• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team
  • HI folks the server that hosts the site completely died including the Hdd's and backups.
    Luckily i create an offsite backup once a week! this has now been restored so we have lost a few days posts.
    im still fixing things at the moment so bear with me and im still working on all images 90% are fine the others im working on now
    we are now using a backup solution

Rationing

I was born after the war in 1950. The generation that fought that war have always had my respect for it has meant in my 60 years I have never had to fight or go hungry ,and until the recent tribulations life has been pretty comfortable compared with my ancestors.
As a kid a four mile walk was not out of the question, my parents never had a car, and the horizon always beckoned me. With a bike I went even further. We certainly exercised more as part of normal life. Food was always plain but adequate. No butter but margarine, plenty of lard and dripping. Cheap fatty meats, spuds and cabbage were a feast. It was not until my forties that I put on weight, after my last dog died and I did not walk so far and so often.
So here I am at sixty, over wieght and with diabetes. I am also fed up with the nonestop barrage of conflicting "research " results telling us what is good or bad for us. I have no problem with thin people, some of my best friends are thin, but as far as I am concerned all the preaching falls on my deaf ears.
 
Hi All,

Although I was around during post war rationing I don't remember it. My only vague memory is of a ration book being burned on What's My Line ? as the last commodity came off rationing - was it coal? I was always painfully thin as a child - but this was due to my mother's cooking. You may remember the Hancock line "at least my mother's gravy moved" - well my mother's Sunday roast could be chewed and chewed and chewed - but it wouldn't go away - it was like having a lump of indestructible papier mache in your mouth. I've been on a diet since the new year and I'm getting desperate - my cat Elsa is looking very tempting! Paul
 
Colin
Note the coupons are for child's clothes, so you might have a job getting into them !
 
I don't know why I missed this thread before but I grew up during the war and I never remember going hungry, there was six of us and my mother ensured we always had a breakfast, cooked dinner every night, and always a roast dinner on Sundays followed by a pudding. Nothing was ever wasted, mom worked at Hercules and would buy a dinner from the canteen, but if there was a pudding she would bring it home in a basin to share. I can remember running down to stand in the queue to save a place for my mother if news went round that there was tomatoes, or fruit on sale at Griffins in Newtown Row. Expectant mothers were given priority in the queues. I didn't taste ice cream until just after the war, I had chicken pox and was confined to the house, but a neighbour Mrs. Clark bought me a home made ice cream from the brown tiled cafe opposite Burlington Hall in High Street, Aston.
 
BTW did anyone notice Father Christmas second left in the queue for tinned food in the photo in the first post of this thread?
 
Has anyone got any photos of ration books and what they could get with them. All the previous photos have gone. Would be really grateful, Thanks.
 
February 1942 - Soap rationing started.
September 1950 - Soap rationing ended.
I was a child growing to my early teens by 1950 and I never noticed !! ....:friendly_wink:
 
The only thing I remember was sweet rationing finishing, and getting a banana some time in the early 50's which mom said I treated with great suspicion and only eating a little of it.
 
Paul, I too remember being given my first banana to eat, probably late 40's. The memory is vivid and I can remember exactly where I was sitting when Mom gave one to me. Like you I wondered what it was she was giving me to eat!

Judy
 
Comment about bananas reminds me of my first taste I mentioned earlier here in the topic. In some photos I posted elsewhere on the forum, I look well nourished but I think it must have the lovely bread and real 'beef dripping' sandwiches which we used to eat.
 
Not old enough to recall rationing, but love dripping on toast, relic from my great aunts!! Mom says the same about her first banana as the rest of you lol! Also from rationing days my g. aunts always had a stew pot on in the scullery, anthing and everything went in it and it was always simmering, never tasted anything like it, best comfort food ever!
Sue
 
I remember, during rationing, how every shop had a little pair of scissors on a bit of string for cutting the coupons out of the ration books.

You had to have enough "points" before you could buy certain articles.

The Black Market must've been thriving in the factories too. I remember my Dad bringing home some dried bananas once. Another time it was dried Locust Beans.

Anything that was sweet was welcome !
 
An end of rationing pic from the 'old evening mail pics' thread....
img087_renamed_31509.jpg
 
Don't those boxes under the counter look sumptious? I'm assuming they're boxes of chocs, but now I think about it, maybe they're cigars! Viv.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top