Food/Volume 1/Chapter I

by R. J. Hammond

The Tradition of Control and the Beginning of Food Defence Plans

I

‘ … State trading in food is practicable and in times of prolonged shortage is necessary. It is within the wit of man to find an alternative to competitive private enterprise with market prices as a means of obtaining and distributing food, to replace economic by human laws, to substitute managed for automatic provisioning of the people’.

This, according to one of its most distinguished participants,^[1] was the main lesson of British food control in the War of 1914. To some of his readers, even so early as 1928, that dictum might have seemed strangely dated; it would indeed be odd (they might think) if the nineteenth-century free-enterprise solution to the problem of feeding Britain's millions should be the only possible one. To many contemporaries, however, including some of those responsible for bringing the first Ministry of Food into being, food control was a leap in the dark; not for nothing was the first full-scale account of it entitled A State Trading Adventure.^[2] This sense of being pioneers, of conducting Experiments in State Control,^[3] of wonder at achieving so much in so short a time, was common to all those who wrote afterwards of their wartime experience in Lord Rhondda's Ministry.

The success of the first Ministry of Food, then, had some of the challenging quality of an apparent miracle, and some of the traditional effect of miracles upon the sceptical. If, by ill-fortune, another war should come, there could be no excuse for a repetition of the doubts and hesitations that had delayed even the appointment of a Food Controller till December 1916, ‘as a reluctant sacrifice on the alter of industrial unrest’,^[4] and that had prevented complete control, including rationing on a national scale, from being achieved until July 1918, almost on the eve of the Armistice.

A great part of the success was credited to the personality of Lord Rhondda, appointed Food Controller at a critical time (June 1917) and spared just long enough to see his creation triumphant over all obstacles. A great part too was owed to ‘luck and time and determination’; the successful introduction of rationing, for instance, was ‘a supreme case of muddling through by brilliant improvisations, made necessary by shifting policy and division of counsels’.^[5] Accidents of fortune apart, however, it was possible to analyse in reasonably simple terms the conditions and limitations of the achievement.

First and foremost was its completeness. There was no satisfactory half-way house between ‘business as usual’ and complete control of supplies and distribution, including rationing where this was necessary and practicable. Control of price alone was nugatory. Interference by Government in an existing system of private trade, or resort to exhortation and sumptuary prohibition, such as had enlivened the brief career of Lord Devonport, the first Food Controller, were alike ineffective, not to say disastrous. Competitive private enterprise, in bulk foodstuff at any rate, must be superseded both nationally and internationally; the Inter-Allied Food Council of September 1918, with its provisions for coordinated buying and allocation of food and shipping, was essential to the success of control in the United Kingdom, and, moreover, to the carrying out of the plans for bringing over the American Army to finish off the war, had it continued into 1919. For 1918–19 there was, that is to say, a reasoned import programme for food; and that in its turn implied complete control of shipping.

Had they had another war definitely in view, the writers on food might, perhaps, have made more of this point, underlining as it does, the essential interdependence of food control and other measures of economic management in time of war. Certainly it seems to have been lost sight of in the years after 1936, at any rate so far as the Government as a whole was concerned. What they did make clear was that the very circumstance that made food control vital for the United Kingdom—dependence on imported supplies—not only made its effectiveness greater, since ships and ports provided a ready-made bottleneck at which the Government could lay hands on commodities, but also reduce it to a secondary role in winning the war. ‘If the submarine could be kept in check, the bringing of sufficient supplies was simple; if not, then nothing availed.’^[6]

The estimate of food control implied in these words was put forward in explicit contradiction of exaggerated claims in the other direction, and was perhaps too modest. By itself the most skilful management of food supply and distribution could not have secured victory or even avoided defeat. But weakness on the food front was generally held to have been an important factor in lowering the resistance of the Central Powers; and mismanagement in the United Kingdom might have had no less than gave consequences. In Britain, however, ingenuity of administrative contrivance was, under Lord Rhondda, informed by the best scientific advice of the day. In particular, the insistence of the Food (War) Committee of the Royal Society on the need for maintaining a supply of breadstuffs sufficient to ensure that no-one went short of essential energy requirements measured in calories, provided the rock on which a sound food policy could be built.^[7]

To these basic conditions of success—adequate control in related fields of Government activity, and sufficient knowledge to determine the ends at which food control should aim—there was added another: the existence of a considerable degree of organisation in the trades it was desired to control. Imported foods, therefore, presented the least difficulty.

