Patrick Hogan
Memories of Food and Water in the 1940s

Digging for Victory  -  1939-1945

Most vegetable gardens inWhittington in WW2 were flourishing and immaculate. This was not really surprising, for although most of the men between 18 and 45 years old had gone away to the Forces, their fathers and grand-fathers had stayed behind - and they were the really experienced gardeners of the village!

The great slogan in the War concerning gardening was “Dig for Victory!”  and we saw posters proclaiming this almost everywhere. “Self-sufficiency” was the stated aim. With merchant ships bringing food to Britain being sunk by German U-boats, the Government used every means to get as much food as possible produced from within Britain itself. Farmers were required by law to bring any unused land into use so that more animals and more arable crops could be produced. Such land was almost always less fertile so the Government paid subsidies to the farmer to enable high levels of fertilizer to be used to maximize the yield from poorer soils. Even with all this new land however, it was  estimated that there would still be a food shortage unless the gardeners of Britain could be persuaded to produce all their own vegetables plus some to sell or give away.

The Ministry of Food under Lord Woolton immediately started an energetic and sustained campaign to get the nation’s gardeners to do just that.  Posters, pamphlets on gardening, talks on the wireless, advertisements in cinemas, newspapers and magazines, contacts through gardening clubs and allotment associations were all used to promote the effort to encourage gardeners to grow the maximum amount of vegetables in their gardens.  Even in towns, those with larger gardens were encouraged to consider keeping poultry to produce eggs and meat for the table. Firms manufacturing hen houses and rabbit hutches were supported by the Government if they needed extra timber and wire netting to fulfil the growing demand for their products. Garden tools received a high priority and their availability was never a problem during the war.  Seed companies were instructed to produce the widest possible range of vegetable seeds for sale and their prices were kept low by government subsidies.

The drive for more land to be put under cultivation went even further, with well publicised digging up of previously hallowed turf in many local football fields, recreation parks, city flower gardens and lawned areas – all to be turned over to producing food for the nation. Buckingham Palace was photographed turning part of its grounds into vegetable plots. The constant publicity equating the production of food in Britain with the fighting of our Forces abroad caught the public imagination and gardens everywhere changed their emphasis almost overnight.  Some flowers were still grown of course, but the hero of the hour was the noble vegetable, standing proud and patriotic in the fight against the foe!

Experienced if sometimes elderly, the gardeners of Whittington vied with each other in an effort not only to grow enough to feed themselves but also to show off to any passer-by the excellence of their crops of tomatoes, potatoes, greens, peas, runner beans, onions, marrows and other vegetables.  The neatness of a garden was a source of great pride to them with arrow straight paths, runner bean poles erected with precision and flawlessly tilled and raked loam between their regimented rows of thriving vegetables - with not a weed to be seen. I remember that the plot of Mr Paddy Withers was a joy to behold !  

In the corner of some gardens there would be an old wooden chair where the gardener might sit with a bottle of beer late on a summer evening surveying the perfection of his little kingdom and planning the horticultural wonders he would achieve next year.

The late summer one-day Garden Show in the Boys Club room, usually set up by the Women’s Institute, was always well attended and enjoyed, with friendly rivalry shown by those exhibitors hoping for a prize.  Some judges came from outside the village to avoid any accusations of favouritism, though village people with unassailable reputations, like the Rev. Fleming, Mr and Mrs Corn, Wing Commander Colquhoun and Mrs Wakeman amongst others also did a stint.  Flower entries were appreciated, especially by the ladies, but vegetable exhibits had distinct pride of place.

Many gardeners, who didn’t already have one, erected a stout fox-proof hen house and a hen-coop or hen-run to accommodate a dozen or so day-old chicks bought from a neighbour or at the market in Lichfield.  When fully grown, the best cock birds would ensure the future and quality of the flock and the rest provide winter roasts. For much of the year, the hens would provide plenty of eggs and when they were off laying, eggs already preserved in jars or pails of isinglass (waterglass) would see the family through. Hens which ceased laying altogether, provided a meal as their last farewell and poultry droppings were treated as a valuable addition and accelerator for the compost heap.

