HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD

WAR
UNITED KINGDOM CIVIL SERIES Edited
by Sir Keith Hancock
EDITORS NOTE
It was originally intended to complete the history of food policy and administration in two
volumes, but it has now been decided to publish three. In making this decision the editor has met
the wishes of the Ministry of Food, which pleaded the educational benefit that members of the
food trades, students of administration and other interested persons would gain by examining in
their detailed context the historical lessons of food control.
Certainly, this volume contains considerably more detail than has appeared in any previous
volume of the Civil Histories. The difference, however, belongs chiefly to the tactics of
publication. Every volume of the series, including even the present one, is in varying degree the
distillation of drafts that have been written at very much greater length. In meeting the request of
the Ministry of Food, the editor has been able at the same time to serve a professional purpose of
his own : namely to exemplify the close attention to detail that is required if war-economic
history is to rest on firm foundations.
The detail in this book, moreover, should prove of interest not only to persons who have a close
professional concern with food but to others.
W. K. H.

PREFACE TO VOLUME II
The studies making up this volume fall into three distinct groups. The first group comprises four
foodsfish, milk, eggs, and potatoesthat from the wartime administrators point of view had
several features in common. All were wholly or mainly home-produced; none required an
indispensable process of manufacture before it could be consumed ; none, therefore, was
susceptible of strict control, let alone rationing, based on complete or virtually complete Ministry
of Food ownership. Unlike the major commodities to be studied in the next volume, in which the
Ministry was completely involved from the first in the trading process, these show it mainly
intervening by way of regulation, through the medium of statutory rules and orders. (Milk is an
exception in that after 1942 the Ministry momentarily became the owner of all milk in England
and Wales not marketed through producer-retailers ; even so, its control over distribution was
never rigorous.) They represent, in fact, the nearest that food control in the United Kingdom
approached to the circumstances of a normal country whose principal supplies are not derived
from imports; and hence display the systems limitations clearly.
The second group of studies deals with food control in emergency, i.e., when the normal system
of controlled distribution proper to a war of attrition broke down, or was in danger of breaking
down, under air attack or apprehended invasion. Important in themselves, they throw light by
contrast upon the settled conditions in which the system flourished and grew ever more

complicated. As the Ministrys provision for communal feeding was inextricably mixed with its
emergency arrangements, the two are discussed successively.
The third group is entirely concerned with a single large administrative problemrationing
that breaks up into two principal (as well as numerous subsidiary) problems. The first of these
the issue and renewal of consumers ration booksmight seem to be simple; in practice, partly
for political and historical reasons, it turned out to be highly complex. More complex still is the
second, namely, the management of supplies to the retailer through the paper instruments of
coupons, returns, and permits. The history of these might be described as morphology; a term
applied to the study of living things is the more appropriate because the development of rationing
consisted in evolution and adaptation rather than design. For that reason it displays numerous
variants that came into being in response to the characteristics of different foods, to the
increasingly stringent limitations on labour and paper, and to the changes of policy, for instance
on differential rationing, that the progress of the war brought about.
The emphasis of the studies, however, is not mainly upon policy. That of milk, for instance, takes
largely for granted the efforts to promote higher production and to steer consumption by means
of welfare subsidies. The nutritional aspects of rationing are likewise not discussed. These
matters have been touched on in the first volume and in any case will be tolerably familiar to
readers. It was thought better to devote what, notwithstanding the books length, was still
Limited space to subjects either unfamiliar in themselves, or upon which the detailed
examination of Departmental records threw an unfamiliar light. Above all, the writer has striven
to make clear the processes of food administration, both by attention to their almost day-to-day
development and by reference to their remoter antecedents.
The pursuit of the origins of rationing procedure, in particular, has had fruitful results. It early
became apparent that certain practices of the second world war could only be fully explained in
terms of their predecessors of 1917-18. A critical examination of documents that remained from
that time made it clear that the accepted accounts of the earlier schemes containedto put it
mildlya strong element of myth, and that the myth-making process had begun as early as 1919.
The whole subsequent history of rationing in Britain was profoundly affected by this fact, and
analysis of it contributes much to the understanding of practice in the second Ministry of Food.
Such analysis is necessarily detailed; the generation of myth was, indeed, largely possible
because the details of past practice had been forgotten or overlooked. For that reason, much
detail, though accompanied (it is hoped) by sufficient discussion to render it meaningful, has
been included about later rationing methods.
The sources are mainly the files of the Ministry of Food, with occasional reference to other
Departments. The Ministrys files run to many thousands, and the number of separate documents
that have been examined must exceed a million. Not much guidance, except on occasion, is to be
had from high level documents, for the matters here discussed, many of them quasi-technical,
came to the surface but seldom; this is particularly true of rationing. To the multiplicity of
sources have been added difficulties arising from the conditions in which many of them were
created : war-time pressures, shortage of clerical staffs, and dispersion of offices. (The last was
not an unmixed evil, for to it is owed the creation of much material especially teleprinter
messagesthat ordinarily might never have been written down.) Though laborious, the search
has been rewarding and satisfactory in that no point of policy or administration that seemed
important has had to go unexplained for lack of material.
I could not have tackled this mass of evidence unaided; and the finished work owes a great debt
to those who undertook the research for, and drafted, the original monographs on which it is
based : Miss M. A. Cotterill, on fish and milk; Mrs. G. W. Briggs, on potatoes and eggs; Mrs. E.

B. Given, on emergency services and communal feeding; and, last but not least, Mrs. R. D.
Cutler, who sustained the whole burden of the investigation into rationing techniques. For the
form in which their labours now appear, for any expressions of opinion, and for any errors that
remain, I take responsibility. Among the many officials who have offered valuable criticism of
drafts and elucidation of knotty points I may especially mention former members of the Ministry
of Foods Rationing Division and the staff of the General Register Office, if only because of the
highly technical matters with which they were concerned. The Registrar-General for Scotland
kindly furnished the unpublished material for removals, printed in Table VIII; the remaining
tables are due to the Statistics and Intelligence Division of the former Ministry of Food, and the
flow charts (Figures I to V), are simplified versions of charts made in that Division during the
war. Mrs. C. A. E. Felvus has again helped to see the volume through the press.
R. J. Hammond
August 1955

A: Foods mainly Home-produced

Part I: Fresh Fish
CHAPTER I
Pre-war Plans and the First Distribution Scheme, 1936-9
I
Control of the distribution of fish must necessarily be both difficult and partial. Neither the time,
place nor volume of landings can be foreseen ; the perishable nature of the produce demands
promptitude and elasticity in handling ; little time is allowed for the application of a rigid system
to be worked by officials acting on instructions from headquarters. Any system must be difficult
to frame or administer, and any scheme that is adopted must be framed with disinterested
knowledge, and above all in the interests of increased production.
Thus Mr. R. E. Prothero,1 President of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1918, expressed
the quintessence of the wartime fish problem in a paper for the War Cabinet. He was opposing
what he thought was an attempt by Lord Rhonddas adventurers to trespass, in setting up a
control of fish distribution, on the territory of the old-established Fisheries Departments. The
Ministry of Food was acting, he claimed, in ignorance of fishery affairs and under trade
influence; the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, by virtue of knowledge and experience, had
the right to be consulted about fish distribution policy, and to be utilised, so far as possible, in
carrying it out. There can be no difficulty about this, provided the Ministry of Food will
recognise the Board as part of the machinery of Government, and not as a rival concern to be run
out of business as quickly as possible.
Whether the disclaimer that this broadside evoked from the Ministry of Food was a reaffirmation
of existing policy or a prudent change of front is not clear; for although Lord Rhondda replied
that he hoped to avoid any complete control of fish, there was at any rate talk within his
Ministry of rationing it. The Ministry was at that time learning the danger of half measures with
fish. Its first price control Order, which fixed merely maximum retail prices, had dislocated
distribution badly; prices at all stages rose to the maximum, and retailers and wholesalers could

not live without breaking: the law.2 Price control had therefore to be extended to all stages of
distribution and, as a logical consequence, a system of licensing of fish traders introduced.
Finally, in July 1918, control was applied to all white fish landed at the larger ports, viz.,
Aberdeen, Fleetwood, Grimsby, Hull, Milford Haven, North Shields, and later Lowestoft. It had
to be sold at the ports wholesale market, and Fish Distribution Officers allocated it to
wholesalers in proportion to their trade in 1917; they in turn were expected to observe the same
principle in supplying their customers, and might be directed so to do in case of complaint.
These measures did not aim at much more than stabilising the already high prices of fish; but
they did at all events achieve that much, without causing landings to decrease. The rapid release
of fishing vessels from minesweeping duties eased the supply position, but relaxations of control,
early in 1919, proved to be premature and it had to be fully reimposed in November. It was
finally abandoned in May 1920. At no time had it meant any serious interference with normal
distribution down to the retailer; after the inadvertent upsets arising from the initial price Order,
care had been taken to allow all types of trader, as well as the producer, a sufficient return. In
particular, provision had been made for the inland wholesaler, through whom the large cities
were supplied, to get his fair share of the trade. On the other hand, there was probably only
nominal regulation, and only nominal enforcement of price control, in the local trade depending
on landings at the smaller ports.
In the period between the wars, the first Ministry of Foods fish control received little or no
attention. Neither Beveridge nor Coller does more than mention it, and although, early in 1936,
the committees on war-time food supply that had been set up in the Board of Trade and the
Ministry of Agriculture caused some preliminary investigations to be made into past activity and
future prospects, these were not immediately pursued when the Food (Defence Plans)
Department was set up. As its Director said later to the Committee of Public Accounts :3
. . . we had to take essential commodities in our preparations in some sort of order; we
could not do that all at once; at the beginning we concentrated on the most essential
items, and fish did not come in until a few months before the outbreak of war.
It was, in fact, the Munich crisis that caused the Department to become active about fish, and
that gave its preparations a new and, in the event, unhappy slant. For because they began when
they did under the shadow of expected devastation from the airthey were from the first
unduly influenced by the most vulnerable part of the fish trade, namely Billingsgate Market.
In the second week of September 1938, the Department put its scheme for decentralising the
Smithfield meat market before first, the Superintendent of Billingsgate, and secondly, the
Chairman of the London Fish Trade Association (Mr. J. T. Bennett, a prominent fish merchant), 4
and asked whether a similar plan could be applied to fish. The answer was yes; and those
consulted undertook to arrange the practical details immediately. A ring of railhead depots
around London was selected, in co-operation with the railway companies, at which incoming fish
trains might be unloaded; the specialist road transport was allocated between depots, for which
managers and staffs were chosen. A tentative financial plan to cover the scheme was also agreed
in principle between Mr. Bennett and the Department. All individual wholesale trading would
cease, not only among the Billingsgate merchants but also in the ports and in the large inland
markets. Fish merchants would, in fact, be formed into a pool to be fed out of a fixed wholesale
margin, each member drawing remuneration in an agreed proportion.
This proposal, amounting to complete nationalisation of the wholesale fish trade, was a startling
outcome of an emergency scheme for the physical dispersion of market facilities in the
metropolis ; and it says much for the prevailing atmosphere of crisis that it should have won such

ready acceptance. The idea of a pool, indeed, fell on such fertile ground in Billingsgate circles
that when the Food (Defence Plans) Department circulated, in January 1939, an outline scheme
for fish control in war-time, Mr. Bennett criticised it for not including a pool; the Department, he
said, was merely copying the 1914-18 scheme. This was not strictly accurate, for the Department
had considerably elaborated previous arrangements; not only were port wholesalers to be formed
into distribution committees with a Ministry of Food chairman (performing the functions of the
Fish Distribution Officer in the former war), but inland wholesalers would be similarly
organised. The latter proposal reveals the basic weakness of the Departments fish planswant
of detailed information about the working of the trade. For, as another critic, MacFisheries Ltd.,
pointed out, the provincial inland markets were not accustomed to supply all retailers outside the
range of Billingsgate, many of whom would need to draw their supplies direct from the coast.
This indication of the complexities that a scheme of fish control must take into account might
have given the Department pause more especially as there had been trouble with the coastal
merchants no other way can one explain the choice for this purpose of places like Blair-Atholl
and Lostwithiel.
These defects in the scheme were not perhaps beyond remedy, given time; what proved fatal was
the decision to introduce it before one absolutely vital piece of preparationthe compilation of
the register of traders entitled to use each depot, with their basic quotas was complete. The
intention was to obtain this information from the White Fish Commission, the statutory body set
up for the industry by the Sea Fish Industry Act of 1938.5
Under this Act, however, the Commission were debarred from divulging the figures of any
individual traders turnover without his consent; and though the Food (Defence Plans')
Department was able to override this by citing the Essential Commodities Reserves Act. 6 it was
in its turn forbidden to disclose the information. A plan for farming out the compilation of
separate depot registers to a firm of accountants familiar with the trade had therefore to be
abandoned; an alternative, to do the work within the Department on the basis of overtime, failed
because the Treasury refused to sanction overtime payment for a month or more, preferring that
staff should be transferred from other Departments. Altogether, more than two months were lost
by these delays, so that the compilation of the registers did not begin until a fortnight before war
broke out.
It is doubtful whether the Director of the Department was aware, when he gave authority on 3rd
September7 for the scheme to be started, that the registerswithout which the superintendents of
depots would be unable to allocate fishwere not ready. As late as 21 st August other
arrangementsfor instance for a pool of fish boxes and for the headquarters of the control at
Oxfordwere incomplete, and the Director-designate of fish had been asked whether, therefore,
he regarded it as unthinkable that the fish scheme should come into operation a week late,
instead of at the outbreak of hostilities. His reply had been that control must come into force
immediately; there was no half-way house between full control and chaos. In the event, the
country was to get both.

II
Immediately war broke out, therefore, the signal was given for the Coastal Committees and
Inland Depots to be established; and on 6th September an Order 8 was issued forbidding the sale
of fish by wholesale or retail other than by authorised persons. Auctions at the ports 9 were
already suspended and the fish being requisitioned by representatives of the Coastal Committees
on behalf of the Board of Trade and subsequently the Ministry of Food. As yet no statutory
schedule of controlled prices, whether at first hand, wholesale, or retail, was in operation, though

such a schedule appears to have been conveyed to the depot superintendents in the form of an
instruction from the headquarters of the Fish Control, now established at St. Johns College,
Oxford.
At once a flood of complaints began from every section of the trade. Trawler-owners and crews,
who had been accustomed to be paid for the catch on the day of landing, found their fish being
taken over at uncertain prices for settlement sine die. At Milford Haven and Plymouth they
refused to put to sea ; at Fleetwood they were barely persuaded to do so, after delays in
forwarding had held up catches in port so that they deteriorated. From Grimsby complaint was
made that the scheme had suppressed a speciality of the portthe direct trade from coast to
fishmonger in headed and filleted fish. As a corollary, a factory that employed 300 men making
fish meal from the residues was in danger of closing down. It was clear that, so far as the ports
were concerned, the scheme could only be made to work given a price agreement with the
catchers, and one, moreover, that took account of the increased importance of the more costly
nearwater and inshore fishing, now that so many of the deep-water boats had been taken by the
Admiralty.
To such an agreement the Ministry of Food urgently bent itself. Meanwhile, however, the
clamour against the rest of the scheme the system of inland depotswas undiminished. Much
of it was directed against errors in siting, that resulted in Isle of Wight fishmongers having to
seek fish at Wimbome, many miles away on the mainland; or in retailers and fish-friers from
towns where the fish was landed having to make round journeys of as much as 80 miles to and
from the depots, only to find that no fish, or derisory amounts of it, was to be had. In the absence
of complete registers of those entitled to attend a given depot, superintendents had to use their
discretion. At Manchester, on 5th and 6th September, scenes approaching rebellion were
reported from the fish market; lorries were said to have been raided and fish secured by main
force. Market inspection became impossible and fish was sold in a bad condition; wholesalers
were said to have bought at the pool price and resold at a profit. Birmingham appears to have
refused to work the scheme at first; when, at urgent persuasion, the depot there was opened, it
was inundated with far more fish than could possibly be sold. When the Lord Mayor protested to
the Director of Fish, he was threatened with a complete cessation of supplies. Cornishmen were
indignant at the influx of people from Hull and Grimsby who knew nothing of local conditions.
Above all, the general shortage and high price of fish, which must have resulted from the
requisitioning of vessels, were blamed on the scheme. 10 As The Times remarked by way of
epitaph, nothing was left of Billingsgate except the language the scheme provoked.11
For a fortnight officials struggled to mend this side of their plans also, in face of demands in
Parliament and elsewhere that the whole scheme be scrapped. The staff at Oxford was
strengthened; redress was promised, and in some cases given, to local grievances; and efforts
were made to complete the retail registers. But reform failed to keep pace with indignation. Had
the Ministry of Food been able, at this moment, to call to its assistance as Director of Fish some
figure commanding the support of all sections of the trade, a measure of control might have been
retained. But no such superman existed; the trade was utterly divided, horizontally and vertically.
(The scheme had made these divisions worse; Hull owners joined those of Aberdeen outside the
British Trawlers Federation on 30th September; and the Hull association was itself split over the
merits of the scheme.) On 18th September, therefore, the Minister decided to drop the scheme;
on the 20th. ne announced the decision in the House of Commons; and on the 22nd, the Control
Order was duly revoked.12
The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry later described the collapse of the scheme as the one
major disaster that the Ministry of Food met with in the early days of the war. 13 It was
recognised as such at the time :

I fear, wrote the official whose responsibility the scheme was, that once the producers have
tasted high prices and high profits, it will be extremely difficult to get them to accept lower
prices and that they will always be out to wreck any scheme of control which gives them lower
prices. If it is true that we should not be able to get prices down again, then we should consider
very seriously whether we ought not to hold on to the present scheme and substitute any new
scheme that we may prepare gradually and perhaps piecemeal without letting go of control.
Events were to bear him out, and very quickly. When the decision was made to abandon the
scheme, it was intended to preserve what the Minister himself called the shadow of control by
making a Maximum Prices Order. But when the Ministry proposed to put into an initial Order a
maximum price schedule based on the scale of near water prices that had been agreed with the
trawler owners before control was abandoned, the owners refused to accept it on the grounds that
these were not guaranteed prices; and the Ministry was in no position to coerce them. It was to
be mid-1941 before price control was introduced for white fish. Moreover, the debacle made
itself felt everywhere in the Ministry, and especially in those fields where drastic control
measures had been proposed. The political difficulties over the meat scheme, over pool
margarine, over the introduction of rationing, all owe something to the loss of face over fish.14
Could the scheme have been made to work ? Were its defects those of imperfect preparation and
haste, or were they more fundamental ? There were those who, having experience of the trade
and of the difficulties of the first fortnight, believed not only that the scheme was feasible, but
that it presented the only fair means of protecting the weaker members of the trade from being
forced to the wall by the fish shortage. (Cf. the arguments used in favour of the concentration of
industry by the Board of Trade in 1941.) The depots, in one form or another, were clung to as the
only means of securing even distribution in the event of bombing, or the diversion of vessels to
unfamiliar ports. Certainly it would be wrong to condemn a depot system in principle merely
because it had been introduced in circumstances other than those for which it was intended, and
in a state in which it could not be expected to work. The wonder is that the chaos was not worse.
Nor ought one to forget the casual misfortunes that beset it, of which the hot weather was
perhaps the most notable.
Nevertheless there remains doubta doubt supported by the high authority cited at the
beginningwhether so complete a control, admitting of no exceptions, could ever work for fish.
It is significant that those quoted in the schemes support were one and all connected with
Billingsgate Market. London is not England, more especially when it comes to fish; it is on the
contrary, regarded as the least discriminating of any market, accepting species that will find a
sale nowhere else. The provinces, to say nothing of Scotland, pride themselves on a nicer taste in
such matters and (because fish plays such a small part in the diet) might be expected to indulge it
even in wartime. Fish, that is to say, could never be just fish, as butter was butter. Moreover, the
fish trade is, in much of the North and Midlands, combined with the trade in fruit and vegetables
a link that the depot scheme must break. Finally, it seems unlikely that the small proportion of
fish landed away from the main ports, with their established methods of forwarding to the distant
consumer, needs ever be brought under more than nominal control.15
It is of course possible that ingenuity and skill in negotiation might, given time, have overcome
all these obstacles, and that, had the Department begun, as it had originally intended, with
something like the last war scheme of allocation, it might have been able to evolve a control
sufficiently complete to take care of the disturbances and dangers that war was expected to bring.
As things were, the best became the enemy of the good; a scheme that only great energy, public
spirit, and resource could have brought so near to completion in the time granted to it, had worse
effects than something less ambitious. The expert, driven by a sense of urgency and unrestrained

by any imaginative realisation, either on his own part or on others, of what would be the
practical effect of his devices, did more harm than a lesser man could possibly have contrived.

Footnotes
1

Later Lord Ernie; author of British Farming Past and Present.

This lesson had to be re-learnt for eggs in 1940.

Committee of Public Accounts: Minutes of Evidence, dated 13th May 1941, paragraph 2150.

Mr. Bennett was also Chairman of the National Federation of Inland Wholesale Fish
Merchants. But he could not speak for the coastal merchants, nor for one of the more important
inland centresBirmingham.
5

i & 2 Geo. 6. Ch. 30.

Vol. I, p. 23.

Sir Henry French accepted responsibility for this decision before the Committee of Public
Accounts, in 1941. Report of the Committee of Public Accounts, loc. cit.
8

S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1128.

That is to say at the ten principal ports, namely, Fleetwood, Milford Haven, Swansea,
Aberdeen, Hull, Grimsby, Newhaven (Edinburgh), Lossiemouth, Lowestoft, and North Shields.
What happened at the lesser ports is not clear. At many of them it was not customary for catches
to be sold by auction.
10

This was to happen also with eggs in 1941. See below, pp. 80-82.

11

The Times, 21st September 1939.

12

By S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1254.

13

Evidence of Sir Henry French before the Committee of Public Accounts, 13th May 1941,
paragraph 2150.
14

for the effect on the potato control scheme.

15

Among the complaints reaching the Ministry was one from the Vicar of Holy Island
(Lindisfarne) complaining that there was no fish because the local fishermen were obliged to
send their catches elsewhere (i.e. to Berwick-on-Tweed). This sort of thing must bring any
complete scheme into contempt.

CHAPTER II

The Movement Towards Re-control,

1939-41
I
The outbreak of war had not failed to bring about the expected shortage of white fish. Total
landings by British catchers, in the six months September 1939-February 1940, were 2.6 million
cwt., compared with 7.1 millions for the corresponding period a year earlier; an increase in
foreign landings from .7 to 1 million cwt. did little to offset this loss, which was, of course, due
to the Admiraltys having taken so many distant-water vessels for minesweeping. Prices had
correspondingly risen at the coast from an average of 19s. 6d. cwt. to 39s. 6d. cwt. for British
landings; for foreign landings, which had commanded a higher price before the war, the rise was
less, from 30s. to 36s. The reduced British catch was largely composed of near-water qualities
and varieties of fish that generally command higher prices even in peace-time and that,
moreover, would have to do so if the near-water vessels were to pay their way; the average prices
before and after the outbreak of war were not, therefore, strictly comparable as a measure of
trawlers earnings. By the same token, the fortunes of war differed greatly between the ports;
landings at Milford Haven and Fleetwood were almost normal, while Grimsby and especially
Hull were badly hit. (By June 1940 there was said to be not a single vessel left fishing from Hull,
whose fleet was the most up-to-date and therefore best suited for the Admiraltys purposes.)
For herrings, the position was quite different, as about two-thirds of the pre-war catch was
exported to markets (Germany, Poland, and the Baltic States) that were now cut off; the taking of
drifters for minesweeping barely restored the balance between supply and demand. Indeed, the
Ministry of Food had been able, in October 1939, to secure the herring catchers agreement to a
maximum landed price of 3s. 6d. a stone (14 lb.) in return for a guarantee to take over all surplus
herrings at 30s. a cran.1 This had enabled it to fix maximum retail prices for herrings, kippers,
and bloaters,2 and incidentally to make a substantial profit (29,000) out of the herrings 3 taken
over. Herrings, however low the price, are not seriously competitive with white fish, for which
the public does not regard them, as being a substitute. Above all they could not be used by friers
to replace the cheap, distant-water fish, such as cod, dogfish, and catfish (rock salmon), that
was the foundation of their trade. (Before the war, three-fifths of the total white fish consumed in
Great Britain is said to have been sold through fish-friers.) These varieties had naturally risen
most in price since the outbreak of war; the price of wet fillets (mainly cod) was 12s. a stone in
February 1940, all but four times what it had been in June 1939.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the friers representatives on the Fish Advisory Committee set
up by the Ministry of Food in December 1939 should have clamoured for price control, more
especially as it could not have been applied to the fish once cooked. Other sections of the trade
were, however, in varying degrees opposed to price control. Trawler owners contended that
having regard to especial war risks and the increased cost of gear, the prevailing prices were not
excessive. Coastal and inland merchants, and retail fishmongers, objected not so much to price
control as to its corollary, a system of allocation at the ports; but they agreed in principle that
price control might become necessary at some later, unspecified date. Desultory and protracted
discussions, in which the Ministry endeavoured to wear down the objectors resistance, went on
through most of 1940; but on 1st November the Fish Advisory Committee, by a majority, voted
in favour of maximum prices being imposed as soon as possible.
Meanwhile the Ministry sought to ease the supply position by importing frozen cod fillets from
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Iceland. Four large firms in the trade, mainly connected with

the depressed ports of Hull and Grimsby, had already formed a group to import these fillets,
which were landed at Liverpool, railed across to the East Coast ana distributed through the
wholesale merchants at Hull and Grimsby, the main centres of the pre-war trade in fresh fillets.
Initial shipments had gone well, but the group appear to have felt that any large-scale
importation, such as would make a serious impression on the shortage of fish for friers, was too
risky to be attempted by private concerns. Although friers would take frozen fillets for want of
anything else, they would always prefer fresh, even at a price one-third higher; and hence it
would only need a spell of good landings at British ports, for frozen-fish importers to incur a
heavy loss. The group therefore approached the Government with an offer; if it would take over
the risk of loss on unsaleable stocks, they would run the scheme as agents for a fee of 6d. a stone,
as against the 1s. 6d. then being earned by them on private importations.
The possible scale of operations was certainly considerable; a million cwt. of frozen fillets
(equivalent to about 900,000 cwt. of fresh fillets, or roughly twice that amount of whole fish)
annually. The outlay would be of the order of 2 millions a year. But the risk, particularly on
unsold stocks when the war should end, was equally considerable; and it is not surprising that the
group should have been unwilling to take it. On the contrary, it is remarkable that for a short time
in January 1940 they should have contemplated going ahead without Government assistance. If,
however, the Ministry of Food were to come to their support with a guarantee, it would
obviously need, in the consumers interest, to establish complete control. This, it was thought,
would mean that the Ministry should become the sole importer of frozen fish, with the original
projectors acting as managing agents; and that it should impose price control at all stages of
distribution.
For the adoption of such a scheme, the time at which it was formulated (April 1940) was
favourable. The Ministry of Food was much concerned with the effect of high food prices on the
poor; fish-and-chips was highly regarded by scientific opinion; supplies of fish from Scandinavia
had been cut off. The risk of loss to the Government seemed limited to that on end-of-war stocks;
and even though this might be estimated as high as 500,000, there was a possible offset by way
of potatoes. If the fish-frying industry could be saved from collapse by the import of frozen fish,
its consumption of the other ingredient in fish-and-chips might, in a single year, save the
Government as much and more in respect of its guarantee to potato-growers.
Treasury assent was readily obtained; but the completion of the scheme occupied a further six
months, and it was not until 1st November 1940 that the Ministry of Food was ready to take over
the sole importation of frozen fish. Two points in particular were difficult of settlement; the
manner of distribution and the remuneration of the projectors who were now to act as importing
agents. The claim of the Humber (Hull and Grimsby) merchants to sole distributing rights, on the
ground that they had virtually monopolised the sale of fresh fillets before the war, was resisted
by the inland wholesalers both on principle and because to transport the whole of the fish landed
from Liverpool to the Humber would be wasteful. The projectors, moreover, put in a claim for a
special allocation to themselves by way of reward for their pioneer work, over and above the
share that their associated companies might expect out of the common pool; and this was
conceded by the Ministry though without publicity. The eventual share-out provided that 8 per
cent, of the landings should go direct to the group, and 92 per cent, be distributed by the Humber
merchants; out of this latter, 60 per cent, should go to inland wholesalers and the remaining 40
per cent, be reserved for direct sales.
As for the importing agents remuneration, the Ministry had been prepared to agree to 6d. a stone
for the first 10,000 tons and 4d. thereafter; but the Treasury described this claim as sheer
effrontery, pointing out that 6d. a stone was, on the groups own showing, a reasonable trading
profit when they were acting as principals, but that under the Ministry scheme they would carry

no risk at all. Agreement was, in fact, promptly reached on a counter-offer of 4d. a stone for the
first 15,000 tons, with a review of actual expenses if imports exceeded that amount. It is not
clear, however, whether the special 8 per cent, allocation, which was calculated to yield the
group some 30,000 gross, was made known to the Treasury.4
Meanwhile, prices overseas had hardened ; and when the Ministry came to work out its price
schedule for incorporation in an Order,5 it was constrained to work on a landed cost of 8s. a
stone, is. more than the original figure on which discussion had been based. The eventual
structure may be tabulated as follows :
The respective margins were considered by the Ministry of Foods Director of Costings to be fair
and reasonable; since coastal merchants had undertaken to sell 60 per cent, of their turnover to
inland wholesalers, their true margin would be in the neighbourhood of 8d. a stone. The retail
margin was somewhat higher than the Director of Costings thought justified, but less than their
pre-war percentage margin.

II
By the time the frozen-fish project had matured, however, the prices of fresh white fish had risen
still further. At the end of 1940 British landings, always at their lowest at that time of year, had
fallen to a quarter of the pre-war quantity; moreover the meat ration had been cut and supplies of
canned fish, which in the summer of 1940 had actually exceeded the pre-war average, were
being progressively reduced. The landed price in February 1941 of such fish as cod, haddock,
hake, and plaice, was two to three times what it had been a year earlier, or perhaps five times the
pre-war average landed price. Public grumbling, whose absence had been remarked upon with
surprise by the Ministry of Food in 1940, was now constant. Nearer home, the Treasury was
increasingly alarmed at the effect of fish prices on the Cost-of-Living Index; the food subsidies,
it pointed out, were not achieving their purpose because two commodities, fish and eggs, were
not effectively controlled. Moreover, it added, these, simply because they were so scarce in wartime, would provide a particularly cheap way of subsidising the index in terms of pounds per
point. Or (to turn the argument the other way about), the scarcer the food, compared with the
1904 supply on which the index was based, the higher its price was likely to rise and the higher
still its effect on the index number. The avowed adoption of rigid price stabilisation in the budget
of 1941 made the introduction of fish price control urgent. Despite its acceptance in principle by
the majority of the trade the previous November, little progress had been made towards control
in practice. There was still a vocal minority in the trade, notably among the coastal merchants
and the retailers, who were opposed to it, and the Minister himself decided to go slowly. A
second failure in fish could not be faced :
It is a simple matter, wrote a Ministry official, for anyone to say that there should be control of
fish prices but this would not be practicable if any important section of the Trade were opposed
to the Scheme and no matter what virtues it possessed or how well it was planned, it would be
sabotaged by a hostile section.

s.
Landed cost .... Importers commission . . . . ..
Freight and cold storage . . .. Provision for loss 8
on end-of-war stocks Flat rate of carriage .. . . ..
1

d. per stone 0
4

0
5
8
Selling price to primary buyers ..

10

,, ,, ,, inland wholesalers ..

11

fish friers and retailers

11

Retail price .. .. .. ..

17

6 (is. 3d. a lb.)

As much might be said of any food; the peculiar difficulty with fish arose from the fragmentation
of the trade into independent and frequently hostile groups. Not merely were the various classes
of tradercoastal merchant, inland wholesaler, retailer, frierunable to find common ground,
but divergences of interest also arose vertically, so to speak, between different types of fishing
and different ports. Exasperated officials were apt to put this down to a treble dose of original
sin. But to impute blame to the members of the fish trade for their inability to agree is to fall into
an error all too common in discussions of economic organisation, 6 namely to make notions,
however well-founded, of tidiness, or administrative convenience, o efficiency, morally
obligatory upon others. The onus of proof that a fish control scheme was fair and workable
rested on the Government ; and it was only just that, after the fiasco of 1939, the Ministry should
find the trade difficult to convince.
If precipitate action might be disastrous, caution had its perils too. It was difficult for the
Ministry to impose control by stages, because it might be accused of tinkering with the problem ;
moreover partial control was almost certain to be ineffective. The Ministry therefore had
endeavoured, even at this late hour, to get the trade itself to take voluntary control measures. Cod
caught in Icelandic waters was chosen as a suitable object for an experiment in price restriction
and allocation, and a committee drawn from the trade undertook to draw up a scheme, to operate
from 31st March 1941. When, however, the scheme was ready, the committee requested the
Ministry to give it legal sanction by issuing a maximum price Order.
This request put the Ministry in a dilemma. The prices proposed were too high for either
Ministry or Treasury to endorse. Moreover, the Ministrys Legal Adviser held that it was
impossible, at any rate in the time available, to draft a control Order that was capable of
enforcement. Icelandic cod, once removed from its boxes to the fishmongers slab, was
indistinguishable by the housewife from other cod, say from the North Sea or the Faroes; price
control at the retail stage must therefore be nugatory. But this was not all; the distinction, vital to
any form of fish control that preserved the existing channels of trade, between inland and
coastal wholesale merchants and dealings, was foreign to the law:
The futile attempt (wrote the Legal Adviser) to define inland and coastal wholesale
sales has been abandoned and I have adopted the criteria (specified in the Schedule) of
the undefined expressions inland wholesale merchant and coastal wholesale
merchant, These like a heap of stones are incapable of legal definition but I understand

that they have established identities and in the circumstances I feel that no useful purpose
would be effected by attempting to define them.
From the legal point of view this is a weakness but the Order itself is otherwise weak
and difficult of enforcement and as a stopgap it will have to do.
For all that, the Ministry could not very well refuse official backing to the members of the trade
who had devised the voluntary scheme at its own request, more especially as Fish Division had
nothing ready to put in its place. In making the Order, 7 the Minister and his advisers recognised
that a full Government scheme is inevitable sooner or later and probably sooner than latera
belief reinforced by a temporary suspension of Icelandic supplies in mid-March and a request
from the Iceland Government that the British should either convoy the fishing fleet or purchase
fish f.o.b. Reikjavik. The Ministry responded by sending a mission to Iceland, to negotiate an
agreement whereby it should become the sole purchaser of fish from thence.
Control of Iceland cod prices thus became clearly no more than an interim measure. The
intention to bring in full control of fish was openly avowed in the press notice announcing that
the Order had been made; moreover it was accompanied by another Order 8 prohibiting sales of
fish by wholesale except under licence. The Ministry was at this time vaguely contemplating
some sort of concentration of the wholesale trade in fish, on the analogy of the Board of Trade
proposals for industry. Prudently, it did not tell the trade this when it persuaded them, on 27th
March 1941, to agree to the extension of allocation and price control to all cod in the near future.
Another move in the same direction had been taken when, in mid-March, it was decided to seek
for a candidate to fill the dormant post of Director of Fish Suppliesfrom outside the trade.9
Now, however, with the stabilisation policy duly announced on 7th April, the Treasury began to
force the pace. It wanted not merely a standstill on fish prices, but a substantial reductionone
that would affect the Cost-of-Living Index by 2 -3 points; and it wanted this by 1st July, as
part of the plan for avoiding the seasonal jump in the index resulting from the advent of new
potatoes.10 Heedless of administrative difficulties, the Interdepartmental Committee on Food
Prices talked of a forced rationalisation of the fish trade; nor did the Ministry of Food, it seems,
demur. Meantime fish prices were still rising. On 6th May a meeting of the trade at Leeds passed
a resolution approving of a very simple scale of maximum prices at the ports. Hake and all flat
fish were to be 1 per stone, others, except sprats and salmon, to be 10s. The trade suggested that
these prices, together with schemes of allocation, should come into force on 1st June.
As with Icelandic cod, the Ministry, while regarding these prices as too high, was once again
prepared to accept them in order to get a scheme going while it prepared something more drastic;
there was talk of setting up a company that would take over all fish supplies at the coast. The
Treasury, however, received the trade proposals with surprise and disappointment. Had not the
time come (it asked) to take a firmer line with an industry that was exploiting the national
emergency to secure for itself a quite inordinate profit ? High fish prices were not merely
endangering the stabilisation policy; they were producing other embarrassmentscriticism of
the large sums being earned by the Danish vessels fishing from British ports; difficulties in
negotiation with Iceland; troubles over the replacement of lost vessels, as a result of the
ridiculously high price which the most decrepit trawler can command at the present time.
Crews, the Treasury alleged, were making such large sums on a single voyage that they were
unwilling to go to sea again immediately. Supplies of fish were therefore reduced, and local
authorities had to cope with numbers ofdrunken and disorderly fishermen. To remedy these
evils the Treasury advocated that the trade should be threatened with heroic, but none the less
(it claimed) feasible measures; the requisitioning of trawlers by the Ministry of Shipping; the
appointment of the owners, or if necessary other persons, to manage them at a suitable and

moderate remuneration and the setting up by the Ministry of Food of a distributing and selling
organisation.
The Ministry of Food, however, regarded the Treasurys proposals as unworkable 11 and the threat
to use them as a very dangerous weapon. No one knows better than the trade that the catching of
fish can only be carried on with the goodwill of the trawler owners and crews. A great part of
the difficulty in imposing maximum prices was that the remuneration of skippers, mates, and
crews was determined wholly or partly by the proceeds of each voyage; they could therefore be
relied upon to make common cause with the owners against any reduction in prices. Indeed, in so
far as owners profits were subject to Excess Profits Tax, their interest in high prices might be
said to be less than that of the fishermen. The Ministry therefore hit on a means to deprive the
crews of any grievance they might have as a result of its rejection of the trades price schedule.
The difference between the mens share under, respectively, the trade proposals and the
maximum first-hand prices the Ministry would agree to was roughly is. a stone. This amount
would be added to the maximum prices, but the whole of it would be handed to the fishermen by
prescribing that owners should settle with them12 as if the trade proposals were in force. As the
mens remuneration amounted to one-quarter to one-third of the landed price, this device enabled
the Ministry to secure a reduction of several shillings per stone without affecting the crews
earnings. In addition, it undertook, as a temporary measure to lower the retail price and ease the
working of the new allocation system at the ports that must come into force along with price
control, to pay the carriage charges on fish consigned to inland wholesalers, fish friers, and
retailers.

III
Meanwhile, at the insistence of the Legal Adviser, the framework of control was taking a rather
different shape from that which the Fish Division had originally contemplated. The broad
principles that the Division had laid down for conducting allocation at the ports were, he
remarked, not much use for the purpose of drafting an Order. The General Directions that it
proposed to issue, to the effect that wholesalers should continue to supply their normal trade
customers, had about as much legal effect as a homily in church. On the proposed exception
from allocation at the ports of fish normally consigned to another market, he observed that
Fish arriving to-day at, e.g., Hull, cannot be identified with fish which was consigned last year
to a particular destination, e.g., Birmingham. In consequence, it was decided not to include in
the Order any provisions for allocation, but instead to embody the allocation arrangements for
each port in a schedule attached to a formal Direction, signed on behalf of the Minister, and sent
to the Chairman of the Allocation Committee at that port. This arrangement would extend to
white fish what had already been done for herrings in the summer of 1940, when three sets of
Directionsone for the Moray Firth, one for the Firth of Clyde, and one for the rest of Great
Britain had been issued. Before it could operate, however, Allocation Committees for white
fish must be set up at all those portssome 60 in numberwhere it was customary to dispose of
catches by auction. The trade was not sufficiently well-organised, outside the eight main ports 13
to do this for itself; and the Ministry therefore enlisted the help of the Fisheries Departments.
Their local Fishery Officers set up, and generally acted as Chairmen of, the Allocation
Committees in the smaller ports; a member of the trade acted as part-time or full-time Allocation
Officer, at a small wage paid by the Ministry.
The Allocation Committees first, and indeed main, task was to draw up a rota of merchants
qualified, by having bought white fish at the port during a datum period, for an allocation under
control. (For the smaller ports generally, the datum year was the calendar year 1940; in one or
two of the larger ports an earlier year was adopted, by agreement among the trade.) Each
merchants share in the landings was to be fixed in proportion to the value of his purchases in the

datum year, though allocation itself was to be by weight of fish landed. Each merchant, or group
of merchants, in the larger ports, would be given a number indicating his order in the rota, and
allocation would begin on each day with a different number in order that all might have a turn at
first pick of the market. These principles had been worked out in laborious negotiation with the
trade during most of 1940.
Allocation was, of course, unnecessary at those ports where a single buyer habitually took over
the fish on landing, or where the fishermen themselves marketed the catch. (War-time shortage
of fish had, however, led merchants in some districts to seek supplies at creeks they had hitherto
neglected, and this had the result of extending the effective jurisdiction of allocation
committees.) Moreover, allocation did not imply the complete suspension of auctions, since it
only came into operation when the maximum price was bidor, in practice, when in the
judgement of those locally responsible, it was likely to be bid. If, that is to say, landings at a
particular time and place were especially heavy, of unpopular species, or in poor condition, the
pre-war procedure would be restored. Nor did allocation at the ports do anything to secure fair
distribution, within the framework of controlled prices, lower down the chain ; even though the
temporary arrangement whereby the Ministry paid carriage removed any incentive for coastal
merchants to favour nearby customers at the expense of others.
Indeed when Lord Woolton announced the proposals in the House of Lords on 25th June 1941,
he explicitly stated that price control was only a beginning and that a scheme of reorganisation
of the fish trade, whose extravagant prices he condemned, was forthcoming. 14 However, the
new arrangements worked more smoothly than had been expected; study of the implications of
reorganisation appears to have convinced the new Director of Fish Supplies of the need to hasten
slowly; and by October the Parliamentary Secretary was telling the House of Commons that a
more drastic scheme of control would not be introduced so long as the existing system of price
control continues to function satisfactorily. 15 The tone of this answer was perhaps a little
sanguine, for the further reduction in prices that the Ministry had enforced by a new Order 16 on
25th September, coinciding as it did with the beginning of the seasonal fall in landings, was to
expose the weaknesses in a system of allocation that began and ended in the ports. To the
complaints that reached it in increasing numbers from October 1941 onwards, Fish Division was
constrained to make the stock reply that the whole question was being looked into.
It was already clear that the allocation procedure needed to be freed from uncertainty and
anomaly. Trouble had arisen, mainly at the major ports, because this or that merchant found
himself excluded from allocation through a particular year having been chosen for the datum
period. Inland merchants who had changed their coastal suppliers since the datum year might
find themselves unable to get fish either from the old or the new source. Different ports followed
different practices. Moreover, the authority of the Allocation Committees rested on no firm
statutory basis, and the directions to them could not readily have been enforced. But no amount
of administrative and legal tidying up could in itself do much to solve the problem of
distribution, which was at bottom a problem of knowledge. As the Director of Fish Supplies put
it to a leader of the trade in November 1941:
Having done all that [cleared up the procedure] there is still the difficulty in finding out
where the fish is going. As you know, there are really no statistics in this industry at all
apart from landings. . . . Until that is known ... it will be very difficult to tamper with the
distribution.
A result of the Ministrys undertaking to pay carriage on fish consigned from the ports was to
throw up a mass of information on this very subject. At the end of November, the statisticians
attached to Transport Division produced an analysis of fish movements during a single week,

30th June6th July 1941. They presented a criss-cross of overlapping hauls. The large cities
were taking their supplies from almost every port in the kingdom; London, for instance, drew on
every one of the 19 major ports and on 41 others. There was a correspondingly wide dispersion
of the destinations to which ports sent fish; Aberdeen, the extreme case, sent it to every one of
the Ministrys Food Divisions, and the other ports were not far behind. Moreover, ports were also
receiving fish from other portsa practice that the Ministry endeavoured to stop by refusing
liability for the carriage charges except for approved cases.17
The conclusion drawn by Transport Division was that fish like other foods ought to be zoned
an undertaking for which the Ministry had taken powers by the Food Transport Order 18 of
October 1941. As early as August of that year the first of a series of transport rationalisation
proposals had been drawn up, in agreement with Fish Division. It proposed to divide the country
into five regions, served by five main ports (Hull, Grimsby, Aberdeen, Fleetwood, and Milford
Haven); to limit supplies passing through inland markets to the amount required for local needs,
and to restrict the circle of redistribution through these markets. Distribution from lesser ports
was likewise to be confined to the zone in which they were situated; that from coves and landing
beaches to their immediate neighbourhood. London, on account of its size, would be allowed to
receive fish from any of the ports, and would, in fact, provide a useful cushion to absorb casual
surpluses that might arise.

