R. J. Hammond

“ So far as the major foods to be rationed were concerned, the Food (Defence Plans) Department rejected this contention out of hand. Some people might not want to take up their rations, and the retailer’s right to by must be adjusted not to his nominal roll of customers but to his actual requirements. ‘The disciplinary control of the retailer is a matter of the first importance’, it wrote in 1937; and it proposed to discipline him, not merely by requiring him to collect and account for coupons, but also by insisting on returns of stock, sales and purchases of rationed food at frequent intervals. ”

“ State trading in food is practicable and in times of prolonged shortage is necessary. It is within the wit of man to find an alternative to competitive private enterprise with market prices as a means of obtaining and distributing food, to replace economic by human laws, to substitute managed for automatic provisioning of the people’.
This, according to one of its most distinguished participants, [1] was the main lesson of British food control in the War of 1914. ”

“ A scheme, however convenient and inexpensive, under which the Sate was beholden to one particular section of a trade while the remainder was out in the cold could scarcely endure, assuming as it did in effect that the organised grain market was nothing more than a speculators’ racket. If the grain trade were not good enough to be the suppliers of the Government's food stores, the sooner they were deprived of the much more important task of handling the nation’s wheat supply, the better. ”

“ The tie of consumer to retailer, and its implications at earlier stages in the distributive chain, presupposed not only a control organisation for distributing each rationed food, but a series of local food offices that alone could maintain an up-to-date register of consumers. For the consumer-retailer tie must be constantly in need of breakage and renewal, in accord with the multitudinous movements to and fro of individual citizens. Other powerful arguments could be drawn up in favour of the decentralised administration of food control ”

“ Contemporaries can be inconsistent from choice or inadvertence; the historian is obliged to bring the whole of his allotted study to the test of critical analysis, without which, indeed, the story of food control at any rate would emerge with little meaning or usefulness.
Critical analysis calls for critical method. The writer’s principle has been to treat food strategy and tactics broadly as if he were writing military history. ”

“ If the market were not remain disturbed and uneasy, the trade must be reassured; and for this purpose the bald statement in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's budget speech [11] that the Government had acquired reserves of wheat, whale oil and sugar was hardly sufficient. Early in May, therefore, meetings of grain trade and milling representatives were held at which the way in which the scheme would work was confidentially explained. The milling concerns, who would do the work without remuneration, had been chosen because they alone could turn over the wheat without a second market transaction. ”

“ If food control were to come into being without a hitch, the planners must carry the traders with them, even at the risk of undue concessions to practices not really suited to a war economy. Directly is passed from the stage of elaborating principles to translating them into terms of men and forms, the Department found itself hampered first by lack of staff and secondly by the requirements of official secrecy which forbade it to associate large outside staffs, such as those of the Marketing Boards and Control Commissions, with the preparation of commodity schemes. ”

“ Vaguer yet, but not altogether to be disregarded, was the widespread conviction among those not directly concerned with it that food control had been well done and could be safely revived if need arose. There was, too, within the Board of Trade, a tiny handful of survivors from the final liquidation of the Ministry who kept in being its last direct legacy, the Civil Emergency Food Organisation for use in the event of industrial disputes. Many of the traders who had helped with food control were comparatively young men, whose services might be called on again in time of emergency. ”

“ What was wanted was dispersed inland storage of foodstuffs equivalent, say, to a year's supply of wheat; but there was no need to have the stocks as wheat, or ingeniously balanced between one commodity and another. Sugar, which was cheap and stored better than wheat, would be especially suitable for security stocks, and since ships were completely interchangeable between wheat and sugar, having the one was equivalent to have the other. Besides the technical arguments for a security stock, there was one strong political argument, namely that they could not provoke a competitive armaments race. ”

“ Competitive private enterprise, in bulk foodstuff at any rate, must be superseded both nationally and internationally; the Inter-Allied Food Council of September 1918, with its provisions for coordinated buying and allocation of food and shipping, was essential to the success of control in the United Kingdom, and, moreover, to the carrying out of the plans for bringing over the American Army to finish off the war, had it continued into 1919. ”

