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"Rollo – are your 3 rellies centenarians or are their details opened in error? There is an option to have them ‘closed’ if you/they/ nok choose.
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The youngest was born in 1939 - I went to his wedding.
I have not got the faintest idea just how FMP decide on whether 39 Reg. records are open or not. I don't give a fig they can open all of them for all I care - most of the information is avaiable from other public domain / FH sources anyway. I'm certainly not forking out though.
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"Of course it would take time to remove Rationing. Not only were manufacturing bases ruined, the raw materials were in short supply. It’s not possible to click your fingers and grow/produce extra food especially as Britain and other countries were supplying Germany with rations – Berlin Air Lift 1948-1949? "
This is the line that the Atlee govt. put out but it found little support ( probably because it was untrue) and consequently the Tories returned to power in 1951 ending of most rationing very soon thereafterwards.
"“Shiver with Shinwell, (the Minister of Fuel and Power), and Starve with Strachey” became a popular catchphrase during the disastrous winter of 1946-1947 while Tommy Handley in his radio programme “ITMA” satirized him as “Mr Streakey”. "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBbpe-8-j_0
There were no facilities in 1939-1945 which might be called "significant manufacturing bases" for food as there nothing remotely like a supermarket or much in the way of processed food. The only raw materials which the Brits imported in bulk for consumption were wheat and tobacco. Evenso throughout the war bread had not been rationed! Lab rationed it in 1946. This was to save the cost of $US imports of wheat. Using British wheat to make brown bread had not apparently been considered. Why not? During the war the short seas had been unfished and could have supplied a good chunk of the country's needs very quickly without costing foreign exchange. Instead Labour put every possible obstacle in the way.
My father had it down as Labour's creed "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs". fwiw GF owned a string of butchers from Woodford to Southend in South Essex and had no difficulty in obtaining supplies of meat 1945-50 much of which came from relatives' farms in the east Midlands. Perhaps that is why Labour nationalised trucking in 1947 "control the commanding heights of the economy" aka screw you I'm alright jack. My GF brother lost a large trucking company he had built up over 25 years, the trucks were scrapped (!) but the site is used for HGVs to this day. Lack of trucking certainly pinned farmers and butchers down. They resorted to bribing the local commissar and using smaller vehicles.
For sure the UK had a first rate sterling crisis but starving the country was not the way to fix it. Rationing had stopped in France from 1945. English farmers had geared up to supply the BEF and Americans invading the continent. From May 1945 that market disappeared and they found themselves with a large surplus which they could not sell due to rationing. They got around it in large part due to the "black" market aka free enterprise. Labour had intended to bankrupt the farming industry and put the land into state ownership and establish collective farming.
The UK contribution to the Berlin air lift was neglible (b.a.) as we did not have any suitable air transport. Most of the US supplies were flown in using the ubiquitous Douglas Dakota.
We did supply something like 100 steam engines to France plus railway and mining engineers as the country could not extract and use its own coal. Supplies of coal to France & Germany were not enough to make any difference to UK home supply - there was insufficient transport to do so. It looked good in newsreels though.
Most of the help to Germany came from the USA. France was not much inclined to help Germany instead hauling as much machinery etc from its Occupation Zone into France as possible. The Brits were similarly engaged around Hamburg.
"Draconian food rationing was not absolutely essential after the war. Savings could have been made in other areas of the external accounts. For instance, tobacco was prominent in Britain's imports from the USA at the height of the dollar crisis. This poison was not rationed, apparently because of its morale boosting and revenue raising qualities. Clearly, if less had been spent on importing tobacco, the British would have been able to enjoy a slightly more appetizing diet. There were other highly questionable drains on the balance of payments after 1945, such as the cost of occupying Palestine, Greece, Germany, and those parts of the empire that did not produce a dollar surplus. Certain uncontrolled outward capital flows, for instance to South Africa and Australia in 1947 (*), also put strain on Britain's capacity to import basic foodstuffs. In other words, rationing was necessary because the government and its supporters preferred to allocate resources to the maintenance of tobacco supplies and Britain's status as a world power than to the provision of a wider choice of food. Whether or not this ordering of priorities was in the best interests of ordinary people is a matter of opinion."
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4364
(*) At Bretton Woods the Yanks rang rings around the Brits and forced a wildly overvalued currency to become convertible. No surprise then when other govts sold off their sterling holdings. Therein lay the root of most of the UK's recurring debt problems right up to Wilson/Healey.
From 1945-48 France dealt with similar problems (a) by availing themselves of Marshall plan loans (b) dropping rationing from 1945 together with massive import tariffs esp on food inc USA (c) letting the currency collapse. This all came to a head in 1948 but that is another story. Our gallic cousins did not have to worry about bread and butter.
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