Footnotes
1

A cran is a unit, not of weight, but of measure : for the purpose of its control Orders, however,
the Ministry treated a cran of herrings as equivalent to 392 lb.
2

S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1426.

A similar scheme, whereby the Ministry took over (for curing) surplus herrings from the
Scottish catch of 1940, was, however, a failure.
4

A covert 2 per cent, allocation (out of the 92 per cent.) was also arranged for those

importers of frozen fillets who were not members of the group.

5

S.R. & O. (1940) No. 1997.

The Perry Committee on Milk Distribution was guilty of this error when it called upon the
high-cost distributors to put their house in order. See below, Chapter XIII.
7

S.R. & O. (1941) No. 440.

S.R. & O. ( 1941 ) No. 417.

The appointment of Mr. John Adamson, an accountant, was announced in June.

10

11

See Vol. I, Chapter XIV.

The Agricultural Ministers, who were responsible for the production side of the industry were
also, as was to appear later, opposed to requisitioning of vessels, at any rate as a punitive
measure.

12

By Section 10 of the Order (S.R. & O. ( 1941 ) No. 924). The provision applied to crews
signed under British articles only. An attempt was made to levy a corresponding charge on
catches landed by foreign vessels; but this provoked so much protest that it was dropped after a
few months. The Order revoked the earlier Order for Icelandic cod.
13

Aberdeen, Fleetwood, Hull, Grimsby, Milford Haven, Cardiff, North Shields and Hartlepool.

14

Official Report, House of Lords, 25th June 1941, cols. 511-514.

15

Official Report, House of Commons, 15th October 1941, col. 1368.

16

S.R. & O. (1941) No. 1468. It reduced all prices by 1s. or 1s. 6d. a stone, according to type,
and added a special category for hake, which had been erroneously classified as flat fish in the
June Order. This, in itself a compromise decision to avoid the troubles with West Coast
fishermen that would have resulted from classifying hake merely as round fish, was even so
undertaken with some misgiving, since the price of 9s. 6d. a stone was 7s. below the previous
price. The Ministry professed to have made arrangements to requisition trawlers at Milford
Haven, should the crews refuse to put to sea; but it is by no means clear that it would have been
able to man them. At the same time, a Treasury Charges Order (S.R. & O. (1941) No. 1495)
imposed a transport levy of 6d. a stone on all fish landed by British vessels, and 8d. a stone on
that from foreign vessels that were not bound to settle with their crews on the specially-enhanced
terms. This latter provision aroused so much protest that it was revoked after five weeks (S.R.
& O. ( 1941) No. 1755).
17

Namely, fish consigned in bulk from Fleetwood to Hull and Grimsby for redistribution thence
in boxes; and herrings requiring to be cured or salted at another port for want of facilities at the
port of landing. The Ministry experienced great difficulty in enforcing this embargo.
18

S.R. & O. {1941) No. 1694. For the general background of the Ministry's transport economy
measures, see Vol. I, pp. 335-6.

CHAPTER III
The Second Distribution Scheme, 1942
I
Agreement between the Fish Division and Transport Division on the principles of zoning was
easy; the putting of zoning into practice proved to be a long and tedious business. For the
Director of Fish Supplies, transport economy was no more than incidental to the larger problem
of securing fair distribution between one part of the country and another. The scheme for a
Ministry-owned company to take over all fish on landing had been put aside; the alternative, now
being devised, meant the tying of each and every fishmonger and frier, some 50,000 in all, to a
particular merchant or merchants. It also meant the calculation, for each of these traders, of a
basic quantity of white fish1 that he would be entitled to receive. The Division had decided to
adopt, not the datum performance principle that was used in allocating ingredients for cakes, or
for manufactured meats, but one that was intended to guarantee each of the zones and sub-zones,
into which the country was to be divided, an equal share of fish in terms of its population. It
would, however, still require to know the amount of each traders dealing during a datum period,
in order to determine his share of the total fish to be allowed to each sub-zone. An attempt to
obtain these particulars through the trade associations was only partly successful. Many inland

wholesalers, it appeared from the replies to a Ministry-inspired questionnaire, did all or part of
their business for cash and might not even know the names of their customers. It was necessary
for Fish Division to think again.
Meantime those responsible for transport matters, both inside and outside the Ministry of Food,
were becoming impatient. On 2nd March 1942 the Ministry of War Transport, in full though
covert agreement with the Director of Food Transport, sent the latter a formal threat: unless a
transport economy scheme were promptly devised and executed, Lord Leathers would be
advised to limit, by Direction to railways and road hauliers, the distance for which fish might be
consigned. By this time a revised version of the zoning scheme had been discussed in detail with
the railway companies; and the Director of Fish Supplies was induced to declare his intention of
introducing it on 31st May. This date was accepted by War Transport with reluctance, for the
invasion season is approaching; but it was completely unreal. Indeed, the difficulty in obtaining
returns from the trade was about to drive the Director to the conclusion that zoning ought to be
abandoned, or at any rate deferred until another reform he had in mind was complete
concentration of the wholesale fish trade. The Director might be excused for thinking that
this reform was his principal raison dtre. Had not the Minister referred, in the House of Lords, 2
to his new advisers knowledge and advice on problems of business reconstruction 3 and to the
scheme of reorganisation of the fish trade for which he was to be responsible? Had not a prewar committee of inquiry4 declared that there were too many port wholesalers, and did not the
mere fact that landings had fallen to one-third of the peace-time level emphasise the redundancy?
Surely (he might think) nothing could be more reasonable than to tell the trade, through its
recently constituted representative5 body, the Fish Industry Joint Council, that it must put its own
house in order and submit a scheme of concentration to the Ministry not later than the end of
March, failing which the Ministry would itself introduce a scheme.
The Director had not realised that a Government Department might not use its war-time powers
to bring about reforms for their own sake. Already he had had to be told that information might
not be extracted from traders by threatening that defaulters licences would not be renewed. 6 Nor
was he aware, it seems, of the special meaning that the Government had given to the word
concentration ; that it was a device to be justified, not on grounds of efficiency, but solely by its
yield in resources to the war effort, and that it was expressly designed to secure the reemergence, alter the war, of firms that might otherwise be extinguished. 7 The request to the Joint
Council had been sent without previous consultation with the Board of Trade, the Ministry of
Labour, or for that matter the Fisheries Departments. When, on 14th April, a deputation from the
Council asked the Fish Division for firm assurances that firms who merged their labour resources
would recover their right to trade after the war. and that the labour required after concentration
would enjoy protection against call-upassurances that were, in fact, basic principles of the
policy laid down in the White Paper on Concentration the Division professed itself unable to
give them. One cannot wonder that the Council should prefer to put the onus of devising a
scheme back into the hands of the Ministry, when from first to last neither the principles of
concentration, nor the safeguards the Government had proposed for individual firms, were
properly explained to it. The process visualised by the Board of Trade, in which temporary
marriages were negotiated between firms, was one eminently suited to the fish trade ; indeed,
two enterprising firms at Hull had actually made such a marriage as early as October 1941. The
Ministry of Food, however, so far from treating this as a welcome precedent, had found some
difficulty in knowing what to do about it, and had had to ask the Board of Trade for advice.
The trades refusal of responsibility for concentration left the Divisions own planswhich were
at once ambitious and vague in the air. It was forced to bring them to earth by itself
undertaking investigations at the main ports and inland centresa process that could not be got
under way until the end of April 1942. The result, broadly speaking, was at once to confirm the

Division in its view that concentration was intrinsically desirable, and to show that it would
release no useful premises and only a limited amount of unskilled and clerical labour. Even so, as
late as September there was still talk of a Ministry concentration scheme, and even, once again,
of setting up monopolistic companies at the ports ; and it was not until the end of December
1942 that these projects were finally abandoned.
Inflated, because priori, expectations of what benefits might accrue from the concentration of
industries were so rife in 1941-42 that the Fish Division cannot be judged too harshly for sharing
in them.8 But it was fortunate for the Ministrys reputation that the Divisions proposal, made
before its local investigations had even begun, to postpone the zoning scheme until concentration
should be complete was overruled. Instead, the Division was told to get on urgently with zoning;
the outstanding difficulty in allocating supplies through inland merchants, namely the absence of
datum figures, was settled by entrusting this task to local committees drawn from the trade, with
an independent chairman appointed by the Ministry. (These new Fish Distribution Committees
would be separate from the Allocation Committees set up the previous year at the ports.)
II
Much had yet to be done, however, before the zoning scheme would be ready to operate. It still
needed to be discussed formally with the Fish Industry Joint Council and the various interests not
represented on that body. In the ten months or so that had elapsed since the scheme was first
drafted, the Ministry and the trade had become increasingly at cross-purposes about it. Repeated
requests, more particularly after unauthorised details of the Ministry's plans had appeared in the
trade press in February, from this or that interest to be heard had been met by the reply that the
Ministry would reveal them through the Joint Council when it was ready. At the same time
certain members of the trade were known to be in the Fish Divisions confidence 9a fact that
only aroused additional mistrust of the Ministrys intentions among those who were not.
Suspicion and dis like of the concentration proposals, which were not always distinguished from
those for transport economy, added to fear of the latter. The dictum fish is fish, used by the
Ministry to mean that the preference of individual consumers for particular types or species of
white fish must yield to the need to eliminate long hauls and cross hauls that had arisen to serve
this preference, was, sometimes at any rate, misconstrued to mean that fish at the coast would be
pooled ; and always opposed lest it mean that certain species would become unsaleable.
At the end of May 1942, before the Ministrys scheme was ready to be presented to the Joint
Council, the latter put forward what professed to be a rough outline of proposals that would
economise transport without dislocating the distribution of fish. There could be no doubt that
these proposals were not a satisfactory alternative to zoning, for they did little or nothing to end
the long and cross hauls of which the Ministry of War Transport and the railways complained.
The Ministry of Foods decision to refer the proposals thither was, therefore, no more than a
courteous gesture, and its result a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless the ensuing negotiations
lasted several months and but for the fact that the Ministrys scheme was not yet perfected might
have delayed it seriously. Only when the Fish Industry Joint Council was convinced, after several
full-dress meetings with the Ministry of War Transport and the railway companies, that these as
well as the Ministry of Food regarded the trades proposals as inadequate, did it perforce assent
that zoning should be tried. At a meeting with Lord Woolton himself on 22nd September
representatives of one section of the trade after another expressed misgiving, but also promised
co-operation.
Zoning wasit must again be emphasisedonly part, and that the simplest, of the new deal for
fish distribution. The pressure on Fish Division from the transport authorities altered, and
perhaps hastened the completion of, the Divisions schemes; but it had been groping of its own

accord towards a reorganisation that would have aimed at a more equal apportionment of fish
between different parts of the country, and that must have contained some such device as the
customers list, now introduced as part of the zoning scheme. Port merchants 10 were furnished,
through the newly appointed Fish Distribution Committees, with a list of customers, retail or
wholesale, showing the proportion of the merchants allocation to which each was entitled. The
merchant was obliged to offer his fish, whether allocated or free (i.e., bought by auction below
the maximum price), to the customers on his list; only when they were completely satisfied
might he offer it elsewhere and then only to customers within the zone allotted to his particular
port. There had been one major alteration to the zoning scheme as originally planned ; the
Birmingham area was allowed to draw supplies from Hull as well as from Fleetwood. Similar
provisions applied to the inland wholesaler, who was, in addition, forbidden to re-consign fish
more than 20 miles from his premises. 11 A wholesaler who was also a retailer might not divert
surplus fish to his own retail business. To watch over all these arrangements, the Ministry
appointed full-time Fish Distribution Officers at the principal ports and at the Divisional Food
Offices, thus for the first time giving Fish Division adequate representation in the field.
Simultaneously with the two Orders12 enforcing the zoning and distribution schemes, there was
introduced a third13 that for the first time established the Port Allocation Committees on a firm
legal basis; unlike the others, it applied to herrings as well as white fish. The limits of
jurisdiction of each Committee, in terms of a stretch of coastline and five miles inland therefrom,
were set out; a standard procedure for allocation was laid down, including a special priority for
buyers of white fish on behalf of hospitals and NAAFI. All three Orders came into simultaneous
operation on 17th October 1942.
At once it became apparent that the Joint Councils promise of co-operation was hollow. For
months before the introduction of the scheme the trade press had resounded with cries of woe
and forebodings of disaster. The whole industryfish-friers, fishmongers and merchants, cried
the fish-friers of Leeds on 13th October, will have to smash this scheme if we want to try to
preserve the industry.14 A few days later the Joint Council, presenting its annual report, was at
pains to disclaim any responsibility for the scheme; 15 the Council resolved to hold another
meeting on 23rd November, at which reports from its constituent bodies on the working of the
scheme would be considered. That day immediately became for large sections of the trade a day
of decision, when the final battle with the Ministry of Food would be joined. As the Fish Trades
Gazette put it:
Its [The Joint Councils] assembling time . . . was apparently regarded as a sort of zero hour and
the gathered forces started manoeuvring. Last week the friers tested the defences of the Ministry,
when they asked that delegates should be received to stress their plight through maldistribution. .
. . Then on Monday morning retailers attending Londons Billingsgate had a skirmish with the
Fish Distribution Officer for the metropolis and peppered him with their complaints. . . . Also on
Monday the retailers went into action and after an all-day engagement fired a telling shot in their
demand for an inquiry. And on Wednesday the coastal wholesalers completed their plans for
going into the line with the remainder of the industry on Thursday. . . .
A cynic might have said that the trade were united for the first time since September 1939, and
from similarly selfish motives. On the face of it, there was nothing in the Ministrys plans to
justify the mingled truculence and hysteria with which they had been greeted; no reason why the
fish trade should not, after three years of war and in the manifest national interest, submit to
inconveniences no greater than those inflicted on many others. So too the appointed leaders of
the trade, the members of the Fish Industry Joint Council, might at the very least have counselled
their constituents to have patience for a few months. At the same time, it ought to be
acknowledged that this crisis in the relations of trade and Ministry was at bottom a crisis of

confidence, for which the trade ought not to take all the blame. Clearly, the Ministry had not
succeeded in living down the fiasco of September 1939, itself largely brought about by
attempting to run fish distribution from the centre. It had not dispelled the suspicion of being
under the influence of the big battalions in Hull and Billingsgate. It had been publicly identified
with vague, and to the trade menacing, threats of concentration, of a kind for which it had neither
legal powers nor Parliamentary mandate, and in pursuit of which emissaries of the Director of
Fish Supplies, sometimes without any first-hand knowledge of the industry, had but recently
been visiting the ports and inland markets. The average small fish merchant, making a good
living perhaps for the first time in his life, could not be expected to know that the bark of the
gentleman from Ministry headquarters was worse than his bite. If he were an Aberdonian, he
would still remember the day when large quantities of fish were sent by Government order to
decay in the railway yard at Blair-Atholl, deep in the Grampians.16
If, that is to say, the trade were tilting at windmills, it was partly in a mistaken but sincere
attempt at self-defence. But that did not make it any less necessary that the Ministry of Food
should stand firm under the hail of resolutions, letters, and questions in Parliament that now fell
upon it. To the demand of the Fish Industry Joint Council, unanimously adopted on the 23rd
November, that the scheme should be withdrawn, Lord Woolton decided to make a personal and
public reply in terms of unequivocal frankness. On 8th December he told the Council that he
would not consider abandoning the scheme, which had already justified itself in terms of
transport savings. After referring to the efforts the Ministry had made to get an agreed scheme,
he went on :
We never expected perfection but the scheme might have been much nearer perfection if
the members of your trade had come forward and helped it at an earlier stage. . . .
I must also tell you that I am not prepared to allow this scheme to be sabotaged by
anybody.
I propose to make a communication to the Press in the precise terms which I have used
to you to-day. . . .17
A few days later the Parliamentary Secretary (Mr. William Mabane, M.P.) in replying to a
motion on the adjournment by Mr. Gallacher, took the same line; the need for transport
economy had been urgent, the Ministry patient, the trade unco-operative :
The trade predicted failure before the scheme was introduced. Within a few weeks
resolutions were being passed announcing failure.
I myself, at Question Time in this House, did my best... to give accurate replies yet from
time to time even the accuracy of my replies was challenged outside. We admitted that
there were mistakes but emphasis was laid on the mistakes.18
The display of resolution was sufficient to quell both the protestants in the trade and the doubters
in Parliament. The Fish Industry Joint Council appointed a committee to co-operate with officials
in amending and improving the scheme; the Ministry, as always, showed itself conciliatory in
matters of detail ; doubtless the dropping of the concentration proposals helped to improve the
atmosphere. At any rate, for the remainder of the war, and indeed for the whole period of control,
there appears to have been fair harmony between trade and Ministry. One reason for this may
well have been the very existence of controlled distribution; though irksome to the trade, it
brought the Ministry, through its Fish Distribution Officers, to master the idiosyncrasies of each
individual fishing port, to establish personal contact with the merchants, and hence, almost

inevitably, to abandon the priori approach that had hitherto been all too obvious in its dealings
with fish.

III
Although the control of distribution had been the Ministrys main concern, and was certainly its
most important achievement, since the introduction of price control more than a year earlier, it
had also continued efforts to increase the supply of fish, particularly from Iceland. Icelandic
trawlers had been, of course, landing a certain amount of fish direct at British ports; in addition
various carrier ships were bringing fish from Iceland. One firm of trawler owners, Hellyer Bros,
of Hull, had suggested as early as October 1940 that the Ministry should itself charter carrier
vessels for this purpose. The Ministry had declined, but the firm had undertaken the enterprise
itself and had volunteered to hand over the profits to the Ministry. So successful was the
enterprise that in eleven months, October 1940-August 1941, the Ministry had been paid about
250,000.
In the spring of 1941, with price control in the offing and alarm being expressed in Iceland at
enemy attacks on trawlers, Mr. Owen Hellyer suggested that the time had come for the Ministry
of Food to buy the whole exportable catch of Icelandic fish. In conjunction with the Ministry of
Economic Warfare, a mission, of which Mr. Hellyer was a member, was sent to Reikjavik in
April. After lengthy negotiations in which, inter alia, the Icelanders stipulated that the United
Kingdom should supply them with about 140,000 tons of coal, an agreement was initialled in
Reikjavik in August 1941, whereby the United Kingdom undertook to buy the entire production
of white fish for the year 1941-42. The Ministry of Food opened an office in Reikjavik; the
handling of the fish was entrusted to Mr. Hellyer and his firm as the Ministrys agents, on terms
that represented a refund of their expenses, including an Icelandic sub-agents commission.
A novel item in the Icelandic contract, so far as most British consumers were concerned, was a
large quantity of fish (mainly cod) that had been wet-salted, i.e., immersed in strong brine for
several days and afterwards dried in the open. Before the war, such small quantities as had been
imported into the United Kingdom had mainly been converted into dry-salted fish for export.
The Ministry believed, however, that in the present shortage, and given a proper send-off by
publicity, wet-salted fish would make an acceptable substitute for use both in the home and by
fish-friers. On arrival, the fish would be handed over to salters to undergo a process described as
washing and pressing, and thereafter distributed through coastal merchants. 19 Before cooking,
the fish would need to be de-salted by soaking for 24 hours or more; and the intention was that
this should be done by the retailer, who would thereby profit from the 20 per cent, or more of
water that the fish would absorb. The salters and coastal merchants took up the new addition to
the countrys food resources with enthusiasm; the Ministrys Public Relations Division launched
a mammoth campaign to coincide with the first release of supplies, re-christened fresh-salted as
supposedly more attractive; press advertisements and radio talks were focused on it, threequarters of a million recipe leaflets 20 were distributed through fishmongers, and posters were
displayed in Food Offices and fish-friers shops.
Few of those persuaded by the campaign to try the novelty were willing to make it a habit; its
wholesomeness and low price (9d. a lb.) 21 were not sufficient to outweigh its leathery texture,
unaccustomed colour, strong smell, and the difficulty of de-salting it enough for eating. Fishfriers, to whom it had been confidently recommended, refused to repeat their orders. Within a
fortnight of launching the fish on the market, the Ministry was constrained to explore ways and
means of disposing of it. A proportion of the cargoes arriving was infected by pinka virus
disease affecting its appearanceand would in any event have to be converted into dry-salted
fish, for which there was a ready market in Spain. Several fish-smokers had experimented with it

as a substitute for finnan haddock, with results described by the Ministrys experimental kitchen
in terms varying from very nice to terrible. In the hope of finding a large-scale outlet, the
Ministry set up Smoked Salted Fish Advisory Committees at the ports, and prepared a schedule
of controlled prices for the smoked product.22 Wet-salted fish of a quantity unsuited for the retail
or frying trade was offered to fish-cake manufacturers.
During January and February 1942 the Fish Division continued to push wet-salted cod. Early in
March it was decided to amend the price-control Order to allow wholesalers to de-salt and fillet
it, in the hope that it would then be acceptable to friers. But by the time the amended Order 23 was
issued, on 28th March, the supply position had completely changed. Salters were coming to the
end of their stocks: the 4,000 tons earmarked for Spain had had to be reduced by 1,000.
Expectations that 30.000 tons of wet-salted fish would come forward from Iceland in the new
year were to be falsified: owing to shortage of labour and the high profits to be had from fresh
and frozen fish, only a few hundred tons had been salted down.
If the prospective famine in wet-salted fish threatened to embarrass the Fish Division, the
successful disposal of the 20,000 tons that had been imported still carried with it a note of
triumph :
I pay no attention, wrote a member of the Division, to what has been said by the
fishmonger or the fish frier about salt fishthe fact remains that we bought 21,000 tons
and this, on the top of 5,000 tons in the country at the time . . . has, apart from the
shipments to Spain, been eaten. ... Is our present Iceland policy sound? Ought we not to
push the trawlers on to salting . . . without salt fish we may be in a sorry position next
winter.
It was fortunate for the Ministry of Food that the recommendation that followedthat 40,000
tons of wet-salted fish be procuredwas not, or could not, be carried out. For closer analysis
suggests that the principal means by which disposal was achieved could not have been repeated
in any subsequent season, simply on account of the development of the Ministrys own fish
control.
Detailed figures of what happened to the 1941-42 imports do not appear to have been recorded;
but one or two indications are suggestive. In the first place, the net quantity that had to be sold on
the home market was not 20,000 tons, but less than half of that amount. Indeed, as early as 10th
November the leader of the Grimsby salters had concluded, from an analysis of a representative
cargo, that after allowances for loss of weight on the journey and during processing, and the
rejection of fish not suitable for marketing as washed and pressed, the out-turn was not much
more than one-third of the weight of fish packed in Iceland. Secondly, the requests for further
supplies that began to reach Fish Division from about March 1942 onwards came, not from
fishmongers or friers, but from contractors supplying what one might call captive consumersin
mental hospitals, for example. Thirdly, salters had great difficulty in disposing of wet-salted fish
otherwise than through the wholesale trade in fresh and frozen fish or to smokers. A cargo of 800
tons, specially consigned to an Exeter salt-fish merchant for distribution in the West Countrya
region where dried salt fish is habitually eaten proved so difficult to sell that nearly half of it
was left in March, and had to be moved to other ports for disposal, mainly by drying.24
It seems likely that a Leith salter was on the mark when he wrote to Fish Division : It is no
secret that coercive measures were employed by the fresh fish trade to ensure the marketing of
the salted fish ; in other words, that acceptance of salt fish was made a condition of the supply of
fresh or frozen fish. No other explanation is sufficient to reconcile the indifference or hostility of
fishmongers, friers, and public alike, with the fact that the fish was got rid of. As for the

advertising campaign, it seems to have been so much out of scale with the actual quantity on
offer, that, had it been fully effective, a shortage of salt fish would have occurred like that of
oatmeal a year earlier.25 That this did not happen, even allowing for the inherent unattractiveness
of the fish to most British palates, may perhaps be set down to the near-coincidence of its release
with the first, and most lavish, issues of luncheon meat and canned salmon on points. Had the
Fish Division been in closer touch with the food supply situation as a wholehad it been aware,
when negotiating the Iceland contract, that heavy Lend/ Lease supplies of canned meat and
canned fish were on the wayit might have thought twice before importing salt fish in abnormal
quantities. (Its location in London, away from the rest of the Supply Department in Colwyn Bay,
may explain this isolationist outlook.) At any rate, the ability of the trade, as yet unrestrained by
zoning and customers lists, to unload the surplus by whatever means, served the Ministry well,
and even enabled it to make a profit.
Imports on such a scale were never again attempted; even so, in the season of 1943-44 when
10,000 tons were brought in, mainly from Canada and Newfoundland, several bulk movements
contrary to the zoning schemee.g., Leith-Northern Ireland, Leith-Liverpool, Grimsby-South
West Englandhad to be made, at Ministry expense, to clear salters stocks. In fact, the Ministry
did not succeed in developing any new markets for wet-salted fish. All it could do was sell more
than formerly in those areas, like Liverpool and the West Country, that had always consumed salt
fish; even then, it had to contend with regional preferences that made Newfoundland fish
unacceptable in the Scottish Lowlands, and large Iceland cod unsuited for the Liverpool trade.
Even fish-cake manufacturers, who had at first been willing to take up sizeable amounts, began
to express perturbation at the declining demand for fish-cakes made solely of salt fish, and had to
be offered a proportion of frozen fillets to mix with it.
It will be convenient here to recount the subsequent history of the bulk contracts with Iceland.
After the United States took over from the United Kingdom responsibility for the defence of that
country, it was arranged that payment for fish supplied to the United Kingdom should be made
under Lend/Lease, and a new Agreement had been drawn up accordingly, in November 1941, to
expire on 30th June 1942. In the negotiations for a new Agreement, the Ministry of Food could,
therefore, merely advise the Americans about price, and it was with some misgivings that it saw
them concede to Icelandic importunity an increase of about 28 per cent., compared with an
estimated general price rise in Iceland of about ten per cent. However, the particular fear that
British fishermen would in their turn demand much enhanced prices for the winter of 1942-43
was not realised.
This Agreement was extended beyond its term of a year, and it was not until February 1944 that a
new Agreement was reached, to run until 31st December. The United Kingdom reassumed
liability for paymenthalf in sterling, half in dollars; the prices of fresh and frozen fish were
unchanged, that of the cheapest item, salt fish, of which the Ministry, in face of the small
demand, would take only 3,500 tons, was raised by about 30 per cent. The Ministry also secured
the insertion in the contract of two clauses to protect itself against the supply of poor quality fish,
one providing for the inspection of cargoes both in Iceland and on arrival, the other for the
blacklisting of vessels that repeatedly delivered inferior cargoes. These precautions had been
rendered more necessary because the Farocse and Icelandic carriers who brought much of the
fish, finding their profits squeezed between increased prices to the catchers and stationary
controlled prices in the United Kingdom, were tempted to overload their vessels and stint the ice
in which the fish must be packed.

IV

One minor consequence of price control gave Ministry of Food legislators a good deal of trouble
during 1942. Before the war, in order to protect the fishing grounds against depletion, the
Fisheries Departments had issued Orders26 regulating the size (i.e., the mesh) of nets, and also
prohibiting the landing of fish below a certain lengthgenerally nine inches. Such of these
smaller fish as would inevitably be caught in trawls of an approved mesh must, that is to say, be
thrown back into the sea, where many of the fish might be expected to survive. In October 1939,
however, the Fisheries Departments had revoked this latter Order27 on the ground that the waste
of possible human food that might result would in war-time be indefensible. The Nets Order,
however, was deliberately kept in force.
Even before the imposition of price control, there were hints that fishermen were taking
advantage of the relaxation and purposely landing the undersized fish. As early as May 1940 the
Fisheries Departments issued a warning to trawler-owners against this practice. With price
control in force, more particularly as the winter of 1941-42 advanced, the Ministry of Food
began to receive complaints that undersized fish, of no food value except to cats, were being
included in allocations, boxed, iced, and forwarded (at the Ministrys expense) to inland markets.
Test samples taken by the Superintendent of Billingsgate Market in April 1942 showed that some
boxes of flat fish were counting 32 to the pound avoirdupois. 28 In November 1941, the Fisheries
Officer at Milford Haven reported that trawlers were deserting the more distant and more
hazardous hake fishing in favour of very small dabs and whitings close inshore. Fish Division
asked the Fisheries Departments, therefore, to consider reimposing the prohibition on landing
immature fish. The English Department, and the Northern Irish, were willing to do so, the
Scottish was not :
. . . many Scottish fishermen, in the belief that the original Revocation Order applied to mesh of
nets as well as to immature fish, are now fishing with a smaller kind of net than is legal, and, if
the Immature Fish Order was restored, difficulties might arise as to equipping themselves with
new nets.
The deadlock between the merits of prohibition, as seen by the English Department, and its
political disadvantages, as seen by Scotland, was complete. Both sides were, however, willing
that the Ministry of Food should prohibit the sale of immature fish for human consumption. If
the only outlet for this fish were the fishmeal factory, there was no risk at all that catchers would
seek it out deliberately.
When, however, Fish Division proposed to include a provision to this effect in its newest Order
on prices, the Ministry of Foods Orders Committee threw the proposal out on the grounds that it
was proper to the Fisheries Departments; and the Committee maintained its objection in the face
of explicit assent by the Minister to an Order being made on his behalf. It was, however, overruled, and a simple Order prohibiting the sale of fish (with certain exceptions) less than seven
inches long came into operation on 1st June 1942. (In October, the limit was increased to nine
inches.)29
At about the same time, price control was extended to fresh salmon as the outcome of a course of
action devised as an alternative to it. In January 1942 Fish Division, while concluding that
control of salmon prices was impracticable, had sought to prevent exporters in Eire from
reaping scarcity profits by itself becoming the sole importer of Eire salmon, just as it had for
Icelandic cod. The Eire Government was constrainedby the absence of another outletto
agree to a bulk contract at prices that, although generous by comparison with past seasons, yet
could not but disappoint expectations from this one. Nine firms pre-eminent in the salmon trade
were selected to act as Ministry agents; these stood out successfully for a commission of 5 per
cent, as against the 2 per cent, that the Treasury thought sufficient.30

Arrangements were completehad, indeed, already been announced by the Eire Government
before, in accordance with established procedure in the Ministry of Food, they were submitted to
the Food Supply Board31 in Colwyn Bay, which recommended that they be not authorised unless
price control were introduced. There it was felt that the Ministry would otherwise be open to the
charge of profiteering; the view that price control was impracticable was, moreover, vigorously
rebutted by expert advice that happened to be on the spot. Since there could be no going back on
the Eire deal, this meant that the Ministry would now be committed to control the price of all
salmon. Much against its willfor it had no illusions about the likely effect of price control
without control of distributionthe Fish Division set about drafting an Order. Once again the
Divisions isolationgeographical and mentalfrom the rest of the Supply Department at
Colwyn Bay proved a stumbling block. The Margins Committee declared that the proposed
producers price of 4s. a lb. which the Division had fixed after discussion with them and the
Fisheries Departments, was 1s. too high, 32 and had to be overruled by higher authority on the
ground of urgency.
The Margins Committee also objected, in accordance with the principle of fair remuneration for
services rendered,33 to the Divisions proposal to make no provision for smoked salmon in the
Order, i.e., to kill the salmon-smoking trade by making it unprofitable. If it were proposed to
prohibit salmon-smoking, well and good; but in default of such a policy decision, the Committee
would be concerned to recommend the appropriate reward for the service. Inevitably, therefore,
the Ministry was driven to control smoked salmon prices also. 34 Moreover, when it sought to
cancel the agreement with Eire, on the ground (a) that price control had destroyed the need for it
(b) that much poor quality fish was coming forward under it and (c) that a differential price was
unfair to Irish producers, the Treasury refused to agree; the opportunity of making a profit on a
Government deal in food (said the Treasury) was too rare to be forgone. (Notwithstanding the
introduction of price control, the Ministry made a profit of 160,000 on Eire salmon in 1942.)
So far as salmon distribution was concerned, the Ministry contented itself for the 1942 season
with a request to catchers and wholesalers of home-caught salmon to base supplies to their
customers on performance in 1940. That year was chosen in preference to 1941 because in the
later year the established pattern of the trade had already been distorted by a growth of direct
sales from catchers to retail fishmongers and above all to catering establishments. The request
was not invariably complied with, and for 1943 it was made legally obligatory on producers in
Scotland and Northern Ireland and on all wholesalers, i.e., on all the organised part of the trade. 45
Salmon netted in England and Wales, and all salmon caught by rod and line, were exempt
(though not from price control) ; supplies from Eire continued to be dealt with through the
Ministry panel of agents. These arrangements, with some amendments, of which the most
important was the inclusion of salmon netted in the Coquet and Tyne fishery districts, and in the
River Tweed, in the controlled scheme of distribution, remained in force until the end of fish
control in 1950. (Salmon, but not smoked salmon, was also included in the varieties whose
supply to catering establishments was restricted by Order.)
As far as one can judge, salmon control worked smoothly enough and without complication
within the unambitious limits that were set for it. The merits of controlling a purely luxury article
are, of course, arguable, and were argued at all times; had not the War Cabinet in August 1940
resolved that such foods should be allowed to find their own price level? Such detachment from
the moral aspect of famine prices, even for foods consumed by the wealthy, was however, not
practical politics for the 1942 Ministry of Food.

Footnotes

It would have been impracticable to zone herrings, because the catch and the ports of landing
vary with the season.
2

Official Report, House of Lords, 25th June 1941, Col. 514.

In the steel industry.

The Sea-Fish Commission for the United Kingdom in their Second Report of 1938 (Cmd.
5130), esp. pp. 58, 74.
5

Not wholly representative; Hull trawler owners and Birmingham wholesalers refused to join it.

The ruling from higher authority deserves quotation; We feel that we must keep the power of
revoking licences to some important offences which will be recognised in Parliament and the
country generally as being prejudicial to the interests of the consumer rather than merely
inconvenient or a nuisance to the Ministry of Food.
7

See Vol. I, p. 322 seq.

See Vol. I, Chapter XXV; also Hargreaves & Gowing, Civil Industry and Trade in this series
(H.M.S.O.).
9

The preponderant influence in the Fish Divisions counsels at this time appears to have been
that of Hullthe most up-to-date and efficient, and therefore least typical, fishing port.
10

Initially, in the ports of Fleetwood, Milford Haven, Swansea, Cardiff, Newlyn, Brixham,
Grimsby, Hull, Aberdeen, Fraserburgh, Buckie, Lossiemouth, Arbroath, and Eyemouth.
(Newhaven [Leith] ranked as an inland market.)
11

Special provision was made for the London and Birmingham areas.

12

The Fish (Distribution) Order (S.R. & O. (1942) No. 1982); Food (Transport) Directions
(S.R, & O. (1942) No. 1983).
13

The Fish (Port Allocation Committees) Order (S.R. & O. (1942) No. 1981).

14

Fish Trades Gazette, 17th October 1942.

15

16

17

18

Fish Trades Gazette, 24th October 1942.

When the writer visited Aberdeen in 1946, this happening was still fresh in mens minds.
Ministry of Food Bulletin No. 168 (11th December 1942).
Official Report, 17th December 1942, Col, 2184.

19

Salters were allowed a quota of up to one-fifth of the total for direct distribution to their
customers.
20

One recipe will exemplify the ingenuity of the Ministrys experimental kitchen in combining
ingredients on other than gastronomic principles. Brown Fish Stew with Beans, 1 lb. of freshsalted cod prepared by the fishmonger. 2 cupfuls of small haricot beans. 1 lb. of carrots. 1 pint of

brown gravy. 1 tablespoonful of Worcester sauce. 1 tablespoonful of dripping. 1 teaspoonful of

sweet herbs. Pepper. Soak the beans in cold water for at least 24 hours, then simmer for 1
hours; add the carrots sliced thinly and simmer for a further hour. Melt the fat in a saucepan.
Cut the fish in small pieces and toss it in the fat till lightly browned. Add the beans, gravy, sauce
and seasoning. Simmer for 20 minutes. Serve with wheatmeal toast.
Haricot and other beans were being almost thrust upon the United Kingdom under Lend/Lease at
this time (October 1941); the biggest carrot crop in British history was about to come to market ;
and the campaign to popularise National Wheatmeal Bread was making little or no headway. (A
fourth over-plentiful food, American fat heavy bellies of bacon, formed with haricot beans the
centre-piece of another recipe in the same advertisement.)
Even so, the description of this and similar recipes as delicious was surely stretching the
meaning of that word too far; it recalls Lord Buckmasters complaint in May 1917, that the
measures of Lord Devonport had been recommended to the public by means that had hitherto
only been extensively used by the vendors of quack medicines (quoted Beveridge, op. cit., p.
39, footnote 1).
21

Prescribed in the General Order already cited (S.R. & O. 1941) No. 1468). Retailers alone
were allowed to sell the fish de-salted; its absorption of water to an extent variously estimated as
from one-third to one quarter by weight enhanced what would otherwise have been a small profit
(2s. a stone).
22

Embodied in S.R. & O. ( 1941 ) No. 1904, which came into force on 1st December. Fish
Division would have liked to describe the smoked fish as Smoked Fresh-Salted, but this
contradiction in terms was too much for the Legal Branch. In January a further category was
added; dry-salted fish, which could thereafter be sold on the home market (S.R. & O. (1942) No.
4).
23

S.R. & O. (1942) No. 585.

24

155 tons is recorded as having been sent to Hull, 80 tons to Grimsby and 72 to Liverpool. A
further 150 tons, infected with pink, had been sent to Leith earlier that wintermaking a total
of more than half the original cargo.
25

The publicity campaign was avowedly geared to secure a consumption of 1,000 tons a
week. On the basis of the Grimsby salters calculation, this would have exhausted supplies in
about seven weeks; in fact they lasted six months.
26

The Sea Fishing Industry (Fishing Nets) Order, 1937 (S.R. & O. (1937) No. 281) ; the Sea
Fishing Industry (Immature Sea Fish) Order, 1938 (S.R. & O. (1938) No. 1506). Nets used for
herrings, whitebait, and shrimps were excepted.
27

By S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1323.

28

The Superintendent later estimated that as many as 100 boxes7,000 lb.of these tiny fish
were coming into Billingsgate daily.
29

The Immature Sea-Fish Order, 1942 (S.R. & O. (1942) No. 957; amended by S.R. & O. (1942;
No. 2102). The Scottish Home Department fougnt a strong rearguard battle over the amendment,
claiming that there was a good market for eight-inch haddocks; eight-inch flat fish were also said
to be saleable in Lancashirepoints that underline the difficulty of legislating for fish as fish.

30

The exclusion of other firms that had previously imported Eire salmon appears to have been
contrary to general Ministry of Food practice, and evoked some protest.
31

For the functions of this body, see Vol. I, pp. 217-18.

32

If margins are to be decided by negotiation (minuted the distinguished accountant who acted
as Chairman of the Margins Committee) then heaven help the consumer.
33

See Vol. I, pp. 109-10.

34

From 17th August, by S.R. & O. (1942) No. 1561. The Order controlling fresh salmon was
S.R. & O. (1942) No. 956.
35

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 110.

CHAPTER IV
The Period of Fullest Control, 1942-5
I
The structure of fish control, as completed in October 1942, was not fundamentally changed for
the rest of the war. However, changes in the supply position, and the need to keep allocation and
distribution at once firm and flexible, meant that the Ministry could never reduce its
administrative activities merely to routine, nor desist from amending the Control Orders.
The proper working of first-hand allocation at the ports, on which the whole subsequent process
of distribution depended, required a nice balance between opposing tendencies to malpractice on
the part of catcher and merchant, which turned on the right of the latter to refuse any lot he
considered unsuitable. Scruple was, indeed, to be enjoined on him by enactments protecting the
inland wholesaler and retailer from the consignment (at Ministry expense) of, for instance,
sharks, squid, fish heads, skeletons and livers, unskinned dogfish and catfish, and monkfish with
their heads on.1 But the provision in the Allocation Order whereby, if four buyers in succession
on the rota refused a lot of fish, that fish might be withdrawn and sent for auction, i.e., rendered
free, lent itself to collusion, which at one port, Aberdeen, became so serious as to undermine
the whole system. After much discussion, the Order was amended so that if, of fish so rejected, a
certain proportion reached controlled price at auction, those who had refused it should lose a
turn instead of being offered another lot. In general, however, allocation at the principal ports
did not cause much trouble, because the trade was well organised; but the effort to enforce it at
some of the smaller Scottish ports was out of all proportion to the amount of fish involved. What
was perhaps an extreme casethe attempt by the Ministry to discipline the fishermen of St.
Abbs, in Berwickshirewill illustrate this law of diminishing returns very aptly.
St. Abbs is about three miles from the much larger port of Eyemouth, and in the past such small
quantities of white fish as had been caught by St. Abbs boats had been landed at Eyemouth for
auction. In 1940 John Burgon & Sons, a firm of fish merchants that had formerly been mainly
interested in the herring trade, took up the white-fish trade seriously, and in that year handled 70
per cent, of catches; with the result that when the Ministry of Food set up an Allocation
Committee in 1941, Burgons acquired the right to that proportion of white fish passing through

Eyemouth. So great was their domination of the market that in the summer months when
whitings in particular were plentiful, they could maintain prices at well below the control figure;
other local merchants had not the labour to increase their turnover of fish, and outsiders were, of
course, excluded from admission to the Eyemouth rota.
In the autumn of 1941 certain fishermen of St. Abbs began to land their catches there instead of
at Eyemouth; one Hugh Wilson, a crippled ex-joiner and relative of some of them, acting as
agent on their behalf, iced, packed, and consigned the fish to traders, mainly retailers, in
Edinburgh. The Eyemouth Committee protested to the Ministry of Food, which directed the
fishermen to resume landings at Eyemouth ; this they declined to do, and as Port Allocation
Committees had as yet no statutory foundation, there was no means of coercing them. With the
issue of the Allocation Order of October 1942, however, the Eyemoutn Committee obtained
authority over the coast-line south of St. Abbs Head, and in January 1943 it appealed to the
Ministry of Food to stop the evasions. At the end of March the Ministry formally warned the
skippers that they were breaking the law and that if they continued to do so, it would refer the
matter to the Procurator-Fiscal. In May a representative of Fish Division in Edinburgh visited St.
Abbs and saw the fishermen and their agent; he was told that they would not willingly agree to
anything that would deprive Hugh Wilson of his livelihood, and would, indeed, cease fishing
rather than submit to allocation.
Fish Division in London confessed itself at this point to be in a cleft stick. The amount of fish
escaping allocation was not large perhaps 5 per cent, of the landings in the Eyemouth district.
There was no question of black market, and Wilson was said to have kept admirable records and
paid the levy on landings regularly. To deprive him, a small man, of his livelihood for the benefit
of Burgons, the large firm, might lead to political trouble for the Ministry. (Moreover, though the
Division does not appear to have noted the fact, the one was as much an interloper into the
white-fish trade as the other; it was a pure technicality, the choice of the 1940 datum, that gave
Burgons their right to a virtual monopoly.) On the other hand, not only the Eyemouth
Committee, but the Distribution Committee at Newhaven was up in arms against toleration of an
abuse that allowed certain Edinburgh traders to get an extra amount of fish, and would not cooperate with Headquarters by adjusting the supplies that these traders received from Newhaven
to take account of their supplies from St. Abbs.
Reluctantly, therefore, Fish Division turned the case over to Enforcement Division, whose
officers arrived on the scene in August, a few days after 200 stone of fish had had to be dumped
in the sea at Eyemouth because the buyers would not take it. This naturally was made the most of
by the St. Abbs men, and Enforcements Edinburgh representative found the argument
convincing. The fishermen, he said, had good reason for refusing to send to Eyemouth; it would
be inadvisable to prosecute, and indeed it is extremely doubtful if any Procurator-Fiscal would
entertain prosecution in the circumstances. The Procurator-Fiscal for Berwickshire, consulted at
the beginning of October 1943, endorsed this view. It would be better, he thought, to license
Wilson and his fishermen to continue.
In November, therefore, Wilson accepted a verbal proposal on behalf of the Ministry that he
should receive a wholesalers licence together with a customers list made up of Newhaven
secondary wholesalers. News of the Ministrys decision, however, got abroad before it could be
put into effect ; Burgons and the Eyemouth Allocation Committee sent in protests, and the
Chairman of the Newhaven Committee threatened to resign. Fish Division in London thereupon
sent a senior officer to Eyemouth and St. Abbs to seek a solution, and as a result put forward a
compromise : to set up a special allocation list at St. Abbs to include both Wilson and the
Eyemouth buyers; to make Wilson part-time Allocation Officer at a small wage from the
Ministry; and to license him as a wholesaler, as already proposed.

