Month: April 2021

Looking back on my early years (see Shifting Classes, Chapters Three: First Footsteps and Four: A Child’s War) made me reflect on the part food played in our lives, both producing it and consuming it. Any parent will be familiar with the ways in which the most lovable of children learn to use food as a means to assert their fledgling identity and fight back against adult authority. I had once gone so far as to vomit a greasy school dinner over my teacher. I didn’t dare to be sick on my mother’s shoes, but to her despair, I simply refused outright to eat the horrid fat bacon my father had grown up on and delighted in, any kind of meat with fat on it, and most vegetables. My father, mindful of a BBC campaign on behalf of surplus vegetables, would wheedle me:

“Look, I’m eating nice Charlie Carrot and Percy Pea.” 

“Daddy, you can have my Charlie Carrots and Percy Peas too.”

I kept this up for years, yielding only to treacle sandwiches and spam fritters.

When I presented a first version of A Child’s War to the Ainsty Villages History Group in Yorkshire’s Appleton Roebuck, the village where I first went to school, I was asked about the experience of rationing in those wartime days. My audience seemed taken aback by my response, that my mother once told me “we were too poor to afford all of the rations we were entitled to buy, like decent cuts of meat, or new clothing.”  On our very low farm labourer’s weekly wage, these would always have been unaffordable luxuries. Farm workers were allowed an extra ration of cheese, a distant Ministry of Food perhaps presuming that bread and cheese was all they needed or were accustomed to. Mum’s response is borne out in Juliet Gardiner’s excellent account of ‘The Kitchen Front’ in Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 (Headline Book Publishing, 2004). Each member of a family, including children over six, later five, had a ration book. Most basic foodstuffs were restricted, including butter, sugar, bacon, meat, cheese, tea, soap, and clothing, while bread, milk, fish, game, fruit and vegetables were not.

The idea behind rationing was to ensure a fair distribution of goods in short supply, but in practice there were many inequities between classes. A survey found that ‘the poorer people themselves do not regard their food position as materially altered’. Meanwhile, it was reported that in London, chauffeur-driven cars were ‘bringing in the rich people from the West End to take the people’s food’. Wealthy diarists like Henry Chips Channon, and Harold Nicolson told of drinking magnums of champagne at the Dorchester Hotel. In any case, expensive restaurants remained open, apparently not much affected by rationing, and out of reach of the majority of wartime pockets. The authorities responded to public resentment of middle and upper class privilege by creating more down market ‘British Restaurants’, but it seems that less than two per cent of housewives ever ate in these. 

One advantage for the rural poor was the ability to obtain food related to their place of work or from their gardens: vegetables, particularly potatoes; eggs from hens; milk from the farm (though all children had good rations of milk). Dad’s garden would be a fruitful source of food throughout my childhood once I grew out of my resistance to his produce. And at harvest time there might be the odd unlucky rabbit. In my village, harvest-time could see an abundance of tea and sandwiches for the weary workers, though there were complaints too of ‘Yorkshire puddings so heavy they were used to prop farm gates open’ (Living History In The Ainsty: ed Marjorie J. Harrison, York Press, 2010).

Another fact that seemed to surprise my twenty-first century audience in Appleton Roebuck was that rationing did not end with the war, persisting for meat, eggs, fats, cheese, bacon, sugar and tea, sweets too. At some point even potatoes were rationed, but Dad’s garden could at least provide these. Our ration book for 1953-54 is pictured above, and was one of the last to exist, as rationing was ended on the 3^rd of July that year. But celebrations were muted, not least because many foods either were still scarce, or were in effect rationed by rising prices. I know that during both wartime and the postwar decade the food my family ate was determined by income rather than availability: for us, ‘austerity’ was a permanent way of life.

What of the bacon and eggs of my title? At a particularly poverty-stricken time of our life in the immediate postwar years, with themselves and three hungry children to feed, Mum and Dad acquired two pigs, a duck, and a gaggle of hens.  All these amiable creatures became our childish pets, and we were distressed and outraged when it became clear they would end up on our breakfast and dinner tables. In my case, I refused for years to accept the strips of bacon regularly cut from disembodied lumps of pork hanging from hooks in our kitchen ceiling. I was saved from imminent starvation when a peripatetic fish van appeared weekly, and Mum acquainted me with the delights of bloaters and soused herrings (see Chapter 6: Country Life: Happiness and Miseries).

