- The Guardian,
- Wednesday May 16, 2001
Pat Smith was 10 when the second world war broke out and she was put on a train at Clapham Junction in south London and evacuated to Horndean in Hampshire. She arrived at the local church and stood in a line so that prospective foster parents could size her up and see how much feeding she would need.
Life would have been hard, even at home. Smith remembers: "There was very little coal or coke for fires. In the winter we used to come home from school and just go straight to bed because it was so cold. If you took a glass of water up to bed with you, it would be frozen by morning."
No doubt everyone has heard similar yarns from parents or grandparents about how tough things were during the war. What is new, though, is that environmentalists are beginning to look at the experience as a model of how an economy can be transformed to cut consumption and improve sustainability.
Roger Higman, senior climate change campaigner at charity Friends of the Earth, believes that the war should act as an inspiration. "It shows how incredibly quickly sectors of industry can reorganise themselves in an emergency situation," he says. "We can phase out use of fossil fuels over a period of 40 or 50 years, but the obstacles to more radical change can be overcome so much more quickly if there is the political will."
Britain's frantic push to re-arm in 1939 had devastating effects on the lives of ordinary people. Shortages were so severe that the government launched a campaign calling on people to remove all non-essential light bulbs and eat more cold dinners. Posters warned: "Switched-on switches and turned-on taps/ Make happy Huns and joyful Japs." They urged people to "save fuel and foil the Führer". A government leaflet advised that "a home-made heater can be made with two large flower-pots and a candle".
Unlike current US president George Bush, criticised for his hands-off approach to the Californian energy crisis, Britain's war government had very few qualms about intruding into people's everyday lives. The sale of a wide range of electrical appliances, including vacuum cleaners, was prohibited, while hot water bottles were available only on prescription. It was deemed "a point of honour" not to fill the bath with more than five inches of water.
Rather than alienating the country, the government's message was taken up with enthusiasm. Writers to the Times recommended the true patriot to shave with cold water, give up toast at breakfast and use the stairs instead of the lift for journeys less than three floors. One writer urged the BBC to close down earlier in the evening, so people would go to bed and use less energy.
We may routinely recycle newspapers and bottles at the beginning of the 21st century, but in the middle of the 20th century the country was recycling everything from thimbles to chicken bones. Lady Reading, charismatic head of the Women's Volunteer Service, launched the salvage effort with the slogan: "Give up your frying pan for a Spitfire!" In a radio broadcast, she told the nation's housewives: "Very few of us can be heroines on the battlefront, but we can all have the tiny thrill of thinking, as we hear the news of an epic battle in the air, 'Perhaps it was my saucepan that made a part of that Hurricane.'"
Smith remembers handing in the front gate of the house of one of her billets, as well as the garden railings and some saucepans. Within two months, 1,000 tons of scrap metal had been collected from the nation's kitchens. Such was the enthusiasm for the project that some people even bought new saucepans to hand in, and the authorities had, politely, to decline artificial limbs offered by first world war veterans.
But families, now formed into "salvage brigades", were told that the war effort did not require just metal. Paper was particularly useful to make "shell containers, bullets, mines and wireless sets for tanks and bombs". Old bones were needed to make nitro-glycerine "to propel hundreds of thousands of shells". The Board of Trade claimed it could make parachutes out of corsets, sand-fly netting from lace curtains, webbing equipment from carpets, anti-gas ointments from toiletries, life jackets from mattresses and gas masks from golf balls. By the end of the war, Britain had gathered an astonishing 6m tons of salvage.
By 1943, kitchen waste was coming in at a rate of 31,000 tons a month - enough to feed 210,000 pigs, whose meat in turn fed the nation. "We had galvanised buckets, and we were supposed to put all our scraps in it, and then someone from the council would come and collect it each week," Smith says. "We would feel terribly guilty if we didn't have anything for the pigs."
The government's propaganda hinged on this ability to make people feel they had to contribute to the war effort. One poster urged: "Buy nothing for your personal pleasure or comfort, use no transport, call on no labour - unless urgent necessity compels. To be free with your money today is not a merit. It is contemptible. To watch every penny shows your will to win."
It is hard to imagine the British people today responding to such bullying with anything other than contempt. But Smith, who now lives in Hertfordshire, recalls: "There was a great sense of common purpose - that we were all moving in the same direction together." Spending on consumer goods dropped 16% in real terms between 1939 and 1943, mostly through reductions in consumption of food, household goods and clothing. Alcohol consumption stayed fairly steady, as did expenditure on books, newspapers and magazines, but consumption of tobacco rose by a quarter and spending on entertainment grew by almost half.
True, the British war economy could not have continued functioning without the large subsidies from the US lend-lease scheme. And the problem today, of course, is that the threat of global warming does not strike quite the same fear as did Nazi panzers rolling across the plains of France.
But the example of the war economy does support environmentalists' repeated argument that people can be mobilised to change their lifestyles, given concerted political leadership. Andrew Simms, head of the global economy programme at the New Economics Foundation, believes some kind of "environmental war economy" will be needed if the west is to pay back its ecological debt to the developing world. "For decades, poor countries around the world have suffered austerity programmes imposed with the excuse of tackling dubious foreign debts," he says. "In the face of climate change, rich countries should now be getting their environmental budgets in order and starting to make huge cuts in consumption."
Aubrey Meyer, director of the Global Commons Institute, an environmental think-tank, believes modern policy-makers could take one fundamental principle from Britain's wartime rationing. "National unity flowed from the government, whose key achievement was to introduce a rationing scheme based on points equality," he says. "This was transparent, simple and accountable. It meant that those who were making the effort to be frugal were not being undermined by those who were not."
Meyer believes that a similar allocation system of greenhouse gas emission quotas could work today. But he fears that it may take some terrible catastrophe - what he calls the "Pearl Harbour effect" - to motivate both governments and people. "The alternative is anarchy," he warns. "You are falling back on happenstance and hoping that when the crisis comes, it hits the other fellow."