What seemed a reasonable proposal to London, however, was regarded by the Ministrys
Enforcement Officer in Edinburgh as untenable. Wilson and the fishermen utterly declined to
accept it; the twenty per cent, share the former was now offered in St. Abbs landings would, he
claimed, not give him a living, and to add insult to injury the Ministry was going to hand over
fifty per cent, or more to Burgon. An attempt to persuade the latter to reduce his claim on the St.
Abbs fish failed. Finally, Wilson, who had previously indicated more than once that he would
like the Ministry to take him to court, sent what officials described as a fiat defiance of the
Ministry order; and with misgivings, at any rate on the part of the Divisional Food Office in
Edinburgh, it was decided to prosecute him.
The case came up for trial at the Duns Sheriff Court on 30th June 1944, and Wilson was
acquitted, on the ground that he was no more than an Agent on behalf of the fishermen and as
such not liable to penalty under Scots law. The Ministry was now in worse straits than ever. It
could not take away the wholesalers licence that had been issued to Wilson at the time of its
near-agreement with him, for he had been proved guiltless of any offence; it could not prosecute
the fishermen as principals because their separate catches once boxed could not be identified as
having been sold to Edinburgh fishmongers ; moreover, several of them were exempt from
prosecution by reason of having appeared as Crown witnesses (in which capacity they had
torpedoed the prosecutions case by their evidence of Wilsons Agency). Consultation with the
Lord Advocate suggested that the point of law taken by the Sheriff had never been settled in
relation to a statutory, as distinct from a common-law, offence, and though a case to determine it
might be brought in the High Court, the outcome was uncertain. There seemed no alternative to
capitulation, which was negotiated between the Divisional Food Officer and Wilsons attorney
on 18th December 1944; but before it could take effect, Wilson had fallen sick and died, and
amid general consent the business passed to his widow.
On 24th March 1945, licences were issued to seven St. Abbs skippers authorising them to sell
their fish through the agency of Mrs. Wilson, who was given a wholesale licence and a
customers list composed of the inland wholesaler and the five retailers who had hitherto taken
St. Abbs fish; their entitlements at Aberdeen and Newhaven were docked accordingly. St. Abbs
became a specified port from which the Ministry of Food would pay carriage inland on a firsthand sale. (Mrs. Wilson continued to trade till July 1949, when she voluntarily gave up her
licence because catches had become too poor to make it worth while.)
Ironically enough, this solution of the problem might have been achieved earlier if officials had
been less unwilling to take extreme measures, since the quirk of Scottish law that gained Wilson
his acquittal might have been disclosed, whether in court or otherwise. But the acquittal was not
in essence technical at all :
I cannot help thinkingwrote an official in November 1944 that the decision of the
Court was influenced by a broad view of what was equitable, with first consideration
given to the party who normally is least able to help himself and is most open to
victimisationthe small producer. Other injustices . . . dwindle in comparison with the
crime of giving the fisherman nothing, or less than his due, for his labours. The St. Abbs
men have been in that position . . . the Wilson developments . . . have been brought about
by inequitable administration of the plan [of allocation at Eyemouth],
On this view, all would have gone right but for Burgons exploitation of their dominant position
in the local market. One may grant that, and yet not exculpate the Fish Division for its handling
of the case. The conferment, through the operation of the 1940 datum period, of quasi-monopoly
powers on a single buyer was something of itself calling for vigilance; indeed, one might have
expected administrators to grasp any opportunity for providing a safety-valve. Three times in

1942 alone they rejected such chances: in January, when a reasoned petition from the St. Abbs
fishermen against compulsory allocation was rejected out of hand; in the summer, when the
Order defining the jurisdiction of Allocation Committees was in preparation ; and in October,
when six St. Abbs fishermen were refused licences to sell as producers. In the last resort, it was
lack of imagination that vitiated the Divisions repeated efforts to be conciliatory.
The main lesson of the St. Abbs case, however, may not lie here or in the pitfalls that Scots law
presents to English administrators.2 It is rather in the revelation of the basic disadvantage of any
control measure that depends on the freezing of a particular pattern of trade; namely, that the
controllers will find themselves enforcing something not because it is equitable, but because it
happened to exist at a particular point of time. For fish, the situation was exacerbated by the late
date at which control was imposed, so that the trade was already distorted by war, and also by the
sheer absence of information on which to construct an equitable system. (After the war, the
Ministry was to encounter the full force of this problem that of change under controlwhen it
had to expand the controlled market to meet increased landings and provide for traders returned
from the Forces.)

II
During the winter of 1942-43 the zoning-cum-distribution scheme experienced, as one member
of Fish Division put it, continuous rough weather; but with the spring, the seasonal
improvement in supplies enabled the Ministry to relax the schemes provisions, and so both
appease the trade and itself gain respite for overhaul. In April new Orders were issued making a
number of changes in zonal boundaries3 and altering, for the time being, the obligation of the
wholesaler, primary or secondary, to offer his supplies to his customers in the proportion
specified by the customers list. This rule still applied to those customers, e.g., of a port
merchant, who were secondary wholesalers; for the others it would suffice if they were offered
not less than the amount supplied during the four weeks beginning on 27th February. After these
requirements were fulfilled, the wholesaler might supply other customers within his zone (or in
the London area), whether they were on his list or not.4
Fish Division had thus temporarily conceded a point vehemently made by its trade critics,
namely that the attempt to relate supplies to the population of each sub-zone, instead of to datum
performance, was unsound in principle and unworkable in practice; it had led (the critics said) to
some country districts being over-supplied with fish, while industrial areas went short. But the
Division was unwilling to give up its equalitarian ends without a further attempt to make the
means of achieving them more efficient. One cause of inequality, the variation in landings in
different zones, was admittedly incurable, though it could be mitigated by releases of frozen fish
from cold store (and of salt fish, if the public had been prepared to eat it). But at this stage of the
scheme the Division could reasonably argue that a more potent cause was the inadequacy of the
original customers lists. The information on which these were based had not shown, for
instance, what proportion of an inland traders supplies were taken in fillets whose weight is
equivalent, broadly, to twice that amount reckoned in whole fish. Friers, in particular, who
habitually take all their supplies in fillets, found their entitlement half what it should have been; a
phenomenon that of itself might account for the emergence of apparent plenty in country districts
within the same sub-zone.
During the summer, therefore, customers lists were completely revised in the light of fresh
returns from coastal merchants distinguishing between whole fish and fillets, and on 5th October
a fresh Order5 was issued reimposing, as from 16th October, the obligations contained in the
original Distribution Order. In addition, fish sold by a wholesaler on commission was made
subject to them, and powers were taken to serve customers lists on individual first-hand sellers,

i.e., to regulate distribution inland from the smaller ports where no auctions took place. But
though the scheme appears to have worked more smoothly than in the previous winter, it soon
became apparent that the equal distribution at which it aimed was as far off as ever, simply
because, with the improvement in the war situation, the pattern of landings was beginning to
shift back towards that prevailing before the war. The Fleetwood and Milford Haven zones, the
latter partly because preparations for the invasion of Europe had disturbed fishing, were losing
ground to the East Coast ports, as the following table shows :
Distribution of White Fish Landings by Ministry of Food Zones
Percentage of Total Landings
(b)
(a)
1944
Zone

19
38

(propose
d)

October 1943 -June 1944 Single Week Ending 17th June

(actual)
1944

A. Fleetwood

.
9'3
.

27.4

26.9

18'5

B. S. Western

.
7'3
.

10'3

8'1

4.8

30.
9

13'8

15'3

25.0

. 41'
. 3

17'7

19'0

19'7

11'
2

30.8

30'7

32'0

C. Grimsby

D. Hull

E. Aberdeen

Moreover, there was reason to suppose that this trend would continue with the reopening of
North Sea fishing grounds, and the departure for their home waters of Allied trawlers working
out of Fleetwood. In consultation with the trade and the railway companies, therefore, the zonal
boundaries were revised and with them, of course, the customers lists, to take effect on 4th
November 1944.6 These revisions in great part achieved their aim in adjusting distribution to the
proportions desired in each zone, taken as a whole. But it was suspected that the population
figures for March 1943, on which the entitlements of inland wholesalers and retailers had been
based, were by the spring of 1945 outdated; and returns to the Ministry were to show that equal
per capita distribution was nowhere near being achieved :
Retailers Receipts of White Fish by Food Regions {expressed as a percentage of their
theoretical entitlement on a population basis)
Novemb
Food Division

Decemb

Janua

Februar

er

er

ry

1944

1944

1945

1945

Northern . .. ..

81'2

97'6

92'0

100'2

North Eastern . . . .

113'8

123'6

130'4

122'8

North Western . . . .

96'9

86.8

100'7

96.4

North Midland . . . .

97'0

100'8

101'5

107'2

Midland . . . .

94.8

83'1

103'3

91'7

North Wales , . . .

69.0

58.4

74'6

63'3

South Wales .. ..

60.7

44'1

58'6

46.5

Eastern I . . . .

89'7

97'0

7906

95'2

Eastern II . . . .

83'4

88.4

81'3

91'9

Southern . . . .

90'8

96'3

80.8

100'3

S. Eastern .. . .

97'3

100'4

98.8

101'9

South Western . . . .

76.6

70.0

79'4

69'1

London .. ..

161'9

157'3

153'4

141'9

North Scotland .. . .

67.4

96.4

66.7

107'2

North East Scotland . . 80'7

91'2

64.9

81'3

South East Scotland . . 102'6

103'8

81'6

111'8

East Scotland . .

99'9

126'1

99'6

120'7

West Scotland . .

101'0

115'2

86.9

95'1

Northern Ireland ..

29.4

31'6

27'9

30.6

The more spectacular discrepancies, such as those between London and South Wales (to say
nothing of Northern Ireland) cannot be explained either in terms of out-of-date entitlements or
the failure of landings in each zone to fulfil expectations. (The amount of fish going to London is

all the more remarkable when one recalls that it was the winter of the flying-bombs and rockets.)
The trade (it was commonly said among members of Fish Division) was indifferent or hostile to
equal distribution; certainly its representatives had made no secret of their preference for a
simple datum line, rather than the complex notional points system of the Ministry, as the basis
for entitlement. However that may be, it looks as if fish had an inveterate tendency to go where it
was most wanted, and that Londoners got the lions share because they were traditionally the
least choosy about species. The excess supplies in London represented not a consistent diversion,
which would have been remedied by a revision of entitlements, but an accumulation of casual
surpluses, whether in species, such as dog-fish, roker, and berghyllts, that many traders were
unwilling to take, or arising simply from the inability of small fishmongers, or friers whose
turnover was limited by their supplies of frying fat, to handle more than normal war-time
quantities.7 Moreover, because London was allowed to receive supplies from all zones, it had
obviously the best chance of getting any such surpluses.
The fact is, of course, that the whole thesisfish is fishon which the zoning scheme was
based was something that the consuming public just did not accept. The regional preferences and
dislikes, to serve which the fantastic criss-cross of rail journeys had developed, were not to be
smothered by a universal fish-hunger, even with supplies down to one-quarter of normal. In wartime, even more than in peace-time, fish held the status not of a necessity, like bread, meat, or
sugar,8 but of a semi-luxury like (say) cereal breakfast foods, the less popular varieties of which
proved an embarrassment under zoning; and as with these, price control tended to reduce or
obliterate distinctions between types and qualities. While the customer might be willing to spend
money and probably effort in queueing or shop-crawling to secure fish of a kind that was
known and, if not liked, tolerated, she would not, generally speaking, do so for another kind that
might require special treatment. It seems unlikely that the equal per capita distribution all over
the country at which the Ministry aimed could have been achieved even without zoning. But the
interdiction of the free movement of different species to their customary points of consumption
must have added to the inequalities. This disadvantage was, however, small compared with the
saving of transport that the scheme accomplished.
For the winter of 1945-46, with a prospect of increasing landings, mainly on the East Coast, as
trawlers were released from war service, the Ministry reverted to the relaxed form of the
distribution scheme that had prevailed during the summer of 1943, i.e., fixing a minimum
quantity to which each retailer would be entitled; not, however, this time in relation to a datum
period, but to a notional total of weekly landings of white fish, which was fixed, for the whole
country, at 8,000 tons. Fish in excess of the due proportion of this figure for each port was
deemed to be free fish, that the coastal merchant might send to anyone within his zone (though
he must offer the inland wholesalers on his list their proportionate share of this, as of tied fish).
Furthermore, the permitted radius of redistribution by inland wholesalers was increased from 20
to 30 miles, and from Billingsgate, over the whole of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex.9
Even before this revised scheme had come into operation, however, the Ministry was coming to
the conclusion that the transport restrictions should be removed entirely. They were the one
feature of control to which the trade remained completely unreconciled : others licensing,
price control, the transport levyit was willing should remain, at any rate for the time being. As
with other foods, the case for abolishing zoning was strengthened, politically and
psychologically speaking, by its being almost the only relaxation that could safely be allowed as
a result of the Armistice. So, amid only faint expressions of regret from the transport authorities,
it was announced early in the New Year that zoning would end on the 2nd March. 10 The structure
of port allocation and regulated inland distribution was, of course, unaffected by this change. Just
over a year later, in May 1947, the increase in fish supplies enabled the Ministry to dispense with
control of inland distribution and licensing of retailers. 11 A clause saving the rights of inland

wholesalers continued, however, to be imposed on coastal merchants until the abolition of price
control, and with it port allocation, in April 1950.12

III
Shortly after the end of zoning, there was suspended 13 another provision of the full distribution
schemethat by which supplies of fish were restricted to catering establishments other than fishfriers. An Order14 to this effect had been rather hastily introduced in December 1942, in an effort
to get more fish to the householder in the famine season. As caterers bought by retail, the
Ministry had not had any means of controlling their purchases, whereas those of friers were
limited by the new Distribution Scheme. Various devices, such as restricting the service of fish to
two days a week, were considered but rejected in favour of a link between the return of meals
servedon the basis of which a caterer got his supplies of rationed foodand the amount of fish
he was authorised to buy. An allowance, in pounds weight per 100 main meals and breakfasts
served, varying according to season, would be worked out and notified to each caterer by his
local Food Office.
The analogy with rationed foods was not very close, because the essential feature of a permit
systema tie between customer and supplierwas omitted. There was nothing to prevent a
caterer from hawking his authority from one supplier to another; no obligation on the supplier to
see that the amount authorised was not exceeded. The provision, usual in such Orders, that the
caterer must keep records of his purchases, could readily be evaded by, for instance, invoicing
the correct quantity of prime fish and supplying a large quantity of cheap fish. In short, the
scheme, as the Ministrys Rationing Division had seen from the beginning, was bound to be
largely bluff, anyhow ; which meant that it bound only the virtuous caterer. Some of these were
hit hard; Madame Prunier herself wrote to complain that her supplies were cut to one-tenth of
what they had been. Could not the Ministry make an exception for those caterers who used
nothing but fish? The reply was that it could not, or rather would not; but it would allow them to
have meat on the same terms as ordinary caterers. (The rejoinder, if any, is not on record.) More
pathetic was the case of another, probably unique, London restaurant that sold nothing but boiled
fish and therefore could not be treated as a frier; its proprietor was reported to be trying to keep
going with shell-fish, which were exempt from the Order.
Wholesale recourse to shell-fish was, of course, ruled out for the majority of caterers by their
price, as well as by the eating habits of customers. Already before the introduction of the Order,
however, there had been some pressure on the Ministry to control the price of crabs and lobsters,
on the ground that fishermen were giving up white fishing in favour of the more profitable and
less arduous search for shell-fish. At first all the complaints of this practice came from the northeast coast of England, but in February 1943 complaints were heard from Glasgow and Edinburgh
caterers that London firms, doubtless with higher permitted charges for meals, were paying up to
10s. a pound for lobsters. In April, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries made an Order 15
which had the effect of confining crab and lobster fishing from Northumberland and Durham to
those boats that had previously engaged in it; the Ministry of Food proposed to introduce price
control for crabs and lobsters.
On trade advice, and as it seems without knowledge of the difficulties that had arisen with other
foods, the new Order16 imposed maximum prices at the retail stage only. Caterers were not slow
to take advantage of the opportunity, nor fishermen of the advantage of selling direct to caterers;
the ordinary wholesaler and retailer found themselves without lobsters altogether. To their
complaints Fish Division responded by proposing a further extension of control, i.e., including
shell-fish in the Order limiting caterers supplies of fish; and when this was opposed by Catering
Division, it proposed instead that all shell-fish should be made to pass through wholesalers and

retailers, by prohibiting caterers from buying except from a retailer. The rationing and catering
side of the Ministry poured scorn on this proposal also; it was, they said, put forward for the
benefit of the fish trade and for no other purpose :
The Ministry (wrote another senior official) has never set out or intended to ration everything
or to secure absolute equity in everything to everybody. Any attempt to pretend that it is trying to
do such a thing is just asking for trouble. Even if by such a manoeuvre as is proposed here a few
more individuals acquired a few more shell fish I cannot see that the war effort is assisted one
little bit.
Nevertheless the Minister, in October 1943, approved the proposal. When, in the customary way,
the draft proposals were put before a representative meeting of caterers, they evoked loud
protest. In particular, it was claimed that the majority of caterers buying lobsters had always done
so from the coast direct, and that it was unreasonable of the Ministry to stop them doing so.
By this time it was becoming clear that the Ministrys ground for doing anything at all about
shell-fish was nothing like as firm as it ought to be, and, with a new Minister about to take office,
the Order was held up for further enquiries. The claim that most lobsters for caterers were bought
direct could not be substantiated but neither could the counter-claim that the inland wholesaler
was being bypassed under the existing Order. Three out of four Billingsgate merchants whose
books were examined by the Finance Director of Fish Division had actually increased their
turnover in lobsters since the controlled price had been introduced. Nor did the allegations of
malpractice made by the fourthwhose lobster branch was losing money and on whose advice
the Division was proposing to introduce more complete controlfind support in his competitors
accounts.
Protests from other sources appeared to have died down, perhaps because loopholes had been
found.17 In short, the trade had settled down under the Order, and it seemed best to let it rest.18
At the other end of the range of control, and completing it, was the Order of December 1942
controlling the price of fish-cakes, valued by the Ministry as a means of eking out fish supplies,
of using-up unpopular varieties, such as salt-cod and pickled fillets, and of encouraging potato
consumption. The Ministry already controlled the price of the separate ingredients, and to control
the final product, both in price and composition, was not only a natural step to protect the public
but in line with the general policy for manufactured foods of all kinds. The standard fixeda
minimum fish content of 25 per cent.likewise embodied the compromise between quality and
economy that was typical of war-time. In November 1944 the standard was raised to 35 per cent.,
but with the rider that manufacturers must now use the proportions of fresh, pickled, or otherwise
processed fish that the Ministry might prescribea measure designed, as it appears, less for the
protection of the consumer than for the disposal of the various imports made by the Ministry
under bulk contract. At the same time, the minimum weight and maximum price of fish cakes
were raised respectively from 2 to 2 ounces and from 2d. to 3d. apiece.19

IV
More important than these extensions of price control were the negotiations with the producers
over the general level of white fish prices. When, in September 1941, the Ministry issued its
second price control Order, it had arranged with trawler owners for a monthly return, voyage by
voyage, showing the proceeds of the catch and its distribution between expenses, mens
remuneration, overheads and estimated net profit; all of which should serve as a guide in the
future determination of prices. During the winter of 1941-42 landings were so low that the
trawling industry lost money for the first time since war began; and it was therefore agreed to let

the same controlled prices run throughout the summer of 1942, i.e., for a full year. With the
spring, landings and profits recovered, and the small loss on the winter seasons working was
rapidly wiped out; indeed, the profit of the whole fleet, for the year ended September 1942, was
1 millions, or 1s. 2d. per stone of fish landed. Revised prices embodied in an Order of that
month20 showed only slight reductions (6d. a stone on hake, 3d. on the coarse varieties described
as other fish) ; it was thought inopportune to be more drastic at the beginning of the winter
season.
For the summer of 1943, however, substantial cuts were planned, which the industry, having
accepted the winter prices and pleaded that they should be higher than the summer prices, could
scarcely resist in principle at any rate. Profits were still rising; thanks to a good autumn, they
totalled millions for the calendar year 1942. As the Treasury, intent on an absolutely stable Costof-Living Index, did not want fish prices in the shops to vary by even one-halfpenny a pound, the
Ministry of Food decided to vary its transport levy, reducing it to 1d. a stone in winter and
raising it to 1s. in summer. This levy, being paid by the first-hand buyer, would offset exactly the
proposed price changes to producers and thus enable the maximum prices at subsequent stages of
distribution to remain unaltered. In addition, the Ministry proposed yet again to attack the price
of hake, which it contended was no more costly to catch than other round fish, and should
therefore be included among them.
These changes were calculated to make, other things being equal, a reduction of some 7 d. per
stone, or one-half, in the trawler-owners average net profits ; and were not likely, therefore, to
be well received, even allowing for the cushion effect of Excess Profits Tax. The profit
upwards of half a million poundsexpected to be earned on the new prices was nevertheless
generous in terms of the capital value of the rump of the fishing fleet, variously estimated at two
to four times that amount; or compared with the charter-hire of those modern vessels taken by
the Admiralty. And, in fact, the owners proved to be quite unable to make out a case against the
Ministry proposals. A cut in prices, however, also meant a cut in crews pay; a cut, moreover, that
would be embodied in the revised Third Schedule of the price-control Order, laying down the
fictitious prices on which owners and crews were to settle. For the varieties making up the bulk
of the catch, the settlement price was now to be 7s. 2d. a stone as against 8s. 9d. (11s. for hake). 21
Moreover, deductions for fish sold ungutted were increased from 12 to 20 per cent.
For some time past the trawler-owners and the Transport and General Workers Union had been
attempting to negotiate a new wages agreement, which, inter alia, would have reverted to actual
prices as a basis for settlement. These negotiations appear to have been taking place on the
assumption that the existing controlled prices would continue; and though both sides of the
industry must have been well aware that prices were likely to be reduced for the summer season,
it was unfortunate, from a tactical point of view, that Fish Division should not have taken the
earliest opportunity of informing the mens leaders of its plans. Instead, they were allowed to
learn of them first through the employers, by the medium of a conversation between the Director
of Fish Supplies and the Vice Chairman of the Fish Industry Joint Council (on which labour was
not represented) ; whereupon owners and men jointly appealed to the Ministry to hold its hand,
until they should have more details.
This was on 25th February 1943. In the first week of March the draft price schedules were sent
to the parties, and in the following week, the Director of Fish Supplies had meetings both with
the owners and mens representatives and with the Fish Industry Joint Council, all of whom
asked that the new Orderdue to come into force at the beginning of Aprilshould be
postponed so that they might complete their negotiations. The Director, however, refused to offer
more than a fortnights grace, on the ground that there was no imminent prospect of a new wage
agreement; and indeed it was admitted by the mens leader that there were 'big principles

involved. Amid continued protests, therefore, the new Order22 was made on 30th March, to
come into effect on 10th April.
Before that date, crews at Milford Haven, North Shields, and Fleetwood had gone on strike
against the new prices; and it became the duty of the Ministry of Labour to intervene. At an
eleventh-hour meeting on 9th June of the two sides of industry and departmental representatives,
Fish Division agreed to postpone the Order for two months on condition that the prices therein
were accepted; the question of the Third Schedule was left for discussion between the owners
and the mens representatives. On 21st May the parties pace the continued misgivings of the
Divisionreached agreement on terms allowing for the abolition of the Third Schedule, and a
revised Order23 was thereupon issued. Even so there were unofficial strikes at Milford Haven and
Fleetwood about the price of hake; but the fishermen were induced to return to work by a
promise that it would be re-considered when the winter prices came up for review.
Fish Division made no secret of its belief that the trawler-owners and the men had connived to
drag out the wage negotiations in the hope of securing better prices, from which both might
benefit. (That the former would leave no opportunity, however unlikely, of defending their
profits is shown by their appeal, early in April, to the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries; an
appeal that was promptly and effectively countered by a request from the Minister for detailed
figures to support it.) If that were so, the Division had presented them with the opportunity by its
neglect of protocol. To make an Order that in specific terms reduced the mens wages, without
full and formal consultation with their representatives, was so unprecedented as to bring rebuke
from the Ministry of Labour. As in the matter of concentration, the Division evinced a strange
unawareness of the obligations of a Government Department; and this enabled the industry to
extract advantage, both moral and financial, from a situation in which the merits of the case were
overwhelmingly on the side of the Government. Nor was the moral advantage merely temporary;
for the rest of the war the mere threat of a fishermens strike was to hamstring officials efforts to
reduce profits they considered to be exorbitant.24
V
For the winter of 1943-44, the general level of prices was restored to what it had been the
previous winter ; but as a measure of assistance to inshore fishermen, an increase of price equal
to the difference between the rate of levy in summer and winter was awarded on prime fish (brill,
soles, and turbot), halibut, and other flat fish, the prices of all of which had not been reduced for
the summer months. For the sake of industrial peace, hake was once again removed from the
ruck of common fish and given a small premium of 7d. a stone. A number of minor changes were
made in distributive margins, of which the chief was a readjustment between those of coastal and
inland wholesalers, to the advantage of the latter; but, armed with costings data, the Division was
able to resist claims from the Fish Industry Joint Council for a general increase. 25 In the spring of
1944, however, the trawler-owners asked that the winter prices should be maintained, and that
the price of hake should be put up by 1s. 2d a stone, i.e., to 8s. 1d. They claimed that the costs of
running trawlers were constantly going up, particularly the price of coal; that the east coast ports
had only done well recently because of the opening of new fishing grounds in the North Sea, and
these were already showing signs of exhaustion, and that the west coast ports, which largely
relied on hake, were not doing so well. Moreover, they regarded the present price of hake as
scandalous, compared with that of inferior species like cod or dogfish, which before the war
had commanded nothing like the same price. (There can be no doubt that the Ministrys
persistent effort to degrade hake prices, however well justified on the grounds of costs, showed a
want of feeling for established tradition; it may also have encouraged the landing of species
whose yield in food was less.)26

The Ministry was not impressed by the general claim, for it estimated that the trawling industry
as a whole had already made in the six months from 1st July 1943 a profit equal to that it was
expected to make in a whole year. There is only one thing wrong with fish prices, declared the
Ministrys Finance Department, and that is that they are too high. Even the west coast ports
(with the possible exception of Cardiff) had not done too badly; Hull, though with only eight
trawlers, was earning 1s. 10d. a stone estimated net profit. If, therefore, a further concession
were to be made on hake, it ought to be offset by a cut on something else; but to all the possible
candidates there was some objection. To reduce the price of plaice or whiting would hit the
inshore fishing industry; to do the same for dogfish would have a disproportionate effect on
certain small ports like Mevagissey. In no case would the really high profits, at Hull or Grimsby,
be touched. After much debate it was decided, and the Treasury persuaded, that an increase of
7d. a stone over the previous summers hake price (i.e., a reduction of 4d. on the winter price)
might be given without any other change.27
In September, fortified by an analysis of the trawler-owners trading profits for the whole year
ended 30th June, the Finance Department again put forward proposals for reducing prices.
Mainly thanks to improved landings, on the east coast particularly, that profit was put at 1
millions netnot far short of, if not equal to, the total assets employed. It suggested a cut of 1s. a
stone on flats and 7d. on rounds, estimating that this would still leave the trawler-owners with
more than a million pounds net profit per year. Administrators, admit though they must the
evidence of the figures, felt however that any change would be inopportune. It was the winter
season; the benefit to the consumer would be negligible or (in the case of the supplies going
through fish-friers and caterers) nil; the cut would fall with severity only on the inshore
fishermen and the less prosperous trawling ports. Was it not better (they asked, to the scandal of
the Ministrys Finance Department) to leave Excess Profits Tax to do the job? The debate was
carried to the Minister, who accepted a compromise proposal that no change be made at once, 28
but that producers be warned of a reduction in the spring; 'I fully agree (he wrote) that we must
take steps to reduce the very large profits which producers of fish are now making.
The warning was duly given; and in December the Ministry put forward to the various sections
of the trade its proposals, to operate from 15th March 1945. Briefly, there was to be a cut in
producer prices amounting, on the average, to 11d. a stone, assuming that landings of the
different species remained in the same proportion; cuts in distributors margins estimated to save
1d. a stone at the wholesale stage and 3d. a stone at the retail stage; and a consequent cut in
retail prices averaging 1 d. a lb. These would operate for the summer season only; and the
Treasury was now willing to see a rise in retail prices in the autumn.
As in the spring of 1943, the trawler-owners opposed the reduction without being able to produce
any decisive arguments against it; the men again opposed the consequent cut in their wages, and
talked of restoring the fictitious basis of settlement in force from 1941 to 1943 ; the inshore
fishermen claimed that they were already suffering from the high cost of gear and from the loss
of the quality premiums their fish commanded before the coming of price control. The Ministry
had some sympathy with these last, and got the Treasury to agree that they might be given relief
by prescribing a higher maximum price and a lower levy for inshore-caught fish. It also prepared
to make some concessions on the general price proposals.
Nevertheless, it was uneasy about the outcome. There were many inshore fishermen (it was
expertly advised) who were doing as well or better than trawlermen at the smaller ports; the
proposed concession might therefore evoke outcry if it were general, and would certainly do so if
it tried to distinguish between one set of inshore fishermen and another. The possibility of a
strike seemed all the more menacing because the world food situation had sharply deteriorated
with the prospect of peace. The Ministrys trade adviser indicated what he called the easy way

outabandoning general price reductions and instead making them only on the coarser species,
such as dogfish, skate, and coalfish (saithe)and the Minister, who had already thought it best to
put the problem before his colleagues in the Lord Presidents Committee, grasped at this
suggestion, with which, he said, he personally would be content. The Fisheries Departments,
who had also been uneasy, concurred; Ministers agreed; and the new Order 29 was made
accordingly. In the words of the Ministry of Foods Finance Department, the decision 'renders
any further examination of fish producers earnings of academic interest only.
That bitter comment was not, in fact, to be justified in the long run, for the autumn of 1945 was
to see the first of a series of reductions in both producers prices and distributive margins, that
were more drastic than anything hitherto proposed. 30 They took place, of course, amid restoration
of fleets, increasing landings, and the impending disappearance of the hated zoning scheme; and
under a Government whose hand was strengthened from a recent General Election, instead of
being weakened by a coming one. There was not, as there had been in March 1945, a prospect,
however illusory, of early decontrol to cast doubt on the wisdom of driving control too hard.

VI
By contrast with the complex and turbulent history of the white-fish control, that of herrings was
uneventful. The seasonal character of the trade, more marked in war-time when the East Anglian
autumn fishing was suspended, and the varying ports of landing, rendered zoning out of the
question; but herrings were, of course, subject to port allocation, which had indeed begun with
them. Some excitement was caused in August 1943 by the heaviest Scottish landings since
before the war; despite a hasty exemption, by General Licence, 31 offresh, roused and sprinkled
herrings from the catering restrictions, a feverish publicity campaign, concessions on carriage
charges, and an increase in the controlled price for pickled herrings, there were yet instances of
catches having to be dumped back in the sea.
For the following season, therefore, the Ministry opened negotiations with the trade at Aberdeen
and the Moray Firth ports in order to secure the orderly marketing of as many herring's as
possible. Its scheme was to underwrite, by the promise to purchase for Relief, an arrangement
whereby surplus' fish, i.e., those not required by kipperers and freshers, should be handed over
to salters and redders at a fixed price (of 55s. a cran). An essential corollary to the Ministrys
offer was an agreement between fishermen and buyers on the minimum price for the home
market, i.e., the price below which herrings should be deemed surplus; failing this, a price war
might develop as a result of which fish might be dumped on the Ministry instead of into the
sea. Another corollary was the regulation of sailings by mutual agreement so as to avoid if
possible the temporary gluts, followed by complete cessation of fishing, that had occurred the
previous summer. Negotiations were not easy, for buyers and fishermen mistrusted each other
and the latter were (it was said) still incensed by the reduction in maximum prices, from 98s. to
91s. a cran, that the Ministry had made in the spring of 1943. In mid-May, however, the two
sides agreed on a minimum price of 78s. a cran for kippering and freshing, and that Joint
Committees should be set up in each port to advise the Ministrys Herring Control Officer at
Fraserburgh.
The scheme was due to begin on 27th June 1944; but a foretaste of trouble with the fishermen
occurred a few days earlier, when a heavy landing of herrings called for a temporary closing of
the ports. Certain fishermen at Macduff were only with great difficulty dissuaded from putting to
sea; and the Division looked round hastily for means to reinforce the agreement. The Scottish
Home Department agreed to delegate to its local Fishery Officers, who were working with the
Herring Control Officer, the power, taken by Order in 1939, to issue Directions regulating the
sailings of drifters. This power was only used on one occasion 32 but the apprehensions that

caused it to be invoked were soon justified. The fishermen at Fraserburgh and Peterhead,
dissatisfied with the proportion of the catch being taken by kipperers at the maximum price,
repeatedly declined to co-operate with the Herring Control Officer in regulating sailings so as to
produce a steady supply for curing. On 6th July and again on the 12th they refused to sail at all;
on the 13th and 14th, having previously agreed to divide the fleet, they put the whole of it to sea
and only the fact of light landings prevented a surplus. Then, for a fortnight, they fished with half
the fleet and a restricted number of nets, although landings were palpably insufficient for market
requirements. On 31st July, however, they decided to fish without restriction; it was freely stated
in Fraserburgh that this was done to swamp the Ministry of Food in August Bank Holiday week,
when demand is low. On 7th August, the Moray Firth fleet landed 10,500 crans, and fishing had
virtually to be suspended for the rest of the week. By this time, thanks to the good offices of Mr.
Robert Boothby, M.P. for the Division, the fishermen were persuaded that their interest lay in
working the scheme so as to provide the heaviest landings that could be absorbed rather than in
selling far fewer herrings at the maximum. From August onwards no serious hitch occurred ;
throughout the season no catches had to be dumped ; and 65,000 barrels were cured of which
40,000 were made available for Relief.
Similar arrangements were made in every subsequent season until the end of control, and
extended from the autumn of 1945 onwards to the East Anglian ports. 33 They illustrate very well
the later and happier period of the Ministrys relations with the trade, arising from a sureness of
touch which is evident from all the documents dealing with this herring scheme, and which is as
evidently absent from many of the Fish Division's earlier transactions.
The comprehensiveness of fish control at its peak was something to have amazed Mr. Prothero,
the author of the quotation with which this account began. Its dogged recovery from initial
misfortune arouses respect, its ingenuity admiration. Its main weaknesses were, or came to be,
recognised within the Ministrytoo long a tolerance, imposed by political considerations as well
as by very real administrative difficulties, of excessive prices to the producer, and an overelaborate basis for distribution, inspired by an aimequal per capita supplies in every part of the
countrythat was neither attainable nor even desirable. Whether, having regard to the small Dart
that fish played in the war-time diet, control was worth while at all is a question that may
legitimately be asked. The Cost-of-Living Index provides part of the answer; for the rest, it is
clear that public opinion will not allow a Food Controller to restrict his activities to those that the
economist or the administrator may consider to be rewarding. One caveat may be added; the
Ministry cannot be said to have attempted in its new schemes to solve the problem that the
original plan for fish depots had at any rate faced; that of distribution under heavy air attacks. In
that respect the experience of 1939-45 offers little guidance.

Footnotes
1

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 546, Art. 3: No. 497, Art. 15 (b).

Another such pitfall concerning fish was revealed after the war at Arbroath, when the
Ministry, seeking to prosecute a fisherman for withholding part of his catch from allocation (he
had claimed that it was the crews fry, or perquisite, though it amount' d in total to 54 stones)
found that the Crown Office in Edinburgh considered that there was nothing in the Order to
compel a fisherman to bring his catch to allocation unless he intended to sell it fresh, e.g. he
might smoke it and thereby put it outwith the Regulations. Although the English Courts had
taken the opposite view, the Ministry was constrained to amend the Order, even at so late a date.
(Cf. Article 4 and Regulation 5 (1) of the new Order (S.I. (1949) No. 1297) with Article 3 and
Regulation 5(1) of the former Order (S.R. & O. (1943) No. 1657) already cited.)

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 547.

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 456.

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 1445. Coastal merchants claimed that the Division could have had this
information from the beginning, if it had asked for it; the Division, that it had previously been
told that returns in such detail could not be supplied. The point is mainly interesting as evidence
of the unsatisfactory relations (by this time fortunately improving) between Ministry and Trade.
6

By a new Transport Order (S.R. & O. (1943) No. 1234) made under Defence Regulation 55,
replacing the Directions previously made by virtue of the Food Transport Order, 1941. Cf. Vol. I,
p. 336, n. 1.
7

Compared with the industrial areas of the North, the London area is short of fish-friers. Some
pre-war figures are in the Sea Fish Commissions Second Report (Cmd. 5130), pp. 47-9.
8

Ibid., p. 49 for the relative unpopularity of fish in peace-time. According to the Report of the
Consumption Levels Inquiry (1944) (loc. cit.) the categoryPoultry, Game and Fish (of which
fresh white fish accounted for approximately one-half by weight) supplied on the average about
one per cent, of total available calories, five per cent, of protein and one per cent, or less of other
nutrients in the calendar year 1943.
9

S.R. & O. (1945) No. 1136, 1137. The latter redrew certain zonal boundaries so as to open
additional areas to free fish; tied fish, of course, continued to be regulated by customers lists
that were not, on this occasion, revised.
10

This was done by S.R. & O. (1946) No. 249.

11

S.R. & O. (1947) Nos. 741 ; 2068.

12

S.I. (1950) No. 559.

13

S.R. & O. (1946) No. 508.

14

S.R. & O. (1942) No. 2538.

15

This, the Regulation of Fishing for Crabs, Lobsters and Crawfish Order, 1943, was not printed
by H.M. Stationery Office, and was therefore not included in the numbered series of S.R. & O.s.
It prohibited such fishing within the waters adjacent to Northumberland and Durham, except
under licence from the Port Fishery Captain at North Shields.
16

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 631.

17

One was the exemption of dressed crab from price control. An indignant London stockbroker,
in April 1944, vainly complained to the Ministry that a well-known luxury store had charged him
10s. 6d. for a small piece of crab meat in a small scallop shell.
18

The re-enactment of the Order (by S.R. & O. (1944) No. 312) was only necessary because the
original summer and winter prices had been so specified as to operate for one season (1943-44)
only. The new Order continued to operate without alteration till 1947, when it was revoked by
S.R. & O. (1947) No. 776, which ended price control of shell-fish.

19

.S.R. & O. (1942) No. 2622; amended by S.R. & O.s (1943) No. 819, (1943) No. 1593, (1944)
No. 1278. When price control was abolished in 1950, the minimum standard was re-enacted by
itself (S.I. (1950) No. 589).
20

S.R. & O. (1942) No. 1910.

21

This represented more than a proportionate reduction compared with the actual prices, i.e., it
was an arbitrary readjustment in favour of the owners.
22

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 497.

23

S.R. & O. ( 1943) No. 820. The postponement of the earlier Order had been effected by S.R.
& O. (1943) No. 558.
24

One ought not, in discussing this matter of prices, to forget that the war risks run by
fishermen, especially from air attack, were great, though diminishing after 1942. There was one
deliberate and sustained attack on the Milford Haven fleet towards the end of 1941. Some typical
experiences of fishermen are given in Fisheries in War Time (H.M. Stationery Office, 1946),
Chapter IV.
25

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 1465.

26

The Fisheries Officer at Milford Haven in December 1941 had expressed this view clearly.
During these winter months, the hake are mainly withdrawn into the deeper water, and the men
will not risk working far from land in the track of commerce raiders, to catch hake at 9s. 6d. a
stone [the then price] while they can get trips of a sort by landing small whitings and flat fish and
dogfish nearer home. . . . The Ministry of Foods policy, he had urged, should be to encourage
the trawlers to work more for hake and less for mixed kinds of fish.
27

S.R. & O. (1944) No. 511.

28

The winter prices were restored by S.R. & O. (1944) No. 1165.

30

S.R. & O. (1945) No. 353.

31

By S.R. & O. (1945) No. 1444 ibid. (1946) Nos. 484, 806, 1642. The main changes arc
outlined in the explanatory notes appended to each of these Orders, the last of which marks the
lowest point in controlled fish prices. Thereafter rising costs impelled a reverse trend.
31

S.R. & O. (1943) Nos. 1229, 1266, 1347 and 1439 (Revocation). The same procedure was
occasionally applied to all or some classes of white fish.
32

At Buckie, on 10th August, when certain boats did not observe a general agreement to restrict
fishing after the heavy landing on 7th August. The Order by virtue of which the direction was
issued was S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1808.
33

From 1946 onwards the responsibility was assumed by the Herring Industry Board, the
statutory body established under the Herring Industry Act of 1935. During the war the functions
of the Board were suspended (apart from certain matters relating to loans for the construction of
boats). In 1942 the Fisheries Ministers, on Scottish initiative, appointed a Committee to review
the herring industry and the problems which were likely to confront it after the war, and the
Committee reported in January 1944 (Cmd. 6503) in favour of the early reconstitution of the

Board. In 1944 the Board was reconstituted, and the Herring Industry Act, 1944, gave it further
financial assistance as well as providing that certain specified additional powers could be granted
to it. The pre-war powers of the Board were restored in full as from 1st May 1946 except that the
Ministry of Food retained responsibility for distributing herrings to the home market, including
the fixing of maximum prices. See Report on the Fisheries of Scotland, 1939-1948 (Cmd. 7726)
pp. 28-9.