By contrast, the highly successful scheme for the marketing of home-produced livestock, and the chequered career of potatoes under control, illustrated the difficulties that confront the most resourceful of officials when he comes to deal with the marketing of home produce. (One might add that it is this foundation of control in an existing trade organisation that accounts for the unimportance of the sheer size of the Ministry of Food's problem. To organise the feeding of forty or fifty million people would indeed by a formidable task if undertaken de novo, though hardly more so in proportion than the feeding of forty thousand in identical circumstances. Given the existence of private trade machinery that is already feeding those numbers, it become quite manageable.)

However complete and successful, food control (it was said) had inherent limitations and disadvantages. It could not prevent all rises in price, unless it were accompanied by a wholesale recourse to subsidies. It might prevent profiteering, that it the exploitation of a seller's market in the face of unlimited demand, but could not prevent the more efficient trader from prospering exceedingly under a regime of standard prices that must allow the less efficient to survive. It meant the disappearance, or the submersion in pooling arrangements, of the better qualities of butter, meat, cheese, bacon, or tea (and also of the cheaper grades–a fact that might bear heavily on the poor). For these reasons, and on account of the intricacy and expensiveness of its machinery, and the tax it levied on limited supplies of administrative energy and ability, it was not to be lightly undertaken.

Particularly this was true of rationing, in the form in which the Ministry of Food had successfully practised it. The feature of British rationing that evoked especial pride was the absolute guarantee of rationed supplies. Rationing was not a mere restriction, nor the coupon a form of currency that of itself might act of a magnet to draw supplies where they were needed. On the contrary; rationing presupposed a complete mechanism which should put each consumer's supplies in a particular shop, where he might be certain, and where he alone was entitled, to obtain it. The tie of consumer to retailer, and its implications at earlier stages in the distributive chain, presupposed not only a control organisation for distributing each rationed food, but a series of local food offices that alone could maintain an up-to-date register of consumers. For the consumer-retailer tie must be constantly in need of breakage and renewal, in accord with the multitudinous movements to and fro of individual citizens. Other powerful arguments could be drawn up in favour of the decentralised administration of food control; this one was inescapable.

Inescapable, that is, granted that the consumer-retailer tie could not be dispensed with. In retrospect, this had become almost an axiom, namely something not requiring proof; in 1917 it had not been so. Registration of consumers, together with the establishment of local Food Committees, had originally been introduced in an attempt to avoid sugar rationing by regulating distribution. It naturally, therefore, cam to form part of the permissive rationing by these committees that was introduced at the end of 1917m and it was duly embodied in the national rationing scheme of July 1918. There had been much controversy about it, controversy almost inextricably mixed with other issues, such as household v. individual ration cards, and the need for a central index of consumers. A proposal foreshadowing in all essentials the ‘points’ rationing scheme of 1941 had been mooted, only to be rejected, by the Ministry of Food committee about January 1918:—

‘As to the coupons themselves the Committee had before it two main alternatives

(a) of coupons each representing a prescribed quantity of a prescribed food or foods ….

(b) of interchangeable coupons valid for all rationed foods, to each of which a particular value in coupons or “rate of exchange” is assigned, the rate being varied from time to time as required so as to divert consumption from one class of food to another.

‘On the whole the Committee came to the conclusion that the disadvantages of the latter plan (which has never been tried in practice) outweighed its advantages. The former plan has been adopted accordingly’.^[8]

Like the central index itself, this more flexible type of rationing must have been swept aside by the combined pressure of events and the vested local interest that had already been established. Logically speaking, registration demanded local food offices; historically speaking, local administration of food control tipped the scales in favour of registration. The ration coupon, which might have been the motive force of the whole system, became at most an additional check on its accuracy. Whether the rejected alternative would have worked as well as that adopted, or at all, must remain a matter of conjecture. Had the decisions of 1917–18 gone another way, and had they been justified in their outcome, the history of food control in the Second World War might have been very different.

