when i was young

[happy daze john in oz]

Oh what a cutey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Captain Kong]

This is a piece I wrote for my ten year old Grandson for his school................
.....
.

A boys view of the Second World War.


When the Second World War started on 3rd of September,1939, I was five years old, and life as we knew it changed dramatically.
Suddenly we had no sweets, no fruit such as bananas, grapes or oranges in the shops, our Ice Cream Man, Mr Manfredi, of Italian stock was interned on the Isle of Man for the Duration, so no more ice cream for six years. Food was rationed by the Government, we were issued ration books and when Mum, went shopping the shop keeper cut the coupons out of the book, and that was all you were allowed to have for that week.
Food Rationing.
(Quantities shown are per person per week)
29th September 1939 - National Register set up & Identity cards issued.
8 January 1940 - Food rationing begins. Bacon, ham, sugar and butter now rationed.
January 1940 - 4oz. Butter, 12oz. Sugar & 4 oz. Bacon allowed a week for each person.
March 1940 - 1s.10d worth of meat allowed per person a week (9p today). Sausages were not rationed but difficult to get; offal (liver, kidneys, tripe's) was originally un-rationed but sometimes formed part of the meat ration.
July 1940 - Tea 2oz 1s 10d (9p). Butter, margarine, cooking fats and cheese rationed. Sugar cut to
8 oz 1s 10d (9p). The Government announced no more bananas no more fresh or tinned fruit to be imported except a few oranges for children only.
March 1941 - Jam, marmalade, treacle and syrup rationed. 8 oz per person per week.
May 1941- Cheese ration increased to 2 oz's per person per week.
June 1941- Eggs: 1 fresh egg a week if available but often
only one every two weeks. Meat ration cut to 1s 6d (7.5p) per person per week then to 1s 2d (6p):
by June 1941 it was down to 1s (5p).
July 1941- Sugar ration doubled to encourage people to make their own jam during the fruit season.
August 1941 - Extra cheese ration for manual workers introduced
December 1941 - Points scheme for food introduced. National dried milk introduced
December 1941 - Milk went on ration 3 pints per person per week (1800ml) occasionally dropping
to 2 pints (1200ml). This amount also varied for young children and expectant mothers.
Expectant mothers, children and invalids were allowed 7 pints of milk per week. Expectant mothers
and children were also allowed up to 18 eggs per month. Children were allowed orange and rosehip syrup as well as cod liver oil. Household milk (skimmed or dried) was available : 1 packet per four weeks.
January 1942 Rice & Dried Fruit added to points system. tea ration for under fives was withdrawn. sweets 2 oz per person per week.
February 1942 Canned tomatoes and Peas. Soap rationed (1 small tablet per month).
April 1942 Breakfast cereals and condensed milk added to points system.
June 1942 - American dried egg powder on sale. 1s 9d (9p) per packet (equivalent to 12 eggs)
Wholemeal loaf
("The National loaf") introduced (far more wheat used which meant less wastage.
Sausages contained less and less real pork or beef , Horsemeat commonly available
(later whale meat was also available)
July 1942 - Sweets and chocolate 2 oz per person per week.
August 1942 - Biscuits added to points system.
August 1942 - Cheese ration was increased to 8 oz per person per week.
December 1942 Oat flakes added to points system.
December 1944 - Extra tea allowance for 70 year olds and over introduced.
January 1945 - Whale meat and snoek fish available for sale.
July 1946 - Bread rationed

Dates Items Came off Ration
July 1948 - Bread.
December 1948 - Jam.
May 1950 - Points rationing ended.
October 1952 - Tea.
February 1953 - Sweets.
April 1953 - Cream.
March 1953 - Eggs.
September 1953 - Sugar.
May 1954 - Butter, cheese, margarine and cooking fats.
June 1954 - Meat and bacon
So Rationing was ended after 15 years.
.
The first bananas to arrive from the West Indies was in November, 1947, so I had gone 8 years
without seeing a banana. They came on a ship called `TILAPA` and in 1954, 7 years later, I was a Sailor on that very same ship, we carried 250,000 stalks of bananas from Jamaica. every voyage.
I joined the Merchant Navy in 1951 and was issued with a M.N. Ration Book, we had double the
rations of ordinary people at home, and Mother got a lot of abuse off other shoppers in the CO-OP
when they saw the assistant give her more food on my ration book than they got.

