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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Jo Thomas of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Frank Carr and David Carrigan and has been added to the site with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

Part 1 of this story can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8948578

Part 2 of this story can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8949900

What did you get for your rations?

DC — Oh my word, rations! Well you had to have rationing during the war because as you know this country, we are an island, a very big island and therefore the only way you could bring food into this country was by boat, from America or elsewhere. Now the Germans had U-Boats that went underneath the water, as you know, and they could attack shipping, so food was very scarce. So you had to have the essential food rationed. I mean a small half a pack of margarine had to last you all week, that was per person. Now if you put butter on your bread, I bet you like putting a lot of butter on, but you couldn’t in the war. You had to scrape it on and scrape it off to make it last. Tea was rationed, so what happened is — you know nowadays we use teabags, you just put a teabag in the pot and don’t think about it, in those days we didn’t have teabags. The tea was loose, so you put a spoonful of tea in, and what’s more, if there was any tea left in the pot afterwards you saved that and you used to warm it up. Not very pleasant, but you used to warm it up to make your tea go further.

What you were encouraged to do during the war as well is, because we couldn’t get food very easily, you were encouraged to dig your gardens up at the back. If you had a nice lawn, dig your lawn up and grow food. Now what food do you think you might grow that you would need in your back garden? Carrots, potatoes, cabbage, sprouts, turnips, radishes, tomatoes. You were encouraged to do that and lots of people did that, so you always had something to fall back on. Bread was rationed, there used to be queues outside shops. If there was a queue there you could guarantee that they were selling something that you were short of, so you went and joined the queue, often not knowing what you were going to buy! But you’d buy it because it was scarce.

FC — Yes, everything was very scarce and sweets, you couldn’t get sweets in the war. You’d sometimes hear a rumour that sweet shop so and so had got some toffees, and we’d get on our bikes and cycle down there, and there’d be a queue about half a mile long outside the shop which you got in and waited, and then you got a quarter of toffees. If you’d time, you went and got in the queue again and went round and got some more toffees!

Even soap was on rations in the war, you took your ration books and they’d just allow you the little bit of stuff that you got and put a tick on your ration book to let you know that you’d had that. People kept hens, so they could eggs in the war. A lot of people bred rabbits and they were going to kill the rabbits and eat them. Most people whom I knew who bred rabbits though, hadn’t got the heart to kill them, and they finished up as pets, hundreds of rabbits were all over the place as pets!

You did everything to make the food go further, I mean you had strange foods as well — potatoes came as powder at one time. We had powdered potatoes, powdered eggs these came from America, one of the few things that were getting over by ships. When you had flour — a lot a people made their own bread because it was difficult to get — and the flour was a very dark coloured, you weren’t allowed to sieve it to make it white; it had to have all this dark stuff in, whatever it was, so it didn’t look very nice. But to be honest the rationing was there, but I never noticed it all that much. I think as children you got enough of all sorts of odd things that your parents used to concoct for you and make the food go further.

DC - I never saw a banana in the war. Yes, as a child I remember no bananas. It’s difficult to remember when I saw one for the first time after the war, because even after the war had actually finished and the fighting had finished, you were still very short on things, so rationing went on for some time after the war had stopped, so I wouldn’t like to put a date on it but if war finished in ’45, it was probably at least 12 months afterwards before we saw bananas. Of course we don’t grow bananas in this country do we? They grow in hot climates, so they had to come from the Caribbean, and such places, and you just couldn’t get them here during the war. But that was the thing I missed and it’s strange that Frank feels the same way.

FC — Another thing, does anyone like mince pies? You have those at Christmas time don’t you? Well during the war, I had a job at a bakery in the school holidays and when it was near Christmas, they were making mince pies and they sent me out for carrots. I brought all these carrots back and they chopped them all up and put all this in with the mince meat to make it go a lot further, so you got mince pies with carrots in!

How did you use the ration book?

FC — Well everybody had a ration book, so in our family, we had five ration books and kept them all in a case, and it was my mother mainly, who when she did the shopping, used to take the ration books with her and you’d have the ration book ticked for everything you got. You could get oranges at one time, I think if you’d got young babies, you got orange juice allowed or oranges. But every time you bought any food, it was marked off on your ration book and you couldn’t get any more. Also, you had to have coupons to buy clothes — clothing coupons they called these — and as a boy, if I wanted a pair of football boots, you couldn’t go and buy football boots ‘cos you needed coupons to buy them. A pair of socks would cost you clothing coupons, if you had a new coat, you had to spend coupons. So people had to mend everything and keep repairing all their garments and make them last a long time, hand them down from sisters to brothers almost and buy second hand stuff. There was a man who used to come round with a horse and cart on a Friday night and he always had government surplus, but it was like from the First World War and I had a pair of boots bought me — oh they were horrible! They were great big, tall, long boots full of hobnails at the bottom and I was almost ashamed to go to school, but when I got to school, everybody admired these. They all wanted some of these boots ‘cos I bet they were from the First World War — First World War army boots! You could get things like that that weren’t on coupons, but any other clothes, you had to use the clothing coupons.