Rabbits were kept in hutches too, but many in the village preferred to snare or shoot wild rabbits in the countryside instead, reckoning that they tasted better.  All this, remember, took place well before the clandestine introduction into England of the vile myxomatosis viral disease to infect wild rabbits in 1953 – a disgraceful act which revolted us all and which was made officially illegal in 1954 (after the horse had bolted).  After 1953, rabbits were no longer shot or trapped to eat. In Whittington, it was felt that our countryside had been poisoned and its traditions damaged by vested interests seeking only a quick, cheap fix for the increased population of rabbits after the War – regardless of the consequences.  The sickening sight of hundreds of dying rabbits, driven by their last agony to blindly bang their swollen heads against rocks or brick walls will not be forgotten by those who saw it. It is worth noting that many in England believed that there had been official collusion in the deliberate bringing of the virus into this country in 1953. Certainly, I can remember no independent enquiry being set up, nor, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone ever officially blamed.  Enquiries that were made seem to have been desultory at best. Did the pursuit of justice in this matter, perhaps depend on who had committed the crime? An irate villager said to me at the time,  “If Nazis had done this to us in the War, we would have had those responsible in the dock in Nuremberg”.  Our countryside is still poisoned with this virus which is transmitted by flea and mite bites.

Like many another boy in the village, I used to take a couple of pails and a small shovel to fields where cows and horses had grazed, collecting dung for our maturing manure heap.  We didn’t use fertilizer, as dung was free, more natural and added fibre to the soil.  Dung also encouraged big earthworms to aerate and improve the soil as they ate through it.

During the War, farm workers generally were somewhat less interested in gardening, but the reasons for this were well understood in the village and excused.   Farm work was well known to be so hard with such long hours, that it was small wonder that in their limited free time, workers had no great interest in growing yet more crops at home.  Farm workers were doing more than their bit for the war anyway, toiling from dawn till dusk or later, sometimes for seven days a week.

“Dig for Victory!” was a resounding success and stayed so throughout the War.  In 1945, it was judged that our population was better fed and fitter than it had ever been.

Patrick Hogan, 8 January 2010

The Pig

Similar events to what follows happened in villages and small towns all over Britain in World War 2, but I know this one first hand.

Before the war, much food for this country was imported by ship.  After war broke out, with U-boats sinking shipping and food imports much reduced, the Government passed laws to ensure that everyone got a basic food ration.  One of the new  Food Regulations laid down that all pigs, even those fattened at home, had to be sold to the Ministry of Food for slaughter and distribution.  There were quite severe penalties for non-compliance

Up to the Second World War there had been a tradition in Britain of village families keeping a pig in a small sty at the bottom of their garden, fed with household scraps,  “pig potatoes”, old bread, sour milk, bran, root vegetables and anything else that could be collected.   If there was common land or a wood nearby, a pig might also be walked on a line and allowed to forage for itself.  The pig was always slaughtered in early December so that everything would be ready for a good Christmas with plenty of meat left over for the New Year.  This custom went back to the Middle Ages.

The new wartime Pig Registration was considered restrictive and unfair. Many people stopped keeping a pig rather than see the animal they worked so hard to fatten up taken away for the paltry price that was paid.  Also, in 1940 there was the possibility that the Germans would get the pig if they invaded.  By late 1941 however, it became clear that the Germans had lost their chance and could no longer invade us.  Whittington was safe – but still rationed for food!  People became particularly hungry for meat which was in short supply and in villages all over the country, the old ways began to be remembered.

The first I knew of the pig was in October 1942 when Les Fradley told me to come with him to have a look at it. “We’ll have to take some food with us or they won’t let us in”, he said.   We were nine years old and eager to see a local celebrity.  We put some old bread, little potatoes, sour milk and plenty of fat earth worms out of the garden into an old stockpot and set off. “Where is it?”  I asked.   “I’ll show you”, he said and off we went out of our tree garden, across the Croft, past Fred’s Hut, down Chapel Lane and turned left into Main Street. As we reached the Bell, Les turned left to the back of the pub and knocked at the gate.  One of the bar staff came and said “That for the pig ?” and let us in.

At the back of the pub outbuildings was a closed sty with a stable door. He opened the top part and there it was, the biggest pig we’d ever seen.  We could easily have ridden on it  -  both Les Fradley and myself, together.  The pig gobbled down what we had brought and turned back to carry on destroying a bale of straw which had been thrown in for him.  We went home.

I thought no more about the Pig really.  At nine years old, nothing struck me as odd and Captain Sam Bradbury, the publican, was highly respected so everything had to be alright.

It must have been on a Saturday morning in early December that I next saw the pig.

I knew nothing about it until, all of a sudden, Ron Kerr arrived in a van at our house with my father. I was told to keep out of the way while everyone scurried back and forth at top speed carrying freshly slaughtered pig meat up the stone steps of the conservatory, into the house, along the corridor and down into the cold pantry where iron meat hooks hung from the beams – perfect for pieces of pig.  The two enormous sides of cleaned and gutted pig were laid on to the scrubbed stone tables under the window, followed by the great, heavy hams. The pig’s head, the tail, the trotters and two enamel pails full of blood and offal were carried through into Mrs Pearce’s kitchen where she was waiting to convert them into brawn, pork pies, black pudding and jellied trotters.  The whole operation was completed in less than two minutes and with a hurried ‘Cheerio, Mr Hogan’, Ron Kerr and the van sped away.