So much for what one may call the written tradition of British food control, as set down in the late nineteen-twenties. It embodied a great deal of detailed experience, more especially in the realm of commodity control.^[9] There was, besides, a tradition not codified, but none the less living on inside the Civil Service in the memories of those former Ministry of Food officials who might still recall a brief hour of administrative triumph in an unaccustomed field. Vaguer yet, but not altogether to be disregarded, was the widespread conviction among those not directly concerned with it that food control had been well done and could be safely revived if need arose. There was, too, within the Board of Trade, a tiny handful of survivors from the final liquidation of the Ministry who kept in being its last direct legacy, the Civil Emergency Food Organisation for use in the event of industrial disputes. Many of the traders who had helped with food control were comparatively young men, whose services might be called on again in time of emergency. In short, there was, as there had not been in 1916, an immense reserve of experienced talent at the disposal of any Government that might need it.

On the other hand, there had been little attempt to analyse in any detail the lessons of the first world conflict with specific reference to what ought to be done in another. In the times of Briand and Stresemann, when the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was still a recent memory, and Bolshevism, for good or evil, a political rather than a military force, this is understandable enough. Sir William Beveridge, bring to an end his study of British Food Control, could write:

‘The account that has been given here … long as it may seem, is no more than a surface gleaning of the archives. There forms and circulars, reports and instructions, schemes and counter-schemes and plans for another war, all so many monuments of toiling ingenuity, lie mouldering gently into dust and oblivion—lie buried, please God, for ever’.

Not five years after that book was published, its author was called in to advise a Government committee on price policy in a major war.

II

It was historically appropriate that the first suggestion that a department of food defence be set up in peacetime should arise from a desire to forestall inflation in wartime, for it was high prices and industrial unrest, rather than actual shortage of supplies, that had led to the appointment of the first Food Controller. The course of Government, and particularly Treasury, opinion on the problem of wartime price policy has been recounted in another volume of the Civil Histories.^[10] Here it will be sufficient to say that, as early as 1933, a representative body of officials reporting to the Committee of Imperial Defence was contemplating a high degree of control over prices, wages and profits, from the outset of a major war. Measures of food control—over imports, home production, manufacture, and distribution; over prices and margins of profit; over consumption, i.e., rationing—all these might, it was thought, be necessary from the out set, not on account of shortage of supplies or shipping, but on anti-inflationary grounds alone. In particular a decision to prepare for ‘card rationing’ should not be ‘unduly postponed’. It was suggested that the Government should set up a peacetime ‘nucleus organisation’ to maintain touch with the food trade and secure their cooperation, and to collect information about food supplies and prices.

The report embodying these recommendations was dated February 1933; it was approved by the Committee of Imperial Defence in May 1934. In May 1935 the Board of Trade, as the Department responsible for food, set up a departmental committee on food supplies in wartime; a parallel committee of wartime food production policy was set up in the Ministry of Agriculture. In 1933 also a large-scale investigation was started into the problems of shipping and transport that would arise if any enemy were able largely to deny to the United Kingdom the use of the South and East Coast ports.^[11]

The Abyssinian crisis, and still more the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, were evidently responsible for converting these quasi-theoretical activities into matters of practical urgency. The appointment of a Minister for the Coordination of Defence, in March 1936, meant that these questions were henceforth the daily specific care of a member of the Cabinet. In April 1936 a new Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence was appointed to go into the whole question of Food Supply in War; it included five Cabinet Ministers and the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. The new body at once initiated two specific inquiries of the first important; by Sir Ernest Gowers into the practical problems raised by a policy of Government storage; and by Sir William Beveridge and a group of assisting officials into the administrative arrangements for rationing. The inquiry into storage, and even, perhaps, the appointment of the new committee itself at the this juncture, reflected a widespread public agitation in favour of the accumulation of strategic reserves of foodstuffs.^[12] For the moment, they took second place to the inquiry into rationing, chiefly because Sir William Beveridge refused to be bound by the narrow terms of reference given to him. Rationing, he pointed out, was a late, not an early, stage of food control. It required an immense administrative machine, which it was not worth while to set up except for an acute and prolonged shortage of supplies, and which it was futile to set up unless the rationing authority was in a position to guarantee the individual citizen his ration, neither more nor less. ‘Rationing assumes control of supply and distribution … in framing proposals for rationing we are in the position of designing a top storey in the air, without knowledge of the structure on which it will rest’. This did not prevent the Committee from drawing up a pretty full and detailed specification of a scheme for general rationing, largely based on the rationing documents used in the last war. Many, though not all, of its proposals were to be adopted by the Food (Defence Plans) Department.