Clothing was also on ration, you had to use your coupons to buy new clothes, or as we did, we had to wear clothes from older brothers or sisters, when my 8 year old cousin Richard was killed in 1942 and I was 7 years old, I had to wear all his clothes and shoes, nothing was wasted.

In the gardens we dug up the lawns and flower beds and we had to "Dig for Victory",
we planted vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, carrots, peas and so on.
In the council parks they were also dug up for vegetables.
Every where we went, out playing or going to school, we had to carry our Gas Masks, in a cardboard box and a piece of string that we slung over our shoulder, in case the Germans dropped gas bombs.
I was always losing mine, the Policeman was always knocking on our door bringing it back, and I would be in trouble for losing it.

My school was closed and turned into a "Air Raid Wardens Post" which meant that we did not go to school.for a long time. Then sometimes half of us went to school in the mornings only and the other half went in the afternoons only. Then later on in the war we were transferred to another school and joined in the classes there, There were more than 60 children to a class room and some of us sat in the corridor and the teacher kept the door open so we could hear what she was saying. Most of our Teachers were
called up to go into the Army, Navy or Air Force. My favourite teacher, Miss Dawes, had to go into the Navy or the WRNS. A lot of old Teachers who had retired had to go back to teaching again.
In the school yard they built air raid shelters, and we had to have air raid and fire drills every week unless there was a real air raid then it was`nt a drill it was the real thing.
A lot of schools were bombed and a lot of teachers and school children were killed.
A school in Liverpool was hit and about two hundred pupils and staff were killed, the bodies stayed there, they could not get them out and so they made a memorial park over the site.
A friend of mine was running to school holding his little sister`s hand and the German fighter plane machine gunned the street and when he got to the end of the street he only had half a sister with him, she was dead and her bottom half was up the street.
One day we saw a German plane that had been damaged circling around,
it passed over my house and in the next road it crashed through the front of a house, killing a lady in the house.
It came out into the back street in a pile of rubble. My pals and I were the first to arrive on the scene and the smashed up plane was smoking with a few flames coming out of the engine. the Pilot was dead in the cockpit. We were excited because this was the closest we had been to a German plane and it did not bother us that the Pilot was dead. We were scrambling over the rubble to find souvenirs, then the Police, Firemen and Air Raid Wardens arrived and chased us off. It could have exploded and killed us all.
We collected a lot of souvenirs, such as shrapnel, bullets, bomb tail fins and lots of other objects that fell from the skies.
At night when the air raid sirens went off to warn us of an air raid, we went into the air raid shelter in the back garden. It was called an `Anderson` Shelter, named after the man who designed it. It was made of corrugated
iron and was buried in the ground with soil on top of it. Inside it was just big enough for up to six people to hide in there and we had bunk beds to sleep in. One night my Mum was working as a bus conductress and was in the town center in Bolton. She was in a transport cafe with her Driver with a few other transport people.
The air raid started with bombs dropping and she said to her driver that she was going outside as it would be safer. She just got outside the door when a bomb hit the Cafe and blew it up killing every one inside.
My Mum was blown up in the air and across the road and hit the church railings. She nearly went through like sliced bread. She was injured but survived.
We were in our air raid shelter when it happened, about one mile away, and the shock waves from the bomb bounced us out of our bunks, just like an earthquake. We didnt know Mum, had been blown up until next morning when Dad went out to look for her. She was found covered in rubble.
Air raid shelters did not protect you if you got a direct hit from a bomb. Many air raid shelters were hit and everyone killed. One Shelter that was bombed in Liverpool killed 166 men, women and children. In the May, 1941, Blitz, or air raid, in Liverpool in one night nearly two and a half thousand people were killed by the bombing.
Manchester and districts were heavily bombed and thousands of people killed. Some times at night when the blitz was on we stood on top of our air raid shelter and watched Manchester burning, all the night sky was lit up as bright as day with all the flames.
In the houses people stuck sticky paper across the windows in patterns. This was supposed to stop broken glass flying around the room if there was a bomb blast. There was a complete `black out`. which meant you had to have a thick black blind that came down over the windows and your curtains so not even a chink of light showed out. The Air Raid Wardens walked around the streets checking all the houses to see if any light showed,
There were no street lights at all, everywhere was in total darkness. A bit scary as a child walking home at night.
There were no or very few cars on the road and they had no lights on.
Some houses, like ours, had a sign in the window saying. "STYRUP PUMP HERE"
which meant we were issued with a pump so if there was a house on fire in the street we could get a bucket of water put the pump in and push the handle up and down and get water through the hose pipe. They were not very successful, but we had great fun squirting water on each other.
We had no sweets during the war so some times we made our own kind of sweet.
We would get some sugar put it on a board and get a red hot poker and roll it over in the sugar, and when it cooled it was like a sweet. or we chewed the wax off a candle and when it melted it was soft like chewing gum, or we had a bag of oats and sugar.
The best thing to do was when the American Soldiers were over here, driving around town in their jeeps.
We would run after them shouting, "Any Gum Chum" or "Any Candy Sandy" and they would throw handfuls of candy bars and Wrigleys Chewing Gum out onto the road and all our gang would be scrabbling on the ground after it.
Some times they threw packets of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, we would then sell these to the grown ups for spending money.
Near my house was a road, Beaumont Road, about one mile in length, surrounded by fields, no one lived there, in the middle was a bridge over the railway line. Suddenly one day thousands of tanks,armoured cars and self propelled guns appeared and there were armed soldiers at each end of the road to stop people going
near them.
But our `gang` walked along the railway line and climbed up the supports of the bridge and then we climbed into the tanks, fantastic. this was our play ground ,wonderful, we didnt need toys we had the real thing. and we never got caught. Then one day we found they had completely vanished overnight. It was just before D Day, 6 June 1944, the whole lot had been shipped onto the railway and sent down to Southampton for the invasion of
Normandy in France.
Another time we found that some spare ground that is now behind the Bolton Technical College, was full of American bomber planes bodies, the wings were stored somewhere else.
We could get into the planes and sit in the Pilots seat and pretend that we were on a mission to Germany. We had a great time.