A:
Foods mainly Home-produced
Part II: Eggs
CHAPTER V
The Framing of the Control Scheme,
1939-41
I
IN time of peace, the United Kingdoms supplies of eggs were drawn in nearly equal amounts
from home production and from more than a score of different countries all over the world. 1
Control of imported eggs presents few difficulties not common to other imported foods, and in
the first world war the Government had itself become the principal purchaser from abroad. It had
also decreed maximum wholesale and retail prices for all eggs, but had eschewed any attempt to
control distribution of the home-produced article. Supplies of eggs from all sources are
estimated2 to have fallen, by 1918, to not much more than half the pre-war annual average of
280,000 tons; even so, to judge by the silence of contemporary writers on food control, the
public must have found the situation tolerable.
This was as well; for the trade in home-produced eggs, then and later, did not lend itself to swift,
brilliant, but essentially improvised control of the 1918 type. Eggs reached the consumer in
many different ways. They might come from a specialist poultry-farmer through packing-station,
wholesaler, and retailer, or by-passing any or all of these stages ; they might come from general
farm or small-holding to a country market, or be bought at the farm gate by a higgler or even
by a passing motorist. The marketing reforms of the nineteen-thirties did not touch them; the
National Mark Scheme, which set up for the first time a network of packing stations working to
statutory standards of grading,8 affected mainly the specialist minority among poultry-keepers.
Legislation wider in scope was under consideration, for some years before the war, by a
Reorganisation Commission, and had been embodied in a Poultry Industry Bill, which was up for
Second Reading when the war broke out, and which would have, at the very least, ensured the
systematic collection of much-needed information. Besides a complex structure to baffle the
would-be controller, the home-produced egg trade presented another difficultythe seasonal
fluctuation of supply and hence of price.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the outbreak of war should find the Government without any
comprehensive plan for egg control. Like fish, eggs had been late in the queue for attention from
the overworked staff of the Food (Defence Plans) Department; a paper scheme drawn up at the

end of 1937 was shelved until a year later, and discussions with the trade during the early part of
1939 did little more than reveal the complexities of the problem. This much only appears to have
been clearthat Government control of egg imports would be essential; and accordingly a
Director of Imported Eggs was, after some search, selected in August 1939. Even this
appointment owed something to the importunity of the London Egg Exchange, members of
which had been for some time anxious about their position in time of war. As for home-produced
eggs, so little was the need even for preserving a possible nucleus of control regarded, that the
Ministry of Agriculture in September 1939 suspended the National Mark Scheme.
It was not long, therefore, before the Ministry of Food had to embark on a series of expedients,
in face of a sharp rise in prices. On 13th September 1939 it issued its first Price Control Order,
which, in accordance with an interdepartmental agreement reached on 30th August, extended to
wholesale and retail, but not first-hand prices, and classified eggs into four categories of
diminishing merit.4 Within two or three weeks, however, this Order led to trouble; shippers from
overseas held out for maximum wholesale prices, and the wholesalers found their profit being
squeezed outsome indeed were faced with a loss on account of carriage charges. When,
towards the end of October, the Ministry prescribed an additional maximum price on a sale by an
importer to a wholesaler, the latter still found himself at a disadvantage, for the former could still
obtain a double profit by selling direct to a multiple or large retailera practice that aroused all
the more protest because these favoured firms might use eggs as a bait to attract registrations for
foods about to be rationed. As a palliative the Ministry raised the price of all types of eggs by 3d.
a dozen5 while it prepared its complete scheme of control for imported eggs.
The initial steps were taken by an Order6 of the Board of Trade, made at the Ministrys request,
prohibiting the import of eggs and egg products except under licence; the Ministry had already
entered into bulk contracts with the Governments of Australia and South Africa for their entire
exportable surpluses. Elsewhere, direct Government purchase was found to be impracticable for
want of suitable export monopolies in the country of origin ; and the cumbersome alternative of
allowing imports to be made privately under licence, only to be requisitioned on arrival and
reallocated to the importers for distribution, lost its attractiveness when, with the peak of the
seasonal shortage past, supplies began to improve. At the end of 1939, therefore, the scheme was
put into cold storage. The only Ministry activities on the imported side of the trade that need be
noted at this time were a political purchase from Hungary and Rumania, made through a
company of pre-war importers set up for the purpose as Ryepool Limited ; and a proposal to
import 1,200,000 boxes of eggs from Argentina, sanctioned by the Treasury on the condition
(very characteristic of this period in the war), that a substantial proportion would be available
for the poorer classes.
Meanwhile similar symptoms of maldistribution had occurred in the home-produced egg trade,
only to be remedied when the seasonal improvement in supplies set in, fortunately a little earlier
than usual. By mid-December it began to be felt that the existing maximum prices were being
treated by the trade as minima and were actually hampering the disposal of eggs; it was decided
to revoke price control for home-produced eggs and rely on controlled imported eggs to keep the
market stable. This was done in the week before Christmas; but prices failed to fall and the
Ministry was reduced to exhortation; eggs, the housewife was reminded, were plentiful at
reasonable prices and retailers were admonished that the prices of imported eggs fixed in the
schedule bear no relation to the present market prices.7 It was not, however, until two
reductions in quick succession were made in the controlled price of imported eggs, that the
general level of prices, in April 1940, fell below 2s. a dozen.
The attitude of the Ministrys Eggs Branch towards the home market was at this time a little
equivocal. It had abolished price control in December in order to get prices down ; yet in

January, considering the rudiments of a policy for home-produced eggs (in the rather odd context
of a further purchase from Rumania), it expressed the view that the livelihood of many producers
was in jeopardy. Questioners in the House of Commons were told, early in February, that
whether steps can be taken to prevent prices from falling to unduly low levels in the spring is at
present under consideration.8 Householders were urged to preserve eggs for next winter and
given dispensation from the Order9 forbidding hoarding; the trade was encouraged to store and
pickle eggs by the promise of generous treatment over prices, should control be reimposed; and
the Ministry itself proposed to buy in bulk for the same purpose from Holland and Denmark, and
did actually buy in Eire.
The German advance in the West abruptly changed the situation. Prices of home-produced eggs
rose in response to the loss of Danish supplies; the Ministry threatened to reimpose price control
and the Inter-departmental Committee on Food Prices discussed its principes. On 9th May, the
Ministrys Home Produced Egg Trade Advisory Committee, meeting for the first time, revealed
widespread disagreement about the extent to which price control was desirable or even possible.
Next day Holland was invaded and the Ministry at once issued an Order 10 controlling the final
selling price alone.
For some weeks no difficulty arose out of this hasty gesture; the price index for eggs for the
beginning of June was less than it had been a month earlier, and market prices were reported to
be below the maximum. The Order admittedly was not popular with retailers, for it obliged them
to grade every single eeg by weight; and this minor cause of complaint had not yet been dealt
with when, at the beginning of July, a major crisis arose. It was put about in the trade that the
Ministry was about to increase pricesa rumour believed to have had its origin in a discussion
between the Minister of Agriculture and the chairman of the National Farmers Union Eggs
Committeeand a scramble for supplies followed. High prices were offered to producers which
had repercussions even on the Northern Ireland market, and at the wholesale stage the prices rose
to the maximum at which the retailer might sell, thus leaving him no margin. The Ministry
realised that unless it raised the maximum prices it would get all the blame for the confusion
and loss that will have been caused by the operations of the speculators ; but the same situation
was likely to recur as eggs became scarcer, and to yield to pressure on each
occasion would make a controlled price worthless. A seasonal increase in price was shortly
due, however, and it was decided to bring this into force on the earlier of two dates 11 already
contemplated for it. But the increase did not relieve retailers difficulties; wholesale, and in some
cases producers, prices merely rose by the whole permitted amount.
Until this time, in defiance of what Lord Buckmaster in 191712 had termed the elementary
economic truth that controlling prices is unsatisfactory without controlling supplies, the Ministry
of Food had resolutely refused to contemplate introducing control of egg distribution. The
complicated machinery that would be required, it was said, could only be justified if eggs were
of vital importance as an item of diet of everyone, whichfortified by scientific opinion, it was
declaredis not the case. Lord Woolton had told a Press Conference on 3rd June 1940 that
eggs were not regarded as an essential food; nevertheless he interested himself personally in an
ill-starred attempt to obtain eggs from Portugal that was being mooted in July. I want you to
know that I would welcome any eggs from anywhere, he told officials. We must try to break
the racket that is going on. The Ministry had hopes, however, that the worst maldistribution
might be ended by reviving the quality premiums for eggs handled by approved packing stations,
on the lines of the discontinued National Mark Schemea plan on which an advisory committee
drawn from the trade had been working since the beginning of May. It was a modified version of
this plan that was put forward by the Ministrys trade advisers, along with proposals for a
complete system of price control at all stages of distribution ; and on the strength of it, the

Order13 embodying the next seasonal price rise, to come into force on the 19th August, for the
first time included separate schedules of wholesale and retail prices.
The complete scheme was brought out on 29th August. It distinguished between fresh eggs
marked with an approved mark, by persons licensed by the Minister, and fresh eggs not so
marked; the former were to command a premium of sixpence a dozen over the latter, weight for
weight, except for very small C eggs, which got only fourpence-half-penny a dozen. Licensed
packers had to satisfy certain conditions : have operated before the war, possess an efficient
electrical grading machine, and to have an annual turnover of at least 2,500 boxes. Notes, issued
by the Ministry for their guidance, asked for co-operation in the reorganisation of supplies where
necessary, and expressed the hope that the required distribution of eggs will automatically be
achieved without recourse to the Ministrys powers of compulsorily directing the movement of
supplies. (The licence obliged the packer to give information about sales and stocks and if
required to dispose of his stock of eggs in such manner as the Minister may direct.)
Simultaneously, the Ministry introduced complete control of imported eggs, by an Order that had
been actually issued some six weeks previously, and on which it had been working since April.
The Ministry would now become the sole importer; at each port supplies would be allocated to
selected importing firms, to the number of three or four, styled now No. I distributors. These,
acting as the Ministrys agents on commission, would distribute to No. 2 distributors (primary
wholesalers) and to multiple groups such as Allied Suppliers Ltd; No. 2 distributors might in
their turn sell to retailers, secondary wholesalers, or multiples. The margins of profit for these
various types of transaction had, in accordance with the usual practice, been approved by the
Treasury, subject to a costings investigation during the first few months of the scheme.
A feature of the controlled price structure for imported eggs was the denial to multiples of the
full wholesale margin by the establishment, rather on the lines adopted for bacon, of a surcharge
amounting to 3d. a dozen eggs, which accrued to the trading account of the Ministry. The
ingenious idea was hit upon of using this money as what was called a balancing payment to
encourage the better distribution of home-produced eggs. Licensed packers, by receiving 3d. a
dozen for all eggs sent to wholesalers, whence the Ministry could determine their ultimate
destination, would be put in the same position financially as if they had sold at the wholesale
price to a retailer. The administrative details of this plan were not, however, worked out in
advance of its introduction.
The prospects of the combined operation were not good. Three-quarters of imported supplies had
been cut off; home-produced poultry would, if the feedingstuffs policy already agreed on by the
Government were to be carried out in its full rigour, fall to the number that could be fed on onethird of the normal supplies of cereals. Already, before this fall had even begun, egg prices were
pressing against the ceiling and eggs were scarce in the towns. Even were it politically possible
to hold the heroic line that eggs were an inessential whose price could be allowed to find its own
level, the logic of the feedingstuffs priorities must compel the Government to abandon it. The
milk supply, in particular, might be endangered by the diversion of cereals to hens that an
uncontrolled egg price would stimulate. The low value set by the scientists on eggs, in defiance
of all culinary principles, made their control more, not less, necessary; the combination of
vanishing supplies with increasingly stringent regulation was paradoxical but inescapable. In
face of the economic forces that could be seen to be at work, the balancing payment shrinks to
the dimensions of an insect. But the Ministry, though admitting that there is no easy way out of
the egg problem', was not yet ripe for difficult and heroic measures.

II

The ultimate deus ex machina, the Cost-of-Living Index, had appeared in official discussions of
egg prices as early as April 1940. In September it reappeared as part of a general survey of the
situation, prepared by the Ministry of Food in an attempt to get a complete annual range of prices
laid down in advance. Normally, the price in the season of greatest scarcity was roughly twice
that in the flush season; such a variation would, at the prices then ruling, mean an annual
fluctuation of 4,1/2 points in the all-items Index (7 points in the Food Index). It might be
possible to reduce this fluctuation by conceding to producers relatively higher prices in the flush
season and by releasing the cheaper imported eggs in the winter. Even so, there would still be a
variation that might need to be evened out by some sort of subsidy, whether to egg producers or
by way of compensation on other controlled foods. In the former case, the Ministry would
require to control at any rate the greater part of the supply; in any event, distribution under a
rgime of maximum prices, even with the new arrangements, was bound to be inequitable, and a
modified rationing scheme, limiting but not guaranteeing consumers supplies, would (the
authors of the survey thought) be worth considering.
The pursuit and much-needed refinement of these proposals was for the moment sidetracked by a
long argument over what was, by comparison, a minor matterthe determination of the exact
price that ought to be paid to producers. The Ministry of Food was anxious to limit price
increases to the actual rise in ascertained costs and to avoid encouraging the general farmer to
divert feed to hens from higher-priority stock, and particularly dairy cows; the Agricultural
Departments on the other hand were anxious to temper the wind to the specialist producer.
Moreover, the two sides took divergent views about the actual rise in costs; calculations yielded
41 per cent, or 75 per cent, over pre-war, according to the base period chosen and the extent to
which maize, the cheapest fodder, was held to be available at that time. A series of compromise
solutions was reached for the earlier part of the season, but on the price to be paid in the flush
period, from 24th March 1941 onwards, the Departments could only agree to postpone
consideration until later.
Meanwhile the new distribution scheme was having numerous teething troubles. Its full
operation had to be postponed twice (to 21st October 1940) because packing-stations were slow
in applying for licences and the rubber stamps for marking the graded eggs were not ready.
Qualifications of the inevitable border-line cases for the balancing paymentmultiples who did
a wholesale business, wholesaler-retailers, wholesalers who were part of the same business
concern as the packing-stationhad to be determined, without any previous decision of principle
by which to be guided. Some guiding principles were evolved during November; the areas into
which the Ministry desired supplies to flow, to be known as zones, were defined as towns of
75,000 inhabitants or more. At the same time it became necessary to warn the Treasury that the
scheme might cost more than had been expected, and that ends would only meet if the price of
Dominions eggs were raised by 6d. a dozen. Again the Cost-of-Living Index was invoked and
the possibility of a subsidy on imported eggs mooted; but the Treasury preferred that the scheme
should be self-supporting and the rise in price was therefore authorised.
With the New Year, several forces combined to push the Ministry further along the path towards
control. The balancing payment was proving ineffective as a means for getting the eggs into the
towns, and the powers of direction taken by the Ministry could no longer beheld in reserve. It
was proposed therefore to set up an organisation of wholesalers and licensed packers, to be
known as Egg Central, by National Mark Egg Central out of the Wholesale Egg Distributors
Association, by means of which a certain proportion of packing-station output couid be moved
to the zones. The whole of that output, however, amounted to only about one-quarter of the
total supply; and the question arose whether the new machinery would be worth while unless
sales to the packing station were made compulsory. The same conclusion was being approached
from another directionthat of livestock policy on which an Interdepartmental Conference was

then sitting; would not the best use of feeding-stuffs, rationed on 1st February 1941, be secured
by making their supply for hens contingent on, or even directly related to, deliveries of eggs to
the control? Elsewhere in the Ministry, the Committee on the Distribution of Unrationed
Foodstuffs14 was naming eggs as one of the principal causes of public complaint, and was asking
that means be devised to secure priority in their supply to children, expectant mothers, and
perhaps invalids, and to cut down the numbers obtained by caterers, who because they could
afford to pay the full retail controlled price, or more, to the producer, were said to be taking the
lions share. The Special Diets Committee of the Medical Research Council endorsed the need
for priority supplies to the vulnerable groups ; as for caterers, the opportunity 15 was taken to
classify even a solitary egg as a main dish, thus forbidding its inclusion in a meal with a fish or
meat course, and the Maximum Price Order was amended to forbid the sale from one person to
another, at the retail price, of more than five dozen eggs in any one week.16
The postponement of price negotiations did not achieve the hoped-for aim of bringing the
Ministry of Food and the Agricultural Departments closer, and towards the end of February the
outstanding point at issue, namely of the price to be paid in the flush season, was referred to the
Food Policy Committee of the War Cabinet. But even before Ministers came to discuss it, two
things combined to convince the Ministry of Food that a substantial further concession should be
made to producers : first the exceptionally severe weather, and, secondly the blow that specialists
in particular would receive from the decision to reduce the value of the poultry ration coupon
from April onwards by half, i.e., to one sixth of pre-war supplies. It was agreed at the Food
Policy Committee, on 27th February, that not only should the price reduction originally proposed
for 24th March not take place, but that a previous one, scheduled for 10th March, should be
postponed until after Easter.
This decision, like the one over bacon-pig prices in the spring of 1940, 17 was taken purely ad
misericordiam, without reference to the season or the economic function of prices that vary with
it. When news of it reached officials in the Commodity Division they at once pointed out that a
reduction of price in May, when laying begins to fall off, would be difficult to defend to the
trade, for all that it really represented a concession by the Ministry. Specialist poultry-keepers
were already up in arms about the previous reductions in price from the seasonal peak, and
accusing the Departments of being out of touch with the realities of the poultry industry, even
before the latest cut in feeding-stuffs supplies was announced; it was going to be extremely
difficult to put over, in such an atmosphere, the scheme for obligatory sales to packing-stations
on which the Ministry was working. Towards the end of March, however, the Treasury
intervened urgently; having adopted a policy of price stabilisation, it was anxious that something
be done quickly about one of the impediments to that policyegg prices. 18 Above all, it was
ready to concede a subsidy on eggs in return for effective control. The Ministry of Food
thereupon conceived the idea thatas an official put it later, in the course of explaining to the
Minister why, by an oversight, he had not been told about a change in the price policy he had
been defending we might be able to sell the after-Easter drop in price for the
concurrence/support of the Agricultural Departments in an improved scheme of distribution. . .
The latter did agree to the general principle that producers, other than the very small ones, should
forgo their right to sell to whom they pleased.
The decision to introduce a scheme of control based on a subsidy, so as to make it more
profitable, within the law, for a producer to sell to a packing station than direct to the consumer,
finally resolved the conflict of views within the Ministry on the matter of price. The supporters
of a rigorous and (as they would have said) realistic livestock policy, forcibly adjusted to the
prospective supply of feeding-stuffs, had hankered after a really unprofitable and deterrent price
for eggs ... if only we could face up to the issue of compensating specialist producers whom we
want to force out of business. The price of eggs, they argued, was already too high for the safety

of milk production. A dissenting voice was raised in Eggs Division against the merits of this
argument; no dairy farmer in his right mind is likely to stint his cows of their production ration
in favour of poultry no matter what the price of eggs within any reasonable bounds. By doing so
he would be largely throwing away the expensive maintenance ration which had to be fed in any
case. If the fear of diversion were groundless, it followed that egg prices ought to be sufficiently
high to encourage the greatest use of waste food for feeding poultry. As the Minister himself put
it, We do want eggs and chickens as well as wheat. And they pick up at least a good part ot their
living !
Whatever the merits of the policy of discouragement by price, it was never (as its supporters
admitted) politically attractive. But now it was administratively out of the question. The control
scheme had no hope of working at all unless it included a price, particularly in the winter
months, that producers representatives would accept. The prices approved by the Treasury, 1
6s. 8d. and 1 14s. 2d. a long hundred 19 in summer and winter respectively, appear to have been
considered generous by all, apart from the specialist minority among producers.
It remained to work out many of the details--against time, for the Treasury wanted the scheme
ready by the 1st July. On the commodity side, plans were fairly well advanced, having been in
active preparation since February, but there were numerous points to be agreed with the
Agricultural Departments and the producers; plans for retail distribution were as yet rudimentary.
In its original form, the scheme would have required an egg producer owning 25 birds 20 or more
to register with a packing-station of his own choice and to send all his eggs to that station; a
packer would be required to accept eggs by count, so as to simplify the proposed linking of
feeding-stuffs supplies to egg deliveries. To ensure that packing-stations had sufficient financial
stability to meet their commitmenis to producers they were to be required to deposit with the
Ministry a bond equal to two week;, purchases of eggs. The output of packing-stations would be
purchased by the Ministry or its agents; the No. 1 distributors of imported eggs were to be
grouped for this purpose, thus utilising an existing organisation that could resell all eggs on
behalf of the Ministry to the trade in the ten areas into which the country had been divided for
the purposes of the imported eggs control scheme, and providing machinery whereby imported
and home-produced eggs could be brought into a common system of allocation. (Incidentally, it
also provided some compensation to the importers for loss of business.)21
The basis of allocation was to be registration of consumers with retailers, which entailed
registration right up the lineof retailers, wholesalers, and packer-wholesalers. Packers would
be required to make a weekly return of eggs handled to the Port Egg Agent, which, together with
returns of imported eggs arriving, would enable an allocation to be made; the scheme, it was
claimed, would make it possible to distribute eggs on any basis that may be decided by the
Government... to control the quantities of eggs issued to the Fighting Services and to catering
establishments and to guarantee supplies to any special classes of the community who need eggs
most.22
For the ordinary consumer, however, there could be no such guarantee, though the retailer would
be required to satisfy his registered customers in rotation, or otherwise in accordance with the
allocations he receives. There was not, in short, to be an egg ration a fact that caused the
Minister himself doubts; this proposal, he wrote, involves the restriction of the right of the
consumer to find goods where he can, without any compensating undertaking to meet his needs.
(At the same time, he put on record his doubts whether we shall get the eggs and beat the black
market.) But further consideration, at Lord Wooltons express request, confirmed that the best
that could be done was to allocate one egg per ordinary customer as supplies became available.
Arrangements for priorities, as requested by the Special Diets Advisory Committee, would be
made as soon as the scheme was in working order. Accordingly, consumers were asked, on 6th

June, to register with retailers, using one of the spare counterfoils in the ration book; the
Ministry would have preferred to wait until the general re-registration following on the issue of
new ration books, but the needs of the Cost-of-Living Index overrode administrative
convenience.

Ill
Meantime the trade had been duly brought into consultation. There was no reason to expect
opposition from the distributors, who would naturally welcome any scheme that promised to
give them more eggs to handle; the Ministry therefore decided to see the producer interests first.
At a meeting at Crewe on 29th May they showed themselves more tractable than the Ministry
had expected; a plea was made (and accepted) that existing producer-retailers should be allowed
to continue their retail trade, provided they obtained a minimum number of registrations; 23 it was
agreed that some link between feeding-stuffs supplied and deliveries of eggs to the packingstation was sound, although the particular scheme before the meeting was condemned as
unworkable; a simplified price arrangement, giving two fixed prices only, one for summer and
one for winter, was accepted, though a higher summer price was asked for. Finally, and most
important, the meeting accepted, on the suggestion of a trade delegate, that the scheme should
apply to producers with more than 12 birds, instead of 24, as in the original draft. On the
following day a representative meeting of both producer and distributor interests endorsed these
views; the only matter left open was that of distributive margins, which the Ministry undertook
to reconsider.
In the light of later events it appears that those present on 29th Maywho included
representatives of the Agricultural Departments must have been less than completely clear
about the Ministry of Foods intentions. The majority seem to have assumed that the obligation
on poultry-keepers with more than a specified number of birds to sell to the packing-station
applied merely to those eggs that they chose to sell, i.e.. that there was nothing to prevent a man
from retaining what eggs he required for his own household. This assumption was a commonsense one, for no one supposed that, no matter what the law, he could be prevented from doing
so. But the Ministry, though it admitted this, argued that to recognise the right officially would
open a door leading to a greater loss of eggs than its tacit recognition' ; accordingly, only those
owning 12 birds or less were asked to refrain from registering with a retailer to obtain controlled
supplies. However, under pressure from the Agricultural Departments, it offered to insert in the
Order a provision allowing an owner of more than twelve birds to apply to the Food Office for a
licence to retain a certain number of his own eggs ; the suggested number being one per week
per resident member of the household.
This concessiondescribed as purely a face saving devicewas put forward on Friday the
thirteenth of June, at Colwyn Bay. Meanwhile, the announcement of the scheme had released a
torrent of criticism in the Press, directed at the 12-bird dividing line. On the 12th, Lord
Beaverbrook, the Minister of State, attacked it in a paper for the Food Policy Committee,
beginning with the arresting sentence, Small poultry-owners are under the harrow. On the 14th,
the Daily Dispatch and the Daily Sketch printed confident reports that the scheme was to be
abandoned. That same day, the Prime Minister, following an interview with the Ministers of
Food and Agriculture, wrote them a personal minute as follows:24
I was very glad to hear from you that the twelve hens scheme would be abandoned in
favour of No official food for more than twelve hens unless you come into the public
pool. Public chicken food for public eggs.

Presumably this was after the issue of a press notice, dated 14th June also, in which the scheme
was defended and the concession to producers announced.
However, the Minister of Food had never, as it seems, been convinced of the wisdom of setting
the exemption limit so low (he had expressed doubts about a 15-20 bird limit as far back as
February) but had been anxious to make a link between feeding-stuffs and deliveries of eggs to
packing-stations. At the Food Policy Committee, on 17th June, he accepted the principle that the
line be drawn at the 50-bird level, i.e., that separating commercial producers, drawing their
feedingstuffs through County War Agricultural Committees, from those drawing them through
the Small Poultry Keepers Council. No restriction was to be placed on the right of a producer to
retain eggs for his own consumption. In vain officials pointed out that the link between public
chicken-food and public eggs might be impossible to make, and that freedom for the small
poultry-keeper to sell unstamped eggs would endanger the enforcement of the Order 25 on the
larger; even though they convinced the Minister, he could not carry his colleagues with him.
Ministry of Food officials26 were unanimous in attributing this last-minute reverse to the
disgraceful press agitation which they believed would have been stilled at once by the
announcement of the higher producers price coupled with a subsidyan announcement that had
been delayed till the last moment, to prevent advance hoarding of eggs by producers. Their
inquest on the crisis never got beyond the point of admitting that their tactics, particularly their
assessment of public opinion, had been faulty : a second best scheme which can be steered
safely into the harbour is better than a perfect scheme which will be wrecked entirely or
seriously damaged.
There was, in fact, a point of principle at stake, clearly expressed by a Ministry of Agriculture
official on the same day as the Prime Minister intervened. The proposal to compel small poultry
keepers to sell all their eggs to a packing-station (he wrote) changed the object of the scheme
from an eauitable distribution of eggs on the market to a requisitioning of home-produced eggs.
The Solicitor-General was reported to be doubtful whether a Defence Regulation for this purpose
would be inlra vires; one may be certain that there would be many, not all tainted with sinister
interest, who would regard it as an outrage. There was a great difference between saying if you
sell eggs, you must sell them to the Ministry and if you keep hens, you must not eat their eggs
without Food Office permission. That dif ference the Ministry of Food was slow to grasp; even
its 12-bird dividing line was based purely on the difficulty of collecting eggs from the
backyarders : we are not, wrote a Ministry official on 13th June, treating the smaller man
favourably because he merits any special consideration but simply because the task of getting
our hands on him is beyond our capacity. Had Lord Beaverbrook seen that remark, he might
have felt it justified what he had written the day before, namely, that the principle on which the
policy [of the egg scheme] is based is one of discouraging individual enterprise and
resourcefulness, and of promoting limitation and restriction.
In short, zeal to repress the black market, that repository ofindi-vidual enterprise and
resourcefulness, had led the Ministry to take up a position that was morally as well as politically
vulnerable, and that was made more exposed by the 12-bird dividing line. The with drawal of
Ministers, in face of the Press move against this flank, could not be halted at the point from
which the mistaken move had started. The successful introduction of a scheme in Northern
Ireland under which poultry-keepers could legally keep as many of their own eggs as they
liked,27 but must without exception sell them only to the Minister of Food or his agents,
demonstrates by contrast the weakness of the British scheme ; though transport difficulties would
probably have prevented a no exemption scheme in Great Britain. Initially, indeed, large areas
in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, had to be excluded altogether from control, for want of
both transport and packing-stations.

IV
It was a gloomy and despondent Ministry, therefore, that set about the task of retrieving what it
could from the wreckage, amid a chorus of disapproval from the distributive trade. One
provision not in the original plan was written into the revised Order; the exempted poultrykeepers were forbidden to sell to caterers or to anyone buying for resale. 28 An unstamped egg in
the hands of any trader or caterer would thus provide prima facie evidence that an offence had
been committed ; though hopes that such evidence would be found did not run high. The
exclusion from the scheme in England and Wales alone, of some 11,3/4 million birds, compared
with the 2,3/4 millions originally contemplated, appeared as a serious blow to the Ministrys
hopes of maintaining a reasonable allocation of eggs to the general public (though not so
serious as its own Economics Divisions plans for adjusting the poultry population to the
computed supply of feedingstuffs would have been). The paper loss of, perhaps, one-fifth of the
total quantity of home-produced eggs was itself not negligible ; but more important was the
opening of wide opportunities for evasion by those poultry-keepers who were still included. An
attempt by the Commodity Division to retain one safeguard by forbidding producer-retailers with
less than 50 birds, who held registrations for eggs, to sell eggs from their own hens by retail, was
held by higher authority to be contrary to the Ministerial decision; it would certainly have
evoked derisive comment in the Press. The result, however, was that stamped and unstamped
eggs could legally be sold in the same shop under certain circumstances.
The troubles of the scheme in its first few weeks, however, were of another order. Consumers, as
ever, were dilatory in registering tor eggs, with the result that allocations to retailers had to be recast; when the general re-registration came along, with the issue of ration books in July, there
were many complaints from those who, having changed their retailers for other foods, found
themselves, as a circular letter to Divisional Food Officers put it, unfortunately placed with the
retailer to whom they are tied for eggs, and they had to be allowed to change their egg retailer
also. There was some difficulty with packing-stations which did not all at first understand that
they could relieve pressure on their storage space by forwarding eggs to Ministry depots. The
scheme had been launched before the Ministry company, National Egg Distributors Association
Limited (NEDAL) was in being, so that the first three allocations were carried out by the Port
Egg Agents under the former imported eggs scheme, and for some months after the company
was set up these Agents and the four Area Egg Officers for the home-produced article continued
to operate as separate groups, with different areas, reporting only to Headquarters. A combined
organisation, in which, however, the predominance of the former importers aroused a certain
amount of feeling, was brought into being by October 1941.
Seven Area Egg Offices,29 later increased to eight, were set up for England and Wales, two for
Scotland, under the supervision of a Chief Egg Officer in Edinburgh. Part of the Area Officers
incriased staff were specifically appointed to deal with the important matters of transport and
egg-boxes, either of which might call for an adjustment of allocations. Headquarters were still
responsible for decisions on, for example, whether eggs accumulated in an Area should be used
for a new allocation there or transferred elsewhere to equalise distribution. Thereafter the Area
Egg Officer was responsible for seeing that such instructions were carried out by NEDAL, and
for such general matters as inspection of packers, investigation of complaints, supervision of
collecting and reconditioning depots, testing and re-packing of imported supplies, and liaison
with Divisional Enforcement Officers.
None of these initial imperfections, however, was responsible for the odium that fell upon the
scheme in its first few weeks; that was due to pure ill-luck. As was to be expected, no substantial
quantity of home-produced eggs was received by packing stations during the first week, and the
bulk of the first allocation consisted of Canadian and American eggs that had been held in

readiness for the start of the scheme. The American eggs bore no distinguishing mark
moreover, some of them, unknown to the Ministry, were cold-stored eggs from the previous
December that had been shipped to the United Kingdom without being candled and repacked.
Their deterioration was now completed by a heat-wave. As, under the new price structure,
imported eggs were sold at the same price as home-produced, and as some of the doubtful eggs
reached consumers who had hitherto been accustomed to English new laid, the distribution
scheme became irretrievably associated, in the public mind, with eggs whose badness was
commonly put down to the holding-up of home-produced supplies in packing-stations. In vain
the Ministry pointed out that even in peace time a certain number of eggs go bad in hot weather,
that retailers were, or should be, in a position to replace bad eggs, that the figures of eggs passing
through packing-stations indicated that there could be no hold-up, and that a small percentage
loss was a reasonable price to pay for fairer distribution. As there was no labour to candle and
repack the remaining North American shipments it was decided to stop distributing these against
allocations and dispose of them outside the scheme as cooking eggs at a reduced price. There
proved to be no difficulty in thus dealing with them, but the loss to controlled distribution of
almost two eggs per head of the population, at a time when home production was beginning to
fall, was unfortunate.

Footnotes
1

In addition to eggs in shell, there was a large import trade in various egg products liquid
egg in bulk, dried egg in flakes, and so forthused in food manufacture, particularly in the
bakery trade. Reasons of space preclude discussion here of the control of these products, which
were mostly replaced from 1942 onwards by spray-dried egg.
2

Beveridge, op. cit., Table XX: Estimated Annual Consumption of Principal Foodstuffs.

Under the Agricultural Produce (Grading & Marking) Act of 1928.

S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1170. The categories were:

I. Home-Produced Fresh Eggs :

II. Near-European Fresh Eggs:
III.
:

Preserved Eggs from the Dominions, North and South America, and from home production

IV. All Other Eggs.

They aroused considerable feeling, particularly among foreign Governments, and were
frequently amended during the first months of price control.
5

S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1554.

S.R.&O. (1939) No. 1680.

The revocation was by S.R. & O. (1939) No. 1840; the exhortations were contained in
Ministry of Food Press Notices, Nos. 180, 210, and Ministry of Food Trade Press Notice, No.
212A.

Replies to Questions by Mr. De La Bere, M.P. (1.2.40). Captain Medlicott, M.P. (8.2.40) and
Mr. Henderson Stewart, M.P. (20.2.40). Official Report, cols. 1288-9, 437 and 1170 respectively.
9

By General Licence (S.R. & O, (1940) No. 393, under S.R. & O. (1939) No. 991),

10

S.R. & O. (1940) No. 712.

11

S.R. & O. (1940) No. 1178.

12

13

14

Beveridge, op. cit., p. 42, n. 2.

S.R. & O. (1940) No. 1499.
Vol. I, pp. 195-198.

15

Of a general Order prescribing austerity in catering establishments (S.R. & O., (1941) No.
229).
16

S.R. & O. (1941) No. 374. Compliance with this Order cannot but have been wholly
voluntary.
17

Vol. I, p. 91.

18

The other impediment was, of course, fish prices.

19

i.e., 120 eggs. These figures were for B grade (medium sized) eggs. 'A' and C would be 2s.
6d. a long hundred up or down respectively.
20

Not hens (or ducks) merely, as appears to have been generally supposed. Eggs Division
actually proposed (without success) to amend the Order to specify male birds also, after the
Tavistock Bench early in 1944 had decided, in an isolated judgment, that they were not covered.
21

The original scheme had been amended to allow egg collectors (higglers) to continue
operations as licensed dealers, obliged to resell the eggs to a packing-station, from whom they
might claim a service charge fixed at 5d. a long hundred. They were also allowed to make a
transport charge to the seller, whereas packers had to collect free of charge within ten miles of
their premises, their margin being calculated to allow approximately 10 d. a long hundrea to
cover these costs.
Over the years this arrangement led to difficulties for the licensed buyers, who naturally found
producers unwilling to pay transport charges within 10 miles of a packing-station. Some of them
surrendered their licences and became simply agents of the packers, at an agreed remuneration
that might legally exceed that fixed by the Ministry; others simply arranged with the packers to
receive extra payment, e.g., by way of bonus. Since, in certain districts, packing-stations were
without transport and relied entirely on the dealers, the Ministry decided, in 1945, to make the
fixed charge of 5a. a minimum; the maximum was fixed at 10d. (S.R. & O. (1945) No. 645).
22

Thus, to take only two examples, air crews on active service could be guaranteed their fried
eggs for breakfast, and extra supplies could be sent to bombed towns.
23

They would, however, be allowed to supply only eggs that had been through the packingstation, i.e., that were not necessarily from their own hens.

24

Reprinted in Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. Ill, p. 688.

25

The revised arrangements were embodied in S.R. & O. ( 1941 ) No. 888.

26

The Orders Committee went on record that the amended Urder would prevent any equitable
distribution of eggs and would render impracticable the introduction of a rationing scheme.
27

This was described by an official of the Northern Ireland Government as making a virtue
out of necessity. It would be impossible to do otherwise, because by no administrative means can
you ensure that a producer adheres to any ration requirement. All he needs to do is crack a few
eggs and he is past you.
28

This prohibition was extended to manufacturers by S.R. & O. (1941) No. 1049, which
revoked and re-enacted the provisions of the earlier Order with some other additions.
29

In London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, Leeds, and later Nottingham.
All these towns were, of course, the centre of a Food Diviaion.

CHAPTER VI
Developments in Control up to the end of the War in Europe
I
For the remaining months of 1941 the distribution scheme continued in disfavour which found
its way to the highest quarters. Even the priority arrangements for invalids and children which
could be introduced now that general distribution had begun to work more smoothly, did little to
redeem it in the eyes of the public. The scarcity of eggs was attributed entirely to faulty
administration without allowance for the fact that the low level of home production was the
result of a considered policy of feeding-stuffs priorities. 1 The Eggs versus Feeding-stuffs
controversy, extensively ventilated about this time in the Commons and in the correspondence
columns of the press,2 owed its inception to the Ministrys misfortunes with the American eggs
and to the agitations of specialist producers. It could, however, be no more than an academic
issue: the advantages of shipping, even in unrefrigerated space, were on the side of the finished
product and anyway the two types of cargo were not interchangeable.
Imports of eggs in shell were forced to give way, though not in favour of feeding-stuffs. Owing
to the lack of fast well-ventilated ships American arrivals were so rare that the Ministry feared
for the future of the distribution scheme ; in winter we could not allocate one egg per month
[per head] without shipments from U.S.A.. However, as the Food Mission in Washington
pointed out, a preference for eggs over other cargo was difficult to defend at a time of acute
shipping shortage; the space they would occupy could be filled with 2,1/2 to 3 times the quantity
of concentrated foods such as dried eggs and powdered milk. It was now that the research made
since 1940 into the possibilities of dried egg began to justify the foresight of those who had set it
afoot.
Dried egg was no novelty in the United Kingdom; but the Chinese product imported before the
war required soaking for as long as twelve hours before use, and the Ministry of Food had early
instigated a search for a better process. Working on fresh English eggs the Department of

Scientific and Industrial Research evolved a technique of spray drying which produced an article
easily reconstituted and suitable, unlike its predecessor, for use in the home. The coming of
Lend/Lease made it possible to obtain dried egg from the United States, and when the control
scheme was introduced it offered a solution to the problem of replacing shell eggs for caterers
and manufacturers. The successful efforts made by the Ministry to persuade the bakery trade to
take up dried egg were particularly necessary now that stocks of frozen egg from China could no
longer be replaced. The chief problems to be dealt with launching the novelty were to determine
a price for a Lend/Lease product that had no pre-war history, and to group together traders in egg
products no longer imported, so that they might obtain a compensating share in distribution; for a
time two separate bodies drew supplies from the Ministry for the manufacturing trade, namely,
the dried egg distributors organisation and the Frozen Egg Pool whose members received dried
egg to supplement deficiencies in their allocations of frozen egg. The anomaly was removed in
August 1943, when the Egg Products Distribution Association was set up. Dried egg for the
catering trade was distributed by NEDAL from the first, as in tnis trade there was no difficulty of
pre-war usage.
Now that the shell egg position demanded an extension of distribution for home use, it was
necessary to ask production plants in the United States to increase their output and to insist on a
high and uniform standard of quality. In February 1942 the Scientific Adviser visited the United
States to discuss the drying specification, the main object of which must be to stress the
maximum degree of hygiene in the preparation of the pulp (Unfortunately the British
specification, which would have minimised the danger of bacteria, was not adopted.) Samples of
supplies arriving in the United Kingdom were carefully tested with a flavour score test worked
out by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research so as to determine the most reliable
manufacturers. Arrangements with the United States concerning quality and packing became a
matter of even greater urgency when eggs in shell had to be eliminated entirely from the
February loadings, and when the import programme for 1942 was revised in March to exclude
any further shipments except from Eire. The Ministry had aimed at beginning the distribution of
dried egg at the end of March, in a special domestic, pack holding five ounces of powder,
nominally equal to twelve eggs, which was to be put up in the United States: but packing
difficulties there3 were such that for the first allocation the Ministry had to undertake the
repacking of bulk supplies, already in Great Britain, into tins originally intended for dried milk.
By putting out the work among many packers it managed to get enough into the shops to start the
first allocation by 24th June. Since the supply of eggs at its seasonal peak had permitted the
record number of nine consumer allocations in April and May, the delay in the issue of dried egg
was no disadvantage.
The working-out of a basis for retail distribution, as the best means of meeting an uncertain
demand, was a matter for some discussion within the Ministry. Eggs Division, anxious to use the
existing arrangements for distribution according to egg registrations through NEDAL, pleaded
successfully that the first allocation should be made in this way for convenience sake. Although
Rationing Division agreed to this it was reluctant to make any decision affecting subsequent
allocations, and hankered for some time after a distribution on points. It was the sale
ofcooking quality dried egg to the general public free of restriction (as one means of getting rid
of the embarrassingly large stocks of second quality accumulating in the country) that finally
defeated this project; distribution therefore continued through the same channels as shell eggs.
As for the price of dried egg, this was arrived at by deducting a little from that of its nominal
shell equivalent,4 and so for the 5 oz. package, reckoned to contain the equivalent of a dozen
eggs, the housewife was to pay 1s. 9d. or 1,3/4d. an egg. A considerable publicity campaign
accompanied the launching on the market of this ingenious and timely product, which eventually
enabled the Ministry to claim that the total national consumption ofegg solids exceeded that
before the war.

II
Dried egg, however, was no answer, as the shipping of shell eggs would have been, to the
immediate problem of shortage in the winter of 1941-42. The time was not ripe for the Ministry,
in defending itself against the Prime Ministers criticism in December, to press for reinstatement
of the lower exemption limit for the small poultry-keeper and for a practical application of the
principle of exchange of eggs for feeding-stuffs ; the Minister had to be content to offer regrets
and faint hopes :
The scheme can only distribute the eggs that it can obtain, and the scarcity of eggs has nothing
to do with the scheme . . .
When the scheme was introduced I stated publicly that it would, be difficult to work, and it has
two weak points :
(i) the exempuon of 370,000 small producers who may dispose of their eggs as they wish:
you will remember that only under pressure did I agree to the exemption of producers
with as many as 50 hens.
(ii) The lack of a satisfactory link between the issue of feeding-stuffs and the production
of an appropriate number of eggs at the packing-stations. You yourself suggested making
this link, but no doubt for thoroughly practical reasonsneither the Agricultural
Departments nor the industry support it.
Even on its present basis, I think the scheme will, in future, secure more satisfactory results. The
Americans are now learning how to stock eggs for export, and we shall probably receive less bad
ones from that country; the packing stations are getting over their teething troubles and their
output has increased by 20 per cent, in the past fortnight: 5 public demand for eggs will be eased
by the import of considerable quantities of dried eggs for domestic cooking purposes.
You will appreciate that it is really impossible nationally to control small articles of home
production that have previously been sold in large and small quantitiesdirect to the
consumer. I have taken the view that the political, rather than the nutritional, factor was the
important one: we had to convince the townspeople that we were doing everything possible to
secure that they got a reasonable share of the available supply of eggs, and the distribution
scheme has, at any rate, stopped queues for eggs in the towns.
The birds will be laying in greater number in two months time and we shall then hear less about
eggs.
Two months later, however, the shipping position and the decrease in feeding-stuffs that would
result from the adoption of high-extrac-tion flour combined to reinforce the case for tightening
up the schcme. On administrative grounds alone the case was strong, for it was estimated that,
after making allowance for exemptions, only about two-thirds or less of the eggs that should
come to packing-stations were doing so.6 So large a black market appeared to menace the very
existence of the scheme. Eggs Division therefore put forward four proposals to avert its
breakdown, viz. :
(1)

The lowering of the exemption limit from fifty birds to twenty;

(2) The halving of the number of hens for which a domestic poultry-keeper might
obtain feeding-stuffs rations, i.e., from twelve to six;

(3) A bonus, over and above the normal ration, of feeding-stuffs to producers in return
for deliveries of eggs to packing stations;
(4)

A grant of higher producers prices.

The atmosphere appeared to be more favourable to the first of these than it had been nine months
earlier; the tone of a debate in the House of Lords, on 11th March, was encouraging. (Moreover,
the Division had dropped, indeed might almost be said to have forgotten, the obnoxious proposal
to seize all the producers eggs.) The achievement of Northern Ireland, for all that it was
favoured by geography, was usefully held up to Whitehall as an example. The Ministry of
Agriculture readily agreed that poultry-keepers with more than twenty-five birds (the number
originally agreed between Departments the previous year) should be brought within the scheme.
It also suggested that the domestic poultry-keepers household ought to forgo its right to rationed
eggs.
The proposals for curbing the domestic poultry-keepers, apples of the Prime Ministers eye, had
difficulties whose solutionalso the suggestion of the Ministry of Agriculturewas simple yet
ingenious. A limitation of rationed feed to that for six hens, reasonable for the normal household,
might bear heavily on the large household whose kitchen waste would maintain more than that
number. To prohibit members of a poultry-keepers household from obtaining rationed eggs was
objectionable inasmuch as they had no legal right to obtain eggs from the poultry-keeper and
might, therefore, be cut off from eggs altogether. Both these points were met by issuing one
hens ration of balancer-meal' against each egg counterfoil surrendered to the Food Office. No
attempt was made to limit the number of hens that might be kept, within the limit of twenty-five
at which a keeper became commercial, though it was agreed that keepers should be warned not
to try and feed more poultry than could be given a diet properly balanced between household
scraps and the official ration.
(This was desirable not merely because it was likely to produce most eggs per bird, but also
because it reduced the danger that hens might be fed on, for instance, sound bread and potatoes
what the Ministry of Food dubbed induced waste.) As commercial keepers might transfer
their egg counterfoils to domestic keepers and so swell the demand for balancer meal, it was
decided to face the legal objections and prohibit them also from buying eggs in a shop.7
Great care, this time, was taken with publicity. The Domestic Poultry Keepers Council, which
had not been consulted at all about the 1941 scheme, was given the opportunity to consider the
new one well in advance; it had, indeed, already agreed to the principle of reducing the number
of birds for which rations were allowed. The Ministry of Agriculture compiled a clear and
persuasive leaflet or Childs Guide on the new scheme, for distribution to domestic poultrykeepers. Most important, the hurry of the previous year, occasioned by the stabilisation policy,
was this time avoided; the new Order,8 though dated 1st August, was not timed to come into
operation until 3rd September. In the event, the changes passed off quietly. Though the passage
of some fifteen months had no doubt inured the public to more stringent control measures, it
seems likely that a scheme in this form would have been acceptable from the beginning.

