Food and Nutrition (Great Britain and Ireland)

Food Supplies and Shortages

During the First World War, food was itself a major battlefield. Total war extended into civilian life, and the domestic and military fronts were considered of equal importance. Victory depended heavily upon food being supplied to both soldiers and civilians. Hunger had to be avoided and nutritional well-being sustained, even through times of shortage. Problematically, since the 1870s Britain and Ireland had relied heavily on importing food. Combined, by 1914 the two countries produced only a fifth of the wheat it consumed, two-fifths of its butter and cheese, and three-fifths of its meat and bacon.¹

From the very start of war, U-Boats targeted ships carrying supplies across the Atlantic Ocean. Across Britain and Ireland, hunger, and even starvation, became a real, tangible threat. The government had anticipated neither the length of conflict nor the effectiveness of Germany’s submarine campaign. By October 1916, Britain had lost 2 million tons of merchant ships. In January 1917, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare which further escalated this precarious situation across Britain and Ireland.²

Throughout the war, food prices rose sharply, but politicians in Britain initially adhered to laissez-faire principles that discouraged state intervention.³ Fortuitously, 1914-16 saw bumper harvests, with any food shortages being local and brief. High prices incentivised farmers to produce.⁴ Irish agriculture benefited from increased British demand, and farmers became wealthier.⁵ Only in December 1916 did the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George (1863-1945), establish the Ministry of Food, a tentative step towards state control of the food situation in both Britain and Ireland.⁶

In Ireland, scepticism grew about graziers producing food for Britain while the Irish appeared to face hunger. In 1914, Lionel Smith-Gordon (1889-1976) and Francis Cruise O’Brien (1885-1927), both advocates of the co-operative movement, published a provocative pamphlet entitled Ireland’s Food in War Time. In this, the authors warned that only 18% of Irish-bred cattle was being consumed in the country, and around 50% of Irish butter. Once Irish farmers had finished feeding Britain, Ireland would have few food reserves of its own, so critics insisted. Ireland, in their view, had been reduced to serving as Britain’s allotment.⁷

These economic arrangements caused anger in Ireland as the problem of hunger became increasingly urgent, and as anti-British sentiment mounted following the Easter Rising (1916). Provocatively, republicans portrayed trading arrangements as reminiscent of the Great Famine (1845-52), a tragic time when Britain was similarly blamed for shipping food out of Ireland during a period of national hunger. From 1917, Sinn Féin actively prevented food from being exported to Britain. Vigilance Committees threatened farmers found preparing or transporting food for Britain. In March 1918, Diarmuid Lynch (1878-1950), the Sinn Féin Food Controller, was arrested in Dublin after seizing a large number of pigs due to be exported, which he intended to slaughter and sell in Ireland.⁸

Soldiers from Britain and Ireland also needed to be fed. Before the war, scientists ascertained that soldiers required 4,193 calories per day. Soldiers had an official ration allocation supplemented with foods posted from home.⁹ In 1914, many men rushed to enlist, swayed by promises of a better diet. Each man had been promised 4,200 calories a day and meals replete with meat, bread, sugar, bacon, cheese, and vegetables. In practice, the army found it impossible to sustain these food supplies and reduced allocations almost immediately. Military feeding was beset with logistical problems. Soldiers’ food was far from being the highest priority on the army’s transportation list and was generally considered less important than weapons. The government imported masses of tinned “‘bully beef”’ which could be eaten straight from the tin or warmed up in a stew, although colonial troops often had specific dietary requirements and required alternatives.¹⁰

Self-Sufficiency

To become self-sufficient, both Britain and Ireland needed to produce more and eat less. Victory might be aided by growing food on farms, allotments, spare land, and in window boxes. Since the Industrial Revolution, urban populations had been distanced from food production, relying upon purchasing, rather than producing, their own food. Allotments and “‘victory gardens”’ reversed this process, reconnecting urbanites to the processes of producing their own food. Aesthetically pleasing gardens were transformed into utilitarian food-based gardens. ¹¹