Eggs are a different kettle of fish. They only became problematic a few years later, now ensconced on a farm in another Yorkshire village, Roecliffe, near Boroughbridge. With two children now at grammar school, and another on the way there, money was very scarce. Dad was able to supplement our income by many hours of overtime, laboured at until late at night. Mum’s contribution was to wash the large quantity of eggs produced daily by our employer’s barnful of hens, an early case of factory farming. We children had to do our bit in this nightly routine, the eggs to be clean and sparkling for the next early morning collection by the Egg Marketing Board. We soon sickened of the dreary task, the cold outhouse in which we worked, the stench of many inevitably half-formed and broken eggs, the impossibility of ever again (it seemed) being able to contemplate eating the things. The great British Breakfast remains a bit of a turn off for me.

The whole experience inspired my sister Sally to write a poem, set out below:

 Washing Eggs
  
 1
  
 Translucent shells, and sometimes the jellied shape
 Of shells without the sharp tap of hardness.
 I can feel one break in my hands, the sudden give
 Of fragile oval strength. Not enough grit
 You said, your hands in the water, washing more eggs.
 You rinsed, I wiped; in the chill sulphurous air
 You carried on, and passed me your taste for escape.
  
 2
  
 Sculleries like graveyards; cascades 
 Of deadly cold tapwater run through 
 A gutted fowl, till the pink turns clear blue.
 Once, a shower of golden eggs, unlaid. 
 I thought of Zeus; you said 
 That all these things are lovely in their way.
 It wasn’t true; neither is this. Your clay
 Moulds into deeper clay; I think of Keats
 Whose name was writ in water, yet still beats 
 In countless hearts, but no more in his own. 
 Quicksilver names ground into stone;
 Dark damp flags, and we’re the scullery maids.
  
 By Sally Minogue, published in Arvon International Poetry Competition 1987 Anthology, selected by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney 

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My previous post, A Tale of Two Fathers, looked at the unlikely interactions in postwar Britain of two families at opposite ends of the social scale. I continue that theme here with a different bit of the aristocracy, illustrated by the photograph of my migrant Irish grandfather, Tom Minogue and other farm workers, mingling with children and nannies of the Mowbray and Stourton family. A fine piece of rural nostalgia, concealing some brutal social realities.

The story goes that in about 1908 Grandad was in a field directing the operations of an Irish harvesting gang when the 24^th Lord Mowbray (and Premier Baron of England) rode by on horseback and cried to his Agent: “I want that man to work for me!”. So he did, on the Allerton Park estate in Yorkshire, as gardener then farm labourer for the next 28 years, living in the small estate cottage where he and my Granny brought up their 11 children. When the notoriously irascible William Stourton inherited as 25^th Baron Mowbray in 1936, he soon peremptorily sacked this loyal family servant and many other staff, including my mother Josephine, who for the previous six years had been a kitchen maid in the estate Castle.

Perhaps it was nostalgia for the place where they first met that persuaded my parents to return to Allerton Park to work for this very same man in the early 1950s, with Dad as the effective manager of the main estate Home Farm. This was the first house we lived in (me now aged 12, my sisters 9 and 3) to have electricity, mains water, and an inside lavatory and bathroom. This seeming idyll was blown apart when Lord Mowbray abruptly sacked Dad, accusing him of involvement in the secret theft and sale of cattle. Mum and Dad and their three children were given only two weeks to find a new job and tied cottage. Since no one locally believed this charge for a minute, Dad quickly found a sympathetic local farmer to give him a job and a house. It later transpired that others were behind the nefarious practice, and Lord Mowbray sent his son Charles to offer Dad’s job back. He proudly refused the offer.

These are grim stories of mistreatment of loyal workers by an uncaring and uncompassionate upper class employers who behaved this way because they could, without any redress.  Dad and his father before him were victims in part of the ‘tied cottage’ system, which gave farm workers no protection against such evictions. I do not forget that, unforgivably, the post-1945 Labour Government did nothing to prevent such abuses in this pernicious system.

We might think that a leading family in the Catholic part of the English aristocracy should have behaved better to its predominantly Catholic servants and workers. Well, some of the family did; but only on the female side of the equation. First, my mother retained for many years a long connection with Miss Mary Stourton, sister of the appalling William. I recall shyly being introduced to her in her Otley home so that Mum could show off my grammar school uniform. She also left £1000 in her will to my Auntie Pat, a friend and companion since childhood on the estate. Moreover, another Mary, niece of the appalling William, and then by marriage the Countess of Gainsborough, always maintained personal contact with my Aunt Peggy, throughout Aunt Peggy’s long life as a Carmelite nun. I see these manifestations of feminine friendship and support as essentially part of a long tradition in the Catholic aristocracy that they should hold some responsibility for the welfare and well-being of the Catholic people who worked for them.