“ Broadly speaking, there was nothing in the 1936 pattern of food supplies and distribution, intricate though it was, that would make the controls of 1918 obsolete. Plans for a future war, assuming it to be of a similar character to the last, could reasonably be based on them, with only such modifications as previous experience, and the opportunity of planning the structure as a whole, would obviously suggest. The Food (Defence Plans) Department could not have seen itself as embarking on a second ‘state trading adventure’ ”

“ When, in 1923–24, the possibility of a wheat storage scheme was again canvassed at the Committee of Imperial Defence, it was turned down just as firmly as before. The Admiralty—it was reported—were confident that by the end of the first three months of a major war the submarine menace would be under control; normal wheat stocks were likely to amount to least ten weeks’ supplies at any time; a storage scheme would ‘handicap the smooth and cheap distribution of wheat,’ and be ‘extremely difficult to provide and unpalatable to the public’. ”

“ This study is not intended to be an encyclopedia of food control; it does not contain comprehensive statistics, [1] assembled for their own sake, or a catalogue of every administrative order issued by the Ministry of Food. It does not set out to describe, even superficially, each and every commodity control, or recount every change in the amount of war-time rations. ”

“ This sort of approach to problems that, if looked at intently, are seen to have wide implications beyond their obvious range at first sight, may hinder freedom of action instead of helping it. To take but one single example among many afforded by the history of food control; it was agreed that the food plans should be such as to enable the Government of the day, should it so desire, to introduce complete import control for the principal foods at the very outbreak of war . It was an indispensable condition of such a control's effectiveness that control of shipping should also be complete. ”

“ The Department, fearing that nominated members might be able to use the Committee as a means of putting trade pressure on the Ministry of Food, sought allies by calling upon the bakers and dairymen, who, since they did not deal in foods expected to be rationed, had not hitherto been consulted, to give their views on the filling of trade seats; and as it had expected and hoped, these strongly opposed giving grocers and butchers preferential treatment. The controversy dragged on for month; it was eventually settled by increasing the membership to fifteen seats, of which five should be traders ”

“ In March, proposals were approved for building silos to hold 250,000 tons of wheat, for a further purchase of 200,000 tons to be put in them when built, and for a subsidy scheme to encourage bakers to hold an extra week’s supply of flour in their premises. Early in April the Department secured assent in principle for a reserve of 400,000 tons of oil seeds—included in the original proposals but dropped for reasons of finance; and for no less than 1,500,000 tons of fodder grains, to tide over the animal population until the first war harvest should become available. ”

“ The preparations of the rationing machinery, while throwing up more knotty problems for immediate resolution than that of the commodity controls, nevertheless made rather better progress, partly because there was not the same need for outside consultation, partly because it leant even more heavily on previous experience, as summarised in the work of Sir William Beveridge's Sub-Committee on rationing. That experience prescribed a national rationing system based a consumer-retailer tie and hence the establishment of a network of divisional and local food offices. ”

“ By February 1937 four detailed schemes for the storage of a balanced group of foodstuffs were ready, ranging from Plan I, an emergency scheme for feeding London for month, to Plan IV which would provide together with normal trade stocks, for months’ supply of wheat, four months’ supply of oilseeds, three months’ supply of sugar, a large supply of whale oil (for cooking fat and margarine) and quantities of canned meat, canned milk and cheese, together with no less than six months’ supply of feeding grains for animals. ”

“ For the matters with which the writer has been concerned, nothing could be further from the truth. In the first place, official skill in detecting, particularly in its infancy, a major issue of policy is great but by no means infallible. ”

“ What they did make clear was that the very circumstance that made food control vital for the United Kingdom—dependence on imported supplies—not only made its effectiveness greater, since ships and ports provided a ready-made bottleneck at which the Government could lay hands on commodities, but also reduce it to a secondary role in winning the war. ”