Ill
A further simplification of the pricing system, as it affected producer and packer, had been
effected in the spring of 1942, following on the Governments decision to recompense farmers,
to the extent of 20 million for the rise in wages that had been awarded in November 1941.
Discussions with producers on the allocation of the share allotted to eggs ( 10d. a long hundred
averaged over a year) had revealed their preference for a flat annual price, i.e., without seasonal

variation; the Ministry of Food for its part wanted to save manpower in the packing-stations by
paying for the eggs by simple count, instead of by grade. Both these suggestions were agreed on
without difficulty or delay, though the producers representatives, mainly specialists, were
emphatic that the price to which the Ministry was prepared to go 30s. 10d. a long hundred, or
3s. 1d. a dozenwas inadequate, and bombarded it with figures to show that 40s. was a
reasonable minimum. These figures do not seem to have been seriously disputed; but, whatever
Eggs Division may have thought, the Ministry as a whole and the Agricultural Departments were
at one in standing firm on the award as it stood. Specialist poultry-breeders could not, they held,
given the feeding-stuffs shortage and livestock policy generally, be given the status of marginal
producers whose output must be stimulated, if need be, by the grant of higher prices to all
producers ; the general farmer, on whom the country must rely even more than in normal times
for home-produced eggs, was, with his lower costs both for feed and overheads, doing well
enough at the existing prices. Intelligible though this attitude may seem to the outsider, one can
well understand that the specialists found it disappointing and even bewildering.9
After some months of operating the distribution scheme, Eggs Division found that the packing
trade was ripe for concentration. In June 1941, the existence of as many as 617 packing stations
to absorb the greater quantity of eggs the Ministry then hoped to obtain had seemed an
advantage. But as production declined it became apparent that there were many redundant
stations and much waste of transport. The petrol demands of packers, often in order to collect in
each others territory, aroused complaints from the Ministry of War Transport; there was also a
number of unsatisfactory stations consisting of little more than a shed to house the grading
machine. Packers, in some cases critical of the number of licences granted, were themselves
anxious that the Ministry should tackle the problem; and from a meeting held in November 1941
at their request, they went away to set up area committees and formulate schemes for the
Ministrys approval. Except in one or two areas, however, no satisfactory scheme was
forthcoming; for more was needed than mere adjustments of producer registrations from one
packer to another. A costings report that won for packers in 1942 an increase of 9d. in their
margin (hitherto 1s. 6d. a long hundred) bore out the Divisions evidence of redundancy. A
suggestion from the London Area Egg Officer provided the ultimate solution to the problem of
closing down redundant packers, who were to be compensated from a levy (of 9d. a box) paid
into a central pool by packers still operating; this compensation, administered by the packers
own organisation, NEPAL,10 ultimately affected some 230 packers, whose licences were
suspended by the Ministry. Remaining stations were allotted a zone in which to collect ; an
interesting feature of the scheme of transfer of producer registrations was that, thanks to the
goodwill of the trade, it could be carried out and maintained on the slenderest of legal authority.11
By the end of the third year of war both the differential price structure and the distribution
scheme were therefore established in a way that might be expected to produce more satisfactory
results. The fact that it did not was a reflection not on the new measures, buton the lateness of
their application. More poultry flocks were now to be included at a time when the packing
industry, already in course of concentration, would find it difficult to cope with extra rounds. The
25-bird restriction and the considerable simplification of a still complicated scheme of rations for
domestic poultry-keepers were more valuable for the amount of feeding-stuffs saved than for any
material difference they made in the supplies of eggs coming into packing-stations. Not even the
twenty per cent, increase that had been cautiously estimated to result from the lowering of the
limit was actually realised, though the discouraging returns from packing stations may partly be
blamed on rcduced feeding-stuffs rations. Additional priority demands during the coming winter
of 1942-43 meant that six-to-seven weeks supply would be needed for a single allocation;
traders appealed to the Ministry to announce to the public the actual number, in order, of the
allocation available, and the time it would take to distribute to all shops.

Dried egg, the only practical answer to the supply problem, was now causing some anxiety.
Suspicion of its bacterial content, in spite of the care taken in testing arrivals, made its
withdrawal from consumption even a possibility at one time. On the supply side, a situation of
semi-shortage (the second allocation could not be made until October 1942, four months after the
first) was succeeded by a glut the more embarrassing because it coincided with the seasonal flush
of fresh eggs; stocks piled up, and it became necessary to add weight to the continual and
enthusiastic efforts of Public Relations Division12 in selling dried egg, by reducing the price by
6d. a packet (to 1s. 3d.) on 27th June 1943. That the previous price had been too high is shown
by the considerable rise in sales that followed this reduction. In September, when allocations
became four- instead of eight-weekly, the proportion out of each allocation sold was naturally
not maintained. During the winter months sales were higher, but not high enough to absorb,
during the lowest period of shell egg production, more than a quarter of the double allocation
then allowed. (The single allocation was one packet for non-priority consumers, and two packets
for priority consumers, in each four-weekly rationing period ; for priority consumers the double
allocation was indeed generous.) Some housewives simply did not need it all. 13 So long as there
was plenty of dried egg, the announced ration of it had no relation either to the amount put out
by NEDAL or the number of packages the consumer could actually buy; but Eggs Division
preferred to maintain the semblance of restriction, fearing that de-rationing might lead to a fall
in demand.
Once it was realised that the lowering of the exemption limit was not going to bring many more
eggs into packing-stations, renewed efforts to this end were made in other directions. The one
course likely to yield resultsa really generous rise in the official price was still ruled out, all
the more because the cereals position was so anxious in the winter of 1942-43. At a time when it
was proposing to take barley and oats for bread, the Ministry of Food could not countenance
anything that might encourage the feeding of more grain to poultry. (There was perhaps a flaw in
its reasoning, for the existence of a large black market, the alternative to a higher controlled
price, was no less effective a stimulus to the misuse of cereals.) Nevertheless, the constant
prodding of the Prime Minister,14 who refused to believe that some home-grown grain could not
be found for hens, obliged Departments, even while dilution of bread was actually going on, to
explore once again the possibilities of a bonus allocation of feeding-stuffs in return for egg
deliveries. A detailed plan, by which poultry-keepers would be able to get a ton of feeding-stuffs
for each ton of eggs delivered to the packing-stations, was worked out during the summer of
1943. Official opinion about it, outside the Eggs Division, was, however, lukewarm; uncertainty
whether it would achieve its object was mixed with doubts about the possibility of sustaining the
extra poultry if they were bred, and about United States reactions to a proposal to use more
cereals for hens. In the end the scheme was shelved; the only additional cereals that could be
found were an estimated 60,000 tons of barley, expected to be released by the decision, in
November 1943, to end the dilution of flour.15 This was about half what would have been
required, in a year, for the ton-for-ton scheme, and even so some of it was claimed for pigrearing: what could be spared for poultry was allocated for the breeding of extra chicks.

IV
The carrot being unavailable, it only remained to thicken the stick of Enforcement, so far as
public opinion and shortage of manpower would permit. As early as July 1942 the suggestion
had been made, in the course of a special Interdepartmental Conference on Maximising Sales
off Farms, that the Ministry of Foods Area Egg Officers should be given access to the quarterly
census returns of livestock on farms collected by the County War Agricultural Executive
Committees. This would enable them to compare the number of poultry on any holding with that
of the eggs it sent to the packing-station, and thus provide prima facie evidence for enforcement
officers inquiries. Producers were obliged, under the Ministry of foods Control Order of 1942,

to make such a return to packing stations, but the provision was widely ignored, even after the
Ministry caused a printed form of return to be prepared, as the form itself put it, to help you
make this return'. The most strenuous efforts failed to secure a better response than sixty per
cent, of producers, and in some areas the figure was forty per cent, or less. 16 It took, however, till
February 1944 to persuade the Ministry of Agriculture to allow access to the County
Committees returns. The decisive argument used by Eggs Division appears to have been that if a
producer were prosecuted for failing to comply with the Ministry of Foods Order, he would
raise the damaging, though in law insufficient, defence that he had made a similar return to the
Ministry of Agriculture; in which case our prosecuting solicitor would of course have no option
but to say that these returns are not available to the Ministry of Food. Logically, agreement to
make them available was followed by the dropping of the requirement to make returns to the
packer.
Certain loose provisions in the Control Orderssometimes due to hasty drafting, sometimes to
the ever-present difficulty of finding watertight legal wordingwere found to make their
enforcement harder. One loophole, glaring but easy to close, was revealed in February 1944,
when a large department store, prosecuted for using eggs from its own flock of over 25 birds in
its restaurant, successfully pleaded that cooked eggs served as a meal were specifically excepted
in the very Order17 under which the case had been brought. This, however, was an isolated
example of ingenuity. Much more serious was the abuse arising out of the exemption of large
areas in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland from the Control Orders. Want of transport
facilities would have made the regular collection, and still more its corollary the regular supply,
of eggs in these remote districts onerous, if not also absurd; and the exemption was therefore
well founded.
The areas, listed in the Third Schedule to the various Eggs Orders, in which the Orders did not
apply, had originally included the whole of the Orkney and Shetland Islands; but the Ministry
caused packing-stations 10 be set up at Kirkwall and Lerwick, and the Mainlands of Orkney and
Shetland were thereupon brought into the scheme, in January 1942. By mid-1943, the
congregation of large numbers of Servicemen in the Islands, particularly the Orkneys, had
produced a situation in which there was plenty of opportunity for the movement of eggs into
uncontrolled, though legal, channels. Not merely were eggs taken home in quantity by troops
going on leave, or bought and posted to relatives from the uncontrolled areas; they were also
brought from uncontrolled areas to the Mainland of Orkney and posted there, and they were said
to move from the uncontrolled Northern Islands to the uncontrolled Southern Islands, where
most of the troops were stationed, through the controlled area. One naval drifter sailing daily to
the island of Shapansay was dubbed the Egg Express. In the Shetlands, army lorries were said
to be systematically collecting eggs, and a fine display of small-size egg-boxes was to be seen
for sale all over Lerwick. Residents in the uncontrolled areas complained that they could not
get eggs at all except at black-market prices.
Finding a remedy to this situation, without putting the 25-and-under producer in the
uncontrolled areas in a worse position than his fellow in the controlled areas, was difficult. The
prohibition of the delivery of eggs from an uncontrolled to a controlled area (other than to a
licensed buyer or packer) had proved ineffective; but the Ministrys Orders Committee, in June
1943, objected to a proposal to prohibit movement instead as too sweeping, forbidding, as it
would have, a person from buying a few eggs in an uncontrolled area to take home. The
Committees suggestion that, instead, price control should be applied in the uncontrolled areas
was rejected by Eggs Division as impracticable; there could not be a subsidised and unsubsidised
egg price side by side. Eventually, in April 1944, the movement of eggs from an uncontrolled to
a controlled area was so prohibited, but a saving clause was added, providing that it should be a
successful defence for a person accused of transporting eggs illegally to prove, inter alia, that

they had been acquired from a flock of 25 birds or less, and, moreover, that the price paid had
not been more than the maximum retail price in the controlled area. The large scale transactions
that had been going on in Orkney and Shetland, and 10 a less extent in Argyllshire, were thus put
unequivocally outside the law.
Even worse, because more general, was the exploitation of the clauses in the Control Orders
relating to the sale of eggs for hatching. Such sales were legal, provided (a) the buyer gave the
seller a written declaration that the eggs were being bought for that purpose (b) each egg was
indelibly stamped H in red (c) the seller kept records specifying the names of buyers, the
quantity of eggs sold, and the date of the transaction. But these provisions soon proved difficult
to enforce, and what was apparently an all but unprecedented trade the sale by auction of
hatching eggsgrew up, described as in effect a legalised black market . . . the operators of
which are in a privileged position. They can obtain supplies legally and provided they obtain the
declaration . . . they are unconcerned with the use to which the eggs are ultimately put. ... A large
number of the declarations have been proved to contain false names and addresses and no further
action was possible.
The control of hatching eggs was properly one for the Ministry of Agriculture, and discussions
between the Departments had been initiated by Eggs Division in December 1942. In the middle
of 1943 the Ministry of Agriculture had proposed to make an Order covering both hatching eggs
and stock poultry (another prolific source of black-market dealings) that would have prohibited
the sale of hatching eggs by auction or for re-sale (i.e., to a dealer;, and in November of that year
the proposed order had been unanimously agreed to by the representatives of producers.
However, in mid-March 1944, apparently for want of staff, the Ministry of Agriculture told the
Ministry of Food that it could not proceed with the Order. It so happened that a consolidated
Control Order for eggs, including the clauses for dealing with the Orkney and Shetland ramp,
was all but ready for signature, and all that Eggs Division could do at short notice was to restore
the provisions for hatching eggs that would otherwise have been deleted, with the addition that
the buyer should give his National Registration number. By this time, of course, the position had
got considerably worse, and was arousing comment in the Press and from local authorities. The
Town Clerk at Maidstone, for instance, wrote that on 28th March 1944 no fewer than 17,000
eggs were sold for hatching at Maidstone market. Elsewhere, an auctioneers clerk was said to
have admitted that many eggs sold by his firm came from farmers who had no cockerels and that
the eggs were therefore infertile, adding that they had received complaints on this score from a
few people who had really been buying the eggs for hatching. Dealings in eggs for resale
amounting to 4 and 6 thousand dozen eggs, over seven months, were unearthed by investigations
in Lincolnshire ; the ruling retail price for such eggs appears to have been 8d. each, or four times
the controlled price. In July 1944, therefore, the prohibitions originally included in the abortive
Ministry of Agriculture Order were enacted by way of amendment to the Ministry of Foods own
Order.18

V
At the instance of the Ministrys Enforcement Division, there had been inserted in the
consolidated Order of April 1944 two further obligations on egg retailers. They must in future
keep accounts of their purchases, showing dates, quantities, categories, and descriptions, and the
name and address of the vendor; and they might not buy eggs except from the single supplier
packing-station, wholesaler, or secondary wholesalernominated by them to the Food Office.
This tying of a retailer to a single supplier had, in fact, formed part of the control scheme from
the beginning; but hitherto its sanction had been applied merely to the wholesaler, who might, by
the terms of his licence, only sell eggs to retailers who had nominated him. However, a Court
had ruled, in the summer of 1943, that as the Order did not make it an offence for the retailer to

buy from another wholesaler, the latter had not committed an offence by selling. It is difficult to
see, in the light of the retailer-supplier tie now explicitly imposed, what purpose the new'
obligation to keep accounts served, other than that of creating an extra offence with which a
retailer suspected of black-marketing could be charged. Such a one was not likely to provide
evidence against himself by recording transactions that were ipso facto illegal. And it still
remained open to him, if caught red-handed in the possession of unstamped eggs, to argue that
these had been bought not in the way of business, but for private use from a producer with less
than 26 birds. In July 1944, this loophole was quiey closed by a further amendment to the
Order, so drafted as to put the onus of proof on a defendant. In effect, it became an offence for
anyone not a poultry-keeper to be in possession of unstamped eggs, unless he could show that
they were lawfully acquired.19
These new provisions went much against the grain of political opinion 20 in the fourth year of
war; indeed one may doubt whether the last would have been accepted by higher authority had it
not been disguised as a mere clarification of the existing law. The new Minister of Food, Colonel
(now Lord) Llewellin, was much concerned lest the Ministrys Orders should be open to attack
as merely vexatious; and the Eggs Order as consolidated in April 1944 was patently vulnerable.
As the official brief admitted, Even the Explanatory Note at the end invites the Question Is it
really necessary to go to these meticulous lengths? Indeed, the Order was commended to the
Minister largely as a pis aller :
. . . The fact is, he was told, that the Ministry has been placed in an impossible position
as regards the control of eggs. We proposed originally to exempt from control the eggs
produced by not more than 12 hens. The less responsible Press immediately printed
cartoons of Betty the 13th hen having its neck wrung. This criticism was supported in
high places and the late Minister, to placate opposition, increased the 1 a to 25 [.sic]. This
made such a large hole in the bucket that effective control over home-produced eggs is
impossible. . . .
The Order is, therefore, bound to be complicated, but egg control is, I believe, essential
(i) so as to enable us to provide eggs at a reasonable price to invalids, etc., (ii) to prevent
the price going through the ceiling, which would seriously affect the Cost-of-Living
Index figure.
In spite, therefore, of the fact that the Order appears to be open to criticism, I
recommend that it be approved.
As a recital of historical facts, this minute left something to be desired; reasons have already
been given for the view that the opposition to the original control scheme had more substance
than Ministry officials would admit. Lord Woolton had been nearer the mark when he wrote in
December 1941, apropos of one of the Treasurys appeals for help with the Cost-of-Living
Index : I brought the eggs scheme in in a half-baked state solely on account of Treasury pressure
and we are still suffering for it. One may well doubt whether the Ministry could have found
means, in an ^ver-growing stringency of labour, materials, and transport, to operate a scheme for
collecting the eggs of so many small poultry-keepers, or whether the eggs such keepers would
have had to spare, outside the flush season, would have been sufficiently numerous to warrant
the effort.
From 1945 onwards the Ministrys Enforcement Division was to launch a series of Egg Drives,
as they were called, designed not so much to catch offenders as to promote observance of the
law. Their results make it clear that the prohibition of hatching-egg auctions had scotched the
organised black-market, leaving only a chronic tendency to petty irregularities.

The drive [of 1945] has revealed, it was reported, that there is little organised black-marketing
in home-produced eggs, but that a large number of producers have been disposing of eggs ... in
an illegal manner. The recipients of these eggs have, however, usually been friends, relatives or
neighbours of the producers, or persons calling at their farms. It seems likely, the report added,
putting its finger on a source of future weakness, that the latter type of offence will probably
expand in view of the increase in petrol rations. . . .
For all that the enforcement drives produced a substantial, and in the case of individual poultrykeepers after an Inspectors visit, often sensational, rise in deliveries of eggs to the packing
stations, they could not alter by much the proportion coming under control. Only a greatly
increased supply of feeding-stuffsor of imported eggs could do that. The decision to cut to
the bone the rations allowed for hens on specialist holdings is readily defensible on general
grounds of livestock policy ; but its consequences for the control of eggs are without parallel for
any other important food. Not merely were supplies almost savagely reduced, but they became
more than ever dependent, not on an industry organised to serve a market as the specialist
minority had been, but on a sideline, the traditional perquisite of farmers wives, that could often
hardly be dignified with the name of commercial enterprise. The country market, useful in
normal times as an outlet for surplus eggs and a source of pin-money, was made into an engine
of control just at the time when, thanks to the general food shortage, these functions were less
than ever in demand. Egg control, from the countrymans point of view, was intrusive in a way
that control of wheat, meat, or milk was not; its weakness went deeper than the caution of
politicians, or the hostility of the Press.

VI
The insufficiency and irregularity of supplies, which precluded the application of full rationing to
eggs, made the administration of the promised priority scheme difficult. It could not be launched
along with the rest of egg control in July 1941, partly because this would have further
complicated what was already hasty and experimental, partly because arrangements for dealing
with invalids had not yet been worked out. Its eventual introduction in November followed hard
upon that of a more formal system of distribution to retailers, based on permits issued by local
Food Offices. These showed the number of eggs the retailer was entitled to receive per
allocation, priority consumers, i.e., children under six, expectant and nursing 21 mothers and
certain classes of invalids,22 counting as four ordinary consumers. The multiplier of four had
been chosen in the belief that allocations, even in the winter, would not fall below one every
fortnight, so that priority consumers would receive eggs at the rate of two a week. The Ministry
had gained the impression, in its deliberations with the Special Diets Advisory Committee, that
priorities were a matter of sentiment rather than nutrition; as a circular letter to doctors put it,
while the food value of an egg is small, the psychological effect of including an egg in the diet
of a patient, whose treatment confines him to a limited number of monotonous dishes, far
outweighs its nutritive value.
Officials were, therefore, rather taken aback to find, when reviewing the scheme in August 1942,
that ten months experience had led the medical advisers to conclude that a more regular priority
supply was wanted. True, the interval between allocations had been at times at least four weeks,
and, as the Advisory Committee pointed out, if a case of peptic ulcer only received one egg a
week, the concession to invalids served no useful purpose. The Committee suggested that
priority eggs should never fall below three per head per week; but this, given the existing list of
priority consumers, would have bankrupted egg control completely. There are simply not
enough eggs in winter to provide even three a week for under-fives, nursing and expectant
mothers and invalids, even if no one else ever has an egg at all. Had the Committee (asked
officials) forgotten that dried egg was now on the market?

A solution was sought by withdrawing priority from children under five (holding ration book
R.B.2) and substituting a double allowance of dried egg; this reduction in the number of priority
consumers enabled the Ministry to concede to the remainder a nominal allowance of three eggs a
week. Two factorsone that might perhaps have been expected, the other notcombined to
compel an early amendment of this plan. Dried egg, on account of the salmonella bacillus, was
discovered to be dangerous for young children, and the medical advisers therefore asked for a
restoration of priority eggs for those under two years old. On the administrative side, the working
of the priority scheme provoked many complaints from the public and the trade, for the threeeggs-a-week concession had taken the form, in practice, of a multiplier of twelve times instead of
four applied to each allocation; this was, however, not disclosed beyond the local food office.
When, therefore, eggs were scarce, priority consumers complained that they got too many too
seldom, and the spectacle of these quantities being taken home might evoke comment from the
unprivileged; when eggs were plentiful, many priority consumers could not take up their
allocations, and the disposal of eggs left on the retailers hands was an invidious task at best.
The former difficulty proved the more tractable, thanks to a brilliant suggestion from the medical
side. Infants under six months required no eggs at all; the dangerous age for dried eggs might
be said to end at eighteen months. If the priority entitlement to eggs ran for a year after the child
was six months old, instead of from birth, no one except the mother, who could quite well make
do with dried egg, would be any the worse, and there would be no extra demand for eggs.
Indeed, the opportunity was taken, a little later, to give the expectant mother a double dried egg
allowance also, in place of her priority in shell.23 As for the distribution problem, the Ministrys
Rationing and Eggs Divisions each propounded solutions unacceptable to the other. The former
would have liked to fix non-priority allocations rigidly, within each eight-weekly permit period, 24
and give any surplus as a bonus to prioritiesa proposal rejected because of the difficulties that
might arise in the flush season. The latter wished to confine priority consumers to a limited
number of retailers, and clung to the idea for some little time despite the conclusive arguments of
Rationing Division against it :
'. . . It is dragooning the public into certain specified shops and that is a thing the Minister
shrinks from entirely and always. . . . There are several obvious objectionsmother
would be required to get her eggs from a different shop from the rest of the family.
Certainly the retailer evacuated would dislike it, and he would dislike it even more if the whole
family was taken off too.Again, people have medical certificates and therefore priority for a
matter of only a few weeks. We cannot fiddle about with their registrations so nimbly as this
would necessitate.
Eventually a plan was hammered out by which the essential principle of egg distributionan
allocation at intervals determined by the varying supply position, instead of a ration perhaps
varying in quantity, at regular intervalswas preserved, but only for nonpriority consumers. For
priority consumers there was henceforth to be, in effect, a ration of three eggs per head per week;
the Commodity Division undertaking to arrange for deliveries at least fortnightly. The form of
the retailers permit was amended to show priority and non-priority eggs separately. After two
years of experiment, the machinery of controlled distributionof quasi-rationing, one might say
had reached finality.
Control of eggs was an ungrateful taskthe most so, perhaps, of any the Ministry undertook.
When Mr. Churchill pointed to the palpable scarcity of eggs as its principal weakness, his
criticism was, for all that it did not recognise that the scarcity was the result of the Governments
own deliberate policy, correct in diagnosing the reason for its unpopularity. No scheme of
distribution, however well managed, could arouse public enthusiasm if all it had to distribute was

thirty eggs Der non-priority head per year: dried egg, notwithstanding all its virtues (which were
to win belated public recognition when the end of Lend/Lease cut off supplies) was a
replacement of limited usefulness, needing care in preparation, and deficient in aerating qualities.
For all that, dried egg, and perhaps petrol rationing, may well have saved the control scheme
from breakdown, the one by relieving the pressure of urban demand, the other by limiting to
some extent the field for sales outside the scheme. After the war, despite the resumption of
imports of eggs in shell, the difficulties of control did not diminish.
It is difficult to see how the scheme, as a scheme, could have been improved upon. Even the
criticism most commonly heard that the Ministry eggs were not only few but stale--in so far as it
was firmly based, reflected conditions that could not be helped; the decimation of specialist
flocks on the one hand, the impossibility of advancc allocation on the other. Every effort was
made to avoid delays in the packing-stations, and the problem was serious only in the season of
scarcity; no egg, however, that has to pass through several stages of distribution can possibly be
as fresh as one direct from a specialist holding. Those from general farms may have lost their
first freshness before they reach the packer. Moreover, want of transport for collection was a
serious handicap in war-time.
Nor, quite apart from the justifications offered to Colonel Llewellin in 1944the needs of the
priority consumer and of the Cost-of-Living Indexdoes it seem likely that the effort to control
eggs could have been avoided. No Minister of Food in 1941 could have washed his hands of a
shortage that had led to such injustices between town and country. Whether the policy that had
produced the shortage, readily defended though it can be on broad grounds of principle, might
not have been modified from its full rigour, had control of egg distribution been accepted as an
inevitable result of it, is a question easier to ask than to answer. A more generous allowance of
feeding-stuffs to specialist breeders would probably have yielded proportionately more eggs to
packing stations, but the weight of opinion, as Mr. Churchill found, was overwhelmingly against
any revision of priorities. At all events, no concession could have done more than ease the Eggs
Divisions worst anxieties. In a time of general food shortage, something must come low on the
list; there are few things more embarrassing to a Controller than the food that does not quite
disappear. As someone ruefully remarked after the war, we never had any trouble with bananas.

ANNEX:EGG -BOXES UNDER CONTROL

The Ministry of Foods egg-box scheme merits special mention, not only as an essential part of
the control of eggs, but also as an example of the general problem of food containers that grew
ever more acute with war-time shortages of their raw material. Distribution of eggs depends
absolutely upon a sufficiency, even at the height of the season, of boxes of adequate quality.
From the first it was realised that an inducement must be provided for traders to return boxes;
this was incorporated in the distribution scheme for imported eggs introduced in the autumn of
1940.1 A charge of two shillings was levied on each box, and half-a-crown refunded on its return,
complete with fittings, in sound condition. Depots were set up in each Port Area to receive these
boxes, and a member of the wholesale egg trade became the Ministrys box supervisor. Boxes
not returned yielded the Ministry a sizeable profit that went in aid of the balancing payment ;
nevertheless, in this first winter of control the tendency was for boxes to accumulate, and though
some storage difficulties were encountered as a result, the stock was a useful asset with which to
start the full distribution scheme, in the summer of 1941.
Under full control the box scheme became more complicated, with, at first, a smaller charge for
those used for home-produced eggs.

Footnotes

Even by Mr. Churchill, who wrote to Lord Woolton on 6th December: Amid your many
successes in your difficult field, the egg distribution scheme seems to be an exception. I hear
complaints from many sides, and the scarcity of eggs is palpable. Churchill, op. cit., Vol. Ill, p.
753.
2

See, e.g., the letters to the Daily Telegraph by W. R. Morris Hammond, a specialist poultry
farmer (22.9.41) and Sir Leonard Lyle, M.P. (2.10.41).
3

U.S. manufacturers contracts, protective cases for shipment, and a technical difficulty
concerning flowability' in packing were all factors in the delay.
4

Experiments in the Ministrys Research Kitchen confirmed the scientists views about the
amount of reconstituted egg that could be got out of a packet of dried egg; but a hurried
housewife, inexperienced in using it, could hardly be expected to get such results. The Ministrys
Catering Division considered that two eggs equalled, practically speaking, three nominal dried
eggs.
5

Significant only as the recovery from the seasonal fall. The Prime Ministers rejoinder should
be noted: The fact that 370,000 small producers have enough gumption to keep chickens is a
matter for congratulation; under this head the only complaint 1 have heard is that this practice is
not sufficiently encouraged. After all, the backyard fowls use up a lot of scrap, and so save
cereals. ... Churchill, op. cit.t p. 757-8.
6

The calculations were at once complex and indefinite. There were estimated to be 62 million
poultry in Great Britain; 47 million commercial and 15 million domestic'. The produce of the
latter, with perhaps 4 million of the former (under fifties) was exempt. It remained to estimate
(a) how many of the others were hens in lay (b) what average egg production might be expected
from each. Taking two-thirds of the total, say 28 millions, for (a), and 100 eggs a year for (b), the
Ministry ought to have got twice as many eggs as it did.
7

The domestic poultry-keeper was not, however, debarred from obtaining dried egg.

S.R. & O. (1942) No. 1562. The delay turned out to be fortunate, for by an overlight in drafting,
catering establishments had been debarred from obtaining eggs on behalf of their residents, the
only exception to the general prohibition of sale by a controlled retailer to a caterer. An
amending Order (S.R. & O. (1942) No. 1801) had therefore to be made, to come into force
simultaneously with the main Order.
9

At the same time, on purely Cost-of-Living-Index grounds, the retail price was reduced by
6d., i.e., to 2s. a dozen.
10

National Egg Packers Association Limited (not to be confused with NEDAL).

11

The problem of re-distributing business was, of course, much greater in some areas than
others; in Lancashire 49 stations out of 79 were closed. Article 1 (2) of S.R. & O. (1942) No.
275, empowering the Minister to direct producers to packing stations other than those with which
they were registered, was the only means by which the arrangements could claim to be legalised.
The compensation fee had no statutory basis.
12

Opportunity was taken, for instance in November 1942, to rub in the ship-saving value of
dried egg; it was clearly far better for the war effort, the Press was told, to import 80,000 tons

of dried egg than the 2,100,000 tons of feeding-stuffs required to produce their equivalent in
shell eggs. Afinistrj of Food Bulletin, 10tn November 1942.
13

Thus in a survey carried out for the Ministry by the British Market Research Bureau Ltd., in
July 1944, 34 per cent, of some 256 housewives approached bought less than their entitlement.
24 per cent, had some stock in reserve. The Pure Dried Egg Consumer Survey, also carried on
for the Ministry, was designed to provide a continuous check on the progress of dried-egg
distribution; but its carefully drawn statistics had such a wide margin of error (admittedly so,
since for the first allocation the survey estimates over the whole period . . . exceeded potential
sales by 5 per cent.) that it could have value in recording general tendencies and preferences
only.
14

Mr. Churchills minutes to the Minister of Agriculture (12th January 1943 Please make
me a plan to have more eggs, 28th February I wish I could persuade you to overcome the
difficulties instead of merely entrenching yourself behind them, and 22nd MarchMuch of the
little poultry which is still kept in the country is fed on bread, which is still unrationed. ... I
should have thought that it would be better to make a further contribution to feeding-stuffs for
the poultry than to keep them going with the most expensive form of food, namely, that which
has already been prepared for human consumption) will be found in Churchill, op. cit., Vol. IV,
pp. 826-7, 830-1, 836-7. At this time the Lord Presidents Committee was discussing the
possibility that rations for pigs and poultry might have to be reduced.
15

For this decision, and the general caution about the cereals position at this time.

16

A packer at Earlston (Berwickshire) reported in October 1942 that out of 1294 producers on his
books, 16 had submitted returns on the required date. A packer in Devonshire, at the tame time,
received one return out of 735. (This was before the Ministry began its drive to secure returns.)
17

S.R. & O. (1942) No. 1562, Articles 3 (a), 12 (a). Cf. Article 7 (2) of S.R. & O. (1944) No.
502.
18

S.R. & O. (1944) No. 874, amending the principal Order, S.R. & O. (1944) No. 502.

19

S.R. & O. (1944) No. 874, already cited, Art. I (b).

20

Cf. the difficulties over food standards legislation, a little earlier.

21

Somf misunderstanding arose between officials and their expert advisers on what was meant
by nursing mother. This was revealed (and cleared up) in the autumn of 1942, when it became
apparent that the experts had not intended to limit priority eggs to those mothers who couid
literally be so described. Administratively this was important because the Ministry was enabled
to dispense with a medical certificate for mothers with children under twelve months old.
(Doctors had already protested that it was superfluous, since the childs ration book was
sufficient proof of its existence.)
22

There was some public confusion at the outset about the invalids priority, given on submission
of a medical certificate in a prescribed form that disguised the complaint from which the patient
was suffering under a class number (I, II, etc.). The explanatory leaflets for doctors were sent out
too late to reach them by 17th November, the day on which the scheme started, and both
Headquarters and local offices of the Ministry were inundated with enquiries and complaints.

23

The new arrangement for children came into force on 7th March 1943; that for expectant
mothers on 25th July, with the new ration book. See below, p. 651, for the changed rgime for
expectant mothers introduced on the latter date.
24

An explanation of permit procedure generally will be found in the section on Rationing, pp.
547-551*

CHAPTER VII
The Pre-war Plans and the Establishment of Control
I
As a producer of problems for Food Controllers, the potato has no rival in the vegetable or the
animal world. With average crops it yields a much higher food value per acre than any cereal,
and is therefore attractive to administrators who have just learned about calories. But the
advantage is diminished by the greater cost of production and the labour involved. Still more is it
affected by the highly speculative nature of the crop, and the difficulty of making good a
shortage by importation or of finding markets for a surplus. Before the War the yield might vary
from 4,1/2 to 6-,1/2 tons per acre; the total output of the United Kingdom [i.e., including all
Ireland] might range from five to seven and a half million tons. Practically the whole of this must
be consumed at home within the year; the bulk of the potato in relation to its value keeps export
and import within limits; its perishability added to its bulk prevents long storage. Thus follows a
great variation of price according to the size of the crop ; with the potato we are back in the
period before international trade; its price rises and falls precipitously, as did that of wheat in the
Middle Ages.
Thus beveridge introduces his account, a locus classicus for obligatory reading by all would-be
controllers, of the course of economic instruction entered upon by the first Ministry of Food,
when it tried to deal with potatoes. The potato queues of 1916-17, the result of simple price
control applied to a short crop, had, aided and abetted by the Food (War) Committee of the Royal
Society, persuaded the Government that, as Mr. Prothero said in February 1918, We could not
have too many potatoes.1 Experience had already shown that the Exchequer might have to pay
too heavy a price to get potatoes grown. In February 1917 the Prime Minister had promised
growers a guaranteed price of 6 a ton; it certainly produced the potatoes, but a bountiful crop
made nonsense of the attempt to give this price by merely prohibiting sales below it, and the War
Cabinet, after considering various schemes of sub' dy, decided on abolishing the minimum price.
The Government undertook to pay to the grower the difference between 6 and either the
average price realised by him in any given month, or a base price fixed, in self-defence, by the
Food Controllerwhichever was the greater. The-cost was about 1.1 millions. For 1918, the
bolder but in the event less expensive course was taken of purchasing, at prices laid down in
advance, the whole of the main crop, and organising distribution within twenty-two zones. The
Ministry of Food successfully disposed of surplus potatoes on the Continent, and made a
comparatively small loss on its trading account. There was, however, considerable heart-burning
among farmers about the application of the guarantee to potatoes found to be blighted in the
clamp. The Food Controller declined to pay for those at the price of sound potatoes, merely
because the grower contended that they were sound when clamped ; indeed, he claimed that the
price for ware2 potatoes had been fixed with due allowance for the incidence of blight in that
years crop. Only where the farmer could show that after increasing his potato acreage he had,

through no fault of his own, encountered actual loss, did the Ministry of Food undertake to
compensate him at an eventual cost of 180,000.
There were those at the time who doubted the wisdom of this policy.
The truth was.wrote Coller afterwardsthat we [the Ministry of Food] rather
resented the craze for planting potatoes: it was extremely unlikely that the comparative
famine of last season [1916] would recur, and everything pointed to the glut which
actually occurred. If we had realised that the result of this glut would be to denude our
profits to the extent of some six millions, our resentment would have been more acute,
although it would have been difficult to express it at a time when five potato-less days in
public eating places were prescribed by Statutory Order. . . .3
and, again, a little later on :
the Food Production Department were engaged in devising costly methods for the
utilisation of the surplus crop. There was to be farina; potatoes were to be dried ; they
were to be utilised by bakers in making bread; they were to be manufactured into potato
flour. The schemes so ingeniously evolved deserved a better fate than that which
ultimately befell them.
The prevailing view, however, enshrined in the First Report of the Wheat Commission in 1921,
echoed by Beveridge in 1928, was that the expenditure was worth while as an insurance
premium against the risk of cereal shortage in 1919. 4 The Commission believed that substantial
economies would have been achieved through the incorporation of potatoes in dough for
breadmaking, and that they would have formed a notable feature in the Nations breadstuff's.
There was almost regret, one feels, that the Armistice should have interrupted progress towards
this goal, which had much preoccupied the Ministry of Food during the first half of 1918.
In October 1917 the War Cabinet had sanctioned the use of part of the bread subsidy to
encourage the use of potatoes by bakers, and the Ministry launched a scheme for supplying them
through Food Control Committees at the subsidised price of 4 a ton. Recipes were prepared by
the Food Economy Section and issued to the trade; priority arrangements were made for potatopeeling, steaming, and mashing machines to be supplied. Butas an otherwise sanguine
memorandum for the War Cabinet admittedit has not been practicable to make the use of a
definite percentage of potatoes compulsory, owing to difficulties in obtaining the necessary
machinery, labour, storage and accommodation etc. (A circular to Divisional Commissioners
four days later, on 19th January 1918, was more candid; in the first four weeks of the scheme
only 1,111 tons of potatoes had been applied for, and Commissioners were asked to find out
why.) As late as June only 100 out of some 1,900 Food Control Committees had been persuaded
to make the admixture compulsory. The advocates of the scheme clearly still had an uphill task
in front of them.5
It seems certain, moreover, that the paper economies had themselves been set too high. The
figure of I2,1/2 per cent, which was initially set as a maximum (afterwards hopefully removed)
for the weight of cooked mashed potatoes that might be added to the dough, would have meant a
saving of only about 3 per cent, of flour, the rest going to replace the other ingredientwater.6 A
substantial economysay of 10 per cent.would have meant using stupendous quantities of
potatoes in the bakehouses, even supposing it to have been technically possible. The use of
potato flour was another matter; but supplies of this could not be produced in quantity overnight,
as the second Ministry of Food was to discover.

In short, the belief that an easy way lay to hand, by which a large surplus of potatoes could
readily be used up in the loaf, to the advantage of cereals supplies, was an illusion. The
scepticism of Coller, writing in 1925, was insufficient to dispel it, and it lingered vaguely on to
influence the plans of 1936 and after. One cannot go so far as to say that it prevented the Food
'Defence Plans) Department from considering what is really the capital question of wartime
potato policyhow many do we need ?but it may have been influential in helping to thrust the
whole potato problem into the background until comparatively late in the period of planning.
When the Chairman of the Potato Marketing Board, in April 1938, asked the Department for
guidance on war-time production policy, he was referred to the Ministry of Agriculture with an
alacrity that went beyond the requirements of protocol, and that suggests that little thought had
been given to the implications, for the future Food Controller, of a policy of increasing the potato
acreage. As late as the summer of 1939, when plans for a thoroughgoing control of potato
distribution had been all but completed, the production programme for the first year of the
ploughing-up campaign wasstill based on a calculation, not of requirements, but of possibilities,
that had been made in the Ministry of Agriculture at the end of 1936, on the basis of the 25 per
cent, cut in food imports that had been postulated at that time. For other foods, such as cereals,
where any increase in home production could be taken up by reducing imports, this approach to
the problem was safe enough; for potatoes it offered an embarrassing prospect of surplus.
Nevertheless the Food (Defence Plans) Department agreed, with Treasury sanction, that the
Ministry of Agriculture should go forward on this basis, i.e., for an increase of one-third over the
pre-war acreage as an insurance against a shortage of other foods.7
This decision was, of course, taken wiihout reference to any thorough analysis of the prospective
food situationsuch an analysis was not made until the spring of 1940nor even any
calculation of the degree of insurance the increase in acreage would provide. There might have
been more hesitation about it, had the Department realised that, other things being equal, the
extra potatoes would represent an addition of only about one per cent, of the total food supply in
calories. On the other hand, the possibility that Channel Islands supplies might be cut off had
barely been mentioned, nor the other more important merit of potatoes in war-time, their value as
a source of the anti-scorbutic Vitamin C (ascorbic acid).
Indeed, the main economic problems of potatoes in war-time supplies, prices, and disposal
were, in the months before war broke out, being dragged along at the tail of an elaborate scheme
for the distribution of potatoes through a network of Government-controlled depots. The reason
for such a scheme was the apprehension that air raids would at once dislocate normal
distribution.8 The suggestion that depots would be necessary had been put by officials to Captain
Mollett, Chairman of the Potato Marketing Board, as early as November 1936, 9 but matters
considered more urgent had prevented its being followed up until the spring of 1938, when an
anxious enquiry from Captain Mollett caused discussions to be resumed. The Food (Defence
Plans) Department invited him to draw up a scheme of control in outline, and during that
summer the outline began to be filled in, in consultation with the National Federation of Fruit
and Potato Merchants.
The Munich crisis naturally hastened its completion. Captain Mollett and Mr. C. H. Lewis, a
leading member of the Federation, were temporarily appointed Director- and Deputy Directordesignate of Potatoes, and together they worked out a comprehensive and detailed plan, which
was stated to be ready for the London area, the most urgent, in October 1938. In November,
following on the official inquest on the state of war preparations, the Potato Marketing Board
was formally asked, and agreed, to allow its staff to continue working on the control scheme; and
by mid-April 1939 Captain Mollett and Mr. Lewis were reporting that preparations for the
physical creation of potato control were complete. Depots had been selected and inspected all
over the country; in consultation with the railway companies, ten Divisional Offices, based on

the Potato Marketing Board lay-out, had been chosen and their staffs earmarked ; Area
Committees had been set up for each of the 29 Areas in Great Britain; arrangements made for the
requisition of potato sacks and their subsequent management; a procedure for the loading and
despatch of potatoes by road or rail laid down. Financial and accounting arrangements had been
made ; the special requirements of the Forces and NAAFI provided for; negotiations entered into
for supplies from Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands.
All in all, the scheme had an impressive ring, and the Department viewed it with great
admiration. There still remained, however, certain questions to be settled before it could be put
into force at the word go. The most important of these was the price structure for potatoes
under control. Leaving aside the question of the guaranteed market for an increased acreage,
there was need to construct a schedule of prices at which the Food Controller would buy the
different varieties, subdivided by area and soil; provision had also to be made for distributive
costs under the depot scheme. It. was difficult to compute a satisfactory figure for the latter, for
costs of normal distribution could not be applied to an arrangement geographically and
funcuonally so novel. The future of the Potato Marketing Board itself had to be arranged in
agreement with the Board and the Agricultural Departments; in principle the Boards functions
would be taken over by the Ministry of Food for the duration, but the precise forms by which
this should be done, and their timing, had to be worked out. Provisions for the control of brock
or chat potatoes, i.e., those not suitable for human consumption or for seed, and for seed
potatoes and manufactured potatoes had to be drawn up. Work on a comprehensive control Order
began in May 1939, but so intractable did the work of drafting prove that on 23rd August it was
suspended in favour of a provisional Order controlling prices merely, to hold the position until
full control was ready. The Food (Defence Plans) Department was, it should be added, publicly
committed to the plan by a Press Notice issued in May; and on the eve of war the nucleus of the
future Potato Division of the Ministry of Food moved to St. Johns College, Oxford, where it
shared quarters with the control of fish distribution.