[alf corbyn]

i well remember fish paste. it was hard to get during the war but a little shop near me had it in trays about a foot square. it had a white fat top about a quarter inch thick and it was delicious. there were a few places you could get things off ration as a kid. one corner shop would only serve kids with sweets very strict rationing, she only allowed you about two ounces, but she would not take coupons. i don't know how she did it. must have taken extra coupons from adults. also a baker used to have chocolate cakes on occasion, how people knew within minutes was amazing. a queue would start about 7am. alf

[Don Rafferty]

hi don. i went round the powder mills before they started demolishing it and found some facinating things.

Hi Alf, a couple of links with pictures that may revive some memories


Royal Gunpowder Mills :: Canal System

Heritage Locations - Royal Gunpowder Mills

[Stuart Henderson]

Alf,
Your fish paste sounded good, the fish paste I hated came in little glasss jars not much bigger than a school inkwell so it had to be spread pretty thinly(just as well in my opinion).
One thing I loved but didnt get it very often with meat rationing was real PORK dripping on real bread.The thick crusty loaves,sliced bread was still years away.
Memories are made of this eh ?
Stuart

[happy daze john in oz]

Fish paste and meat paste in small jars, now Alf do tell me is is still available? My grandfather worked on the railways and as far as I know from what I was told we were never short of meat at any time. Black market must have been a very good business in those days.

[John Arton]

Fish Paste and meat paste is still available in the U.K. in small jars. They are made by a muber of the major food manufacturers and are readily available in the supermarkets. I like both but guess the modern stuff tastes nothing like the wartime stuff. Like most foods these days the E numbers give you the flavour not the natural flavours from the ingredients.
rgds
Capt. John Arton (ret'd)

[Des Taff Jenkins]

Hi Alf.
I have two of the small glass paste jars, the glass is thicker than the amount of paste that would have been inside them. I found them along with a school ink well while pulling down an old house in Parammata back in the 70s, the glass is an eight of an inch thick with a band of three sixteenth glass around the top. You can still get the paste but it doesn't taste the same.
Cheers Des

[Tony Wilding]

It seems utterly amazing it took so long for rationing to end, 9 years after the war befor it finally ended, does not seem possible it could take so long, i wonder why it did ? anyone have any ideas, ?. i can remember sweets coming off ration , and seeing long ques, that calmed down after a week, i remember the ration books, maybe it was easier in country areas as you could keep chickens for eggs and meat, there was a black market and if you knew the right people you could get extra food at a price, expect many a farmer killed a sheep or pig unofficially, i wonder if there livestock was counted, ?

[happy daze john in oz]

It does make you wonder why it took so long. But then look at how it is today, EU regulations sees a good supply of food not available because it does not conform to some stupid regulation. Claimed there is a world food shortage but I think it is more a political thing where governments use it as a weapon aginst the people. How long before EU regulations control the size and shape of the people??