History: A war-time diet....

[Fozzer]

...something I well remember from 1939 until after rationing ceased in 1954

http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkie ... n_WW2_diet

Memories...>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_ ... ed_Kingdom

I remember we were very, very thin, and mostly suffered from rickets, lice, and scurvy...

...lived on Turnips....and often died of something or other...

Otherwise, it was happy times!......especially after the Germans had stopped bombing us.

Paul...still quite thin, even tho' I don't eat Turnips any more... ...!

[expat]

An interesting read Paul. I was not aware the rationing continued for 15 years after the war. I take it it did not just come to a sudden end, but product by product was reduced?
I will have to have a chat with my dad about this, he was born in 1938, he is a man of few words about his past, but I am sure he has a few things to remember about this.
Funny how we come full circle, after such events as the second world war, I now live in Germany, married to a German, just like around 250,000 other Brits here.......

Matt

[Hagar]

I vividly remember the day sweet rationing ended. 5th February 1953 when I was 10 years old. I celebrated by purchasing a whole Mars bar on the way home from school.
If I remember correctly it cost 3 old pence, that's 1.25 pence in today's money.

[G.K.]

Just before my time but interesting non the less.

That whole generation including my parents were conditioned to be very frugal. Cheap meat, offal, rabbit and the like were dished up in my house, nothing ever thrown away, if it was on your plate you had to eat it or you had it for the next meal. The habits learned through rationing continued for years........

[Fozzer]

One of the advantages of "getting-on-a-bit", is that I have a wealth of vivid memories going back into the 1930's when I was very small, and started school.
Times when most of the folks around me were not even born..(or thought about!).

I can remember details in my distant past in great detail, much better than more recent times!
I can spend ages recalling what the landscape around me used to look like many years ago....
War-time England I remember vividly, with German bombs dropping all around us whilst sitting in our Anderson Air-raid Shelter, and collecting shell and bomb shrapnel fragments from the roads after a blitz!
...when the City of London still belonged to Londeners!, and my home town of Hereford, (after evacuating there from London at the start of the Blitz), looked like it was still in ancient, Victorian times, and slowly falling apart.
The Herefordshire countryside all around me was just vast stretches of open fields and woods, with farmyards and tractors, flocks of sheep, herds of cows, and the smell of pigs everywhere, lots of Turnips, and very few people around!
I can remember my experiences all through the war, like it was yesterday!
Traffic on the roads was minimal all through the war, and all the roads were very "thin", and my motorbikes, later-on, in the 1950's, were the fastest vehicles on the local roads!
A motorcycle ride from Hereford to London and back, on the old "A40" route, in 1950, was a magical experience, with lots of tyre punctures from boot nails, etc, on the roads!

I often wish that my "flock" could see what I see, when I recall my distant memories to them!
England was a much slower, quieter, less complicated place, in those very far-off days.

Fortunately, I/we have a wealth of photographs going back into our distant past, to remind ourselves what things used to be, and look like, in the Olden Days!

Paul...I love closing my eyes and reminiscing about my past!...... ...!

[Flying Trucker]

Interesting Links Paul...well worth the time to read them...

[expat]

One of the advantages of "getting-on-a-bit", is that I have a wealth of vivid memories going back into the 1930's when I was very small, and started school.
Times when most of the folks around me were not even born..(or thought about!).

Paul...I love closing my eyes and reminiscing about my past!...... ...!

Funny, when I am your age Paul, it will be telling the grandchildren about how I watched home computing start in the 80's with 286's and the Sinclair ZX80, about my first mobile phone to the smart phone I have today and by then, you see that aircraft on the museum line at Duxford, the A380, I remember the first day that flew. We also had super sizing, everything was full of sugar and we had a thing called the internal combustion engine.....Oh and F1 sounded like a proper racing car an not like a muffled superbike......sorry that has already happened, I am getting ahead of myself............

Matt

[Fozzer]

One of the advantages of "getting-on-a-bit", is that I have a wealth of vivid memories going back into the 1930's when I was very small, and started school.
Times when most of the folks around me were not even born..(or thought about!).

Paul...I love closing my eyes and reminiscing about my past!...... ...!

Funny, when I am your age Paul, it will be telling the grandchildren about how I watched home computing start in the 80's with 286's and the Sinclair ZX80, about my first mobile phone to the smart phone I have today and by then, you see that aircraft on the museum line at Duxford, the A380, I remember the first day that flew. We also had super sizing, everything was full of sugar and we had a thing called the internal combustion engine.....Oh and F1 sounded like a proper racing car an not like a muffled superbike......sorry that has already happened, I am getting ahead of myself............

Matt

My dear old Dad saw the progress from horse drawn carriages, gas lights, early motor cars and aeroplanes, and the birth of Radio and Television, .......to men on the moon..... in his lifetime!.....1900-1989...

...the same with my dear old Mum...1905-1991...bless them both!

Paul...I went through the second World War....and still expecting the next one to arrive any time soon!