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This story was told by Fred to Christine Barker at the VE Celebrations in Beverley in 2005 Beverley

I was duty cook for the day in the cookhouse; we all had to take turns with this. The shift started at 4 o’clock in the morning and so this particular day I’d been on since four.
By the kitchen there was a little washroom we used, on the windowsill in there was a little corned beef tin with brown powder in it and whenever I went in I used to look at this tin I wondered what was in it. I never asked anybody but I always wondered.
This day we were having a big camp inspection with the General, the Colonel and everyone else. They came to us and we had to stand by the stoves where we were cooking. They went into this washroom, the General and his group looked into the corned beef tin, had a little conversation, then the RSM turned around and waved his finger called me over and said ‘what might this be?’ and I came over wearing my clogs and looked at this tin as I had many times before and I had to reply ‘I’m sorry sir I don’t know’.
So the magic finger went up again and he asked my mate, Bill Crosier who was a Yorkshire man what was in the tin. They were all there intently looking into the tin when Bill surprised everybody, including me, by saying ‘it’s custard substitute sir’, he replied ‘what?’ ‘custard substitute’ so the General said ‘it’s not even the same colour are you really telling me you make custard with that?’ ‘yes sir we do’ to which he then asked ‘how?’ Bill kept a dead straight face and said ‘trade secret sir’! I didn’t know what to do I had to make my excuses saying something was boiling to get away from it.
After they’d gone I said ‘custard substitute Bill, what do you do with it?’ and he said ‘well you know we don’t get custard? Well we always make a white sauce to make believe we’ve got custard and I always add some of that in mine, to give it some colour’. By this time I really wanted to know what it was and he told me ‘red oka what me mum puts on doorsteps’!

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