I was called into the cold pantry and shown how to rub saltpetre (Potassium Nitrate) over and over again into hams and the sides of  bacon.  Apart from breaks for meals and cups of tea, that is what Bunny, my brother, and I did  for the next two days, till our hands were raw and the soft pigmeat was changed into hard cured pork and bacon.  By Sunday night both great hams and one enormous side of pork were hanging proudly from the iron hooks in our cold pantry, ready to be sliced, carved and cooked as we needed.  I never saw where the other side of bacon went.  I supposed that Mr Farnsworth, the village butcher, and Captain Bradbury got some, as well as Ron Kerr.   I also remember that Police Sgt Woodward seemed less abrupt with me after that time.  But no-one in Whittington ever said a word to an outsider about the pig - nor that my father had won it in the secret village raffle. It was all as if it had never happened.

But I remember that it lasted us the best part of two years and tasted just wonderful – worms or no worms !

Patrick Hogan  6 March 2009

Eggs  -  1943

One late-summer evening in the middle of the War in Whittington, Pat Withers and myself climbed over the hedge from the Hawthorns into the Croft to pick some blackberries.  They were ripe and tasted good.  As we picked our way along the hedge from the Church Street end, we spied what looked like a nest on the ground inside our hedge.  Parting the thick grass curtain which kept it from casual view, we peered in, then looked at each other with open mouths for piled high inside was a large mound of hens eggs;  there must have been more than a hundred.  A lot of hens must have preferred to lay their eggs there in the cool rather than go all the way back to their nest box – wherever that might be!

Inching ourselves back from the nest we sat down in the Croft in the last rays of sunshine to consider matters, for the question of ownership was complicated.  Houses near the Croft all had hens which roamed, so proving ownership of the eggs was not going to be possible.  If we took all the eggs to just one possible owner, word would soon get out and trouble would come from the others.  Each poultry owner would claim the eggs as theirs alone and arguments could again turn nasty.

If we handled this situation badly, we thought, our peaceful village could become riven by strife – perhaps turning into a feud like the famous Hatfields and McCoy feud in Kentucky.  We knew what would happen then for we had seen the film at the Regal in Lichfield.   Everyone got shot and killed!  Yet if we left the eggs where they were, it would be a waste. They would just get addled with no broody hen sitting on them and go bad.  We two boys felt we had a duty to keep our village peaceful.  It was also a crime to waste food in the War.

So as dusk turned to darkness we found enough baskets for both of us and crept back again to the nest and took out the eggs carefully, one by one.
In the darkness of the blackout we carried our heavy baskets of eggs back home and put them in our food cupboards.  No-one saw us.    

And so there was no strife in Whittington, no feuding and no shooting, but Pat Withers and myself got badly egg-bound.

Patrick Hogan   17 March 2009

Water

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, though mains water was available to most houses in the village, a surprising number of places in Whittington still had a working manual water pump in the kitchen or in the yard outside.  Local workshops often had one too, as did Mr Windridge’s Smithy. The back of the Hawthorns had a good one inside Mrs Pearce’s kitchen.

The underlying sandstone of Whittington was a good water filter and I can’t remember anyone getting ill from well water.  If a house had both, then good Midlands common-sense dictated that the first choice for water for drinking or cooking would normally be mains water - although some people still preferred the taste of “pure” well water without chlorine added to destroy bacteria.  For washing clothes, many housewives opted for well water too if they had it.   “Clothes smell better afterwards”,  they averred.

Pumps were kept well maintained with efficient washers, usually made of leather lightly greased.  It took a bit of “dry” pumping to get the water up from the well until at last it gushed out of the pump-neck into the stone sink. There was nothing fancy or beautiful about pump sinks. Older ones were sometimes made from a solid block of limestone, basalt or granite and they were massive, heavy and virtually unbreakable. If something heavy and metallic was dropped by accident on to a pump sink, the chances were that it would not break the stone but instead get well dented itself.  A pump handle was up to a yard long and water was sucked up the vertical pipe each time the end of the pump arm was pulled down.  On the return movement, air was expelled through a non-return valve. In time, out gushed water from the pump neck. The time it took for water to start pouring out depended on how far the water table was below the pump and the speed that the arm was operated – provided, of course, that the washer was in good condition.  When a vertical pipe was wider than normal then more force was needed to pump water up   – and more would gush out -  so there was an optimum pipe width for domestic pumps to achieve a happy medium.