II
When war broke out prompt measures were taken, for potatoes as for other foods, to prevent a
speculative rise of prices. The first provisional prices Order was delayed for a few days by lastminute amendments, intended to bring the price-schedule previously agreed upon into line with
current market prices. It came out on 9th September, and meanwhile these prices were displayed
as voluntary maxima at the principal markets. Within a week a new Order proved to be
necessary, replacing the single retail price for all potatoes by separate prices for Grade A and
Grade B varieties. (The former Order had prescribed separate prices only at the growers and
wholesale stages, with the result that retailers were asked to handle the better-class potatoes at a
lower margin.) At the same time the former five price-zones into which Great Britain had been
divided were transformed into six by the creation of a separate zone covering the South of
England, with slightly higher growers and wholesale prices. There was still trouble, however, in
Lancashire, which was divided between two zones. Complaints came from wholesalers in
Liverpool, and also in Accrington, Colne, and district, that the lower price they might charge,
compared with those in Manchester and the surrounding towns, meant that they could not afford
to handle Lincolnshire potatoes, because the cost of carriage was too high. Fish-friers in Colne
objected to being forced, because of this, to use wasteful Lancashire potatoes instead of
Lincolnshire silt-grown potatoes for which they would willingly pay a higher price. Some of
these and similar grievances were removed by a third Order in October, which extended the
boundaries of the higher-priced zone further into Lancashire; for Liverpool, on account of its
geographical isolation, a solution on these lines would not work.10

These troubles never for one moment approached a hold-up of distribution, such as an illconceived price Order can bring about; there were plenty of potatoes everywhere, if not of the
particular kind or quality that people would prefer. But they were not calculated to rouse
enthusiasm in the trade for the full control that was promised, and to which the staff at Oxford
were busy putting the final touches. When Captain Mollett, on 24th September, put forward for
approval the introduction of the scheme not later than mid-October, he found his civil service
colleagues less than lukewarm about it. The collapse of the fish scheme had made them wary of
any system of distribution revolving round newly-created depots; the very fact that they
attributed that collapse, not to inherent weakness but to the want of a strong enough
Headquarters staff, made them wonder whether the staff of Potato Section, too, might not be
overwhelmed as Mr. Bennett had been. One revolutionary feature of the potato scheme, the
segregation of wholesale merchants into two groups, one of which might only collect potatoes
from growers, the other distribute them from depots to retailers, in particular gave officials
pause. They had always recognised that it would need careful handling ; already in August Mr.
A. V. Alexander had objected to it as cutting right across Co-operative Society practice. Could it,
they asked themselves, be justified in circumstances so unlike those for which it had been
designed? Moreover, they were becoming aware that, inevitably since the scheme had been
prepared with such speed, the net of consultation had not been cast as wide as was customary.
The larger growers and merchants were no doubt satisfied with it; the smaller men, for that very
reason, suspicious. The smallholders of Bedfordshire approached the Parliamentary Secretary
(their Member of Parliament), to ask for representation on the Ministrys newly established
advisory committee; the National Farmers Union asked that it should be consulted before the
scheme was brought into operation. By mid-October the Minister was said to be bombarded
with objections.
In vain it was argued on the other side that full control was necessary in order to ensure the
guaranteed prices and orderly disposal of surplus that would be required if more potatoes were to
be grown ; that there was a danger of potatoes that might be required for seed being sold as ware;
that proper provision ought to be made at once against end-of-season shortage; and that delay
would demoralise the industry', which had been keyed-up for an early move. These arguments,
though they had force, could not, officials thought, justify changing the whole system of potato
distribution. Some other scheme for guaranteeing prices for the 1940 crop would need to be
worked out ; the scheme already prepared for controlling seed potatoes might need to be
introduced in some modified form, but that was all. In the atmosphere of October 1939, much
weaker arguments than these would have been decisive. On the 27th, the House of Commons
was told that there was no present intention of introducing the scheme; the Ministry would
continue with a minimum of interference with ordinary channels of distribution and trade
practices.

Ill
The Ministry had now hastily to retrieve the baby that had been thrown out with the bath-water.
Growers had been, in efiect though not in form, deprived of the insurance provided by the
Marketing Boards operations, for which the Government purchase incidental to the depot
scheme would have been a substitute. The prices they were getting in November 1939 were
everywhere well below the maxima prescribed in the provisional prices Orders, Restriction of
marketing by control of the riddle, on pre-war lines, would nerd to be very drastic, since that
expedient had been in abeyance for three months, and would be open to ill-informed public
criticism as a policy of deliberate food restriction in time of war. Yet, unless growers received a
return for their whole crop at least as good as was customary, they would not merely be
unwilling, but unable, to incur the costs of the heavier sowing that was required : the 1939 crop
must be able to finance that of 1940. Potato Sections census of growers stocks indicated a

prospective surplus of the order of 200,000 tons or more. Small wonder that the Potato
Marketing Board should call a meeting without consulting its Chairman (Captain Mollett) and
demand guaranteed prices for both 1939 and 1940 crops, and that the Ministry of Agriculture
should urge that an early announcement be made of the Governments intentions. 11 Captain
Mollett, as Director of Potato Supplies, therefore drew up a plan whose essential feature was the
creation of a fund for the purchase of surplus stocks out of a tonnage levy payable to the
Ministry by first buyers from producers. This was calculated to reduce Ministry interference
with the trade to a minimum; the first buyer alone would require to be licensed and to make a
return of his purchases. Many of the wholesalers concerned were already on the books of the
Potato Marketing Board; the difficulties were to lie with such sales (some ten per cent.) as were
not made through wholesalers. The problems of determining the respective type of licence and
rate of levy were to take longer to solve than the month that it was at first hoped would be
sufficient to get the scheme ready.
Parliaments recent interest in potatoes had attracted the attention of high authority; the
Parliamentary Secretary himself considered this scheme at an unwontedly early stage and
authorised Potato Section to discuss it, and also a modified version of the pre-war seed plan, with
the trade. The Ministry did not propose to lay itself open a second time to the charge of nonconsultation. Growers were not readily convinced that the fixed prices now promised were
sufficient guarantee of security without more definite arrangements for the purchase of the
surplus; wholesalers were concerned that there should be strict scrutiny of the issue of licences to
retailers for direct trade with growers; retailers, however, had encouragingly conceded that they
should pay a higher levy on direct sales than would be paid by the wholesaler provided that
satisfactory trading margins could be determined. With these reservations, the trade was prepared
to fall in with the scheme. What exactly should be done about the prospective surplus was not,
for the moment, discussed; some undertaking had to be given, however, before the Parliamentary
Christmas recess, and Mr. W. S. Morrisons statement in the House on 13th December was
deliberately couched in rather general terms.12 The insurance fund (it said) would be used to
ensure to farmers a reasonable return for any surplus crop remaining at the end of the [1939-40]
season. As for the 1940 crop, In the event of a surplus, whether resulting from an expansion of
acreage, or exceptional yields, the Ministry of Food will make the necessary arrangements for
ensuring that growers will be enabled to obtain a remunerative return on their potato crop as a
whole.
Minimum, as well as maximum, growers prices for the remainder of the 1939 season were the
most tangible part of the guarantee; but the new price structure that was prepared accordingly,
starting as it did from minimum prices approximately 5s. higher than the existing maxima, 13 and
also embodying the levy on sales, threatened to bear hardly on the poor; some paring of the retail
margins made it possible to maintain the existing prices per lb, 14 but an increase in the price for 7
lb. lots was likely to affect the Cost-of-Living figure by about a quarter of a point. The Treasury
preferred this to the alternativea permanent subsidy for potatoes that would, moreover, require
special machinery to administer, for the Ministry of Food did not trade in potatoes and therefore
could not simply incur a loss. Increased consumption had, indeed, according to the December
census returns, caused the prospective surplus to shrink: it was now put at less than 60,000 tons
and might eventhe Director of Potatoes saiddisappear altogether. But this prospect
surprising only to the novice in potato statisticsthough it provided reassurance that the potato
fund would be self-supporting, did not lessen the urgency of getting the new arrangements
working during January.
The building up of a new ana elaborate price structure, though an enormous legal and
administrative task to accomplish, in the face of some trade dissatisfaction, in such a short time,
was a straightforward one; the awkward questions of policy centred on the precise nature of the

guarantee offered on 13th December. There was a tendency in the Ministry of Agriculture and
elsewhere to read into its ambiguities a promise that the Ministry of Food would purchase any
potatoes for which growers could not find a market, supplementing any deficit in the levy fund
from the Exchequer; and there was a general impression that it would do so at a price not less
than the minima to be prescribed. The Ministry of Food refused, greatly to the disappointment of
the Ministry of Agriculture, to accept any such responsibility or to make definite proposals then
and there about compensation. In announcing the introduction of control it endeavoured to make
its position clearer:
. . . the Ministers assurance ... of a reasonable return to growers for any surplus crop . . . does
not imply that the Insurance Fund will be used to guarantee the payment of the prescribed
minimum prices for sales of surplus stocks.15

IV
The two Orders that provided the machinery of control came into force on 8th February 1940;
the Ministry of Food prescribed the vast new schedules of growers maximum and minimum
prices variety by variety, wholesale and retail prices and licensing provisions for the sale of ware
potatoes;16 for seed potatoes the effect of the schedule was to fix prices to growers within a fiveshilling range, and to fix a maximum wholesale margin; a Treasury Charges Order instituted a
levy of 5s., 6s. or 7s. 6d. a ton for ware, and 2s. 6d. a ton for seed. 17 The price provisions had not
been operating for long, however, before it was necessary to give the promised reconsideration to
the uneasy structure of distributive margins, and the damage done by severe frosts in February
provided growers also with a good case for increased prices. The schedules now offered to the
trade proved generally acceptable, though growers had to be content with a halfpromise that a
further seasonal increase might be granted; as the chairman at a preliminary discussion had said,
if the consumers should be eliminated there would be excellent prospects of settling all their
differences ; consumers now had to pay about a farthing a pound more, a situation reluctantly
accepted as inevitable by officials whose minds were more intensely occupied at the moment
with the problem of getting a larger potato crop grown in 1940.18
The remainder of the 1939 crop produced few difficulties; a further increase in growers prices
was not in the end considered to be justified, though in May some minor adjustments to the
schedule were made, which did not affect wholesale or retail prices.19
The Potato Fund was more than adequate to deal with the tiny surplus of 5,280 tons, 30 which
was purchased for disposal to processing factories and owners of livestock; in spite of paying
growers, after all, the current minimum prices, and in spite of the failure of some growers to send
in their returns, the Fund had over 175,000 in hand at 31st July 1940. This considerable
balance, accumulated at the expense of the Cost-of-Living figure, passed over automatically for
use in handling the 1940 crop. It is possible that more old potatoes might have been surplus if
the full expectations of imports had been realised; until shipments had to be suspended owing to
the military situation, Channel Island potatoes came forward in good time under the auspices of a
marketing scheme which showed the value of the long established contact between Potato
Section and the island authorities. As it was, a slight relaxation of the riddle restrictions on the
old crop was the only measure necessary to meet a temporary stringency.21
The control scheme had been in operation for a few months only, and its limitations were not yet
revealed. At any rate it had restored order in the potato trade when the regulating powers of the
Potato Marketing Board and the impending regimentation of the depot scheme were both
withdrawn. The latter may have been unjustly discredited, in the eyes of officials, by its
superficial resemblance to the fish scheme. Beyond the fact that they both relied on depots,

there'' was little in common between them; the potato scheme, unlike its neighbour, was based on
complete familiarity and substantial agreement with the trade. Had disaster of the type expected
come, there was reason to suppose that the minority objections, that weighed so much in October
1939, would not have seriously impeded the schemes functioning. The absence of disaster not
only meant its postponement, while the further consultations there had not been time for were
pursued; it produced a lasting aversion towards interfering with trade channels more than was
absolutely necessary. In five years of war potato control was never to attain the proportions of
1918.
Footnotes
1

Quoted by Beveridge.

Ware potatoes are those deemed ht for human consumption, as contrasted with seed, and
brock or chat (for animal feeding, etc.).
3

Coller.

Royal Commission on Wheat Supplies: First Report (1921), 38.

Ibid. The Commission say no fewer than 100' Food Control Committees. They may have
been in ignorance of the small proportion this represented ; but it is odd to find Beveridge (loc.
cit.) repeating their statement without comment.
6

Mashed potatoes are roughly 80 per cent, water; flour, 14 per cent. I am indebted to Dr. T.
Moran of the St. Albans Cereals Research Station for this information.
7

The original proposal of 1936 had been justified inter alia by the statement that potatoes can, if
necessary, be incorporated in the loaf.
8

Mr. C. H. Lewis comments (November 1953): our verbal instructions were very precise. We
were to imagine and plan for the worst; the main cities were isolated; some, if not all, of the main
line bridges were out of action . . . our plan was supposed to be based on the extreme and could
be modified to suit the actual conditions.
9

In an interview on the 23rd, four days before the Food (Defence Plans) Department was
formally established. All the officials present duly became members of the Department and in
effect spoke for it.
10

The three Orders were S.R. & O. (1939) Nos. 1149, 1200, 1489. A fourth Provisional Prices
Order, introducing further sub-classifications, was made in January 1940 (S.R. & O. (1940) No.
III).
11

The Parliamentary Secretary had told Mr. Boothby, M.P., on 7th November: It is hoped that it
will be possible to make a statement shortly'. Official Reportt col. 1434.
12

13

It is given in full in Annex I.

The wholesale margin was based on the mean between growers minimum and maximum
prices (the minimum plus 10s.)a source of dissatisfaction on the grounds that there could be no
profit if the growers maxima were reached.

14

It was alleged to be impossible to attack the wholesale margins, which now took careful
account of delivery costs as they differed over the country. It was not to be expected, however,
that retailers would welcome the cuts which were now made on smaller lots, for the consumers
benefit. Further increases were ultimately allowed on sales of a stone and half-a-stone.
15

16

Ministry of Food Press Notice 249 ( 10th February 1940).

S.R. & O. (1940) No. 192.

17

Payable by wholesale merchants, grower-salesmen, retailers, and seed merchants

respectively (S.R. & O. (1940) No. 203).
18

The subsequent Order was S.R. & O. 1940, No. 402, dated 18th March, publicised with the
defence that a rise in retail prices is normal at this time of the year*.
29

A reduction in minimum prices of Kerrs Pink and Redskin in northern and eastern counties
was tempered by a concession for potatoes grown on skirtland soils. (S.R. & O.
(1940) No. 799, dated 25th May.)
20

Official Report, 1.8.40, cols. 1425-6 (answer to Sir Adrian Baillie, M.P.).

21

The tonnage received from Jersey in 1940 was 34,800 as compared with a six year* average of
62,397 tons. (Total imports of earlies in the previous year had been about 130,000 tons.)

CHAPTER VIII
The 1940 Crop
I
The ministers promises about the 1940 crop provided no great incentive for growers, still
uncertain of the implications of the 1939 guarantee, to increase their sowings of potatoes. The
assurances of December were offset by the announcement in February that the minimum price
would not necessarily be paid for surplus potatoes, and by dissatisfaction with the prices the
1939 crop was fetching. The Agricultural Departments were not, just then, pressing farmers hard
on potatoes; but in March the shipping situation directed attention to the failure of planting to
live up to expectations. ft seemed likely that some 120,000 more acres would be planted in 1940,
as against the 150,000 acres programmed for; moreover a smaller than normal yield was
expected not only on account of wireworm in the newly-broken grasslands, but also, with less
justification, merely because there had been a succession of good crops. The Interdepartmental
Committee on Food Prices, considering on 21st March the question of prices for the 1940 crop,
pointed out that only three or four weeks remained in which to influence supplies in the second
year of war. Though the Committee made a tentative examination of the increase already
apparent in costs of production, which should form the basis of growers prices for the 1940
crop, it did not recommend announcing any basic minimum at the moment; encouragement
should, it thought, rather take the form of an announcement reassuring growers about the fate of
any surplus.
A few days later there was produced, apropos of the investigation into import programmes set
afoot by the War Cabinet on 1st March, the first detailed analysis of the ends and limitations of a

policy of growing more potatoes. The aim of this inquiry, conducted jointly by senior officials
from the Treasury, the Agricultural Departments, and the Ministry of Food, was to discover what
contribution increased potato production might make towards saving imports of cereals, and its
emphasis was on the manufacture of a surplus into human food ; but it dealt with the question of
price inducement also. Assurances of too high a remuneration to growers would be likely, it was
thought, to prevent farmers from making every effort to find their own market. No new price
offer would be justified at this stage in the season; it would now need a very sharp change in the
expectation of profit from potato growing to increase the potato acreage substantially, and the
distortion of price relations between the various crops migni have serious' political
consequences. Unlike their colleagues of the Prices Committee, these officials dwelt more on the
prospect of surplus than the possibility of shortage. Even if this should be no more than 250,000
tons (a figure based on a yield of only six tons an acre, as against the average of 6.7 tons) a more
extensive factory programme than that already being inaugurated for the current surplus would
be necessary. However, this had been foreseen; the Ministry of Food had already arranged to
finance the construction of four further factoriesmaking a total of six1that should
manufacture potato meal for animal feeding. These would absorb 100,000 tons over a year. In
addition, sugar-beet factories could be adapted for the same purpose during the off-season, and
this would absorbit was saidanother 200,000 tons. (A little later, there was talk of using a
further 60,000 tons in the making of farina, to replace lost supplies from Holland.)
What of the mixture of potato flour in the loaf, which had been the main objective of the inquiry
in the first place? The special factories to be built, though not the sugar-beet factories, could, it
was said, be used to make potato flour; but this was objected to 011 the ground that there would
be a double loss of feeding-stuffsthe meal itself, and the wheat offals that would not be
produced in consequence of potato flour being substituted for wheat flour. The objection was of
very limited validity, because it assumed, first, that no alternative measure of conservation, such
as increasing the extraction rate, would be employed in place of dilution', and, secondly, that the
amount of potato flour would be substantial enough to matter. Perhaps because of the haste with
which the report was drawn up, there had been confusion between the extent to which the use of
potato flour was technically feasibletwo per cent.and the extent to which it could,
eventually, be made available; the latter, on the assumption that 100,000 tons of potatoes could
be processed, would be not more than 25,000 tons annually, or say one-half of one per cent, of
wheat-flour supplies. Even so, the inquiry poured salutary cold water on the more extravagant
hopesof a five or even ten per cent, dilutionthat had been pinned on potatoes, and much
effort would have been saved later if its general conclusionthat an increased potato acreage
could not guarantee any definite, calcu-lable saving in tonnagehad not been allowed to drop
out of sight.
The immediate outcome of these discussions was a further effort at reassurance, which was not
well received by farmers; they were (it was reported to the Ministry of Food) hoping that the
problem of the 1940 surplus might be dealt with by way of acreage payment. This method would
not discriminate between deserving and undeserving cases, and the Ministry would have
preferred to continue more or less on the 1939 basis, i.e., to pay a minimum price for potatoes
removed from the market during the season, and something less for any surplus remaining at the
end of it. (As yet it had not been decided that the Potato Fund would in fact settle growers
surplus claims for 1939-40 at the minimum price.) By June, however, when authority was given
to enter into formal negotiations about the main-crop prices for 1940, growers were clearly, as an
official remarked, on a good bargaining wicket.
For this change the war situation was, of course, responsible. It was difficult to remain cool
about the potato supply with the enemy at the gates; the Ministry of Food was hard put to it
during the summer to repel helpful suggestions that would have disorganised the trade

completely in the interests of national safety. There was a proposal that the potatoes grown in the
Wash areamore than a quarter of the whole main-cropshould be given the monopoly of the
market in August and September, lest they be lost through enemy action. Some such course was
favoured by the Division, but higher authority, including the Minister himself, doubted whether
the risk justified the disturbance to normal trade channels, and it was not pursued. Dr. Redcliffe
N. Salaman lent the weight of his unrivalled authority to a suggestion that the digging of new
potatoes be prohibited until they were more or less mature, thus increasing the total supply by as
much as 300,000 tons. The Division replied that this would create a present shortage in order to
form a surplus that would have to be fed to livestock nine months later; nevertheless, the
suggestion bore fruit in an Order prohibiting the lifting of main-crop potatoes before 1st August,
except under licence from the County War Agricultural Executive Committee. This was the first
small step towards the policy, later to be adopted, of regulated disposal of the crop throughout
the season.
These ideas reflect a more general notion, namely, that the potato crop was in some especial way
an insurance against national starvation. The Scientific Food Committee had specified a large
quantity of potatoesone pound per head per dayas part of the basal diet proposals. Apart
from bread, the potato is the most important single foodstuff in the basic diet for supplying
energy ; it is also the principal source of vitamin C available to the poorest class of consumer at a
reasonable price. The lack of precision in this statement was calculated to mislead, so far as
energy was concerned; even a pound of potatoes a day, twice the average pre-war consumption,
would provide only about 250 calories, as against 850 from the 12 oz. of bread that had also been
specified. Moreover, to furnish that amount of potatoes, even supposing people would be willing
to eat them, was in the short run quite impossible. 2 The contribution of potatoes to vitamin-C
supplies was far more substantial; even before the war they accounted for one-fifth of the total
intake, and with supplies of citrus fruit cut off would obviously become much more important.
Even so, the uncertainty of the crop would have made it very dangerous, in emergency, to bank
on potatoes as a safeguard against scurvy.
When, that is to say, the scientists argued that the possibility of a surplus should not... be
allowed to restrict the acreage planted which should be regarded as an insurance premium for
greater security, and advocated that at least a further 200,000 acres should be planted in 1941,
the sceptic would have been entitled to ask whether the premium, in relation to the certainty of
cover, was not perhaps a little high. When they added that the Government should give
remunerative prices combined with a complete and simply worded guarantee that it would take
over the surplus, he might well recall Beveridges remark about a similar guarantee in 1917It
is the business of civil servants to translate into complicated prose the simple raptures of their
masters.

II
In such an atmosphere, it is perhaps odd that the Ministry of Food should have managed to retain
the levy in its control arrangements for the main-crop of 1940. (New potatoes had been allowed a
free market within a maximum prices framework agreed with the trade.) 3 Its advantages were
obvious, the more so since the levy fund continued to prosper and evasion was negligible; failing
a Government decision to purchase the entire crop, farmers regarded the fund as at least some
security against loss. While the fund might not cover the purchase of a large surplus, it would
take a considerable burden from the Exchequer. The smooth working of present arrangements
made it likely, too, that merchants would continue to accept a measure they had at first disliked.
Against the levy had to be set the effect on consumer prices and the inconsistency of imposing a
special tax upon a commodity the consumption of which it is desired to increase. Scruples on
this point, however, were overcome by the financial advantages; the alternative was, after all,

some form of subsidy to growers, the mere suggestion of which could be taken no further at the
moment. So the Ministry successfully convinced itself that the small fraction 4 of a penny per lb.
that the levy meant for retail prices was not likely to prejudice any propaganda for increased
consumption.
It was necessary, therefore, to strike a price bargain that should give growers some
encouragement to increase production in 1941, and yet not affect the cost of a staple food much
more seriously than the levy had already done. The Interdepartmental Committee on Food
Prices, anxious to redress an existing scale of priorities for home produce that put potatoes at the
bottom of the list, recommended in August 1940 an increase for the 1941 crop of 15s. a ton,
considerably more than the measured increase in costs.5 By coincidence rather than design this
corresponded to the figure that finally emerged from the Ministry of Foods argument with
growers representatives about the 1940 main-crop price.
The original offer to farmers at the time of the general price settlement had been of a 20 per cent,
increase on 1939 prices in 1940, to be followed by a further 10 per cent, increase in 1941. The
schedules for the early crop in August and September (later known as the bridge period, i.e.,
between old and new potatoes) had been accepted as an interim measure, representing no
increase on prices at the end of the 1939 season, but operating in support of the ban on the early
lifting of main-crop varieties. Growers therefore looked for a more generous offer for the main
crop, and, as had been expected, criticised as inadequate the Ministrys offer of a minimum price
based on 5 per ton in the cheapest English area and 4 10s. in the north of Scotland; they
claimed a further 10s. but were met halfway with an increase of 5s. on minimum prices only,
which made the total average increase 15s. a ton. When this arrangement was finally approved
the Ministry considered that it had come well out of the negotiations.
In fact, however, growers were to do very well out of the 1940 crop, for three reasons. In the first
place, not only was the price offered at the beginning of the season one that allowed for an
increase in costs of about 30 per cent., but the Ministry had, at the request of the growers,
committed itself to four seasonal increases in a published range of prices which covered the
period until the following June. Secondly, the price to be guaranteed to growers for any potatoes
that could not be marketed by the end of the season was now to be the seasons average
minimum price and not, as was at first decided, the lowest price, that of October. A third measure
of reassurance, which the Ministry .had seen fit to offer at the beginning of negotiations in order
to create a favourable atmosphere, was an undertaking to pay the minimum price ruling at the
time of delivery for any potatoes required for the factories, the needs of which, it was thought,
would remove most of the surplus during the course of the season In stressing the benefit of a
growers market that the factory programme would provide, the Ministry as yet gave little weight
to the need for forming a deliberate policy of preserving long-keeping varieties and accumulating
an end-of-season reserve. The possibility of a poorer yield, which had been allowed for in the
price offered, and the fact that stop-gap supplies of new potatoes from abroad would not be
coming in next spring were, for the time being, subordinated to the opposite and greater fear of
leaving a surplus in the hands of indignant growers.

Ill
Comparatively few changes in the control scheme itself were made to deal with the 1940 crop.
The technical details of price structure and margins remained the same, except that the difference
between growers maximum and minimum prices was now halved; a return to the distinctions of
soil classification from the simpler schedule operative in August and September was made in the
main-crop control Order;6 and a clause was inserted to ensure that the wholesalers minimum
price should not be less than the growers minimum price for the same class of potatoes.

Wholesale margins, which the Ministrys Director of Costings thought too high, remained
untouched for the season pending further investigations. (To obtain information concerning a
merchants trade in potatoes, as distinct from his trade in fruit and vegetables, was difficult even
if the merchant were prepared to co-operate; and to apply an average based on such costings data
to a margin that was to allow for the extreme case of long haulage was no less so.) The
opportunity of the new Orders was also taken to strengthen the licensing provisions in small
ways. Growers would now require to be licensed as grower-salesmen if they wished to dispose,
by way of occasional sale, of more than one ton during the season, and the holder of a licence to
buy direct from growers, apt to be confused with any retailer licensed by the Food Control
Committee, was now distinguished by the description licensed potato buyer.
The higher prices now prescribed drew from one quarter a protest to which the Ministry gave a
sympathetic hearing. Fish-friers, a far from inconsiderable group of potato users, claimed that the
attempt to pass the increase on to the consumer, as the rest of the trade was able to do, was
reducing their turnover. The Ministry, not yet ready to encourage potato consumption by a
general subsidy, felt that this was a case in which a special grant could be justified. To pay fishfriers the difference between an agreed economic price and actual market prices would not be
very expensive in subsidy, though it might be awkward to administer. Out of many suggested
schemes one found favour by which the Ministry in effect decided every month on its own rate
of payment. The fish-friers, some 24,000 in all, were invited to register 7 and return particulars of
their purchases each month, and in cases where the average market price in the area, as
computed by Area Potato Supervisors, exceeded 7s. 9d. a cwt. the Ministry would pay the
difference. This subsidy to a special class of trade is interesting as the first instance of
intervention by the Exchequer in potato prices, but in spite of Lord Wooltons explicit interest in
a more general cheapening of potatoes it remained the only move for several months.
The November 1940 census of growers stocks revealed that the crop yield, so far from being
poor, was well above average. The prospect of a surplus of more than 450,000 tons at the end of
the season, and pressure from the Ministry of Agriculture, convinced Potato Division that the
factory programme must be supplemented by other measures to remove supplies from the current
market. In the Divisions view, a surplus of this size could not be absorbed by any probable
increase in human consumption; the Ministry would have to buy in quantity for resale as stockfeed at a lower price.8 This would create the anomaly that while the only outward sign of the
Governments wish to increase the human consumption of potatoes and so save imported foods
was a steadily rising price, potatoes would be subsidised as a food for animals. As a matter of
expediency, however, the decision was finally approved on a month-to-month basis, though the
scientists, watching the position jealously after the tacit rejection of the Basal Diet, had not been
slow to attack the proposal, and to urge instead that a greater increase in human consumption be
sought.
The practical arguments in favour of a vigorous policy of gradual disposal (as the Director of
Potatoes put it) were, however, overwhelming. The alternative, a temporary increase in the size
of the ware riddle, following pre-war practice, would have had the further advantage of
increasing the quantity of seed for the coming season, but was likely to affect the growers
remunerative return and disorganise the market. The growers could make an impressive case
against the postponement of purchase for livestock until nearer the end of the season. They had
not the labour to move the whole surplus from the farms in the spring; its transport had far better
be spread out over the season, particularly under air raid conditions ; if potatoes were to be used
to feed cattle they would be wanted before the beginning of the grazing season. That certain
varieties were even then (it was said) deteriorating in the clamps and that all varieties would lose
weight and require hand-picking if left after March, were incidental considerations. At the end of
the season when there would be less demand for livestock feeding and potatoes were unsuitable

for manufacture, the Ministrys loss on stocks purchased under the guarantee would be far
greater. Nevertheless, the position needed to be, and was, carefully watched; up to the end of
December a quota of 85,000 tons was allocated among the various areas, for January, 70,000
tons, and so on for each month as occasion required. The December stocks census, in fact,
showed an apparent reduction in the surplus that was greater than had been expected, and local
officers were advised that the situation calls for restraint and patience in dealing with growers
anxious to dispose of their stocks quickly. Actually, in the three months from mid-November to
mid-February, less than 50,000 tons of potatoes were sold for cattle-feed under the scheme.
During January and February 1941 the possibilities of encouraging people to eat more potatoes
were thoroughly canvassed at the Interdepartmental Committee on Food Prices. Opinions were
divided on whether a slight reduction of priceid. per 7 lb.by way of subsidy would do the
trick. The Director of Potatoes was convinced that it would not; moreover, as prices were
generally below the maximum there was no guarantee that a subsidy would not simply go into
the pockets of the trade. Arguments on the other side were pretty tenuous, the chief one being
that the pre-war Bishop Auckland experiment, when potatoes were sold to the unemployed at
half-price for a short time, had resulted in a 70 per cent, increase in consumption. It was
therefore suggested that a rebate of 3d. per 7 lb. might be given to the poor, on the lines of the
National Milk Schemea rather late example of the type of special provision fashionable in the
early months of 1940, and one which was to founder on the administrative objections of the
Ministrys Milk Division which would have had to handle it. Other suggestions were a special
publicity campaign, for which the Treasury agreed to earmark 25,000; 9 the addition of cooked
mashed potatoes to the loaf, which was dropped as technically objectionable; the greater use of
potatoes in emergency and communal feeding; and the encouragement of caterers to serve larger
helpings of potatoes in place of bread. More important, the Prices Committee endorsed a
suggestion, originally made by Potato Divisions Trade Adviser in December, that the Ministry
should buy at least 100,000 tons of good-keeping potatoes for an end-of-season reserve, to help
bridge the gap until the new crop should be available.
The Committee also, against the advice of the Division, recommended that the seasonal rise in
prices, due in March, be cancelled by abolishing the levy; but a modified form of this proposal,
intended to preserve the different treatment of sales through the wholesale trade and sales direct,
was turned down by the Treasury, and it was not until after the Budget speech in April that the
levy was turned into a subsidy, in the interests of the Cost-of-Living Index.
The proposed end-of-season reserve, however, threatened to become a fiasco. Although the
February 1941 stocks census put the surplus as high as 200,000 tons, the Ministry of Food found
growers unwilling to sell best quality potatoes at less than the maximum price. This did not
prevent their representatives from complaining to the Ministry of Agriculture that they could not
find a market; they were said to be reluctant to plant the extra acreage that the Government had
asked for, in spite of previous assurances. The Ministry of Agriculture therefore proposed an
extension of the previous guarantee. Let the Ministry of Food undertake to buy any potatoes the
growers cared to offer before the end of April 1941 at the minimum price appropriate to the
season, on condition that growers undertook to sell any potatoes the Ministry might require at the
same price. On 4th March, the Minister of Agriculture announced this new decision to relieve
the farmer of the risk of being unable to find a market for his ware potatoes. Had the concession
been balanced by a genuine quid pro quo, the Ministry of Food stood to save a considerable sum,
representing the difference between maximum and minimum prices, on the end of-season
reserve.10 But the National Farmers Union, with whom the bargain had been agreed, could not
bind its members, and the precaution the Potato Division had taken of getting Treasury authority
to pay up to the maximum after all, proved all too justified. (In the end, some 180,000 tons were

secured.) The Division thereupon resolved that as experience had shown that growers always
claimed a right to the maximum price, there should in future be fixed growers prices.

IV
The subsidy of10s. a ton, agreed on immediately after the 1941 Budget, was by no means the last
expedient necessary to peg the price of the 1940 crop. New potatoes were likely to weight the
potato index figure too heavily on the first of July, in spite of feverish plans for adjustments in
other commodities; a suggestion that the Ministry of Food should buy up the early crop and sell
it at a loss was dropped in favour of action 10 cheapen the final selling price of the old potatoes
that remained. If it might be assumed that there were 4,1/2 times as many old potatoes as new on
sale on 1st July, and the index figure for potatoes were calculated anew on this basis, 11 a
maximum price of 8d. per 7 lb. by means of a subsidy on old potatoes would bring down the
Ministry of Labour average price quotation to the 1 id. required by the Interdepartmental
Committee on Prices. The final outcome of discussions carried on through May and concluded at
the beginning of June was a ratio of 5 to 1 for old and new, and a subsidised price for old
potatoes of 6,1/2d. for 7 lb., so as to give an average price quotation of 9,1/2. for 7 lb. on the 1st
Julyat a probable cost to the Exchequer of 762,000 for one months subsidy. This would be
the cost of reimbursing first buyers for payments at the rate of 85s. a ton to growers. An
alternative plan put forward by the Ministrys Economics Division was, taken at its face value,
cheaper: to take over the remainder of the crop and employ the wholesale trade on commission
as distributive agents, instead of allowing normal trade to continue and paying the subsidy
through the existing levy machinery, Potato Division felt that such a departure would cause
confusion and waste, and would be incalculable in cost; the condition of the remaining crop in
mid June is very unstable, and any attempt to collect the thousands of odd lots scattered
throughout the United Kingdom and ensure distribution, without deprivation of any section of
consumers, would be a speculation of an extreme type. Moreover, the distributive trade, on
whom the liability for the heavier subsidy would temporarily fall, was prepared to accept these
arrangements,12for they enabled merchants to keep their old customers.
Some reduction of the margin for transport allowed for in wholesale prices (sufficient in previous
schedules to cover the cost of the longest haul, up to 35s.) had been in the minds of Economics
Division for some time, and had even entered into Potato Divisions proposals for the control of
the 1941 crop. Now that the heavy subsidy was proposed as a heroic temporary measure the
need for every possible economy in distributive margins brought about the hasty introduction of
a smaller transport allowance on the old crop ; with provision for no more than 20s. a ton for
transport charges (as the alleged generosity of wholesale margins was still a matter of
controversy) there was more likelihood that the benefits of subsidy would be passed on to the
consumer. In order that outlying areas13 should not suffer because it was now unprofitable for the
trade to supply them, the Ministry proposed to offer them potatoes from its reserves carried at its
own expense. Thus, at the tail-end of the season, two important innovations crept into the
structure of control to provide for special circumstances.
As arrangements had been made both to dispose of the surplus and to acquire a reserve it was not
to be expected that the Ministry would encounter end-of-season difficulties. But there was a very
unlucky combination of weather, a dry cold spring followed by heat and drought; the Ministrys
reserve14 was smaller than had been intended, and a part of it would not keep in the hot weather
and had to be prematurely sold for stock-feed; the new crop of earlies was three weeks late.
(Whether a rigorous policy of quality reservation throughout the season might have made for a
better keeping reserve is problematical.15) The Ministry rebutted accusations that the shortage
was due to its having sold potatoes for stock-feed, stating firmly that the trouble did not arise
from lack of foresight or control ; if any old potatoes had been left, said a note to the Prime

Minister, they would have been sprouting in the clamps or melting in the bags. In the
meantime, the movement of the early crop was speeded up and equalised as far as possible. (A
cornering of the market in earlies had taken place which in later years the Ministry set out to
prevent by monopolising purchase from the main producing areas for the first few weeks of the
season, and using the trade as agents for planned distribution.)
That there should be queues for potatoes in some districts, purely because of the weather, was
perhaps unfortunate for morale after the worst winter of the war for food supplies: material
importance it had little, as there was no shortage of bread. But it was to have a lasting effect on
the form of potato control. Growers for the following years crop whose first crops had missed
the early market were to ask for some remuneration other than price; and the fear of a few
weeks potato famine was to cause the Ministry in future to accumulate early in the season a
reserve that was never less than twice as much as it had been in 1940-41.

Footnotes
1

i.e., together with the one pre-war factory, set up at the instance of the Potato Marketing
Board, and one previously arranged for by the Ministry of Food.
2

And all but impossible in the long run. The scientists reckoned that the 7.7 million tons of
ware that would be required could be got from 1.5 million acres; but this assumed that the
proportion sold as ware would not diminish as acreage increased. On the basis of the quantities
so sold in 1943 and 1944 it looks as if the required acreage would be more like 2 millions.
3

S.R. St O. (1940) No. 637.

I/37th ; but the existence of the levy charge gave rise to other claims by traders that tended to
raise prices.
5

Vol. I, p. 90. Even this increased price would not bring potatoes into parity with other crops,
but the provision of a virtually guaranteed market was felt to offset some of this disadvantage.
6

S.R. & O. (1940) Nos. 1384, 1739, and 1928.

Ministry of Food Press Notice 649 announced the scheme, which was to start from 1st
December, and to last till 30th June. In fact, the general subsidy was to make the scheme
redundant before then.
8

Such potatoes were dyed, in order to prevent them finding their way back into the ware
market.
9

The campaign was a small (and not conspicuously successful; affair in comparison with what
was to come; it marks, however, the first appearance of the attractive gnome Potato Pete, who
was to enliven the Ministrys publicity for several years.
10

This would have been partly set-off by the fact that surplus potatoes remaining at the end of the
season would have commanded only the maximum mid-season price.
11

Some justification for this manipulation could be found in the loss of Channel Islands new
potatoes.

12

Representatives of the wholesale and retail trade were asked for their views on 13th May. It is
not surprising that they were somewhat bewildered as to the purpose of the scheme; they were
given the politic answer that it was the aim of the Government that the crop should be fully
consumed and that consumers should not be faced with the necessity of paying higher prices. It
was, in fact, the policy of the Government to keep prices at a low level.
13

i.e., the South-West and South Wales, regions most distant from the main supplying area of
Lincolnshire; and districts on the fringe of other scheduled areas.
14

Reserve purchases of various types amounted to 180,000 tons, of which 105,000 were longkeeping potatoes. Stocks on 8th June were estimated at 250,000 tons (as compared with 38,000
tons in the previous year).
15

In succeeding years the purchase of long-keeping varieties for the reserve was initiated in
November and December; but it is doubtful whether even the best keepers could have survived
the heat of late June 1941.

CHAPTER IX
The 1941 Crop
I
Plans for dealing with the 1941 crop were necessarily under way long before the embarrassments
of June and July were upon the Ministry of Food. The extra 200,000 acres budgeted for (and, in
the event, exceeded) would, other things being equal, mean a surplus of unprecedented size,
calling for heroic measures; the adoption of price stabilisation, with its corollary, a subsidy on
potatoes, likewise caused heart-searching about the existing method of control. The fact, hitherto
meritorious, that, thanks to general plenty and competition between traders, the retail price of
potatoes was often below the maximum might become obnoxious if it threatened the accuracy of
price forecasts, or obscured the result of applying a subsidy.1 The opportunities for long and
wasteful haulage of potatoes, offered by over-generous wholesale margins, aroused criticism at a
time when transport economy was in the air. There were those in the Ministry therefore who
hankered, though doubtfully, after a full-blooded scheme of Government purchase, such as had
lately been recommended for carrots and onions. In May it was agreed between them and the
more cautious Potato Division to explore two possible ways of reform that would not entail full
control : a reduction in transport allowances, accompanied by a Ministry scheme for sending
potatoes to areas remote from their source of supply, and an acreage subsidy that should be paid
direct to growers, rather than a tonnage subsidy that must make use of merchants.
The first of these two proposals had to be hurried through on the old crop, as part of the Cost-ofLiving Index manipulations, and hence became accepted policy for the future. The second was
likewise accepted more readily than it might have been, because of the exceptional weather that
summer; the lateness of the new season caused growers of early potatoes to lose, not only some
of their crop, but their normal market opportunities in June and July, and a deputation from the
National Farmers Union asked for compensation. It could not be given by an increase of prices
later in the season, for this would benefit those growers least who had lost most; and, moreover,
would completely upset the careful arrangements made for the bridge period, and the nice
adjustment of the index, for whose sake the Treasury would now concede almost anything.

It is a pity, wrote an observer within the Ministry, that this important point of principle should
have to be decided in a hurry merely in order to deal with a temporary shortage of potatoes
arising from special causes. The pros and cons of an acreage subsidy were indeed various. At
this stage in war-time potato production, when the increased acreage that the Government
desired had mainly to be obtained piecemeal from new growers and from relatively inferior land,
an acreage subsidy would offer not only an inducement to all growers but a compensation to
marginal producers for a slow return on outlay. That there would be less inducement to good
husbandry and a smaller proportionate remuneration to the established growers who produced a
better crop per acre was an unfortunate but inevitable corollary. Though a small tonnage subsidy
in addition would be necessary later on in the season to balance the proposed seasonal increases
in growers prices, the fact that less subsidy would have to be paid indirectly, through the
goodwill of wholesalers, was an advantage. Potato Division claimed that the acreage subsidy
would be easier to administer (rightly, as it involved a single payment, based on the June acreage
returns, instead of a monthly one), but the existence of two types of subsidy, if the tonnage
subsidy had to be retained in part, would make for more office work; moreover, an effective
check on some 200,000 growers claims was not considered possible. The disadvantage that a
smaller return on tonnage might encourage a farmer to feed his potatoes to his stock instead of
selling them was recognised, especially for Northern Ireland, where feeding to stock already
accounted for about half of the crop; 2 any growth of this tendency in Great Britain was not yet
regarded as serious. On the other hand, the fact that growers would get a cash advance early in
the crop year would discourage the tendency to market supplies as early in the season as
possible, and encourage the holding of long-keeping varieties. If the subsidy were extended to all
potatoes, it would enable lower prices to De fixed for seed, and thus bring down the cost of
producing the 1942 crop.
Although the Agricultural Departments were not enthusiastic about the new proposal, they were
willing to abide by growers views; the latter unanimously welcomed it (though some Scottish
representatives afterwards had second thoughts, too late to affect the issue). Accordingly a
reference to the acreage subsidy was included in a comprehensive statement of potato policy by a
Government spokesman ( the Duke of Norfolk) in the Lords on 6th August.3_
The amount, said the Duke of Norfolk, has still to be decided. As the acreage payment was to
come out of growers prices, the whole question of their remuneration, and of the desired level of
retail prices, was bound up with it. A payment of 10 an acrethe mean, ultimately agreed upon,
between the 5 suggested by the Treasury and the 15 asked for by Potato Divisionwas
calculated to cost nearly 11 million, and even so would require a tonnage subsidy of some 2
million in addition if the retail price were to be kept at or below 8d. per 7 lb. It is not surprising
that the Treasury should, notwithstanding the importunity of the Director of Potato Supplies,
have taken some three weeks to reach its decision, both on the acreage payment and the nominal
price against which it should be set-off. As to the latter, both the Agricultural Departments and
the Treasury were convinced that an extra 10s. a ton would be sufficient inasmuch as growers
had received so much more for the 1940 crop than the 20 per cent, originally promised; but the
Ministry of Food was authorised to concede 15s., the sum it would have preferred, if the course
of negotiations with the growers should make this necessary. That the extra 5s. would need to be
offered was perhaps a foregone conclusion; growers maintained that the 1940 prices only should
have been the basis for the addition of increased costs, and that a poor yield and an increase in
blight was indicated; the English growers, in the hope of gaining by delays, even urged that
prices should be fixed for another bridge period, until December only instead of May. Even the
final offer of 5s. more did not satisfy them; but as the Ministry made a tentative promise 4 to
consider the position if the gloomy forecast of yield should be justified, there was no further
opposition.