What a pity that this spirit of charity and social responsibility was not to be found among the men in the family. Not that this carelessness did the men much good. The 25^th Baron’s public reputation was destroyed by a court case in which he was found to have behaved with cruelty to his wife, who was rescued by a lorry driver when she fled from her husband to the Great North Road in the middle of the night. Relations with his son Charles were also badly affected by a messy disagreement over the estate finances and inheritance provisions. Charles, made some kind of political career in the House of Lords, and was by all accounts popular with his peers. His son Edward, 27^th Baron, seems to have led a rather sad and inconsequential life until his recent death after a fall, having abandoned Allerton Castle to one of those curious wealthy Americans who seem to yearn for the aristocracy they had long ago rejected. At least he was always friendly to my Auntie Agnes, as a regular patron in the pub she and her husband ran for a time in Knaresborough marketplace.

At one point, when just 14, I had occasion to act as an assistant bag handler to Charles Stourton during the shoots then organised by Lord Mowbray, essentially ways to bolster the increasingly hard-pressed finance of the estate. I was extremely impressed by the fact that he was able to shoot at all, given the piratical black patch he wore over an eye lost during the war, and later he would be Captain of the House of Lords shooting team. He was rather brusque with me, as I had not been brought up to all this gun and cartridge handling. For my part, I could scarcely conceal my distaste at having to collect together a series of dead and disarranged birds. Many years later, as 26^th Baron Mowbray, he would walk the same corridors of power in the Foreign Office as I had. He had never been reconciled to his father, who bypassed Charles and left the Allerton estate to Charles’ own son Edward. We were destined not to meet again as adults, but I doubt he would have recognised me, either socially, or as a former bagman.

If I examine these people and their lives, and look at my own family and its story, I see that both have had their due share of difficulty and hardships. But I’m pretty certain that my family instinctively knew more about how to lead a happy and fulfilled life than their erstwhile social superiors did. I’m glad that I was born on the right side of this social divide.

A detailed account of the social ups and downs of life on an aristocratic estate can be found in Chapters 1 and 2 of Shifting Classes (in the 1900s to the 1930s), and Chapters 7 and 8 (the early 1950s).

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Chapter 5 of my memoir Shifting Classes takes the family story forward to the end of the war in 1945. I quote Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon’, who reportedly looked around a grand champagne celebration of victory by London’s upper crust and said: “After all, this is what we have been fighting for”. This was rather rich coming from an American expatriate who had married into the wealthy Guinness family, and was notorious before the war for pro-Nazi sentiments and support for appeasement of Hitler. He and his connections provide a telling portrait of the ways in which the British social and political elite felt themselves entitled to the privileges they had done little to deserve, and continued to enjoy those privileges despite the stunning post-war Labour victory.  Class war no more brought them defeat than the real war had done.

The story of these two fathers and their sons illuminates the nature of social and political relationships after 1945. On the one hand we have Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, establishment grandee and his son Paul Channon, later Lord Kelvedon; on the other hand, my own father, a Yorkshire farm labourer, and his son. Astonishingly, given the enormous social gulf between them, the career trajectories of these two sons would bring them together in the mid-1960s, working in the same place (the Foreign Office), and meeting in the same Downing Street office to discuss government policy towards Southern Rhodesia.

Paul Channon had progressed from Eton to Oxford, then (leaving without a degree) into Parliament as an elected MP. At the age of 23, he was the youngest member of the House of Commons. He owed this precocious achievement entirely to the almost feudal grip his wealthy, well-connected family had on the constituency of Southend West (prior to that Southend-on-Sea). As four members of the Guinness family represented the constituency between 1918 and 1997, it became known as Guinness-on-Sea. His grandmother, who had retired from the seat, complimented the Southend electors for ‘backing a colt when you know the stable he was trained in’.

As my farm labourer father unaccountably had no parliamentary seat to hand on to me, I had to make my own way to Whitehall and Westminster, via Cambridge (which I did leave with a degree) and the fiercely competitive Civil Service ‘fast stream’ examinations. Paul Channon was in the same room as me because from 1961-64 he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, a position his father had also held. I was in the room because from 1963-64 I was Assistant Private Secretary to Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, responsible for Rhodesian policy.

It’s important to emphasise the difference in these two trajectories which brought together a wealthy son of the aristocracy, and a son of one of the poorest sections of the working class. Mine was a story of post war careers open to the talents; Channon’s was a story of success and position owed overwhelmingly to birth and wealth. This is not to say he was a dunce; indeed, he had a quite respectable if challenging career, ending as a Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher. Through the Guinness Trust, an investment vehicle, he became even wealthier, recorded in 1990 to be worth £164 millions, some of that money flowing from rents from more than 3,000 working class homes in London. In 1996 my father, who had remained a lowly paid labourer all his life, left savings of £3000 to be divided among his three children (to our astonishment and near disbelief, given his small earnings and pension). These were indeed two different worlds, and it was a small miracle that they ever collided, however briefly. But as Dad might have said: ‘After all, this is what we were fighting for’.

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