British Civilian Life in World War II.

For many people the blitz was a hard and daunting experience. Living on your own during the blitz, with bombs falling all around you in a blacked-out city is an extremely hard thing to do. This turned many people’s lives upside down. Having to go out to the shelters every time the siren went off meant that people did not get much sleep. People missed their families because they were either at war fighting, or they had been evacuated.

The first major air raids began in 1940. The main targets were the industrial areas and the docks. Since this was where many of the working people lived, they suffered most of the casualties. Other towns and cities were bombed as well as London, Coventry, Bristol, Liverpool, Southampton, Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield. By the end of 1940, 22,000 people had been killed. The Government waited anxiously to see what effect the London Blitz would have on the people – especially since the city was bombed night after night.

However the blitz ended in the summer of 1941 because the German bombers were needed in an offensive on the USSR. This meant that the bombing of the British cities lessened.

Another problem that the British had during the early years of the war was the problem with supplies and the battle of the Atlantic. Britain got most of her supplies of food, goods and raw materials from the USA. These were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in large cargo vessels. German U-boats started to sink these merchant ships cutting off the British lifeline. This caused a shortage of supplies throughout Britain.

This shortage led to the government setting up a ‘ministry of food’ to control supplies and advise the public. In 1940 they started to ration the supplies of food. At the beginning it was just the basic foods that were rationed such as sugar, butter, cheese, and bacon. Then, later on in 1940 other meats and tea were rationed as well. There was a policy for equal shares on all of the basic foods and anything else was purchased on a point’s basis. This caused long queues, which was another one of the problems that the home front had to face. Many would even sleep outside the shop doors in order to get their rations. The black market flourished in some areas selling off goods that were rationed or were hard to get hold of.

The ‘ministry of food’ also sent scientists to advise on healthy foods that used more non-rationed foods such as vegetables and brown bread. There were also shortages of other goods as well as food, such as the control of raw materials in manufacturing. At first this annoyed many people because they were limited to the lives that they lead and the clothes that they wore. People were encouraged to mend their clothes rather than buying new ones. This meant that some people led worse off lives than they had before and felt that their whole lives were being controlled.

In order to eke out dwindling amounts of home-grown food and to cut down on imports, ration books were issued, to be renewed each summer. These were in different colours according to category – general adult, children, travellers, seamen and pregnant women.

Even after rationing there was still not enough food so the Government made a campaign called Dig for Victory. This was where everyone planted fruits and vegetables at every place possible so the people could grow their own food. 

Women tended cauliflowers and beans on the local rubbish dump or bomb craters. The Dig for Victory campaign encouraged people to grow food in the most likely and the most unlikely places. Even the moat of the Tower of London was used to grow peas and beans!

Criminals flourished under rationing due to the creation of the black market. The black market was used to obtain extra, sometimes rare goods without the use of the ration book. The black market was very open and many people knew how to access the local black market fairly easily. Police men often used to know about the black marketers in their area but often turned a blind eye to the dealings going on and would even in some cases purchase from the black market itself or accept bribes. There were two common views of people towards the black market. One was that the black market undermined the efforts of the British people and it was almost betrayal of the country. The other, which many others went by, was that the black market was generally accepted and even seen as necessary for some people to survive.

However, by the end of the war it was found that the average food intake for the country was much higher than it was before the war began. This was because many of the poor people that made up the majority of city folk were too poor to feed themselves and their families properly. This led to the nation as a whole being generally healthier.

As the war progressed the supply problem grew smaller. Britain were winning the battle of the Atlantic in 1943, so food and goods shortages were no longer too much of a problem. In 1941 women were conscripted into the land army, meaning that less food needed to be imported from America because it could be grown at home. This all went towards the war effort and greatly lessened the supply problems that the British people had faced at the beginning of the war.

With the ‘ministry of food’ now set up and the realisation of how poor some people were, the government set about to improve the nation’s health. Disease epidemics were one of the results of the Blitz. When the Blitz ended in 1941, the government went about wiping them out. To cope with the war casualties the government took control of most hospitals through an emergency hospital scheme. This meant that as the war progressed the health and fitness of the nation progressed with it.

Before 1941 the British people also had problems with keeping up morale. With the great defeat at Dunkirk and the problems throughout the Blitz people would have started to loose faith in their country and their morale would drop, which is not a good thing to happen during a war. Therefore the government went about boosting the nation’s morale using censorship, propaganda, and campaigns. The government boosted the morale as the war went on by only broadcasting the good things that were happening and forgetting about the bad things. The government reported Dunkirk as a heroic rescue and only reported the positive things about the Blitz, such as brave rescues and how many enemy planes had been shot down.

Campaigns were set up by the government to encourage the war effort and to make people think that their efforts were worthwhile. This meant that more people on the home front began to work and their lives became better off for it. Posters were used in these campaigns to get the message across and to help them stick into people’s minds. Government ministers, such as Winston Churchill gave speeches across the radio to tell the home front to keep up the good work.

The social side of life also got better for people towards the end of the war. Before and in the early stages of the war, there was a great division of social class. The rich kept themselves to the rich and looked down upon the poor and the poorer people kept their ideas to themselves. However all of this was changed due to the war efforts, evacuation, rationing and the actual fighting during the war. The barrier was broken down between the social classes and people realised that they were just the same. This caused the nation to see equality between the social classes, which was what rationing introduced to many people.

Another social victory for the country was in the way that people viewed women towards the end of the war. Before the war women were seen as less important and less able than men were. Women were refused jobs and could not join the armed forces. Instead, most women were housewives and supported by their husbands. Those that did have jobs were often in unskilled labour, such as textiles. However as the war progressed and women participated in the war effort and were conscripted in 1941, people started to see women as equal and just as capable as men were. Women had the chance to prove to the country that they could work hard, and got equal rights in return.

The British government and the people themselves were responsible for helping the home front out of this hardship and disruption. For these reasons, I feel that the British civilian population was not so hardly treated in the last 12 months of the war as they were up till 1941.