II
The fact that the new prices were fixed, instead of maxima and minima, excited no comment
from the trade so far as ware potatoes were concerned, though Scottish growers, who had last
season fallen under the suspicion of sharp practicepassing off inferior seed at maximum prices
objected to the application of the principle to seed potatoes as well. Growers were once again
to have the option of selling their potatoes to the Ministry before a certain date, finally fixed as
31st March;5 but this year it was proposed to take powers to direct growers to sell stocks to the
Ministry if the quantities offered voluntarily were insufficient for the end of season reserve. A
further measure of caution was the prohibition in the new control Order of sales of ware potatoes
for livestock feedingnot that such a prohibition could be effectively policed. A more important
step, on paper, towards orderly marketing and the conservation of supplies was the accentuation
of the normal seasonal rise in price. In comparison with the same month of the previous year
October showed an increase of 5s. only, May, an increase of 20s.; 6 the prices proposed (but not
yet announced) for June and July showed increases of 30s. and 35s. respectively. This generous
allowance to cover deterioration during the last three months of the season would, it was hoped,
tend to counteract growers understandable reluctance to hold their crops over. These seasonal
changes were made less apparent, however, by reductions on account of the acreage payment, 7
rising gradually from the middle of October to a full 30s. a ton; and growers had as yet no
definite statement of the Ministrys intentions in June and July 1942.
The draft Order embodying the final price schedules nearly foundered at the Orders Committee
on the vexed question of wholesale margins. It was proposed to maintain last years margin of
35s. a ton (made up of 5s. for the country merchant, 10s. for bags, and 20s. for the town
distributor) with the addition of the reduced allowance for transport costs that had operated at the
close of the previous season. At that time much concern had been expressed that the disturbing
problem arising from the inclusion in the merchants margin of a fixed allowance to cover
varying carriage charges had not yet been solved, and Potato Division had agreed to a reduction
of 15s., in spite of its conviction that competition would have continued to prevent any excessive
profits. But the Margins Committee still had suspicions about the size of wholesalers margins,
which naturally were not allayed by the fact that the attempts made by the Director of Costings
to obtain figures from potato merchants had met with obstruction. Although the Division asserted
that the margins were reasonable and that any attempt to reduce them would lead to a
dislocation of the trade with disastrous political results 8the question was referred to higher
authority. The introduction of the new price schedules was, however, urgent, and so the proposed
margins were allowed to stand pending a fuller use of the Ministrys powers 9 to obtain accurate
costings figures.
To the advantage of the wholesale trade also was a survival from the levy scheme that required
the renewal of the Treasury Charges Order. The payment of additional levies by growersalesmen, and retailers who bought direct from growers, had been a kind of restriction on
double margins, and though the general levy was abolished the National Potatoes Advisory
Council (including the retailers representatives) was in favour of continuing the differential
payments. Described as a means of preserving existing marginal relativities, this payment
should logically have been collected all the year round ; but in practice it came for convenience
sake to be confined to main-crop potatoes. During its first season so much extra work was
entailed in collecting an inconsiderable amount from some 14,000 traders that the Treasury
sanctioned a precedent of abandoning collection for the early crop months ; at other times the
payment was collected on the same form on which the tonnage subsidy was claimed, and by
deduction there was no actual cash transaction. The interest of this survival lies less in any profit
derived from it10 than in the fact that it remained, in spite of occasional suggestions that it should

be abolished, a permanent feature of the war-time potato price structure ; a rare example of the
application in practice of the Ministrys oft-reported objection to double margins in principle.
The need to give full protection to growers at one end of the distributive chain, and to the Costof-Living Index at the other, had greatly increased the administrative burdens on potato control.
There were others, such as the need to make provision, now that rail transport was so difficult,
for carrying the customary heavy load of seed potatoes from Scotland by sea, which entailed a
freight subsidy to meet the greater carriage costs. The final plans for the 1941 season, involving
as they did so many different types of unsatisfactory 11 financial transaction, might well lead the
Ministrys Internal Audit Division to ask, as its Economics Division had in the spring, whether it
would not be better for the Ministry to take over the whole crop and use the distributive trade as
its agents. Obviously no change could be made at this late stage; but the question was to be
reopened, after some bitter experience, in the following summer and at other times in the future
when the organisation of potato control was under discussion.

Ill
The 1941 increase in acreage provided the largest crop grown in the United Kingdom since the
two peak years of 1918 and 1919; stock census estimates were markedly higher than those that
had caused the fear of a surplus in the previous year. Although there was every indication that the
increase of approximately 10 per cent.12 in domestic consumption each year was continuing, and
although it was necessary', on account of disease, to make an allowance in estimation of as much
as 18 per cent, (as compared with the average of 10 per cent.) 13 for waste, there still appeared to
be enough to meet greater seed requirements for the even larger acreage of 1942 and to provide a
residue for stock-feed. The provision of supplies for stock-teed was, however, handled with
extreme caution; the importunities of Animal Feeding Stuffs Division to obtain the release of
more potatoes for processing had sometimes to be resisted; in fact, Potato Division claimed in
April 1942 that we have not sold for processing or stock-feed a single potato fit for human
consumption since the beginning of the season. So, too, the 1941 season was not one in which
there were many new developments in potato processing; there had been little progress in
obtaining the extra drying plantfactories it was hoped to set up in Northern Ireland were not
yet completed.
Experiments on the use of potato flour for bread 14 hung fire, although in theory plans were being
made for such dilution if it should be required. For all that the Duke of Norfolk had said in
August: . . . it will rest largely with the consumer whether the alternative is to be potatoes or
bread. It is the Governments duty to persuade the consumer that it is both in his own and in the
national interest that the choice should be potatoes, there was no new publicity campaign; it was
decided to take no active steps to encourage consumption until the supply position was clearer.
Disease promised to be so extensive that the supply position hardly became clear at all; and
official endeavours were directed instead towards eking out a bountiful but blighted crop till the
end of the season.
Suspicions of disease among the crop also made it difficult to carry out the plans for the early
purchase of an adequate reserve, for until the disease should have developed it was impossible to
decide which particular stocks would keep. Not till well on in the New Year did the Ministry
begin its attempt to obtain the desired 350,000 tons. After a short and abortive period of buying
on voluntary lines Potato Division had to seek further powers of compulsion in order to make its
purchases. The first step taken was to prohibit the sale of certain varieties grown on the best soils
except under licence,15 interpreted vigorously to give the Ministry power to requisition the bestkeeping varieties where it thought fit. Not only had these restrictions to be extended, but further
assistance was needed later on in the form of transport restrictions by which the Division might

prevent the dissipation of potatoes from the heavy producing areas and allow only those potatoes
which were not keeping well to move into the main consuming areas. 16 (In effect, the consuming
area was cut off from its main source of supply, and depended on the assistance from the
Ministry, discussed below.) The request for approval of these restrictions led to further sparring
between Potato Division and the Ministrys Orders Committee, which was deeply concerned at
the slow progress in accumulating the reserve, and in this as in some other cases interpreted
rather broadly its function of criticising legislative proposals brought before it. The Committee
had already declared that the various proposals submitted to them from time to time would be
unlikely to achieve the objects they were designed to produce. Yet wholesale requisitioning,
proposed as an alternative to a series of contracts with growers, would not save time, as Potato
Division pointed out. It was imperative that the potatoes bought for the reserve should be good
keepers, and this could not be determined without careful inspection-necessarily a lengthy
process in a season when disease was general. Requisitioning as a general measure would
involve the Ministry in the purchase of inferior stocks; a farmers labour, moreover, could not be
requisitioned, whereas a contract could include the necessary labour provisions. But to threaten
requi-sitioning in cases where a grower was reluctant to make a contract was an expedient of
which the Division had actually availed itself on occasion. If any further measures were
necessary, it asserted emphatically, we could not recommend the adoption of those
recommended by Orders Committee.
Though practical considerations supported the Divisions policy, its defence against criticism of
the constant need for further amendments was a little thin : for the Committee to say that if they
are now necessary they should have been introduced at an earlier date is merely to say what can
be said of most amending regulations in the Ministry and elsewhere. It is true that the varying
conditions of any crop year call for a certain readiness to improvise; but so much time has to be
taken up in securing further legislation that it is an advantage to have the fullest powers ready for
use in the first instance. (A distinction must be made here between the need to obtain further
powers, and the application of those powers in the form of Directions which must be suited to
the particular circumstances of the moment.) There was justification in the complaint that the
Orders Committee have displayed a lively interest in these intricate operations, but do not appear
to have appreciated their technical character. . . . It was perhaps unduly difficult to convince the
Committee that the several amendments gave Potato Division the actual power to requisition
without the embarrassment of the word, that it had been wise in feeling its way over difficult
ground; but the Committees quarrel with the timing of these operations might well have been
fully justified if the weather had been bad, or blight had spread.

IV
In February and March rumours were current that potatoes were about to be rationed. They had
little support from any official discussions, in which potatoes were a subsidiary part of the
problem of restricting flour consumption; but they brought about a considerable increase in
buying for a short time. (They were attributed to a forecast by a newspaper astrologer.) Supply
estimates at the beginning of March were indeed such as to argue against a mooted reduction in
price to assist the Food Index figure; a cut in prices, it was stated, may upset the balance and
cause temporary shortage, which in turn might necessitate rationing. Potato Division was
confident, nevertheless, that there was no present prospect of a shortage calling for rationing ;
this had been put forward as an additional reason for requisitioning by the Orders Committee,
who talked of the immediate preparation of a plan to avoid a temporary potato famine. Potato
Division, however, was not to be rushed into thisand certainly not by way of immediate
requisitioning. Instead it arranged to increase supplies from Northern Ireland. 17 The arrangements
by which merchants were compelled to accept the poorer keepers for immediate consumption
were not popular with the wholesale trade, many of whom deliberately ordered short in the hope

of forcing the Ministry to abandon the scheme. But the Division continued resolutely to acquire a
reserve, and by the beginning of May was not far short of its aim.
All these measures, embarked on at short notice, meant the sudden and unforeseeable onset of
an enormous volume of new trading work. The final prohibition of transport between areas left
the Ministry the sole supplier of London, Birmingham, and other markets, and the purveyor of
some 35,000 tons a weeka big undertaking, but, as the senior official responsible justified it,
the only sure and effective way to achieve our policy was for the Potato Division to assume
control of trading operations on a large scale and this accordingly was done . . . the net result was
that the Potato Division had to buy and sell more than one million tons of potatoes throughout
the season with an area organisation provided to deal with about half that volume of trade.
Staff dispositions that year had been intended to cover the orderly and gradual progress of
surplus disposal, any offers under the Ministerial guarantee, the new element of a large end-ofseason reserve,18 and also the purchase of first early varieties of the 1942 crop in certain areas.
The consequences of the decision to engage in large-scale trading with no more than the
machinery to hand were almost disastrous in busy local offices such as that in the Eastern Area,
and above all in the Payment Section at headquarters where arrears mounted up alarmingly; the
manpower position in Oxford was such that Establishment could not immediately provide the
increased number of clerks agreed on. The Ministry found itself forced into the position of
having to pay first and check afterwards ; matters were put right as soon as possible, and
growers and merchants pacified,19 as staff became available; the destruction of some of the
financial records by fire in January 1943 was another unfortunate setback; and the real solution,
the installation of machine accounting equipment in a new office at Marston, near Oxford, could
not be reached until April 1943.20
At the height of this anxiety discussions on the form of control for the 1942 crop were taking
place in Potato Division, and one remedy suggested was the decentralisation of financial work
into the divisional offices ; the centralised system had had a lengthy trial, it was felt, and had
proved to be inelastic, unwieldy and incapable of coping with the fluctuations inseparable from
potato control and potato marketing. However, the technical disadvantages of splitting- up the
work were finally agreed to outweigh the advantages; the future proportions of Ministry trading,
though in fact they were by no means to diminish, were as yet indefinite; and one of the
disadvantages of the acquisition of the staff so much needed at headquarters during that summer,
namely, that the volume of work might not be sufficient to keep them fully employed in less busy
seasons of the year, would apply even more to area staffs. All that could be done was to alter the
organisation at headquarters to cope with arrears and such trading as the Ministrys obligations
demanded. The Division affirmed that it did not intend to devitalise the trade 21 by taking over its
functions of selection and purchase unless absolutely necessary; in practice, however, it was each
season to hold that some arrangements of the kind were called for, so as to ensure that at least a
proportion of the better keepers might be distributed at the Ministrys discretion.

V
Unfortunately the very zeal with which the reserve had been accumulated was to add to the
Ministrys difficulties, so diffrent was the position at the end of the season from that of the
previous year. By the third week in June it became apparent that at least 50,000 tons would not
be required for human consumption; the new crop, the distribution of which the Ministry was
itself to direct for a few weeks, showed certain signs of being a heavy one and available early,
while supplies of old potatoes were being taken up more and more slowlya tendency no doubt
increased by the indifferent quality of the potatoes that had appeared on the market in recent
months as a result of Potato Divisions conservation policy. The fact that growers apparently held

considerable stocks that they had not sold to the Ministry complicated arrangements to get rid of
the reserve (and constituted an argument in favour of taking over the whole crop after a certain
date). Two beet factories were quickly reopened for potato drying, and permission was obtained
to sell for stock-feed at the bargain price of 1 a ton; these emergency measures disposed of
about 60,000 tons, but out of the end-of-season reserve approximately 20,000 tons remained that
had gone too far to be cleared in this way.
The outcry raised by the Lincolnshire growers, in whose area most of this waste was
concentrated, fed the suspicions entertained in many quarters about abnormal waste in the 1941
crop. Misleading figures about it were produced by the Minister of Agriculture at a meeting of
the Lord Presidents Committee and had an embarrassing effect on that committees decision
concerning bread dilution ; at about the same time the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a letter to
the Minister of Food, commented on the fact that out of a total crop of the order of eight million
tons rather less than five had been eaten as human food. The Minister of Agricultures statement
that 760,000 tons of potatoes had rotted on farms because there was no adequate machinery for
marketing them, took no account of his own Departments allowance for shrinkage, nor of blight
that had made so large a proportion unavoidably unfit for market. A distinction ought to have
been drawn between such waste and that created by the deliberate policy, well-intentioned but
unlucky, of retaining a reserve that turned out to be too large by two to three days supply; it was
indeed the use of special marketing machinery, not the want of it, that increased the incidence of
waste in a bad year. The gap between total production and human consumption, about which the
Chancellor was concerned, owed some of its size to the same cause, and the remainder to the
larger amounts used for seed and fed to stock ; that the proportion of potatoes used neither for
human consumption nor seed had increased greatly in this year in particular could not be denied,
though it could in part be explained by unavoidably abnormal waste.
During this crop year, potato control had acquired certain salient features that were to become
lasting. The acreage payment, most profitable to small and marginal growers, provided
encouragement to increase production as a supposed insurance against famine. The precedent
was set of directing marketing in times of difficulty by a number of restrictions of special
application rather than by any grandiose requisitioning scheme. The principle of getting the
poorer keepers sold first became an important part of every succeeding years control plans; and
though Potato Finance almost went under with the first sudden plunge into large-scale trading,
the Division did not hesitate to take on itself for the future, in addition to any particular
purchases made from time to time for special purposes, the bulk of the potato supply trade in the
later months of the season. The inquests and recriminations that accompanied the final clearance
of the years crop were the result of misfortune rather than negligence or lack of powers ; yet
they are noteworthy because in consequence potato control was brought into the limelight, and
certain questions of policy were given a re-examination that might have proved salutary. Was the
Ministry of Agriculture right in its conviction that the Ministry of Food was asking for more
potatoes to be grown than it could handle, even to provide for reserve demands ? How could the
still greater abundance of the 1942 crop be best used in order that the Minister of Food might
give to his colleagues a more convincing justification of his potato policy? Although human
consumption of potatoes seemed to be steadily increasing, a crop so subject to disease could not,
the Ministry now realised, be safely regarded as a buffer food comparable to bread; what
therefore were to be the implications of the present end-of-season fiasco for the still larger
acreage contemplated in 1943 ? The extent to which these difficult and much-discussed problems
were capable of satisfactory solution will appear in the account of subsequent crops.

Footnotes

Cf. the trouble caused (Vol. I, p. 189) by the failure of the flour trade to pass on the whole of a
permitted increase in price to the consumer.
2

For this reason it was felt that to pay Northern Ireland farmers at the same rate could not be
justified, but the Department of Agriculture successfully pleaded for the same conditions.
3

Annex III.

The National Farmers' Union did in fact attempt the following March to put forward a case for
a retrospective increase in prices because of the abnormal degree of waste but, as there was no
general complaint by growers, did not press it.
5

The Ministry of Food would have preferred to make the end of February the closing date, in
order to get its plans formulated early, but the wishes of the growers, supported by the Ministry
of Agriculture, prevailed.
6

S.R. & O. (1941) No. 1532 (Main Crop Control Order No. 2; No. 1, fixing prices for the
bridge period, was No. 1060).
7

This balancing reduction in price led to a peculiar difficulty in the administration of the
payment. Certain merchants had bought potatoes by the acre under contract, before the
announcement of the payment, and stood to lose by the subsequent provision of lower tonnage
prices. In these cases, about 100 altogether, the Treasury had to agree reluctantly to a double
payment, for all growers had been automatically paid on acreage planted, and even where they
had sold their crop in this way it was not considered practicable to recover any payment.
8

The framework of the wholesale price schedules is admittedly anomalous and inconsistent
with general price policy governing food commodities, but this has been recognised from the
start and its anomalous features were fully discussed and argued before the Orders Committee a
year ago.
9

Under the Food (Inspection of Undertakings) Order, S.R. & O. (1941) No. 378.

10

It was estimated that the levy would bring some 20,000 into Potato Divisions account each
year. Though never collected for any full year, it brought in, for example, 14,000 for the first
seven months.
11

Because they depended on returns made by the interested party, which the Division had not
the staff to check adequately. The present system on which the Exchequer is paying out large
amounts in different forms of subsidy without a proper check on the amount claimed is
unbusiness-like and unsatisfactory and may lead to a major scandal, wrote a senior official in
September 1941. Complete Ministry purchase, however, would not obviate the necessity for a
comprehensive check on merchants returns. The difficulties of obtaining additional staff in
Oxford are noted below.
12

In August, with reference to the 1940 crop, the Duke of Norfolk had said: The measure of
the increase in potato consumption is difficult to estimate, but it may safely be set down at not
less than 400,000 tons during the past year This is not a very great increase relatively to the
normal annual consumption of about 3,750.000 tons, including that of Northern Ireland, . . Cf.
the consumption figures in use at the time.
1939-40

3,600,000

tons

1940-41

4,100,000 tons

1941-42

4,700,000 tons

Consumption figures, however, at this primitive stage in statistical interpretation were merely
inferences drawn from the disappearance of growers stock with no corrective check on sales
returns. This corrective factor, when applied retrospectively to the period during which subsidy
claims were made, brought down the 1941 crop consumption figure; see below, p. 148, n. 4.
13

An allowance of 18% was made after the December census as an outside figure so as to
provide for the worst eventuality now that Potato Division was aware of the prevalence of
blight. A very generous allowance was made for wastage, as the tendency of stocks to lose
weight in the clamps was likely to be greater in a season of blight. The Minister himself was
considerably alarmed by the prospect of danger to potato supplies, which he discussed with
Captain Mollett; he subsequently asked to be briefed on the position every month.
14

The Duke of Norfolks statement of 6th August had been sanguine about potato flour: Plant
capable of being turned to this purpose already exists in Great Britain, and arrangements are now
being made to set up additional plant in Northern Ireland. These factories will probably be ready
by the end of the year. Provision will then have been made for a total output of 80,000 tons of
potato flour annually, the equivalent of a 2 per cent, admixture with wheat flour for bread. . . For
the further history of this ignis fatuus, see Vol. I, pp. 263-265.
15

S.R. & O. (1952) No. 204, in force from 9th February.

16

S.R. & O. (1942) No. 457, which came into force on 16th March, extended the prohibition of
sale, except under licence, to all potatoes of certain varieties grown in certain Scottish counties;
No. 538, coming into force on 26th March, included those grown in certain English counties. No.
653 (Direction under the Food Transport Order) prohibited movement into specified areas except
by permit, and came into force on 8th April.
17

The flow of Northern Ireland supplies had been difficult to adjust that season, as during the
early part of the season there had been little demand in Great Britain for its plentiful and sound
potatoes. Now, when these potatoes were badly needed, transport congestion (on account of the
arrival of American troops) hindered shipments. An officer of Potato Division visited Northern
Ireland, however, and was able to arrange for an increase of shipments from 7,000 to 11,000 tons
a week.
18

Some concern had been shown early in the season about their adequacy even for these
commitments.
19

The Ministry met re present ati ves of claimants at Peterborough on 13 th June 1942, and gave
an assurance that claims would be quickly dealt with.
20

The floor of the Clarendon Hotel, where Potato Finance was previously housed, was not
strong enough to take the weight. All these difficultiesstaff, accommodation, loss of records
left the Division with such a legacy of arrears that as late as July 1946 some few thousand claims
still needed investigation.
21

Traders protested that while the Ministry directed distribution their own experienced staffs
had to be kept on with nothing to do.

CHAPTER X
The 1942 Crop
I
The 1942 season was to see few important changes in the now complicated mechanism of crop
control. To reduce the unknown quantity [of the 1941 crop] held by private owners, growers
were warned that they should clear their stocks by 30th April, after which date the Ministry will
be responsible for supplying the needs of the public in old potatoes (the end of March was the
last day on which growers could sell to the Ministry under the guarantee). The system of
allowing freedom of movement only within various zones, imposed under the Food Transport
Order, was to stay; it provided a flexible means of saving transport, being capable of temporary
adjustment by general licence and special permit,1 and as it forced traders to turn first to the
perhaps less attractive production of their own zone, made waste less likely.
The resulting economy in the distances potatoes had to travel enabled Potato Division at last to
overcome its qualms about the reduction of wholesale margins; the season of occasional scarcity,
just ended, had, moreover, revealed that competition could no longer be regarded as a guarantee
that the whole subsidy would be passed on to the consumer. For the bridge period and
thereafter the gross margin was lowered from 55s. to 40s. ; the wholesaler could also claim as
much as 7s. 6d. for delivering his potatoes to the retailer, a charge which came partly out of an
adjusted retail margin and unfortunately had the ultimate effect of keeping it higher than costs, in
later years, were thought to justify. With the exception of efforts made by opposing branches of
the trade to juggle with this transport allowance, and of an unsuccessful attempt to get the retail
margin whittled down, the 1942 schedules remained the basis of prices for the rest of the war.
Growers also obtained their last price increase until 1945, namely the 5s. that had been promised
in the spring to cover the latest wage award; the incline in prices towards the end of the season to
offset wastage was made slightly steeper by transferring 5s. from the November price to the
April price. An innovation that, however, was only to last one year was the elimination of the soil
distinction from the wholesale price, growers being allowed their premium for potatoes grown
on the better soils by means of a differential subsidy; the tonnage subsidy could now be based on
the one lower wholesale price, with some saving to the Exchequer. But nor only was the
differential payment, as may be imagined, troublesome to administer; 2 its existence had also the
effect of encouraging sales of the better sorts of potato and leaving the blacklands and others as
a drug on the market. This encouragement had to be partly corrected by a more rigid application
of the transport restrictions and by directions prohibiting sales in certain areasmeasures which
were also valuable in protecting the end-of-season reserve.3A measure out of line with the
established policy of getting rid of poorer quality potatoes first was relatively unimportant in a
year of plenty ; but it was fortunate that the differential subsidy was abandoned (chiefly for
administrative reasons) before the stringencies of the 1943 season. A heavier tonnage subsidy
had also to be paid this season as a consequence of the September decision, to be discussed later,
to reduce the average retail price of maincrop potatoes to id. a lb.
This year, however, the main interest lies not in how Potato Division solved its own problems but
in how it was called upon to help solve those of the Ministry as a whole. Consonant with the
increasing stringency of shipping and the more elaborate efforts being made to devise an exact
allocation of national resources were attempts to plan potato utilisation to the best advantage.
Acreage was still on the increase; a further 150,000 acres had been scheduled in the cropping

programme for 1942, and the Ministry of Food would have liked even more. Potatoes were once
again beginning to attract attention as a possible diluent in flour; but if direct consumption
continued to increase at the rate indicated by Potato Divisions figures for 1941 and previous
crop years, a yield of slightly more than average would be necessary to meet demand. Moreover,
as was pointed out in March 1942, should the yield be plentiful the most effective method of
utilising an increased supply of potatoes would be to persuade the public to consume them in
their natural form, rather than to convert potatoes into potato flour as a diluent to bread.
Through a series of misunderstandings, however, the Lord Presidents Committee was allowed to
believe, for several months, that the addition of as much as two per cent, of potato flour to
national flour was an im minent practical possibility. (So ineffectively were Ministers briefed on
the facts that from one meeting, on the agenda for which potato flour had not even been
mentioned, emerged a decision inviting the Minister of Food to make arrangements forthwith
for adding it to the loafand this in June.) There were in fact two insuperable obstacles to the
use of potato flour on any worth-while scale. One, which became apparent to reluctant Ministers
in the autumn, was the absence of processing plant; the product of the beet-sugar factories, in
which great hopes had been placed, turned out to be unsuitable. The second was the impossibility
of guaranteeing that a sufficiency of potatoes would be available for processing without robbing
the normal market; the Ministry could not very well ration potatoes in order to put them into the
loaf.
The series of equivocations into which, for want of a clear formulation of the facts within his
Department, the Minister of Food was driven during the Lord Presidents Committee discussions
naturally made him insistent that every effort be made to avoid waste, which ought not, he told
officials in July, to be too readily accepted as in the normal course of nature: I cannot believe
that this is a view that a country that may be faced with starvation ought to take. Again in
October, after he had had to offer sceptical colleagues potato cossettes for animal feeding instead
of potato flour for the loaf, Lord Woolton asked for an assurance that the potato crop was being
used to full advantage :
It is an alternative to the cereal crop as a form of food, and I think it is true to say that we have
never, up to now, been forced during wartime to recognise it as such. We have made all the
provision that was necessary to secure supplies, but not by any means all that is necessary to
secure their controlled and beneficial use. . . .
Re-examination of the problem within the Ministry, though exhaustive, threw up comparatively
little that represented a sizeable contribution to it. The trouble lay in the unpredictable nature of
any surplus, both in quantity and quality. Suggestions for the settingup of further processing
plant had an academic ring when the programme already agreed on was so far behind schedule.
In any event economic operation of factories depended on a regular supply of potatoes; an
allowance for processing requirements was, in fact, included in calculations of the reserve
required for the end of the season 1942-43. The series of elaborate schemes for using potatoes in
a variety of manufactured products from beer to breakfast foods might or might not have proved
workable in practice; their impact on supplies could not have been other than negligible, and
their pursuit over many months argues more for the Ministrys ingenuity than its sense of
proportion.
More important was the resolve taken at this time to improve the statistical methods by which
the supply available throughout the season was measured; anything that lessened the Ministrys
uncertainties on this score was a help to rational disposal. A suggestion that the end-of-season
reserve, the existence of which had added to waste in the summer of 1942, be limited was more
controversial. It was correctly pointed out that any deficiency in the new potato crop would only

equal half-a-weeks supply of flour; the decision, notwithstanding, to acquire a stock of old
potatoes sufficient to last into the middle of July 4 was based on quasi-political grounds. The
questionwrote an officialis largely a choice of outcry. Are we to be blamed for not keeping
a reserve, or for the waste which necessarily attends the keeping of a reserve ? The Ministers
anxieties on the score of such waste were allayed by the assurancewhich was only a half-truth
that shrinkage in potato clamps was a natural process, similar to that which, when performed
in factories, was known as dehydration.5 But the 'vigorous policy of gradual disposal for stockfeed throughout the season, which had caused so much outcry from the scientists in 1940-41,
was reaffirmed as an anti-waste measure.
There remained the obvious course, undertaken almost of necessity in the face of the glut of new
potatoes that summer, yet vulnerable, like every other way of dealing with them, to changing
fortune: an advertising campaign.

II
It was not to be expected that the campaign, embarked on as early as the middle of July,6 would
be able to assist Potato Division so far as to dispose entirely of the glut. A suggestion made by
the Minister of Labour that prices should be reduced was not acted upon.7
Growers of earlies were clamouring to be able to clear their land for following crops; and
merchants, aggrieved at the long-delayed reduction in their margins, were not a keen sales force
in handling the abundant supplies. The Ministry had therefore to make arrangements to relieve
the pressure by purchase and re-sale for stock-feed, or for storage for seed or processing later;
one beet-sugar factory was opened ahead of the beet campaign for a special three weeks run. 8
Sales for human consumption, so far as could be ascertained from growers returns, nevertheless
showed an encouraging rise compared with last season. Public Relations Division had been
quick off the mark with its potato publicity; all sections of the Division were concentrating on
giving potatoes what they called the whole works ; demonstrations had been held for the
catering trade, and a special grant of 50,000 had been made to advertise to the general public
the merits of the potato. An expedient that fitted in conveniently with the Eat More Potatoes and
Less Bread campaign was a reduction in the price of potatoes and a rise in that of bread,
undertaken to get a Cost-of-Living Index sum right. Though the potato, with a range of
distributive margin that was still so wide, was a not altogether desirable choice for an even larger
subsidy, rarely had any change of this sort been so much in harmony with general policy.9
Throughout the autumn the campaign increased considerably in scale. Like its less outstanding
forerunner, the carrot campaign, it combined an attempt to interest seller as well as buyer. The
caterer was urged to give bread only when it was demanded, and to increase the size of his
helpings of potatoes; the fish frier was given some tangible encouragement in an increased
allowance of fats in spite of shortage, and with the external help of the Potato Publicity Bureau
the retailer was encouraged to increase his sales with some apparent success. Some new ideas
included a competition for the best recipe provided by a housewife in the different Food Advice
regions; potatoes ranked with dried egg and cheese as the ingredients prescribed in the Victory
dish campaign for caterers; for a time Ministry of Food notepaper bore the slogan (in red
capitals), Eat Potatoes instead of Bread, and at the elaborate Potato Petes Fair, held at
Christmas-time on a bombed site in Oxford Street, London, visitors were given potato stamps to
be cashed later, by an arrangement with the trade association, at their local retail shop.
The tone of publicity ranged from the breezy frivolity of Potato Pete to the sober exhortations of
the Potato Plan advertisements, which attempted the task of explaining to the public why they
should eat potatoes instead of bread ; a sterner presentation of this truth, a photograph of

torpedoed sailors clinging to an upturned boa.., with the caption Your bread costs liveseat
potatoes instead was evolved to meet the Ministers wish for a more urgent note in advertising,
but apparently went a little too far for publication. 10 The personal note by which the Minister
gave weight to the campaign was very real; he was willing to do more than to be photographed
enjoying innumerable helpings of potato soup; letiers asking for the cooperation of editors and of
local catering trade associations went out over his signature; he interviewed the advertising
specialists engaged on the campaign, asking about their difficulties and fixing for them an
ambitious target, he even wrote his own copyThe Potato Planan Explanation and an
Appeal'; and he it was who urged the importance of giving Public Relations Division some
indication of consumption movements every week as a guide to publicity, which was made
possible by the employment of a team of thirteen women inspectors reporting to Potato Division.
Potatoes were not altogether promising ware for publicity, even though undertaken by the agents
who had handled the pre-war Eat More Fruit campaign. A report on two surveys carried out to
estimate the success of the Potato Plan mentions the difficulty of combating an innate
conservatism about ways of serving staple foods, a feeling among many that they are already
having to eat as many potatoes as they can stomach and among a minority, though a significant
one, a disbelief in the nutritional value and harmlessness of the potato. The increase in
disappearance of more than 15 per cent, indicated by the census returns appeared to be a
success beyond all expectations and the Ministry had some justification, in the maintenance of a
high increase, for the self-congratulation in which it indulged later.11 But it was impossible to
say, as Potato Division pointed out to Public Relations, how far the increase 'n human
consumption was due to publicity; or to say, as Public Relations wished to do to justify its earlier
arguments to the Treasury, that the money spent on the largest publicity campaign yet launched
had saved the taxpayer anything in effecting a transfer of potatoes to human food from the
expensive outlet of stockfeeding: if used for human consumption, potatoes attract tonnage
subsidy and if processed or fed to stock a monetary loss is involved approximating to the same
amount.
The saving of money, however, was incidental to the main purpose of the campaign, to save
shipping. There was much setting-off of potato consumption figures against those for flour. In
March 1943 the Economic Section of the War Cabinet Offices pointed out: Despite the slogan
Eat potatoes instead of bread the increase in potato consumption has been accompanied by a
slight increase in flour consumption (2,000 tons per week or about 2 per cent.). That increase,
however, was mainly due to special Service demands, and later figures for the period October
1942 to March 1943, making a deduction for this fact, showed an increase of 12,000 tons per
week for potatoes to be compared with a decrease of 3,000 tons for flour in comparison with the
same period of the previous year. As the calorific conversion ratio of 85 per-cent, extraction
flour to potatoes was now put by the Medical Research Council at 1 : 5.61 it might be claimed
that, for the winter concerned at any rate, some part of the desired effect had been achieved. Such
comparisons are too simple to be of much value, since they take into account neither changes in
the supply of other foods, nor possible fluctuations in the populations food requirements, nor yet
the weaknesses in potato statistics. The best testimony, perhaps, to the success of the 1942
campaign as far as potatoes alone were concerned was the fact that its slogans survived in the
public mind to be repeated against the Ministry in 1944-45, 12 when potatoes were scarce. The
effect of a successful publicity campaign does not easily wear off.
Ill

The same variability in supply, on paper at least, had been apparent even during a year in which
confidence had seemed justified. But a period of anxiety and its subsequent relief were salutary
in giving high officials a realistic appreciation of the value of any statistics about potatoes. No

one knows, wrote a high official upon enlightenment, or under present circumstances can
know, how many potatoes there are or what is their condition. The farmer guesses as to the
quantity of potatoes in his clamp, in many cases without even inspecting them; the Division in
turn guesses as to their quality and the prospective demand. Improvements in statistical control
had been an integral part of the declared policy at the beginning of the season. Some sections of
Potato Division had little hope of being able to give a more accurate picture; 13 returns of stocks
held by growers and merchants were still used, as they had been by the Potato Marketing Board,
as the main source of computed information, but an attempt was made to check their accuracy by
inspection;14 the cross-section of retailers in the various regions who had occasionally in the past
been asked for returns of their sales was considerably extended;15 a more reliable guide, which
was used this year for the first time in comparison with these returns and those from growers of
the tonnage moved from farms, was provided by the tonnage subsidy claims 16 (these, in fact,
caused the Ministry quietly to revise its estimates of 1941 consumption and of the subsequent
increase, with a bewildering effect on the Treasury).17 But there was still a long gap between the
beginning of November and the beginning of January when no census of growers' stocks was
taken, and the figures obtained at the later date indicated a disquietingly large disappeaiance.
Growers might have overestimated their stocks in the November returns, when some of their
potatoes were still in the ground; more doubtful potatoes might have been discarded by farmers
for much-needed stock-feed, publicity having led them to think that supplies were so plentiful
that less care was necessary in maintaining stocks. The public, too, might have had a similar
impression about the unimportance of wasting potatoes in the kitchen.
In February 1943, therefore, there was talk of calling off the campaign; but the Minister
justifiably objected to being asked to do so on the basis (as he said) of a series of
speculations ; he was prepared to continue the publicity and run the risk of a shortage at the end
of the season, although he agreed that no potatoes fit for human consumption should be
processed for flour.18 Everything possible was being done to increase the quantity of potatoes
available, including the alteration of the riddles-so that the Ministry was in the position of
following up its publicity by offering the smallest potatoes yet permitted to be sold. 19 The
wisdom of making no more drastic changes on account of one census result was borne out by the
next, for the February returns showed a decline in the stocks so much smaller as to lead to an
assumption of an increase in demand of only 13 per cent, instead of the previous 20 per cent.
Calculations gave a prospective surplus of the order of 200,000 tons, and the figure in the March
census was very little less in spite of an allowance of 18 per cent, now made for waste because of
the early incidence of sprouting in the clamps. Though there is no reason to place greater or less
confidence in a statistical estimate that presents an encouraging picture than in one that presents
the reverse, the deterioration caused by the mild weather was an additional argument in favour of
acting on the later set of assumptions and arranging for an expansion of the very limited
processing programme then in operation. Experiments that were being conducted this season on
the proportions of shrinkage in clamps 20 could help in calculation for subsequent years if not for
the present one; but no such scientific enquiry could help greatly with the other uncertain
element, that of human guesswork.
At the time the results of the January census came out, a campaign was being launched to
encourage the use of potatoes in flour confectionery. 150 volunteers from the bakery trade were
already instructing their fellow bakers in the preparation and mixing of potatoes so as to make a
palatable article with less flour.21 Publicity to the consumer was suspended for the time being,
but the enthusiastic activities of the lecturers and demonstrators were not curtailed. There were
no means of measuring whether enough extra potatoes were used in this way22 to justify the
efforts made by the Ministry and the trade to overcome the difficulties of production; but it
seems most unlikely.

The implications of the January census had indeed nipped in the bud many ingenious processing
schemes. Though there was little likelihood of potatoes being available for them, experiments
covering a wide range of products continued throughout the spring and supplied data for the
discussions concerning the use of next seasons crop. One firm evolved a process for turning raw
potatoes into glucose and so reducing; imports of maize and maize starch for the syrup used by
brewers and confectionery manufacturers ; it had the disadvantage, however, that a beet-sugar
factory was needed for the main production. Other possibilities studied were industrial alcohol, a
known process which was given little consideration since it was not a use for human food; beer,
which apparently could not be made from raw potatoes; gin, which the need for special washing
and cleaning equipment rendered impracticable; and farina, which had been previously
considered and rejected in 1940 for the same reason, that the right type of potatoes were not
available in this country.
Potatoes that had gone through the beet-sugar factories, however, could be used for diverse
purposes; research on the use of these cossettes for beer had established that up to 5 per cent, of
the barley needed by brewers could be replaced, and enquiries went on to see whether more
could be used, and whether the residue from the factories, otherwise destined for animal feed,
was also suitable for this purpose. Experiments at the Cupar beet factory had produced a high
grade potato flour, and there was talk of equipping all beet factories for its manufacture. An early
but abortive decision was made to include 25 per cent, of this flour in cereal breakfast foods; it
was also said to be suitable for sausage rusk, cakes, and biscuits, for various manufactured foods
normally using wheaten flour, and possibly for bread dusting; as an ingredient of chocolate it had
been tested and found unattractive. Little attempt was made, huwever, to revive the project of
using the flour in bread; thoueh it was of higher quality than hitherto its effect on loaf quality
was said to be much greater than that of flour from diluent grains The outstanding innovation of
the year as far as processing methods were concerned was a plant to produce potato mash
powder; but its output was reserved for the Services.
All these activities in so many parts of the Ministry raised a problem of organisation which the
appointment of a senior member of the General Department as a sort of rapporteur or coordinator did not suffice to solve; at the end of the year it had to be- reiterated that there shouul
be one individual who is the centre of all this potato activity . The difficult links were between
Potato Division, Dehydration, and Scientific Advice; the experimental flights of the last two
could not be carried further except in close relation to such estimates of supply as were available.
Without a clearer definition of the functions of each Division it was impossible to arrange to get
processing smoothly under way. The policy of using as many potatoes as possible for human
consumption meant that Dehydration Division ought to try and make the highest grade product
from them; Potato Divisions need was rather to dispose of deteriorating potatoes quickly
towards the end of the season. The surplus was once again master rather than servant. Only those
in touch, through Area Officers, with conditions in the field were in a position to realise when it
was necessary to rush supplies to the beet factories. To Dehydration Division, however, a request
to turn factories on to the quicker process of producing animal food and thereby absorb more
potatoes at short notice was bound to seem an unjustifiably sudden change in policy. These
difficulties led in April 1943 to the devolution of the main responsibility for potato utilisation on
the Potato Division itself.
The Ministers refusal to be alarmed by the mid-winter stock position was more than justified by
the situation at the end of the season; but the very fact that the prospect of shortage had been
mooted was a cause of delay in starting up the beet factories. Though the factories kept up a
good average of over 15,000 tons of raw potatoes a week from April to the beginning of July, it
was still necessary to make a bargain offer to farmers of even bigger quantities of potatoes than
in the previous season. The new crop was the earliest known to many experienced growers, and

the final figures of the May census showed that the Ministry held some 120,000 tons of the old
that were now not likely to be needed for human food. Although the amount was larger than that
of the previous year it did not excite the same degree of adverse comment; the public had been
repeatedly warned of the surplus ; the East Anglian growers had been to some extent pacified by
permission from the Ministry of Agriculture to lift new potatoes earlier; and even in those areas
giving rise to anxiety the crop was cleared by the end of July, growers being in some instances
willing to buy back their own produce (of course at the reduced stock-feed rate, a much lower
price than they had been paid for them by the Ministry). Though the financial loss in this period
was considerable, the wastage was negligible in comparison with the previous year.

Footnotes
1

e.g., a general licence permitting the transport of potatoes from the Eastern counties into certain
areas was revoked on 8th November, but permission to send certain classes of potatoes was
granted by licence from Area Supervisors.
2

Roughly one form in five had to be returned to its sender for correction; the amount of checking
the small staff of investigating accountants could carry out was small, and there were
implications that a substantial number of wrong claims had been made.
3

Hence, e.g., S.R. & O. (1942) No. 2307, confining sales of limestone and warp soil potatoes in
Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire to the Ministry from 9th November. A month later a similar
restriction was imposed on Grade A potatoes grown in Lancashire and Cheshire, which was
relevant to the end-of-season reserve only. Reservation of the better quality potatoes had such a
noticeable effect on the market that at a press conference on 27th November the Ministry had to
contradict a rumour that such potatoes were being shipped to Russia!
4

The Treasury declined, however, to sanction a project, costing 4,400, to put 10,000 tons of
potatoes in gas stores normally used for apples; pointing out that this quantity would not
represent even a days requirements.
5

Nobody appears to have pointed out that potatoes in clamps not only lose water, but also (a)
undergo starch oxidation, which reduces their nutritive value, (b) lose Vitamin C, (c) are liable to
develop disease. Storage is in fact a necessary evil, resulting from eating habits that make the
potato a daily item of food throughout the year.
6

Both Lord Woolton and Mr. Hudson mentioned potatoes in public speeches; a demonstration
of potato dishes was given for the Press on 29th July, and a 'Food Fact' appearing during the
week beginning 2nd August featured new potatoes: Enjoy them while you can-new potatoes
here for only a few more weeksa pre-war delicacy at a pre-war price. . . . Thanks to fair
weather, farmers foresight and the subsidy, we have a record potato crop.
7

Producers would have regarded anything less than the promised prices as a breach of faith,
and the principle of subsidising new potatoes had not yet been conceded. Retail prices during the
bridge period, however, were brought down by a special subsidy.
8

The Ministry purchased 21,000 tons during August, of which 19,000 tons were sold as stockfeed and nearly 2,000 tons processed.
9

Potato Division had to stagger the resultant change in retail and wholesale prices so as to
avoid a barrage of claims for compensation.

10

It was in any event calculated to mislead the public; for ships not required for wheat would
have still had to face risks with some other cargo, possibly a more dangerous one.
11

At a Press Conference, on 19th October 1943, when the general increase in consumption was
given as 12 per cent, on the previous year, and more than 50 per cent, on pre-war average
consumption.
12

For example the cartoon by Moon in the Sunday Dispatch, 7th January 1945, over the
caption Cancel the Campaign-Theres a Shortage Now', showing a Ministry of Food van
disgorging officials laden with slogans reversing those even then being pasted on a hoarding. ...
13

A senior official wrote in August 1942 : Their statistics are crude enough, although on the
whole they have been shown to be fairly reliable, but their crudity is due to the fact that we
cannot trouble farmers with elaborate returns. It is only with some difficulty that we have
recently persuaded the Agricultural Departments to agree to the insertion of one small additional
item in the very simple return furnished to us periodically for purposes of the census. Accurate
statistics must be built up from accurate and reliable material, and we can never hope to get such
material from the potato growers.
14

About 1.000 growers were visited by Area officers, who found slightly more than 1,1/2 of
over-estimation. (At best another estimate!)
15

500 retailers were asked for their sales in September 1942. Efforts to extend the sample to well
over a thousand were not so effective as could be hoped, since a corresponding proportion of
returns were not sent back, or were badly filled in, or showed no sales of potatoes.
16

It should be noted, however, that this check was of limited value in being but a sample. Only
when the total figure of tonnage subsidy paid in any given period had been taken out could there
be a really trustworthy figure for human consumption and this Potato Finance could not give
until too late for it to be of any assistance in planning future utilisation. A comparison of
estimates from the three sources for the last three months of 1942 gives an average increase in
consumption of 18% but reveals no consistent variations in the three methods.
17

As the revised estimates of the 1941 disappearance were lower, the apparent increase in 1942
crop consumption had therefore to be put at a higher rate than had been previously given. The
higher estimates found then way into a report from the Central Statistical Office to the Lord
Presidents Committee without explanation. It is embarrassing for me when I have to explain to
my colleagues in the Government why the Departments estimates of potato consumption vary so
considerably . . the Minister complained. I am aware of the difficulties of estimation but when
we improve our technique of estimation let us publish it at regular intervals. A further revision
was made when a sample of subsidy claims for the 1942 season was to hand, when the Division
felt justified in assuming a 20% increase .in consumption over the previous year.
18

A minute dated 12th February had recommended, inter alia, that processing in the beet
factories should not be started for the moment. The Minister at first refused to give any decision
on the beet factories until an attempt had been made to define the guesses ; I shall not alter the
publicity, he said. If we eat the potatoes now and save flour we shall get the benefit in the long
run and Ill risk there being a shortage of potatoes and deal with it when it happens. At a
meeting held on the 17th he said, however, that he would not object to the slackening off of
publicity towards the end of the season. Because of deterioration in the clamps, two beet
factories were started up at the beginning of March.