Women assumed a crucially important role. In Britain, the Women’s Land Army (WLA) actively recruited women to work the land. Around 5,500 women applied for service before 1917, followed by an impressive 45,000 from April 1917, a time when food-related problems were more critical. Typically young and middle-class, this was the first time many of these women had undertaken paid work. The “‘land girls”’ wore a distinctive uniform. WLA propaganda served up delightful images of happy young women working in fields and performing acts of patriotic cultivation. Of course, unlike in the adverts, the English countryside was hardly basking in sunshine all the time, and work was certainly harder and less fun-packed than WLA propaganda suggested.¹²

In Ireland, the United Irishwomen, founded in 1910, became wholly devoted to war work. By 1916, it had 44 branches working across rural Ireland running milk depot schemes and training village nurses. It co-operated with government agendas to boost food production while promoting domestic shrewdness. Other women’s groups lobbied for the implementation of free school meals, as already promised in a 1914 Act. By March 1917, the scheme was finally up and running, largely thanks to the charitable assistance of the Women’s National Health Association (WNHA), United Irishwomen, and the Irish Women Workers Union.¹³

However, since the 1870s Ireland’s post-Famine agricultural economy had focused strongly on cattle raising and dairying.¹⁴ When war commenced, farmers needed much persuasion to return to tillage, especially in light of the huge profits being accumulated by the demand for meat from an increasingly desperate British market. Graziers began to face public criticism as individuals whose selfishness threatened to spread hunger upon Ireland.¹⁵

From December 1916, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI) assumed responsibility for implementing orders in Ireland from the Ministry of Food. In 1917, DATI enforced compulsory tillage. Farmers who owned land of ten acres or more were obliged to cultivate a tenth of that land each year or face fines and/or imprisonment. Farmers were infuriated. DATI also began fixing food prices, much to the annoyance of food producers.¹⁶ In Britain, local rationing schemes were introduced in December 1917 for sugar, butter, and margarine. These schemes became ubiquitous in early 1918.¹⁷

Health, Morale, and Demography

Historian Derek J. Oddy argues that “although great difficulties in food distribution were experienced during the later stages of the war, Britain was never subject to the shortages experienced by civilian populations in central Europe in 1918.”¹⁸ That might well be true, but stating that things were worse elsewhere risks downplaying the health consequences of food shortages where they did arise. Britain (and Ireland) might not have starved, but hunger and rising living costs, combined with deep-rooted levels of urban poverty, posed serious short and long-term health risks, and the threat of starvation loomed large in the civilian imagination. Especially in Ireland, hunger became a hugely politicised matter.

In the decades leading up to war, working-class diets had generally improved and diversified; now, due to war, they threatened to decline sharply. Despite concerted efforts to produce more and eat less, access to a nutritious diet risked being compromised, especially from 1917. Throughout the war, rising food costs in Britain halved sugar, butter, and cheese consumption and severely restricted meat purchasing. Reliance upon tea, bread, and potatoes increased further still. The quality of basic foodstuffs also declined. From April 1917, the government regulated flour extraction. So-called “‘war bread”’ had an 81% flour extraction rate and tasted stale and hard. By Spring 1918, the flour extraction rate had risen to 92%, giving bread an unappetising black appearance. Selling fresh bread was made illegal, an effort to reduce consumption. The government imposed a minimum weight on bread loaves which encouraged bakers to increase water content, turning their bread underbaked and soggy. By 1917, the price of a loaf had doubled since the war began. All of this was far from morale boosting.¹⁹

Rising costs made milk unaffordable for many families, despite its nutritional benefits. It was only in 1918 that the British government formed the Milk Control Board and offered free milk to schoolchildren from less affluent backgrounds. By that time, the price of milk had risen to 10 shillings a quart.²⁰ The quality of Ireland’s milk supply was a long-standing concern. Infant mortality rates were lower in Ireland than Britain when looking at the national picture, but urban death rates were notoriously high. During the war, the inadequate milk supply was blamed for these soaring infant mortality rates. However, milk had been scarce even in normal times. In 1917, scientist David Houston (1866-?) published The Milk Supply of Dublin which heightened concern about the contamination of milk with germs and cow-dung, but once again this problem was not unique to wartime, an observation which discouraged decisive state intervention.²¹

