If you had a back garden, the council would come and build an Anderson Shelter. It was made of steel corrugated panels and was covered with soil. People often grew vegetables and flowers on top. There was a bench seat inside which could serve as a bed at night.
The council built a concrete shelter (not an Anderson Shelter) in our back garden but Dad, doubting its safety, would not let us use it. He and Jack dug a huge hole at the top of the garden, lined it with railway sleepers, roofed it, and built a couple of bunks inside. We used this when the sirens went off warning of German planes overhead.
At the beginning of 1940, the government began rationing food. Each week each person got 2 ounces of butter, the same of margarine and lard, 8 ounces of meat (half of which had to be taken in canned corned beef), and 8 ounces each of sugar and flour.
We were more fortunate than most because Dad worked on a farm every Friday repairing machinery and shoeing horses, and he was able to take some of his pay in poultry, rabbit, eggs, and sometimes, bacon.
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| Anderson Air Raid Shelters in a backyard, unfinished on the left finished on the right. |
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| The interior of a type of communal air raid shelter. The boxes the girls are carrying hold their gas masks. |
Dad had four allotments where we grew vegetables, so Mam salted beans and pickled red cabbage and onions. Potatoes, we bought from Mr. Moss by the sackful. Mr. Fish, the baker, would bring us a sack of flour, so we had homemade bread right through the war. Sheep's head soup and beef tongue were plentiful. We were able to get fish until the U-boats started sinking the fishing fleet. I remember seeing canned whale meat at the fish shop; my Aunt Alice would buy it and fry it--ugh! She also bought tripe (the stomach of a cow), cut it into squares and fried it, too.
The war was the start of queuing for which we British became famous. If one heard of a shop that had received something special, word spread like wildfire, and before the shopkeepers could unpack the goods, there would be a queue outside." -- Joan Shelton
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| an adult's rationed food for a week |
3 pints of milk
3 /4 lb - 1 lb meat
1 egg or 1 packet of dried eggs every 2 months
3-4 oz cheese
4 oz bacon and ham
2 oz tea
8 oz sugar
2 oz butter
2 oz cooking fat
+ 16 points a month for other rationed foods (usually tinned) subject to availability.
Bit of history: Every member of the public was issued a ration book which contained coupons that shopkeepers cut out or signed when people bought food and other items. The color of your ration book was very important as it made sure you go the right amount and types of food needed for your health. |
| Queuing during World War II |
Most adults had buff colored ration books. Pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under 5 had green ration books. They had first choice of fruit, a daily pint of milk and a double supply of eggs. Children between 5 and 16 years of age had blue ration books. It was felt important that children had fruit, the full meat ration and half a pint of milk a day.
Fourteen years of food rationing ended at midnight on July 4, 1954, when restrictions on the sale and purchase of meat and bacon were lifted. The war ended 9 years earlier in 1945
