to 5 per cent in 1925, and a mere 1 per cent by 1925–32.³⁶ The generally improved fitness of the population also seemed to be proved by conscription during World War Two, when 70 per cent of men were graded as fully fit, twice the proportion in 1917–18. The official Reports of the Ministry of Health and of the local Medical Officers were almost unanimously optimistic, even about the state of health in the depressed areas. While it was recognized that infant mortality rates here could still be two or three times higher than in prosperous areas, this was put down mainly to ignorance rather than economic causes: remarkably, at Neath there was reported to be no ‘real malnutrition’, while at Ebbw Vale and Aberdare not a single child was classified as having ‘bad nutrition’.

Such findings seem oddly at variance with popular images of the 1930s drawn from photographs of dole queues and hunger-marches, hollow-eyed men and stunted, rickety-looking children. The more polemical literature of the day painted a very different picture from the official reports. In Hungry England Fenner Brockway concluded that ‘frequently, the allowances provided under the Means Test involve semi-starvation’,³⁷ quoting budgets of the unemployed which provided only 16s 5d a week to feed a family of six. George Orwell believed that ‘twenty million people are underfed’,³⁸ and argued that ‘the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food’.³⁹ After a survey of 1,250 women and family budgets, Margery Spring Rice concluded that housewives were the chief victims of poverty and unemployment, almost always denying themselves food for the sake of their husbands and children.⁴⁰ Professor Oddy has calculated that some of the women’s diets yielded as little as 1,305 kilocalories and 36 g of protein a day – far below even Boyd Orr’s lowest Group 1 who averaged 2,320 kilocalories, and 63 g of protein.

In fact, both judgements of the inter-war years are true, and not incom-patible. General standards of health improved though, significantly, less quickly in the 1930s than in the 1920s or 1940s. It is not impossible that at a time of national anxiety and international tension government departments felt under pressure to produce an optimistic picture and to play down the unpalatable. The national averages, accurate in themselves, concealed enormous variations in mortality and morbidity rates, and there continued to be gross class inequalities in health stan-dards – inequalities which R.M. Titmuss believed actually widened in the 1930s compared with the 1920s. One of the unpalatable statistics was that the maternal mortality rate peaked in 1933 and 1934 at a higher level than at the beginning of the century, suggesting that there was some correlation with the worst years of the Depression and the height of unemployment. For most people the inter-war years were years of wider food choice, better health, and improved nutrition: for a minority – and in some years and some regions, a large minority – the progress was so frail, and started from so low a base, that it could easily revert to conditions of hunger, disease, and misery not seen since the turn of the century. England in the 1930s was still Disraeli’s Two Nations.

Notes

1 Smith, Charles (1940) Britain’s Food Supplies in Peace and War, a survey pre-pared for the Fabian Society by Charles Smith, 2.

2 Oddy, D.J. (1982) ‘The health of the people’, in Theo Barker and Michael Drake (eds), Population and Society in Britain, 1850–1980, 129.

3 Fielding, Sir Charles (‘Agricola’) (Late Director-General of Food Production) (1923) Food, 16.

4 Layton, W. T. and Crowther, Geoffrey (1935) An Introduction to the Study of Prices, 265–9.

5 British Agriculture: The Principles of Future Policy (1939), a Report of an Inquiry organized by Viscount Astor and B. Seebohm Rowntree.

6 Britain’s Food Supplies in Peace and War, op cit., 240 et seq.

7 Hunt, Sandra The Changing Place of Bread in the British Diet in the Twentieth Century, series of unpublished research papers sponsored by the Rank Prize Funds (Brunei University), chap. 4, 1920–1939, 6–11.

8 Boswell, James (ed.) (1969) JS 100. The Story of Sainsbury’s, 44.

9 Johnston, James P. (1977) A Hundred Years of Eating. Food, Drink and the Daily Diet in Britain since the late Nineteenth Century, 82–4.

10 Crawford, Sir William and Broadley, H. (1938) The People’s Food, 8.

11 For a description of new foods and food habits see Graves, Robert and Hodge, Alan (1940) The Long Weekend. A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939, chap. 11, ‘Domestic life’, 171 et seq.

12 Walworth, George (1937) ‘The organization of the co-operative movement’ in W. A. Robson (ed.) Public Enterprise.

13 Simon, Andre L. (1929) The Art of Good Living, 3.

14 Montizambert, Elizabeth (1924) London Discoveries, quoted in S. Price (1986) Eating Out in London. A Social History, 1900–1950, Brunei University dis-sertation, Appendix V.

15 Richardson, D.J. The History of the Catering Industry, with Special Reference to the Development of J. Lyons and Co. to 1939, unpub. Ph.D. thesis quoted in ibid., Appendix VIII.

16 Constantine, Stephen (1983) Social Conditions in Britain, 1918–1939, 3.

17 Peel, Mrs C.S. (ed.) (1919) The Daily Mail Cookery Book, Introduction.

18 ibid., 1–2.

19 Tschumi, Gabriel (1954) Royal Chef. Recollections of Life in Royal House-holds from Queen Victoria to Queen Mary.

20 Orr, John Boyd (1936) Food, Health and Income. Report on a Survey of Adequacy of Diet in Relation to Income, 18.

21 Cole, G.D.H. and Postgate, Raymond (1938) The Common People, 1746–1938, 619.

22 When insurance benefit was exhausted the unemployed passed first onto ‘transitional benefits’ and then onto the ‘dole’ administered by the Public Assistance Committees. In 1936 this provided 23s a week for a man and wife, 4s for the eldest child, and 3s for other children: a quarter of the dole was regarded as rent.

23 Orr, op. cit., 49.

24 Herbert, S. Mervyn (1939) Britain’s Health, prepared on the basis of the Report on the British Health Services by PEP, 171.

25 Titmuss, R.M. (1938) Poverty and Population.

26 McGonigle, G.C.M. and Kirby, J. (1936) Poverty and Public Health. On aver-age, only 2s lid per man per week was available for food in the council houses compared with 4s in the slums.

27 Orr, Sir John and Lubbock, D. (1940) Feeding the People in Wartime, 61.

28 Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Cardiff for the year 1936, 148 et seq.

29 Cuckfield Rural District Council: Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year 1936 by William B. Stott, 5 and 10–12.

30 Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne on the Sanitary Condition of the City, 1936, Appendix A: A Study of the Diet of 69 working-class families in Newcastle upon Tyne, 23 et seq.

31 Orwell, George (1937) The Road to Wigan Pier.

32 Cole and Postgate, op. cit., 607.

33 Rowntree, B. Seebohm (1937) The Human Needs of Labour.

34 HMSO (1946) How Britain Was Fed in Wartime. Food Control, 1939–1945, 46.

35 Milk Drinking in Schools, Information Booklet No. 2, issued by the National Dairy Council’s Information Service (nd), 3.

36 Webster, Charles (1982) ‘Healthy or hungry thirties?’, History Workshop Jour-nal (Spring), 112. This article admirably analyses the opposing evidence and its interpretation.

37 Brockway, A. Fenner (1932) Hungry England, 223.

38 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1958 edn), 89.

39 ibid., 95.

40 Spring Rice, Margery (1939) Working-Class Wives. Their Health and Conditions.