More important, however, was the brief, incisive,yet comprehensive review of the whole problem of food control in wartime that Sir William Beveridge put in as an Annex to the Report he had been asked for. This Note on the Wider Aspects of Food Control^[13] stands out as a landmark among State papers on the subject. The whole subsequent history of food policy bears witness to its mastery of first principles and grasp of essential detail. Sir William Beveridge pointed out that unless a Food Controller with a policy thought out in advance was in the saddle from the outset of war, problems would be

‘dealt with piecemeal and the seeds of future trouble will be sown. The dis-coordination which in the last war led to the imported meat supply of the civilian population being controlled in the interests of the fighting forces … and the to the setting up of independent Sugar and Wheat Commissions never fully absorbed in the Ministry of Food, was a weakness which should not be repeated'.

He insisted that the true purpose of reserve food stocks was not to avoid starvation in the first year of war:—

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He argued that the Government should consider beforehand what the wartime diet out to be; what should be done about livestock policy and the rate of extraction of flour from wheat. He foresaw a general policy of subsidising food prices in order to prevent inflation. He drew attention to the usefulness of the recently established marketing boards and commodity commissions as a nucleus of food control, while emphasising that the very existence of these bodies made centralised food control the more necessary. The expected initial air attack on London, he said, would necessitate not merely the emergency feeding of refugees, but a comprehensive plan to ensure the internal distribution of food from ships diverted to unaccustomed ports. He summarised the ‘substantial requirements for dealing with food in a future war’' as four:

1. ‘A decision to appoint a Food Controller with full powers as from the outbreak of war.
2. A feeding policy, thought out in advance, for adequate total supply in the country at all stages of a possibly protracted war.
3. A control plan, prepared in advance, in regard to each essential food—for taking over supply, regulating prices and directing distribution.
4. “Outbreak plans” for the probable initial emergency resulting from air attack’.

and he added—‘To think out in advance and as a whole, the civilian side of the next war is as important as to design measures of military attack and defence’.

In so far as they clinched the case for setting up a food defence organisation immediately, Sir William Beveridge's arguments were welcome; the idea of such an organisation had, after all, been in the air for several years previously. The Sub-Committee on Food recommended, on 11th November 1936, that Sir William Beveridge should be asked to undertake the preparation of the plans for food control. What subsequently passed between him and officials appears to have left very few traces in the records. This much, however, is clear: that Sir William's ideas about the scope and authority of the task were altogether too ambitious for the Government.

The question was one, as an official minute put it, ‘involving inter-Departmental matters of some delicacy’; the heads of major Ministries, with peacetime responsibilities touching the problem of food control at numerous points, were reluctant to yield authority to an outsider, however able and experienced. Indeed, the very force and range of his thinking made him that much more disturbing, particularly to those who were not yet convinced that war was inevitable. They therefore decided to go ahead without him; he disappears henceforth from the history of food control. The establishment of the Food (Defence Plans) Department was publicly announced on 29th November 1936; Mr. (later Sir) Henry Leon French, then Second Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, was appointed to be its Director.

The new Department was to a sub-Department of the Board of Trade, reporting through the Permanent Secretary; that is to say, its status was below that of a full Department of State.

It was:—

‘to formulate plans for the supply, control, distribution and movement of food (including feeding-stuffs for livestock) during a mjaor war with a view ensuring that the food supplies of the United Kingdom are maintained and distributed in all eventualities, including aerial attack’.

Its main function would be:—

‘to prepare in advance plans for execution by the Board of Trade immediately on the outbreak of war and by the Ministry of Food as soon as constituted. The preparation of plans will include proposals for the Headquarters as well as the local organisations which will be required in the event of war and the preparation of the necessary legislation’.

