大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War Site by Katie Holyoak, for Three Counties Action, on behalf of Brian Gurney, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

A high proportion of our supplies had to imported from abroad including oil, iron ore, cloth, timber, paper, and of course many items of food. Because of this the government imposed rationing and stopped the importation of anything that they did not consider to be essential such as bananas, other fruits, and manufactured goods other than those for use in the war effort. Each family had ration books with pages of coupons that had to be given up or cancelled whenever we bought any of the rationed goods. Many items of food were rationed (including meat, butter 鈥� 4oz per week 鈥� margarine, sugar, sweets, tea, eggs and bacon 鈥� 4oz per week) and we often had to queue for other items of food such as sausages which were in short supply.
Everyone was asked to make an effort to grow as much food as possible so we dug up our back garden and panted vegetables such as potatoes, parsnips, carrots, greens, beans and peas. The government campaign was called 鈥淒ig for Victory鈥�. Clothes were also rationed as well as soap, furniture and petrol; newspapers were limited to four pages, and as well as sharing bath water we were asked to restrict the depth to 5 inches. One item of food that I remember is scrambled egg, omelettes, cakes and even fried 鈥� it was quite a luxury. However, it was not until 1954 that rationing finally came to an end. Metals were needed in the manufacture of armaments so we were asked to give up any aluminium saucepans that we had, and all iron railings were removed from houses, parks etc to be melted down.

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