Was the food nice?

DC — You didn’t have the choice of food then that you have now, but it was nice and it was healthy, because then you had to eat a lot of the natural foods, whether you liked it or not, you ate carrots and you ate cabbage and you ate sprouts. Probably if you had a choice as children, you wouldn’t necessarily want to have that but you did have that. Another thing, Frank mentioned that you used to get dried eggs if you couldn’t get real eggs. Dried eggs were American, that used to come in small packets, it was like a waxy packet and they were just like a yellow powder. You used to mix that and it made like scrambled egg. But there were all sorts of things you could make with that and mix it in with, so you got all different dishes. Nowadays of course you just go to the supermarket, and you look and there’s all these ready meals you can have, but then you had to kind of invent what kind of meals to have. Anybody know bubble and squeak; mixing in your cabbage and potato? So it was adequate, but it wasn’t as exciting perhaps and as tasty as some of the foods these days, but it was very good for you. They do say that during the war years we were all a lot healthier, because we didn’t over-eat and because we ate the right kind of things, we were a lot healthier than we are nowadays with all the processed food that we get.

Was it dangerous where you lived?

FC — Only at odd times, like when we had the Blitz that we’ve spoken about. I think the biggest danger around our houses was from the guns that were up on Shirecliffe, that used to fire up at the aeroplanes — the shrapnel from those knocked all our slates off and this was the stuff we used to go round picking up as David said. So, we never really thought it was dangerous.

DC — As Frank says, the nearest bombs that actually dropped during the Blitz were probably about quarter of a mile away. I lived up on the Shiregreeen estate then, so you weren’t aware of that. But just as a matter of interest, my wife — she’s younger than me, so would have been about 5 or 6 — lived down Attercliffe, the East End where all the steelworks were, and the sirens went one night and her Mum and Dad brought her downstairs with her brother. There was a petrol store just near there and two bombs dropped outside, and when they went back upstairs, one of these edging stones at the side of the road had been blown out and it’d gone straight through her roof and landed on her bed, so she was rather lucky that she was downstairs. But from my point of view, nothing got near enough me to start me getting worried.

FC — They used to drop bombs with delayed action, so the bomb didn’t explode, it used to go into the floor and leave a big hole. These were a bit scary because the bomb might blow up two or three days later. They’d block up the street, you couldn’t go up that street because there was an unexploded bomb. I remember my father telling me that one had dropped near his works in St. Philip’s Road, and they covered the hole up with big stones. Of course this bomb went off and when it went off, all these big stones went flying through the air and they saw a boulder coming towards the window in the place where he worked, and it hit the wall, just underneath the window. He said that these stones were more dangerous than the bomb and these were the things they’d put on to try and make the explosion less, but it didn’t, it caused it to be dangerous. So the unexploded bombs were a little bit frightening, because you never knew when they were going to go off.

Did you experience any water shortages or power cuts?

DC — No, personally I was never aware that we were short of water. You had to save water and sometimes, in case you were bombed, you were encouraged to keep spare water for drinking purposes just in case the main water went off. The other thing, power cuts, I can’t specifically remember but when you talk about power cuts, have you ever been outside nowadays yourselves when there’s been a power cut? Your tele goes off, the lights go off, you look outside and everything’s in pitch darkness.

Well, during the war, there was what’s known as blackouts where you had to make sure that no light shone out of your house once it got dark, because if planes were coming over, they could see. So everything, every house had to be completely blacked out so that you couldn’t see any light from that house. The street lights were blanked out so it just left a little light shining down onto the road, cars — there weren’t many cars then driving around — but they couldn’t have their main headlights on, they had to have a mask on the front of the headlights which just allowed a little bit of light to shine through, they couldn’t really see. The curb edges in a lot of places were painted white, so that in darkness you could see the curb edge.

FC — We used to wear luminous badges to go to school, so that people could see this little bit of luminous badge coming towards them in the dark.

But, what they did in the war in case there was a water shortage, they built water tanks all around, wherever there was a bit of spare ground, they put what they called a static water tank. This was so that the fire brigade could use the water in case of any bombs falling and fires. So all around the estates were these water tanks and what happened at first was that quite a few children were drowned because they were messing around and hanging over. The tanks were all fenced off, they had fences put round, so people couldn’t get in them as easily.

We had to boil water after the air raids and so on because water mains were burst all over the place, but I don’t remember any other real water shortages or power cuts. But we didn’t use power then like we do now — there were no televisions and so on. In fact, the electricity in Sheffield was about the cheapest in the country in those days ‘cos we had a few power stations around that provided the power for us here.

Pr-BR

Part 4 of this story can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8950278

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