19

The minimum ware riddle was reduced to I ,1/2 from 4th March by S.R. & O-(1943) No.
319.
20

Investigations were carried out by Dr. Dillon Weston of the School of Agriculture,
Cambridge, for which the Treasury approved an expenditure of 2,000. A bigger proportion of
shrinkage than had been imagine apparently took place during the early months of the season ;
the curve then flattened out and rose again steeply during the last months.
21

Potatoes and potato flour were made a permitted ingredient even in the loaf by S.R. & O.
(1943) No. 42, issued on 13th January.
22

One baker wrote that he had increased his potato usage from 56 lb. to half a ton a week. An
estimate of possible usage in this way, should propaganda be continued in the following year,
was 50,000 tons.

GHAPTFR XI
The Crops of 1943 and 1944
I
Any doubts about the wisdom of an ever-increasing potato acreage, that the Agricultural
Departments might have roused in the Ministry of Food during the summer of 1942, gave way
before the indications of so large an increase in consumption towards the end of the year. When
the inflated figures of the January 1943 census came out, the Ministry of Food made an
immediate effort to get the acreage increased as much as was possible at that late hour; it seemed
to Potato Division that otherwise rationing could not be avoided in 1943-44. The growing
practice of feeding potatoes to livestock, in Great Britain as well as Northern Ireland, was
thought likely to aggravate the position. It was agreed to press for 1,215 thousand acres (in Great
Britain), as against the 1,166 thousand originally agreed upon. In the end, however, no more than
1,193 thousand acres1 were obtainedan increase of some six per cent, on the previous years
acreage, but still appearing to leave only a small margin of safety, at current rates of
disappearance, if yield were no less than 7 tons an acre and wastage no more than ten per cent.
The first problem the Ministry encountered over the 1943 crop was nevertheless not one of
scarcity. Encouragement had always been given throughout the war to the planting of early
varieties, as a second insurance policy against end-of-season shortage, and this year, with the
assistance of a mild spring, it bore embarrassing fruit. The crop of new potatoes was the earliest
and heaviest within living memory, but of less outstanding quality; a special publicity drive had
to be made to get rid of as much of it as possible for human consumption. The Potato Division
would have liked to reinforce this by a drop in price early in July instead of waiting for the
reduction for Cost-of-Living purposes that had been agreed with the Treasury for 17th July 1943.
As growers must be allowed to realise their full expectations of profit, the gap would have had to
be bridged by an earlier subsidy on new potatoes than had been arranged for. The argument that
it would be better to subsidise new potatoes rather than let them degenerate into stock-feed (also
a drain on public funds) had however to give way before first, the general conviction that a
reduction in price might not increase consumption, and secondly, the particular difficulty of
altering financial arrangements at short notice. In any event, as the Ministry accepted
responsibility for finding the grower a market, a considerable tonnage found its way, during July

and August, to such processing factories as could be kept open; and some of the second early
crop was put into clamp for use later in the season.
After the early glut had been absorbed as best it could be, the position, notwithstanding the
increase in acreage, seemed likely to be tight for the rest of the season. A fall in yield of 0.1 tons
per acre meant the loss of over a weeks supply at estimated rates of consumption, and the fact
that the yield for England and Wales was reckoned in October to be only 6.9 tons 2 was
disquieting. It had been thought necessary, too, on account of transport difficulties, to provide for
a higher ware riddle in England and Wales 3 to conserve supplies of seed. There was thus little
scope for the ingenious utilisation devices of the previous year; hardly room, in fact, for more
than priority processing for the Services, and for the manufacture of some high grade potato
flour plants in Northern Ireland so long as supplies permitted; the other factories, equipped and
staffed at considerable cost to produce potato flour, could not be given sound potatoes. From the
deteriorating potatoes withdrawn from the market from time to time little could be made that
would serve as human food. The sugar-beet factories, some space in which, it was thought at the
beginning, might be used for additional glucose manufacture, did not warrant reopening after the
end of the beet season.
No new publicity was given to the encouragement of consumption either in the housewifes
kitchen or in the confectioners bakehouse; nevertheless there was a steady increase in the
quantity accounted for as human foodas much as 14,1/2 per cent, in October-December 1943,
in comparison with the same months of the previous year. (This phenomenon appeared all the
more serious because allotment-holders had been advised, as a result of previous surpluses, to
concentrate on other vegetables than potatoes.) How far some of the increase, both during this
year and previous ones, was chargeable to domestic livestock it is not possible to say; no doubt,
as Professor Engledow wrote in December 1943, much of the remarkable increase in potato
consumption, together with the improvement in national health which it has no doubt induced,
arises from the potatoes entering the human system in the form of eggs and bacon and rabbit
flesh. (Pigs, in particular, are great consumers of potatoes; it was the reduction of the pig
population in Northern Ireland that brought about so difficult a surplus there.) A measure of the
amount of potatoes fed in this way is, however, lacking.4

II
The end-of-season reserve was intended, like the acreage, to be larger than ever before700,000
tonsand Ministry purchases actually overstepped that figure. Control at the outset of the
maincrop season was therefore mainly directed towards ensuring that this reserve should consist
of the best potatoes available: the fact that the previous years reserve had kept so well was
encouraging. Restrictions on the sale of long-keeping varieties in certain areas were imposed on
17th October5 and were removed gradually from mid-Dccember onwards when the reserve was
secure. In the hope of conserving the better supplies within the freedom of the market, the
Ministry fixed retail prices from 6th November that, by means of a subsidy, widened the gap
between Grade A and Grade B (this new differential took the place of the soil subsidy paid in the
previous year).6 But it was perhaps hardly to be expected that consumer preference for the best
quality potatoes would be influenced by the fact that Grade B potatoes were now Jd. per 7 lb.
cheaper and Grade A 1/2.d to id. dearer. Merchants still sought out the best supplies. It was
necessary to make special arrangements in certain areas in the north-east to prevent the poorer
keepers from going to waste without finding a market.
The keeping quality of the crop indeed turned out to be poor generally; stocks were being
disposed of at a rate that promised a shortage of about two weeks supplies at the end of the
season. The only course7 open was to reduce the ware riddle as in the previous season. It was

arranged that the riddle of two inches, imposed in the interests of seed, should come down to
one-and-a-half inches, on 1st February in all but the principal growing areas and Wales, on 19th
March in the whole of England and Wales; but Potato Division later decided that the reduction
on 19th March must be more drastic, to one-and-a-quarter inches for the whole United Kingdom.
This reduction, which had the effect of obtaining perhaps an extra 50,000 tons for human food,
continued in force until 31st May,8 by which time, although the management of supplies still
needed considerable care, there was less need for anxiety (and none, fortunately, for rationing) ?
The peak period of Ministry trading coincided with the climax of preparations for the invasion of
France, and the end-of-season problem this year was one of evening out the distribution of small
lots in the face of great limitations on transport. In the fear that supplies from East Anglia might
be cut off, Potato and Transport Divisions made arrangements for the movement of nearly 100
thousand tons in bulk into the south-west of England during March, April, and May ; special
trains and sea transport were employed for this purpose, and farmers in the area provided space
and material for clamping them. Smaller in extent, but essential because of the pressure on the
railways, were the movements of old potatoes by coaster at the end of the season ; Scottish
potatoes came down to the Western ports, and Londons needs were supplemented by shipments
from the North of England. In this way the means of transport hitherto used chiefly for seed
potatoes during the war became a useful means of bridging the end-of-season gap.

Ill
We should be placed in an impossible political position, a senior official wrote, if we had to
celebrate the Armistice by potato rationing. That was in November 1943, when the Ministry of
Food was engaged in making out the best case possible for an increased acreage in the next crop
year; but though supplies at that time promised to cause some anxiety, rationing was then still no
more than an academic exercise9, and even the final outcome of the acreage discussions did not
foreshadow how nearly the Ministry would come to the imposition of consumer rationing in the
last few months of the war in Europe.
The potato acreage provided the main source of disagreement in discussions on the 1944
cropping programme. The rod that the Ministry of Food had at any rate helped to make for its
own back, a continual increase in apparent domestic consumption, was not the only reason for
pressure to increase production; there were now the probable needs of the Services in Europe
(including the Americans, for whom potatoes represented one item of reverse Lend/Lease) to be
considered, as well as considerable quantities of seed that might be needed for relief purposes.
On the other hand, the Agricultural Departments were bound to resist any increase in the
production of a crop so expensive in seasonal labour and so difficult for the small producer to
harvest; more especially as repeated planting during successive years had encouraged infestation
of the land by eelworm. Nevertheless, in May 1943, County War Agricultural Executive
Committees were told that the target for 1944 would be an increase of 5 per cent, on that of the
previous year; this would give the Ministry of Food 1,230 thousand acres out of the 1,250
thousand asked for in Great Britain. The price awards for 1944 crops were, however, to offer no
increased incentive to grow potatoes; the decrease in the price of first earlies, calculated to
encourage the sowing of main-crop varieties, was no more than balanced by increases in the
February, March, and April prices.
In November 1943 the Minister of Agriculture asked to be relieved of the necessity of pressing
for an increase in potato acreage on account of difficulties over labour supply and agricultural
prices. This request was followed by the alarming suggestion of a 10 per cent. reduction, and
discussions were vainly reopened at the official level ; the Ministry of Food would not assent to
any figure below that supposed to have been agreed. In December, when manpower policy for

1944 was being discussed, the Minister of Agriculture told his colleagues that the result of his
small allocation of agricultural labour would inevitably be a much smaller potato crop; after
reviewing the position in conference with its Liaison Officers his Ministry could offer no
guarantee that the acreage would be even as much as that actually obtained in 1943.10
Even more disquieting were the predictions made when a cut in recruitment to the Womens
Land Army was mooted. In an exchange of letters Ministers reiterated their original arguments
with some variation in emphasis; the Ministry of Food were now prepared to accept 1,200
thousand acres as the minimum to avoid the risk of a shortage, and even to offer some
concession on sugar beet; the Prime Minister asked for the largest production possible with the
resources available. Nevertheless the Minister of Agriculture refused to guarantee more than 850
thousand acres in England and Wales (as against the million hoped for) and authorised his
Liaison Officers to regard that figure as their target or even to allow reductions of as much as 5
per cent, in cases of labour shortage. Eventually, however, Liaison Officers obtained from their
Committees the promise of 925 thousand acres, on the condition that supplies of seed arrived
promptly ; this figure the Ministry of Food accepted with some relief, though still hoping that
County Committees might improve on it.
Apart from the rearrangement of crop return that had been announced in December 1943, there
was little alteration in plans for ware control.11 The principle of compensation for prices more
discouraging to first-early production, by way of an increase in the February, March, and April
prices, was admirable in itself, but unfortunately conflicted with the ascending scale of reward
for clamping and storage that had been for some years an important feature of price structure in
the later months of the season. May prices were now the same as April, with every
encouragement to the grower to market his potatoes in the earlier month. Potato Division would
have liked to add a further sum to the May price, but it was felt to be unwise to reopen any part
of the general question of growers prices in the current season, however much there might be a
case for an increase in 1945. The re-grouping of varieties of seed, which had been discussed for
some time, is noteworthy.12 Differential subsidy according to grade had proved popular with all
but the accountants, and was to continue; retail margins, which the Margins Committee would
have liked to see reduced, were given some slight adjustments, but no more.
In 1944-45 the end of season reserve presented a particular problemor rather a number of
problems that had long existed, but had finally come to a head. The labour situation made the
keeping of supplies for dressing and lifting at the Ministrys bidding an added burden to growers,
and the Agricultural Departments successfully pressed that the proposed size of the reserve
should be slightly curtailed; to 700,000 tons against 754,000 in 1943-44. 13 The legal problem of
how the burden could be distributed more fairly and growers prevented from selling off their
crops early,14 and evading their responsibility towards the reserve, was given considerable
thought, for both English and Scottish Agricultural Departments and farmers' unions had insisted
on an assurance that some effective remedy would be found that year. That every grower should
be required to hold back a proportion of his crop, a measure frequently considered, would be fair
but no solution to the problem from the Ministry of Food s point of view, as a reserve would be
valueless unless carefully selected.
The Ministry finally agreed to try a new method by which the grower was threatened with
requisition but given the option of a special contract, delaying any valuation of the potatoes
until they were clamped. At the same time the purchase of the reserve was to be spread more
evenly over the country; though this concession was not likely to improve its general quality, it
was an advantage that purchases should also be diverted from the eelworm-infested areas of the
eastern counties. Potato Division for its part would have liked to reduce the advance payments
made to growers, described as the main lubricant of the end of season reserve scheme; 15 but there

was so much feeling about the scheme itself that this was not pressed. Restrictions on the sale of
certain varieties were imposed from 1st October, so that purchases could be made, but so
difficult was the season that, later on, sub-standard potatoes which may look unattractive but
remain perfectly edible had to be bought even for the reserve.16
On the acreage finally obtained, some 1,219 thousand acres, supplies might be expected to be
adequate, with some luck and careful management. But in one respect, lack of labour, the
Ministry of Agricultures recent arguments had proved all too justified. Mr. Hudson had said,
Though ... we look like getting the acreage, I have the gravest doubts whether we shall get
commensurate results in yield or harvesting of crop. . . .' The bad weather of that autumn made
matters worse. Early in November 1944 the Minister of Agriculture appealed at the Lord
Presidents Committee for extra labour to be allotted in order to get in the potato and sugar beet
harvests, but little could be offered. Of the total acreaee planted that year, some 15 per cent, then
remained in the ground as compared with 4 per cent, the previous year. Preliminary estimates of
stocks made it seem advisable to reduce the riddle to 1,1/4 in. from 6th December, and to
prohibit sales for stock-feed. Supplies were coming forward slowly for the large towns and a
special dispensation was made to allow potatoes to be sent to London from areas otherwise
closed under the order restricting sales. Nevertheless there seemed to be such a likelihood of an
acute scarcity of potatoes in London over the Christmas period that the Minister of Food
succeeded in persuading his colleagues to provide far more Service labour for riddling and
loading than was actually necessary.

IV
By the end of 1944 it was well apparent that there were two distinct causes for anxiety. Onethe
current local shortages arising because the weather and the dearth of labour had made it difficult
to get potatoes out of the ground and off the farmscould be overcome by special arrangements.
The other could not; late lifting and bad weather had made a poor-yielding crop so much the
poorer that there was little hope of anything but scarcity throughout the season. The November
census pointed to a deficit, at the full rate of consumption, of nearly 600,000 tons, or five to six
weeks supply. The next census, taken at the end of December, showed a position only slightly
better and therefore not reassuring. Though more of the crop had now been lifted, the wet
conditions under which the work had latterly been done did not inspire confidence in the ultimate
yield of the clamps.17 A frost-bound January precluded much investigation of the real state of all
other stocks in clamp; wastage, however, was expected to be higher than during the previous
year.
This was a season when demands on the crop for Service' use and for priority processing were
greater than ever. For export to troops overseas the best quality potatoes were needed, but
attempts were made to get part of the requirements from Brittany. A reduction of the scale of
allowance to troops in this country, deliberately inflated during the year of surplus, was also a
little help when finally effected. On the other hand, yield in Northern Ireland was bad, and there
was little prospect of increasing the already low rate of shipments from that source. A further
reduction in the riddle, already so small that it might well be abolished if it were not for the
elimination of soil in the process of riddling, and a free licence to growers to sell as ware cuts,
scabs and cracks, were the only measures that the Division was able to introduce to stretch out
home supplies. Both of them meant a regrettable lowering in the quality of potatoes coming on
the market.
The Ministry still felt that more could be done to increase deliveries from farms; but an attempt
to go further than the prohibition of sale for stock-feed (which it was hardly possible to enforce)
and discourage growers from feeding potatoes to their own stock by a price bonus of 1 a ton,

was defeated at the Lord Presidents Committee. As the Ministry of Agriculture said, ii would
have meant passing from tacit to overt recognition of law-breaking, by offering farmers an extra
reward if they comply with the regulations ; a measure of the anxiety of the Government, not of
the needs or deserts of the growers. At a cost of some one and a half million pounds, 18 it might
still not succeed in getting many more potatoes off farms.
The only course now open to the Ministry of Food, in order to reduce the deficit and eke out
supplies to the end of the season, was a substantial restriction of civilian consumption; the severe
winter weather, limiting the lifting and movement of potatoes, had brought about a reduction, for
the time being, to as little as 50 per cent, of normal in some areas; and in submitting the case for
the price inducement the Director had mentioned the possibility of rationing supplies from the
end of March. The scheme for short-term controlled distribution evolved in the previous year
was exhumed and given consideration in greater detail; in the middle of January, Potato and
Rationing Divisions were instructed to be ready to operate a rationing scheme at short notice,
though 'the earliest date consistent with successful administrative action appeared to be 4th
March. The wholesale trade, invited to give an opinion on a primitive framework for the scheme,
urged that potatoes could be distributed fairly by voluntary means without going to the length of
imposing official rationing, which would be of great propaganda value to the
enemy.Nevertheless the Ministry went forward with its preparations during February; it obtained
from wholesalers particulars of purchases from growers and sales to retailers, that might form the
basis of a scheme permitting each trader a proportion of his datum tonnage; each retailer would
receive so many units of potatoes to sell to customers presenting ration books.19
An early decision was taken that there should be no registration with retailers; but it took the
Ministry longer to decide between the respective demerits of schemes by which coupons were
cut out or merely cancelled, and Rationing Divisions insistence on the latter procedure was,
because of the unpopularity of the similar schemt for oranges, one small factor influencing the
Minister atrainst a decision in favour of rationing. Timing was a bigger difficulty; Potato
Division now put forward a convincing case for postponement until April; though the ration
would then have to be smaller, there would be a longer period for free loading of damaged
stocks, otherwise liable to waste; and the later date had, among other advantages, that of
enabling the Division to obtain a clearer picture of the situation. By this time, mid-February,
higher authority was in any case doubtful about rationing at all; if stocks were keeping as badly
as was then feared, the Ministry did not want to run the risk of inflicting on the public a
compulsory ration that might have to be denied in the last few weeks because potatoes that could
have been eaten in March had gone bad by May. So it was decided in March to leave distribution
to the trade and hope for the best as far as the few weeks shortage was concerned; the Press,
which had since Christmas speculated freely on what the Ministry might do, was not told of the
decision till a month later, when, as it happened, the general position was known to be more
favourable.
From the third week in January the Division had operated, through Area Potato Supervisors, a
system of allocation to wholesalers that was designed to spread supplies as far as possible evenly
over the country. No attempt had been made to requisition supplies, so that in cases where a
merchant was able to obtain potatoes through his normal connections he still did so ; otherwise
he appealed to the Ministry, for whom certain long-keeping stocks were still reserved, and was
given a proportion of his requirements. It was inevitable that so long as free stocks were
plentiful some consuming areas were able to obtain disproportionate supplies; London, in spite
of the different impression given by the Press, had very little less than its needs until April; apart
from the West Riding of Yorkshire, which also had nearly 100 per cent, of its requirements, free
stocks became rarer as one went northward; Scotland and the outlying industrial areas of South
Wales went short for a time. How the trade distributed the supplies obtained in this way could be

a matter for recommendation only, and therefore the scheme could hardly be termed even an
unofficial system of rationing.
The Ministry was satisfied, however, that the trade had done its best to be fair, and indeed the
paucity of general complaint bears this out. There were certainly complaintssome bitter ones
from allotment-holders, whose own potatoes were now gone and who, as previously with
oranges, found it difficult to get any local greengrocer to serve them. Housewives in one large
cityBirminghamrepresented that rationing would have been fairer; but it is at least possible
that the queues that led to the complaints might have persisted in the towns under rationing. To
have introduced it would indeed have been using an untried steamhammer to crack a nut. So long
as bread was unrationed, minor inequalities in potato distribution for a season were, except
perhaps politically, of little consequence. (The decision, in 1947-48, with bread rationing in
force, to restrict potato consumption from November onwards, was another matter.) It is odd to
find a Ministry committee in March 1945 actually canvassing the likely effect of the shortage of
potatoes on national supplies of Vitamin C, the content of which in end-of-season potatoes is
negligible; over-emphasis of slight and temporary fluctuations in food supply was now frequent,
so nutrition-conscious had administrators become.
At one time Potato Division even became alarmed at the extent to which consumption had been
reduced: according to the indications of census returns for the period between 10th March and
7th April, when the aim had been to distribute 85 per cent, of the usual supplies, human
consumption had apparently fallen to 65 per cent, of normal. This situation must have come
about because, at the same time .as the Ministry was still preventing the sale or transport of
potatoes from certain areas, more free stocks had been withheld from the market than had been
expected; during the especially fine weather of March growers had apparently been more
anxious to get on with arrears of other farm work than to riddle their remaining potatoes. The
political consequences that might have followed if a delay in movement had brought about waste
at the end of the season, induced the Division to act rapidly in removing the restrictions, 20 in
spite of the risk of dissipating any sound stocks that might otherwise be useful in June-July. The
trend of figures on which this decision was based was no better to be relied on than most
growers estimates; there is some doubt whether consumption ever really did reach this low
level, declared the final version of the census.
At the end of April the Ministry still held the bulk of its end-of-season reserve of some six
hundred thousand tons. This quantity, together with free stocks, promised to provide very little
less for human consumption than in the corresponding period of 1944. Frosts in May, however,
delayed the new crop, which Potato Division had hoped would be a week earlier than usual;
during that month there was a generous movement of old stocks, and in June the Division had to
turn to the still inadequate and uncertain supplies of new potatoes coming forward, distributing
old or new where they seemed most needed. Even in the first week of June it was, according to
an early report to Public Relations Division, impossible to plan more than twenty-tour hours
ahead. The new potatoes under the Ministrys control, those from Cornwall and the Scilly Isles,
were diverted to the South-West, London, the Midlands, Lancashire, and the NorthEast; some
from Northern Ireland and Eire were sent to North Wales and Lancashire. The remaining areas
had to obtain supplies as they came forward from areas free of control, such as Pembrokeshire
and Lincolnshire.
The attempts of the previous autumn to safeguard the quality of seed planted, by the provision of
a high riddle and the prohibition of the use of uncertified seed, were doomed to failure ; the
poverty of the crop was to throw emphasis on obtaining enough seed by any means. There were
greater demands on it for export to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean
countries, and the decision to plant no less an acreage for the 1945 crop meant that no offset

would be found at home. Growers were, moreover, reluctant to open their clamps and dress out
seed, particularly as the present seasons February-April increases in price had, for certain
varieties, left that of ware higher than that of seed. Northern Ireland could not spare the extra
quantities that had been expected at the beginning of the season, and Scotland had far less to
send south than in the previous year; at the end of February 1945, supplies of seed for England
and Wales looked like being 50,000 tons short. Transport was also a serious problem; bad
weather had held up delivery programmes, and growers could not be sure when their seed was to
be collected. The Ministry did its best to relieve the position; to encourage growers to dress out
their remaining seed a new provision ensured that prices of seed should be not less than 1 os. a
ton more than ware of the same variety. (Though the dressing out of seed was already
compulsory in some areas, financial inducements were once again necessary to uphold the law.)
During the first weeks of March it became clear that the prospective shortage in England and
Wales was even worse; the Division felt that the only course was to authorise the use of healthy
ware potatoes for planting and, on the assumption that the grower needs about two tons of ware
to replace one of seed, to subsidise such planting by an extension of the ware tonnage subsidy
arrangements. The Treasury and the Ministry of Agriculture agreed to this course, in spite of its
disadvantages, because of the urgency of the problemone that made the question of ware
supplies temporarily less important.21

V
The point of the story about the boy who cried wolf was that the wolf actually came in the end.
So although the Ministry escaped potato rationing during the whole of the war years, a
rudimentary form of it had eventually to be introduced in the winter of 1947-48. To continue the
account of successive crops to that date and beyond would not add much to the lessons to be
learned from the war period. Although the experience of the quasi-rationing scheme was not
exactly catastrophic (particularly as the new crop came fortunately early), it was sufficiently
harassing 10 the Commodity Division to confirm its belief that the policy of planting the
maximum possible acreage, whatever the cost, had been right.
That potatoes do not lend themselves to rationing may be conceded without argument and no one
would, therefore, advocate a potato supply policy deliberately framed with rationing in mind,
such as was from the first proposed for sugar. On the contrary, not only is a plentiful supply of
them desirable, both on account of their intrinsic food value and of their habitual daily use in the
diet ; they represent an obvious way of making good the shortage of other ingredients in a main
meal. If there is little meat or fish, it can be eked out into at any rate a reasonable bellyful by
extra potatoes.
The Ministry of Foods policy, however, was not pitched in this key; more especially, it did not
conceive of a plentiful supply of potatoes as something relative to a demand that might, within
reasonable limits, be regulated by means of the price mechanism both up and down. (If it be
objected that the demand for potatoes is inelastic, the reply must be that the point was never
tested practically.) The policy was nurtured, as it seems, in two beliefs that survived the
experience of the first world war; one, that the potato crop can be a safeguard against national
starvation, the other, that there can be devised satisfactory means for disposing of a surplus, other
than by feeding to animals. By the end of 1942 these beliefs were at length beine blown upon;
potatoes were no longer regarded as a buffer food comparable to bread, and it was realised that
potato-floui in the loaf was a mirage. By that time, however, the Ministry was the prisoner of its
own propaganda; it would not willingly call a halt in expanding acreage, even though this was
urged on the most telling of groundseelworm infestation and the shortage of labour.

One cannot but conclude that the conception behind the policy was over-simplified ; into a mere
matter of calories per acre. Because a peasant society like that of Ireland before the Famine may
be best able to exist, where land is scarce compared with labour, on a diet consisting largely of
potatoes, it by no means follows that a population largely urban, in a war situation where
agricultural labour is chronically short and transport not much less so, will be well advised
deliberately to increase its dependence on them. A conspicuous weak ness in the pre-war food
plans generally was that their makers seldom took into account the probability that other
resources besides food and shipping would be scarce; still less did they make a consistent effort
to size up the supply problems with which they would be faced. Had this been done for potatoes;
had the pre-war acreage, the yield, and the contribution they made to the national diet been set
against any possible war-time increases in output, it must have become apparent that to raise the
acreage beyond a certain point must involve at once diminishing returns and increasing
administrative effort. The fact that, from an acreage double that before the war, without any
diminution in yield, the calories per head per day furnished by potatoes rose only from four per
cent, of the total in 1935-39 to six per cent, in 1943, 22 puts in their place the long arguments of
1943-44 about an increase of five per cent, on an already huge acreage.
In terms of feeding the people, an increase of that magnitude was hardly important, even
supposing that its net yield in potatoes fit for human consumption were up to average. But the
point had been passed at which the yield from extra acres could be expected to be average. Not
merely could new growers, in districts not habituated to potato growing, not be expected to
produce crops of the size and quality of those from established growers in, say Lincolnshire;
their potatoes were also more likely to need disposal for stock-feed during the season. The
disadvantages of pressing potato-growing too far did not end with the low yield from the extra
acres. The sheer size of the whole crop meant that, in a bad year like 1944, a smaller proportion
of it could be harvested and clamped successfully; it might even be argued that the large acreage
positively contributed to the shortage of that winter.
It is admittedly easier to say that the acreage under potatoes was permitted to become too large,
than to determine at what point the increase had better have been halted. Much depends,
obviously, on technical and local conditions governing, for instance, the alternative crops that
might have been substituted. But it seems at least doubtful whether the Ministry of Food was
well advised to ask for any large increase beyond the near-million acres planted (in Great
Britain) in
1941, or whether it would have done so, had it not been deceived about the prospects of putting
potato flour into bread. Potato policy at most times seems to have been over-influenced by the
difficulties of the moment. Just as the acreage payment was adopted in a hurry on account of the
dry spring of 1941, so the fact of blight in 1941-42 overlaid the fact that the surplus of sound
potatoes that year would otherwise have been unmanageable, and so stilled doubts about the
larger acreage of 1942. In 1942, on the other hand, the fact that the crop was a bumper one was
the means of confirming the Ministry of Food in its policy. For out of the prospective surplus
came the advertising campaign, the Potato Plan; faced thereafter with an increase in apparent
consumption beyond its hopes, the Ministry convinced itself that this must be treated as wholly
genuine, necessary, and permanent.
Prima facie, there would seem to be no reason why people should not be asked to vary, within
limits, their consumption of potatoes, as of any other food, in accordance with the supply
position, or why the price should not be manipulated to encourage them to do so. (The Cost-ofLiving Index was a hindrance, but not a fatal impediment to this.) By 1941 the acreage had
already risen to a level at which there was no reason to apprehend that consumption would have
to be reduced to below the pre-war averageor in terms of calories, 60 per day below the 1943

average level. The alternative policy, chosen by the Ministry, was an inflationary spiral in which
the meansgreater consumptionof disposing of a surplus one year was treated as the norm for
the next, so threatening either a new and bigger surplus, or a deficit absolutely greater, because
demand had been enhanced.
Just as the policy of fostering consumption was rational, given the nature of potatoes, only if it
were capable of going into reverse if occasion demanded, so the various processing devices were
only worth while on two conditions. First, they must make serious inroads into a surplus; as
Beveridge puts it, any satisfactory dealing with potatoes depends on having an indefinitely large
outlet for a surplus, by conversion into flour or some other non-perishable form. Secondly, they
must not be allowed to stake a permanent claim on supplies and thus make worse the problem
they were designed to cure. By these criteria, the use of the sugar beet factories in the offseason
alone emerees as an economic expedient; the others were at once trivial and, as Coller pointed
out long ago, expensive. Expensive also was the subsidised sale of raw potatoes for stockfeeding, though justifiable in so far as it used potatoes unfit for human consumption. On the
other hand, the indulgenceinseparable from the policy of meeting all demands ostensibly for
human beings at an artificially low priceto keepers of backyard livestock was unfortunate. As
Professor Engledow remarked in December 1943, whether the farmer and the land ought to be
pressed to keep on increasing the potato crop in order that a limited section of the population
may have extra eggs and bacon and rabbit flesh, is an interesting question; a question, it should
be added, that was not completely answered by Potato Divisions comment that the only remedy
was rationing, which God forbid.
That comment reveals much about the Ministrys potato policy. No mere calculation could shake
the conviction of the Potato Division that it was responsible not for any ordinary food, of which
a shortage could be made good by others, but something sui generis. In varying degrees this
belief was, of course, and quite properly, held by every Commodity Director, as has been noted
in discussing stock levels.23 But for no other food, even bread, did it impose itself on the Ministry
as a whole to a comparable extent; so that an estimated fall in the yield of one-tenth of a ton per
acre, or1,1/2 per cent., on an acreage twice that before the war, could be canvassed as if it were a
harbinger of disaster. One can but conclude that memories of the depressing potato queues of
1916-17 (themselves partly the result of price control) were strong enough to brush aside
considerations of proportion and expense.
Most of the criticisms that can be, and were, levelled against the organisation of potato control
most notably by an investigator from the Ministrys own Organisation and Methods Division
may be shown to turn on the point of policy. If the Ministry had been prepared to tolerate local or
temporary shortages or variations of price, not only would all the problems of waste and surplus
disposal have been more manageable, but also the particular difficulties arising from the end-ofseason reserve. The abuses that crept into the payment of growers claims, the complication and
friction that arose from the taking over by the Ministry of traders functions during the later part
of the season, the cumbersomeas was allegedarrangements whereby the Division made
itself responsible for providing potato sacks ; all these arose, in the last analysis, from trying to
do so much. So also the fact that the stock census returns offered at best a digest of guess-work
that, as trial showed, could only be made more accurate at the expense of delay, might have been
used to justify an easier attitude to a problem inherently unmanageable. There were those who
thought that for the Government to take over the whole of potato trading, as it had done in 1918,
would have been tidier and more economical; the Director of Potatoes, however, despite his
responsibility for the depot scheme of 1939, stoutly maintained that this would have cost more
money and have had no compensating advantages. Perhaps because of the fiasco of the
marketing scheme for carrots and onions in 1941-42, the Divisional view was allowed to prevail
(indeed, carrots were handed over to it for treatment on the same lines as potatoes).

This much the Division could claim : at whatever costand it was not, in the last resort, for it to
decide on thatthe experience of 1916 had not been repeated; the public, throughout the war,
had never had to complain of any shortage of potatoes. There had been no difficulties over the
guaranteed price, comparable with those over abnormal wastage in 1918. Thanks to the
flexibility with which the riddle regulations and the surplus disposal arrangements had been
worked, there had been little unavoidable waste; the unexpected problem caused by the loss of
Channel Islands potatoes had been met successfully. If the contribution of the potato to the
general food supply had not been as great as some enthusiasts had expected, that was not the
fault of the Division (though it cannot escape some responsibility for the illusions that were put
about) ; it was inherent in the unreliable character of the vegetable. The real lesson of potato
policy lies just in that fact; the potato shows very sharply the danger of too great a reliance on
home-produced food. Ability to maintain imports is, in our present state of knowledge, the only
safeguard against famine.
I
Mr. w. s. morrisons statement of December 1939
The Government have given careful consideration to the question of ensuring to farmers
reasonable prices for Ware potatoes of the 1939 crop. At present the trade in Ware potatoes is
subject only to the Orders of the Ministry of Food prescribing maximum prices. It is proposed in
the near future after consultation with the interests concerned, to fix minimum prices for the
remainder of the season. Maximum prices will also be fixed to enable account to be taken of
variations in value due to special quality or proximity to markets. The Government have taken
over the regulatory powers of the Potato Marketing Board and propose to watch the situation
closely and to exercise those powers as and when required.
It is proposed by means of a tonnage levy payable by the first buyers, to create an insurance
fund which, after the deduction of a small percentage towards the cost of the scheme, will be
used to ensure to farmers a reasonable return for any surplus crop remaining at the end of the
season. No deduction would be made from the growers price in respect of this levy, which
would be added by the first buyer to his price on re-sale. It is not anticipated that the retail price
would be appreciably affected. The details of arrangements on these lines are now being
discussed with the interests concerned.
As regards the 1940 crop, the Government have already announced that it is desired, as part of
the home food production campaign, to secure a substantial increase in the acreage planted to
potatoes next spring. Minimum prices for that crop will be fixed on the basis of the new 1939
minimum prices with such adjustment as may be necessary to take account of increased costs of
production and in relation to yield. As regards the proposed adjustment in relation to yield, it will
be appreciated that, if the yield of the crop generally is above normal, farmers should not expect
the same tonnage return as if the yield were normal. Similarly, if yield is abnormally low, it
would be right to adjust the price per ton upwards. In the event of a surplus, whether resulting
from an expansion of acreage, or exceptional yields, the Ministry of Food will make the
necessary arrangements for ensuring that growers will be enabled to obtain a remunerative return
on their potato crop as a whole.
The assurance I have given will apply in respect of all potatoes of the 1940 crop marketed after
1st September.
II

MR. r. s. Hudsons statement at hereford, 4 march 1941

The Government have had under consideration the question of the marketing of the remaining
stocks in Great Britain of the 1940 crop of potatoes. The arrangements at present in force are that
the Ministry of Food purchase from time to time ware potatoes which are surplus to the
requirements of the market for human consumption or which are showing signs of deterioration,
and will buy any sound marketable surplus which remains on growers hands at the end of the
season. Apart from these arrangements, the grower is expected to find his own market.
It has now been decided to relieve the farmer of the risk of being unable to find a market for his
ware potatoes. The Ministry of Food will accordingly be prepared to buy from any grower the
whole of his remaining stocks of marketable ware for immediate or future delivery (at the option
of the Ministry of Food) at the minimum prices appropriate for the grade and district concerned
at the date of removal of the potatoes from the farm. Growers who wish to take advantage of this
offer should notify the Director of Potato Supplies, St.Johns College, Oxford, as soon as
possible and in any case not later than 30th April next, indicating the approximate tonnage for
sale. The Ministry of Food if it so desires will have the corresponding right of purchasing the
whole of the remaining stocks of any grower at minimum prices on the above basis. Where the
Ministry does not exercise this right, these growers who prefer to continue to find their own
markets are, of course, at liberty to do so and in their case any surplus left on their hands at the
end of the season will be eligible for purchase by the Ministry of Food. The price for this surplus,
as already announced, will be the mid-season (January-February 1941 ) minimum growers price
for the lowest grade of potatoes in the district where grown.
As regards the 1941 crop, it is not possible to prescribe prices and other arrangements in detail
until an estimate of the yield of the crop can be made. The Government, however, renew the
statement made on 13th December 1939, that growers will be enabled to obtain a remunerative
return on their potato crop as a whole. The principle of relieving the grower of the risk of being
unable to find a market for his crop will be maintained and adequate arrangements to this end
will be made.
III
THE DUKE OF NORFOLKS STATEMENT, 6tH AUGUST I94I (made in the House of
Lords on behalf of the Minister of Food)
The policy of His Majestys Government has two main objectives. The first is to put as much as
possible of the crop of potatoes into human consumption, and secondly to see that any surplus
remaining should be used to the best advantage in the national interest. The measure of the
increase in potato consumption is difficult to estimate, but it may safely be set down at not less
than 400,000 tons during the past year. This is not a very great increase relatively to the normal
annual consumption of about 3,750,000 tons, including that of Northern Ireland. There will
probably be a greater increase during the third year of the war, and it is in the national interest
that this should happen. A lareer consumption of potatoes, as of other home produced food,
means a saving of shipping. What is more important, it will be the best means of maintaining
general standards of health unimpaired notwithstanding the loss of certain imported foods, and
notably a large part of our normal fresh fruit supplies. There areI understandno food values
in fresh fruit which do not exist in vegetables, and among vegetables the potato is accorded first
place in the order of food value as being exceptionally rich in Vitamin C.
The Governments policy has been to increase the total acreage of potatoes. The total area of
cultivation throughout the United Kingdom has already increased by about 50 per cent. A further

increase is proposed for next year. It is hardly to be expected that anything less than an extreme
shortage of other foods, a contingency which is not within our contemplation, would suffice to
put the whole of this vast tonnage increase into human consumption. The pressure of reduced
supplies of other foods will, no doubt, continue to operate, but it will rest largely with the
consumer whether the alternative is to be potatoes or bread. It is the Governments duty to
persuade the consumer that it is both in his own and in the national interest that the choice should
be potatoes. An active and useful propaganda for this purpose is being conducted by the Ministry
of Food, and the results have already been most encouraging.
Price will also be an important consideration. Although experience has shown that price
reduction is not, under normal conditions, an effective stimulus to increased potato consumption,
it will naturally play a part in determining the consumers choice, if he must perforce increase his
consumption of this or some other food. An increase in price would almost certainly operate as a
deterrent. It is desirable, therefore, that the price of potatoes should be maintained at a uniformly
low level, and it is the Governments intention to see that the level of potato prices to the public
does not rise appreciably above the normal pre-war standard. To give effect to this policy a
subsidy will be necessary. The cost of production of potatoes, as of all other agricultural produce,
has risen since the war, and the Government are under an obligation to growers to ensure them a
remunerative return on their potato crop. We are faced, in these circumstances, with the
alternative of subsidised or excessive prices to the consumer. A scheme of consumer subsidy,
paid in the form of an acreage payment to farmers, is now being considered, but the amount has
still to be decided. It will however be fixed at a figure consistent with the maintenance of low
prices to the consumer.
Consideration has also been given to the possibility of increasing potato consumption by
converting surplus potatoes into flour, to be used in a certain proportion with wheat flour in the
making of bread. Plant capable of being turned to this purpose already exists in Great Britain,
and arrangements are now being made to set up additional plant in Northern Ireland. These
factories will probably be completed by the end of the year. Provision will then have been made
for a total output of 80,000 tons of potato flour annually, the equivalent of a 2 per cent,
admixture with wheat flour for bread. This represents a factory intake of 400,000 tons of
potatoes.
I should mention however that the same plant is also capable of making animal food, flour and
other processed potato products, and it may be that the balance of comparative advantage will be
in favour of using it for some such alternative purpose. The important thing is that the plant shall
be available to be turned to whatever use may be thought best when the time comes to decide.
Consideration is also being given to the possible use of raw potatoes for making glucose and in
the preparation of manufactured foods. Experimental tests are now being carried out to ascertain
the potential demand for such purposes.
Whether it will be possible to maintain continuity of supply throughout the year will depend
.pon conditions over which the Government have no controlnamely, the weather conditions
affecting next years new potato crop. Old potatoes tend to rapid wastage as the summer
advances, and it is quite impossible to ensure an adequate reserve in the month of July to make
good a really substantial deficiency of new potatoes. Normally, the greater part of our early
supplies of new potatoes are obtained from the Channel Islands.
These are no longer available, and nothing the Government can do by increasing the potato
acreage in this country will enable us to make good their loss during the early part of the season
if, as occurred this year, the growth of the new crop is retarded by unfavourable weather

conditions. Subject to this reservation, however, potatoes should continue to be available in

adequate supply throughout the year. . . .

Footnotes
1

This is the acreage finally found to have been sown; the figure eitimated and worked on for the
year by the Ministry of Food was 1, 188 thousand acres.
2

The yield had been previously reckoned as 7 tons. Final statistics, however, present it as 7.2
tonso. 1 tons per acre less than the previous year.
3

Though the arrangements, in force since 1941, to bring the heavy weight of seed from Scotland
by sea, had helped the transport position, it would be an advantage for the burden of southward
traffic to be eased, particularly in view of the preparations to invade Europe.
4

An enquiry was conducted for the Ministrys Surveys Branch in April 1944, into the
comparative expenditure on certain foods, of domestic poultry keepers and others; so far as
potatoes are concerned, the sample was too small to serve as useful evidence.
5

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 1463.

S.R. & O. (1943) No. 1525. The suggested widening of the gap between the retail price of
Grade A and Grade B potatoes came from the trade and not from the Division.
7

Even this step was not enough to allay anxiety; an announcement warning the public to cut
down consumption was considered, but abandoned.
8

A reduced riddle was, contrarily enough, in force for a shorter time than in the previous year,
that of the surplus.
9

Rationing was not actually considered during the March crisis, but desultory consultations
had taken place about it ever since September.
10

At the Liaison Officers meeting, it was decided that the quota originally allotted could not be
enforced by compulsory direction if necessary, as in previous years- The Ministry of Food
derived little comfort from the Ministry of Agricultures suggestion that any deficiency in
acreage would be somewhat offset
(a) by the fact that performance (in the matter of acreage planted) might be better than promise in
some areas ;
(b) by the efforts of C.W.A.E.C.s to improve efficiency by the avoidance of inadequate
cultivations and bad seed. (One gathers that insufficient attention had been paid to this problem
in past seasons.)
11

It should be noted that this year an order had been made incorporating the general provisions
of control (S.R. & O. (1944) No. 648) ; prices for each period could then be fixed separately
without repeating the control regulations.
12

e.g., a variety like Ninety-fold, which had been over-planted and had to be disposed of as
surplus, was to be discouraged.

13

The hope was expressed that there would be some Jersey supplies in June 1945, but owing to
the risk of Colorado beetle infection these would not in fact have been used even if the Channel
Islands could have spared them that year.
14

In the green state, before clamping and before any restriction on sales Order could catch
them. Potatoes were purchased for the reserve only after they had been clamped, when careful
selection was possible.
15

There had been cases in which the potatoes had not realised the value of 4 a ton already paid,
and it was difficult for the Ministry to recover the debt. Some modifications were, however,
made in payments for sub-standard ware.
16

Estimates of yield finally came out at 6.6 tons per acre.

17

It was very difficult to estimate the tonnage still in the ground, as some growers had
volunteered information on this point and others had not (the census form had been printed
before it would have become necessary to ask the question). Potato Division reckoned that some
twelve thousand tons might be salvaged from this unlifted acreage.
18

Not necessarily to be borne by the Exchequer. The increase of id. per 7 lb. in retail prices, that
would result, were the subsidy not increased, might also do a little to reduce household waste.
19

In the belief that consumption varied in different areas throughout the country, Potato Division
intended to make the unit variable in five different areas, but the latest Wartime Food Survey
figures did not support the necessity for this complication.
20

i.e., the provision that prevented growers in the eastern counties and part of Yorkshire from
selling their stocks except to the Ministry, and the Transport Order prohibiting rail movement,
other than by permit, from Lincolnshire.
21

There was a precedent for this special subsidy; in the spring of I941the Ministry had obtained
authority to buy and resell certified ware for use as seed. But the use of ware in 1945 far
exceeded the 5,000 tons or less of 1941.
22

These percentages are calculated from the information in the First Report of the Consumption
Levels Inquiry (H.M.S.O. 1944) Appendix V. They merely indicate the order of magnitude of the
contribution made by potatoes. In terms of Vitamin G it was, of course, more important, but not
so much as to invalidate the general argument urged here.
23

Vol. I, Chapter XXI. annex: government statements on potato policy .