It would also take over the existing civil emergency organisation. But, on the other hand, it would not be directly concerned with home production, nor, for the present, with storage. (It was to take over responsibility for the latter within a few months.)

The terms of reference make no mention of a ‘feeding policy’, the second of Sir William Beveridge's desiderata. There seems to have been a notion at the Committee of Imperial Defence (it recurs after the outbreak of war) that feeding policy could somehow be divorced from the task of planning food control.^[14] At one stage there had been a suggest that Sir Ernest Gowers should be asked to formulate it, but this appears to have been dropped. Perhaps the intention was that the Food Supply Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence should itself undertake the task, but it never did so. A fortiori, no attempt was made anywhere ‘to think out in advance and as a whole the civilian side of the next war’.

Concentration on the practical details and the relegation of first principles to a rather dim background is so characteristic of the pre-war plans affecting food, and so far-reaching in its effects, as to demand further scrutiny. If one looks, for instances, at the factual material put before the Food Supply Sub-Committee during 1936, one is struck by the contrast in quality between the contributions of the service departments and those of the civil: The one closely reasoned expert; the other (with rare exceptions) pedestrian and lacking in penetration. The reason is not far to seek. Service questions—strategy, tactics, logistics—have a long tradition behind them of quasi-scientific, detached, minute study. They are the permanent concern of General Staffs, who, because wars are intermittent occurrences, are not continually in danger of distraction by day-to-day questions of administration. For civilian questions as a whole there is no comparable tradition, expertise or organisation. The art of administration in a modern state has its own skill and finesse; but they afford little help in the task of formulating a series of strategic assumptions. Indeed, they are liable to intrude questions of day-to-day expediency into what ought in the first instance, to be a process of pure reasoning. Even the particular contribution to planning that administrative experience can bring, its insistence on the uncertainty of human calculation and the need for flexibility and adaptability in advance arrangements, can readily become, through over-emphasis, a dangerous impatience with logic or even a sort of intellectual nihilism that denies the need to think in general terms at all.

This sort of approach to problems that, if looked at intently, are seen to have wide implications beyond their obvious range at first sight, may hinder freedom of action instead of helping it. To take but one single example among many afforded by the history of food control; it was agreed that the food plans should be such as to enable the Government of the day, should it so desire, to introduce complete import control for the principal foods at the very outbreak of war . It was an indispensable condition of such a control's effectiveness that control of shipping should also be complete. If, therefore, those responsible for planning shipping, for whatever reason, should choose (as in fact they did choose) to make preparations on the assumption that full shipping control would not be necessary from the start, the Government of the day would not in fact enjoy its expected power to introduce complete food control. It would be a counsel of perfection to suggest that such loopholes could be altogether avoided in practice, if only because of limitations of time and staff. But the provision of adequate central planning machinery, and still more and cultivation of an outlook transcending immediate Departmental concerns, might have done much to reduce their occurrence.

Endnotes

1. Beveridge, Sir William H. (later Lord). British Food Control. 1928. The quotation is from pp. 337–8.
2. Coller, F. H. (later Sir Frank). A State Trading Adventure. 1925.
3. Lloyd, E. M. H. Experiments in State Control. 1924.
4. Coller, op. cit. (opening sentence).
5. Beveridge, op. cit., p. 229.
6. Beveridge, op. cit., p. 333.
7. Starling, E. H. The Feeding of Nations. 1919.
8. The passage quoted is from a draft of Outline of National System of Compulsory Rationing, discovered by the Food (Defence Plans) Department among the few remaining records of the old Ministry of Food. It is undated, but from internal evidence would appear to emanate from the committee on rationing machinery mentioned by Beveridge (op. cit. p. 195).
9. Lloyd, E. M. H, op. cit. This experience will be referred to in the detailed commodity studies of Vol. II.
10. Hancock and Gowing, British War Economy, pp. 46–52.
11. See below, Chapter IX.
12. See Chapter II. Sir Ernest Gowers, though a member of the Civil Services, at this time occupied the somewhat detached post of Chairman to the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission. His inquiry, like that of Sir William Beveridge, was essentially a personal one, although both were assisted by departmental representatives.
13. The full text is given as Appendix A.
14. See below, Chapter IV.