mission” purchased between Oct. 1917 and Feb. 1919 nearly 2¼ million tons of food valued at £267,000,000, at a cost for administration amounting to about 115 of 1% on this turnover. All these figures exclude cereals and sugar.
The success of this policy of ensuring supplies by direct purchase abroad and consultation at home was unquestionable. The United Kingdom came nearer than any other European country to maintaining during the war a pre-war standard of supplies, and at the same time achieved a far more equitable distribution. This was due to the fact that there was a single national authority making itself responsible for looking after food supplies as a whole, and for using such influence with other departments as would secure that they were forthcoming.
Upon control of supplies was founded an even more extensive control of prices. Once goods were in the hands of the Ministry, it only remained to fix the margins of profit to be allowed to the various classes of distributors and the resulting prices to the public. This was done on the basis of “costings—” that is to say, investigation of the actual costs incurred and margins of profit required by typical distributors; effect was given to the recommendations of the Costing Department of the Ministry by statutory orders fixing the prices or the profits to be allowed at each stage. Ultimately out of everything consumed in the United Kingdom by way of food and drink, 94% was subject to fixed maximum prices. Almost the only articles untouched were fresh vegetables, canned fruits, honey, salt, vinegar, spices, aerated waters and meals in restaurants. Many of these but barely escaped, and only the Armistice prevented the Ministry of Food from fixing prices for soap and candles. It did regulate the prices of tallow, beehive sections, horsemeat and desiccated coco-nut as well as those of oil cakes and other feeding-stuffs. At the time of Lord Rhondda's appointment, many authorities were inclined to say that any fixing of maximum prices must check supply and lead to the disappearance of the article in question. Lord Rhondda secured himself against this by controlling the supply to start with and only fixing the price when the supply was assured. In one or two cases alone, of which beer and the “disappearing rabbit” are the most familiar, did he depart from this policy; he then did so more or less deliberately because it seemed more important to give the public the comfort of protection against profiteering than to ensure them the food.
Lord Rhondda died in July 1918, after a year of office as food controller and nine months of active work. His successor (from July to Dec. 1918) was Mr. J. R. Clynes, who had previously held the post of Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry and, amongst other matters, had taken an active part in the formation and work of the “Consumers' Council”; this was an advisory body, consisting mainly of representatives of trade unions and coöperative societies, which did a great deal to keep the Ministry in touch with the feelings and grievances of working-class consumers. Mr. Clynes naturally made no great changes from the policy of Lord Rhondda. The most marked feature of his tenure of office was the development of international action, following upon a visit to Europe of the American food controller, Mr. Hoover. An Allied Food Council, consisting of the four food controllers of Britain, France, Italy and the United States, with a standing “Committee of Representatives,” was established in Aug. 1918. There was thus extended to food generally the plan already in force in respect of cereals (and to a less extent sugar and one or two other articles), of making international instead of merely national programmes of food requirements, and presenting these international programmes to the financial authorities and the shipping authorities for supply if possible of the necessary foreign credit and tonnage.
By the latter part of 1918, the submarine menace had been practically mastered by the convoy system, and the limits of the food problem had been defined by the success of rationing. The greatest pinch of all, however, was apparently still to come. Considerations of shipping dictated a concentration of traffic on the shortest route—the N. Atlantic—and the abandonment so far as possible of any attempt to get supplies from the Far South and the Far East. Financial considerations by a natural reaction dictated the exact opposite; the British Treasury had relatively ample sterling credit for purchases in Australia, very few pesos in S. America and hardly a cent to spare in the United States or Canada. The Ministry of Food, and other supply departments, constantly found themselves being offered ships only where they could not get credit, and credit only where they could not get ships. On top of this standing or rather gradually growing difficulty came in Sept. 1918 the necessity, as it then appeared, of hastening the transport of the American army so as to deliver a decisive blow in the coming spring. The framing of shipping programmes had by that time reduced itself to a division of two lions' shares between the Ministry of Munitions and the Ministry of Food (or their international extensions), with a few scraps for import of raw cotton or fertilizers and the like; each of these departments was compelled to accept for the winter of 1918-9 a provisional import programme totally inadequate for its needs and to hope that the war would end before its stocks ran out.
This hope was realized. The Armistice of Nov. 11 put an end to hostilities though not to food control, or food shortage in the United Kingdom or other countries. The Ministry of Food, under two more food controllers—Mr. G. H. Roberts (from Jan. to Feb. 1920) and Mr. C. A. McCurdy (from March 1920 to March 1921), lived longer after the end of hostilities than it had done during them, and after its formal demise on March 31 1921, left a substantial legacy of work and staff to be transferred as a “Food Department” to the Board of Trade. The winding up of a business so vastly beyond the scope of any private concern and the adjustment of accounts with the accuracy required of public departments inevitably took much time. The problem of judicious de-control, that is to say of handing back to private traders the responsibility for maintaining food supplies, without risking any failure of supplies or any excessive rise of price, proved exceedingly difficult; it was complicated by more than one change of view as to the speed with which and the extent to which de-control should be accomplished. A reason for not hastening the end of food control appeared in the disturbed condition of industry and the perpetual threat of paralysis in the essential services of coal or transport. The success with which, during the railway strike of Oct. 1918, the supplies and distribution even of perishable foods were maintained by the Ministry of Food shed lustre on its declining years.
At the end of 1918 the Ministry of Food issued a short memorandum with tables and diagrams illustrating its work under the four main heads of supplies, stocks, prices and rationing.
In respect of supplies a comparison is made in the accompanying table of the amounts of the principal food-stuffs available per head for consumption in 1918 and before the war, in the United Kingdom, Germany and Holland:—
Weekly Domestic Consumption of Bread, Meat, Fats and Sugar per
Head per Week in the United Kingdom, Germany
and Holland. Pre-war and 1918.
| United Kingdom | Germany | Holland | ||||
| Pre-war | 1918 | Pre-war | 1918 | Pre-war | 1918 | |
| lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | |
| Bread and flour | 6.12 | 6.57 | 6.44 | 4.06 | 7.25 | 3.06 |
| Meats | 2.50 | 1.54 | 2.25 | 0.49 | 1.50 | 0.44 |
| Sugar | — | .50 | — | 0.33 | — | 0.52 |
| Fats | 0.51 | 0.45 | .56 | 0.15 | 0.70 | 0.37 |
The consumption during 1918 is based on the rations, except in the case of bread in the United Kingdom, where the actual consumption is taken. In the case of sugar no figure of pre-war domestic consumption is given by the Ministry of Food; it is commonly estimated at about 1 lb. per head per week.
It appears from the table that in 1918 the United Kingdom “had half as much bread again as Germany, three times as much meat and fat, and substantially more sugar. As compared with Holland, the United Kingdom had twice as much bread, three times as much meat, more fats, and practically the same amount of sugar.” In comparison with pre-war consumption, the bread consumption per head in the United Kingdom had actually increased slightly in 1918; fats had fallen very little; meat had fallen by a little over a third; sugar had fallen somewhat, but
