Wartime rationing

My aunt had a boyfriend in the war who posted her bananas.took 6 weeks to get there and were rotten

butterandjam

I remember rationing and so will plenty of others here; it didn't end until 1954.

My mother left me in a pram outside the shops, came back to retrieve her rationbook and found I'd eaten it.

Love this story.
You must have been a very hungry baby.

I seem to remember a sort of twig which we used to buy at the chemists and chewed it. It was called 'sticky lice' or something like that. It tasted vaguely sweet!

I believe that the rationing system was once used to help solve a crime.

It was made a requirement to have your fingerprints taken, I think it was, before you would be given your ration book. The authorities figured this approach would work because people need to eat, so everyone would need to get a ration book.

I believe it did work.

If any of you visit ( or live in ) Yorkshire visit the Eden Camp near Pickering. It is an old army barracks that has been converted to a war museum. It is absolutely fascinating and we stayed for four hours with our 15 year old grandson.

Folded on my bed is a woollen blanket from WW2. It has the utility label on it with the weight of the wool (pure wool) and its price. It's very heavy. There's another one in the airing cupboard. I still have my ration book although I was born after the war.

Mum was born 1942 and still has the ration books from her parents and other books, food wise, they never went without as they lived on a smallholding, granddad milked his Ayrshire Cows twice a day and delivered milk via horse and float, dispensing the milk with a jug out of a churn (the bottles came later). Pigs reared, half were taken towards the food effort. Mum says though it was tough, she can remember when old enough, using the pigs bladder as a football.

My granddad was one of 6 I think, 1 brother didn't go to war as he too was a farmer but in South Shropshire, the other 3 went and died. I believe the oldest sibling was a girl, married, he died, but no children as she helped raise her brothers. When you think of it, from a brood of kids, only 2 were able to have offspring and I'm from one of them (after mum that is)

I found my grans ration book in my late mothers things

I remember being told of the food or well the lack of food really but everyone being in the same boat really.

Mam and gran had an allotment of sorts for veg and gran kept chickens too

From mams stories it was all very community minded, she lived in a miners village though till her fathers death in 47 and there was a gaggle of kids and step kids in the mix but they got a week to find new digs.

The grandparents took em in till another property was found but gran remarried and we knew it wasn’t for love it was for security but when she moved to another tied house it was still all community based too with the lassies of the house cooking for the street and they’d take turns.

I’ve an aunt that remembers rationing with fondness cos it meant for her the bairns got fed she’s now in her 90s well nearly 100 to be honest bless her

Many a pancake was made with the powdered eggs they got but they didn’t tell the kids that 😂 cos apparently it was ruddy vile.

Nannan2, I remember being given 'milk saps', as we called them, before going to bed at night to keep the hunger away during the night. I was talking to a Scottish man about rationing a few months ago and he mentioned the bread and milk. He had yet another name for them. I guess it must have been in a wartime cookery book.

My paternal Grandparents kept chickens and rabbits, my grandad had a huge garden and grew lots of vegetables. They also had family in the countryside, so could get food. My maternal Grandparents were not so lucky, they grew a few vegetables, and I think they had a couple of chickens (or fowl as they said!) Gran gave the four men in the house the greater share of the food, the three women lived on very meagre rations. I think this was the case for many families. Grandad was too old to serve and was Head of the home guard, and a preacher. I think he had a lot of food ‘favours’ from his parishioners!! One son served in the military police, and had PTSD from the atrocities he saw in Japan. The other children were too young, or infirm. My Mom was an Air Cadet, and I have wonderful pictures of her and her friends.

Life was quite tough after the war ended, and I remember my mother bringing home a load of blue prints from work. These were soaked in the bath for a couple of days and then washed (no washing machines). The rresulting very fine cotton was made into night dresses which lasted for several years - as did a dressing gown made from a grey army blanket enlivened with scarlet rickrack braid and large matching buttons. I loved it and wore it till I was bursting out of it when it was then passed to a neighbour.

Yes Polnan, my mum used to still give us the cabbage water even in the 60's& 70's.😁 I guess once you'd lived through such austerity it just stuck with you.(our family always had lovely skin though)🙂

I can remember sweets rationing ending and then going back to rationing for a short perioed to preserve supplies.

I wasnt born till the 60's but my mum told me tales of the rationing, my grandma still used camp coffee even in 70s it was awful! And she still used sterilized milk which i presume was a throwback from the war times(also awful) and when we visited her she used to ALWAYS make me 'milk- pobs' (sterilized milk and bits of bread) I hated it..But what was worse tasting was the malt virol that they still used to give out to kids from child clinic,(mum said it started in 1948 with the NHS) It had vitamins &malt and i guess was good for you(!) But it was truly horrible.

I was born in 1936, and remember always being hungry.. never saw a banana till well after the war, my mum grew veggies and we kept chickens, dad away in the army.