Voluntary rationing was generally unsuccessful, at worst misguided. In Britain, an “‘eat less meat”’ campaign ran through 1916, but meat was already scarce for the poorest. Instructing hungry people to eat even less was hardly an informed or sensitive strategy. As part of its 1917 voluntary rationing campaign, the Ministry of Food organised cookery demonstrations across Britain offering instruction on economical cookery. “‘Mock duck”’ was made from lentils, well-seasoned and shaped as much like a duck as possible. Such dishes presumably failed to satisfy people who had a taste for real duck, but duck was hardly an accessible food for the poorest in the first place.²² British wartime cookbooks contained recipes using leftovers, including inventive ways to turn leftover crumbs of cheese into a meal and scraps of fish into sausages. Recipe books such as The Win-the-War Cookery Book presented the cooking of these concoctions as a patriotic act that allowed women to partake in the campaign for victory.²³ Again though, the poorest families rarely had basics such as cooking utensils and a stove.

In Ireland, DATI implemented a “‘productive thrift”’ campaign from 1914 until 1918 which incorporated a so-called “‘war on waste’.” DATI encouraged everyone to live on healthy foodstuffs such as vegetables, oatmeal, wholemeal flour, cheese, and milk and eschew less nutritious (and financially wasteful) diets of tea, white bread, and cheap bacon.²⁴ Of course, middle-class diets often remained at their usual huge size, while women from that social group were advising hungry people to eat even less than usual.²⁵ In Britain, but not Ireland, compulsory rationing was approved in January 1918 and remained in place until 1920.²⁶

In both countries, nutritionists actively involved themselves in the war effort, although their advice was often impractical or oblivious to life’s realities. In 1915, Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947) and Thomas Barlow Wood (1860-1918) (professors of biochemistry and agriculture, respectively) published a guide to civilian food economy based around calorific principles, depicting the human body as a motor requiring specific inputs and outputs. However, humans ate and understood food in complex ways that could never be fully captured by quantitatively-based guidance. Governmental and public interest in nutritional science remained limited.²⁷

In Ireland, nutritional guidance was similarly viewed as impractical or impenetrable, but William Thompson (1860-1918), one of Ireland’s leading nutritionists, is notable for his underlying critique of Anglo-Irish trading relations. His 1915 book, War and the Food of the Dublin Labourer, developed in conjunction with the WNHA, noted that the average working-class diet already provided 259 fewer calories per day than it had before the war, largely due to ever-rising food bills.²⁸Lady Aberdeen (1857-1939), founder of the WNHA, was an active campaigner for milk depots and school meals provision, and Thompson’s scientific glean no doubt offered firm empirical evidence to support her campaigns.²⁹ In his subsequent Food Problems: Supplies and Demand in Ireland (1916), Thompson lamented that 94% of Irish-produced wheat was being exported, only a quarter of Irish produced potatoes was being used as human food, two-thirds of oat supplies were being fed to animals, and only 30% of pigs and 21% of cattle was being domestically consumed. Instead, Thompson warned, Ireland’s working classes were deriving their energy from tea, bread, and potatoes.³⁰ As Ian Miller argues in his study of the changing post-Famine diet, critiques formed in Ireland took on an increasingly politicised tone, especially in the latter half of the war, but nonetheless reflected the hungry realities of life for the very poorest, especially those living in urban areas.³¹

Anecdotal evidence often proved more compelling than dry quantitative data about nutrition. In 1914, James Esse (1882-1950) (a pen name of Stephens James,) published a powerful short story which depicted a Dublin family’s descent into unemployment, poverty, the dreaded tea and white bread diet and, for some family members, premature death.³² A 1917 pamphlet by Smith-Gordon and O’Brien, provocatively entitled Starvation in Dublin depicted hard-working Dublin men being driven out of their homes each night by the harrowing sounds of their children crying for food. The authors warned that Dublin’s poorest were struggling to procure even the grossly insufficient tea and white bread diet, adding that revolution was probably on its way (as it had been recently in Russia) if the Irish masses remained hungry.³³

The situation was not altogether bleak. Before 1914, few workplaces had staff canteens, but by 1918 industrial canteens served up to a million meals per day. Appointed as Minister for Munitions in 1915, Lloyd George believed that munition workers should be adequately nourished. He authorised the opening of canteens in new factories serving low-cost meals including chops, roast beef, mashed potatoes, steak pies, fish and shepherd’s pie.³⁴ The introduction of National Kitchens (a form of subsidised restaurants) further widened the practice of communal eating. Some operated in a takeaway capacity, but others had space for customers to eat inside. For poorer customers, this was their first time eating in a restaurant and the meals provided were undoubtedly more varied than the meals typically being consumed at home.³⁵