“ The Department felt that rationing might be required not more than a month after war broke out, and was prepared to make do with an interim, simplified scheme for three months while the documents for the full scheme were being printed. The Stationery Office, facing an avalanche of printing orders to be executed urgently on the outbreak, could not guarantee to deliver interim ration cards under a month or full ration books under six months. There was nothing for it but to abandon the interim scheme and print sufficient ration documents for the permanent scheme before the war broke out. ”

“ The experts of the corn and milling trade, disagree thought they might on everything else, were unanimous in declaring that for the Government to enter the wheat market, even under the cloak of some well-established trade organisation, would be liable to send prices sky-high. The only workable scheme Sir Ernest Gowers could suggest was to bypass the market and purchase secretly and directly from the Canadian Wheat Board a large block of ‘May futures’, i.e., options on wheat to be delivered in May 1937 ”

“ A shadow divisional organisation was ready to hand in the civil emergency food organisation that had been maintained, as a legacy of the old Ministry of Food, on account of its proven utility in the great Railway Strike of 1919. The Divisional Officers, persons of local standing who received a small retaining fee for their readiness to serve in emergency, were brought into consultation with the Department, and a few of the older ones were persuaded to make way for younger men. ”

“ He foresaw a general policy of subsidising food prices in order to prevent inflation. He drew attention to the usefulness of the recently established marketing boards and commodity commissions as a nucleus of food control, while emphasising that the very existence of these bodies made centralised food control the more necessary. The expected initial air attack on London, he said, would necessitate not merely the emergency feeding of refugees, but a comprehensive plan to ensure the internal distribution of food from ships diverted to unaccustomed ports. ”

“ The highly rationalised milling industry was dominated by three large enterprises, the privately owned firms of Ranks and Spillers, and their natural enemy, the Cooperative Movement, which was outside the millers’ trade association and which on principle did not use the services of the specialist grain importers and brokers who operated on the terminal markets of London and Liverpool. These in their turn were concerned lest they be squeezed out of business by direct purchase by millers in the country of origin—the policy of the Cooperative Movement and to some extent of Ranks also. ”

“ Processors, such a flour millers, sugar refiners, and oilseed crushers, would operate as directed on allocated raw materials, at margins of profit to be negotiated with the Ministry of Food. So, too, wholesale distribution would be subject to Ministry orders. ‘The final stage is reached when the retailer, registered with his local Food Control Committee, has delivered to him at a fixed price the regular weekly supplies required to meet the needs of his registered customers’, to whom he in turn would sell at a fixed price. ”

“ They are the permanent concern of General Staffs, who, because wars are intermittent occurrences, are not continually in danger of distraction by day-to-day questions of administration. For civilian questions as a whole there is no comparable tradition, expertise or organisation. The art of administration in a modern state has its own skill and finesse ”

“ Officials were to have little difficult in picking up the tricks of the trade, or traders in learning the conventions and customs of the Civil Service. Neither accomplishment, though indispensable, was sufficient for a world in which, even before the war had broken out, the trend towards national and international interference in economic matters had more and more displaced or distorted the measuring rod of market price. ”

“ The image of the pre-war plans, in their civilian sector, is not that of an army, moving towards its objective in accordance with flexible, adaptable strategy. Rather is that of a number of intelligent individuals making each his own way towards a common destination, and finding mutual interests en route. ”

“ It was historically appropriate that the first suggestion that a department of food defence be set up in peacetime should arise from a desire to forestall inflation in wartime, for it was high prices and industrial unrest, rather than actual shortage of supplies, that had led to the appointment of the first Food Controller. ”

“ A storage plan that would command the agreement of so many conflicting interests would clearly be difficult to find. Moreover, the existing state of the wheat market was unfavourable to a large-scale Government operation; four successive short crops in the United States and Canada, a crop failure in the Argentine, and two years of large imports into the United States, normally an exporter of wheat, had reduced world wheat stocks to normal proportions, and produced a seller’s market in wheat for the first time since 1927. ”