I would eat almost anything, but hated white boiled cabbage.. but had to eat it... Iremember when Stork marjorine came available,, my it tasted so beautiful like butter to me! and pasturized milk, from that awful sterilized milk! I am amazed at how my mum managed to keep my brother and me healthy... we, my brother and I argued over who would get to drink the cabbage water after it was cooked.. many memories.. certainly no sweets.. liquorice root!

My parents were both born in the war. - my late father in 1940 and my mother in 1942 so knew nothing but rationing until they were teenagers. I was born at the end of 1964 and, having talked with friends of a similar age who also had parents born just before or during the war, we found it very much affected how we were fed. The rationing diet, although healthy enough, was boring and there were very few treats so our parents were determined that we would have the things that they were unable to have when they were children. We ate healthily and were expected to eat the food we were given but there was an emphasis on lots of full fat milk, plenty of fruit, especially oranges, l seem to remember and vegetables. Sugar was not the villain it now is, either. I think there was very much a spirit of wanting to forget the hardships of the war as much as possible and of optimism for the future in the sixties.
Interestingly, the one fruit that older people missed most in the war was bananas and they were hyped up to both my parents as this wonderful treat. When they were finally able to try one - probably one that was overripe by the time it reached this country - they couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about and neither were very bothered about bananas ever after. I have heard of others in the same age group who reacted similarly. I also know that my grandmother burnt all the ration books as soon as rationing ended.

I remember my MiL telling me that meat came off ration on the day she got married, I think that was 3rd July 1954.

I was 8 when rationing stopped 1954.We had chickens, loads of fruit and veg home grown. Went berry picking in hedgerows in the autmn. The one thing I remember and was down to rationing is blackcurrant jam. Father had loads of blackcurrant bushes and in spite of also having strawberries, raspberries, goosberties it was always blackcurrant jam my mum made. Can't eat anything black currant flavoured now. Suppose it was all down to the high level of vitamin C in the ftuit.
Also, had aunt who had a really sweet tooth. When rationing stopped she started hoarding sugar. When she died in the esrly 60s my cousins discovered the floor in a walk in cupboard had collapsed due to the weight of the bags of sugar she had piled up over the years just in case rationing came back.

Cadbury continued to advertise throughout WW2 to make sure people didn't forget about it.

Strangely, enough I do not remember the British side of my family talking of rationing, although they must all have had to deal with it.

My mother's family in Nazi-occupied Denmark had plenty of stories during my childhood , after the war, of only being able to heat one room of the house in winter, summer sandals for women and girls that had wooden soles and tops made of tanned skin of flatfish, gas and hot water only available for a couple of hours each day, washing floors in cold water without soap, as the soap ration certainly could not stretch to cleaning if a family were to have clean clothes. french knickers that a friend of my mother's had come down in, believe it or not, the City Hall Sqare in Copenhagen because the buttons holding them up, elastic being unobtainable in 1944, popped off, dresses sewn of curtain material, bicycles with rags or newspaper tied round the wheel-rims, as neither inner tubes, tyres or rubber valves were obtainalbe, and much, much more.

I didn't have to navigate it myself obviously as I was too young but I do remember when my mother who had felt starved of chocolate for so long started keeping a cupboard exclusively for sweets and chocolate it was always full!

I too was born in 1943 . We were lucky in that my Grandfather and my Uncle were market gardeners and so we did have extra seasonal vegetables and occasionally eggs. The one thing I do remember apart from sweet rationing is there was always a small lidded pot of saccharin tablets on the tea tray. I hated them and still refuse anything with artificial sweetener. Also the other thing I hated was margarine back then it was awful stuff. I remember getting my first grown up bed and the mattress had the cc41 symbol on it as did a lot of other household goods and clothes. I remember the excitement of running to the sweet shop when my Grandmother gave me one of her ration coupons for 2 ounces of jelly babies. The same Grandmother would also send me to the shop for a quarter bottle of brandy, had to be VSOP and no one refused to serve me, how times have changed!

before my time but from what I have learned though the allowances were small most houses then kept at least chickens, often a pig. My gran used to have the chickens for meat obviously but also the feathers were for making mattress' and cushions.
Also of course the Goverment were then encouraging everyone to grow vegetables so one way and another there was plenty to pad out the rations.

Looks like there are loads of us who remember rationing, watermeadow. I was born at the end of August 1939, just days before the start of the war so rationing was part of virtually the first decade of my life. Bananas were a complete mystery, never saw one until the war ended, but being so very young, had no idea that we were eating such small amounts. I do remember my Micky Mouse gas mask and the horrible rubbery smell of it. Someone mentioned it earlier, but to this day, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I hear the siren at the end of Dad’s Army! (However, I’m sure it’s down to early sugar deprivation I still have virtually all my own teeth!)

I watch a You Tuber who followed the war-time ration book diet for a week. She lost a couple of pounds.
Just shows how normal diets have changed.