As Bryce Evans demonstrates, National Kitchens grew out of female-run efforts in working-class communities to combat food shortages and price inflation. They were designed more like civilised restaurants, replete with music, artwork, tablecloths, and flowers, a self-conscious approach intended to distinguish the National Kitchens from stigmatising soup kitchens. However, the reliance on state provision and the communalism of eating together in the Kitchens provoked fears of socialism among some. Women played an integral role in organising and running the kitchens. The National Kitchens shut down rather rapidly in 1918 due to a combination of factors including the introduction of rationing and fears about the spread of influenza.³⁶

Drawing decisive conclusions on whether nutritional health declined or improved during the First World War is difficult and has caused much debate among historians. In an influential 1985 study, Jay M. Winter concluded that the conflict saw significant gains in British civilian health, especially among working class communities. According to Winter, a relatively strong wartime economy reduced the sheer depth of poverty. The government’s harnessing of the food supply in 1916 improved civilian health by encouraging more equitable distribution among all classes. As supporting evidence, Winter points to falling infant mortality rates which he ascribes to improved nutrition.³⁷

Deborah Dwork broadly concurs, arguing that war was “‘good for babies and other young children”’ as increased attention was given to tackling infant mortality, improving milk supplies, and offering school meals.³⁸ Colin Spencer likewise suggests overall that working-class women and children were better fed than in pre-war times, owing to improved employment and canteen meals.³⁹ Of course, various factors were at play, and situations undoubtedly varied considerably on individual and regional levels, but the overall picture strongly suggests improved calorific intake and perhaps a more balanced diet. Nonetheless, people may not have perceived any positive developments when faced with increasingly black-looking bread and the scarcity of basics such as sugar. As mentioned above, discourse on food served political purposes during the revolutionary decade, but in Britain too, also from 1917, perceptions of the food situation were poor. Housewives in small industrial towns such as Cumberland, organised boycotts of farmers and food dealers by refusing to pay more than the government’s fixed price for potatoes. A general feeling arose that farmers were surreptitiously being exempted from military service. This antagonism arose as a relentless search for food increasingly characterised daily life, campaigns against which actively involved women on the home front.⁴⁰ But governments seemed to be failing to provide despite having driven their population to prolonged war, a perception that risked undermining their legitimacy in the public eye.⁴¹

Historiographical debates regarding the nutritional health of soldiers are similarly complex. Many historians presume that army rations, for millions of soldiers, offered higher quality feeding than many had previously been accustomed to. However, Rachel Duffett takes issue with these presumptions. Technically speaking, calorific intake probably did increase but many soldiers nonetheless remained hungry. The military experience of eating was unfamiliar, and the provision of nutritious food was often patchy and precarious.⁴² The Manual of Military Cooking and Dietary Mobilisation lists an exhaustive list of appealing, and often even healthy, recipes including beetroot salad, curry stew, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, soups, and desserts. However, cookery books are prescriptive sources and rarely give an accurate indication of what people actually ate. This was an ideal, not a reality.⁴³

Historically, soldiers had been fed well to avoid mutiny, but the First World War saw a greater interest in maintaining soldiers’ nutritional health and military productivity. In practice, this encouraged delivering a prescribed amount of calories to men comprised of whichever combinations of food happened to be available. For the army, taste was a secondary consideration to ensuring that soldiers ingested specific energy values. Guided by science, the military fuelled soldiers with calories, but soldiers were people, and people view eating as a social, cultural, and emotional event. A high calorie count did not necessarily make for palatable food. Soldiers were treated as bodies to be stoked with calories rather than human beings entitled to civilised meals.⁴⁴

Conclusion

Evidently, food became a major concern across Britain and Ireland during the First World War, although the course of events differed for reasons including the political tensions mounting in Ireland. Governments and the public saw adequate feeding, on both civilian and military fronts, as essential for success, but faced issues such as the disruption of food supplies by seat blockades. State-supported initiatives in both countries encouraged self-sufficiency by producing food, with varying degrees of success. Food costs rose exponentially, although historians differ on the health consequences, both long- and short-term. The general view among historians is that, while an imperfect process, nutritional standards were generally maintained, and even improved, during the First World War.