Patrick Hogan  15 June 2009

Delivering the milk

In Whittington early in the war, fresh milk was delivered daily both by Charlie Mann of Rock Farm and by Baxters at Church Farm. Also, from Pearce Farm at the Crossroads, each morning and evening Eric (Tubby) Bratten, Laurence (Lol) Wakefield, Reg Clay and Derek Leedham would use delivery bicycles to carry bottles of milk to customers around the village.  There may have been other deliveries but they don’t come to mind although we could get milk if we went to almost any of the farms with cows.

Initially, after arriving at the village in 1939, we got our milk from Charlie Mann, meeting him shortly after he got married the month. His two full grown Old English Sheepdogs, Jip and Shep, used to come lolloping along behind his milk float.
Perhaps because Charlie was unable to carry on his delivery after many of his farm workers went off to war, a year or so later we changed to having our milk from Baxters at Church Farm which was quite near to our house.

From 1941 onwards I used to help Audrey Evans, the eldest daughter of the Evans family, delivering milk from Church Farm.  Audrey had joined the Landgirls early in the war and had been lucky enough to be posted back to Whittington, so she was  able to live at home and work at Church Farm.  The Evans family lived at Green Farm which by then had ceased to be a working farm, as we understood the term.

Early in the war, Church Farm had about sixty cows, some Ayrshires, plenty of Shorthorns and some Frisians too.  They also had their own bull which was kept in its own brick built bull house with a bull pen made of strong steel pipes welded together.  It needed to be strong as the Shorthorn bull was immense, powerful and often bad tempered.

Church Farm was a T.T. attested farm.  That meant that regular tests were made to ensure that the cows on the farm were free of tuberculosis so that milk could be sold directly to the public.  Cows were milked twice a day, early morning and early evening, both by hand and by the automatic milkers run by vacuum. The milk was all fed into a cooler, then bottled or put into churns. From the evening milking, about 5 or 6 churns each of about 10 gallons were kept cool overnight for the morning milk-round with about 6 crates of 24 pint bottles each. Apart from local deliveries, milk produced at Church Farm and the other village farms was collected in churns seven days a week by the Crows Nest Dairy lorry from Lichfield, calling a couple of hours after morning milking had finished.

The milk float at Church Farm was loaded up with full churns and crates of bottles by 6.15am each morning. Audrey had the delivery book and pencil ready to note down what each house took and a strong leather cash bag with a shoulder strap.  Payment was usually done on the spot in cash or weekly in cash.  Our starting load was altogether about 624 pints but since we always gave extra measure to those who preferred milk ladled directly from a churn into their own jug, such a load was probably worth only 560 pints in money terms.  Any milk left over on return was fed to the pigs.

After houses in the village had been done, the regular route was straight up Barracks Lane (Common Lane) to Botany Bay delivering along the way. Then into the Barracks where married quarters were served plus the Barracks Post Office where the Moreland family lived in the second part of the war.  The last leg was towards Freeford Lodge and then back along the road to Church Farm, picking up the last houses along the way as we went.

We used to hope to be back by 12 noon when empty bottles would be put into the bottle cleaner, surplus milk taken to the pig sties and the empty churns washed and cleaned ready for the next morning.  In summer the dray horse would be taken out of the float, hosed down  and turned into the meadow. In winter it would be put into a stable and given water and hay.  The milk float was hosed down and the leather reins cleaned, dried off and hung up for the next day.  With luck, all would be finished by about one pm or just after, then home for lunch.

I was fond of the milk round. The work was not over-hard and on most days it was a pleasure to be out in the open air. Customers were soon friends and always glad to see us and pass a few words before we had to be off to the next place.  Driving the horse and float was easy with the horse ready to stop at each customers house as we went along.  If curtains were drawn or they waved “nothing today” then we just kept going, giving a wave back and a ‘thank you’. I never got paid money but could take a couple of pints of the left-over milk if I wanted or some eggs.  It was all great fun and Audrey was a family friend anyway so I was glad to help.

Sometimes I came back for the evening milking and helped.  Milking by hand was interesting but machine milking was always quicker and more efficient.  The cows knew the routine as well as we did and were usually ready to be unhitched and plod away back to field or stall before we could get to them.  All in all, Church Farm was a nice place to go for me in the war. Eventually even Sydney Baxter himself would pass a pleasant word or two when he saw me.  I learned a lot about farming and about people through helping on farms. It was well worth while and enjoyable to boot.

Later in the war (we believe on a Christmas carol-singing visit to the Colquhouns at Whittington House) Audrey Evans met an Australian pilot in the R.A.A.F, married him and went to Australia to live. She was a sunny intelligent girl with a great sense of humour and we missed her when she went.

 Patrick Hogan   10 June 2009