Many Mouths by Durbach Nadja

Author:Durbach, Nadja
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Marketing the Meals Service

If the MOF had clearly articulated that communal feeding centers were intended for the large numbers of people who would be forced “below the poverty line” as prices rose, they were not meant for the “very poor” who were to be dealt with separately by the Public Assistance Authorities.44 When the question was raised as to whether local Public Assistance Committees (that had essentially replaced the Boards of Guardians in 1930) could issue vouchers for those unable to afford the cash prices in British Restaurants, the consensus within the Ministry was that this should not be permitted as, they reasoned, it would only discourage other consumers from utilizing the restaurants.45 W. J. O. Newton, the chief meals officer for the LCC, warned that any system where some customers presented public assistance tickets to obtain a meal was a “wrong system” because it would have the “taint of the poor law.” “Decent people,” he argued would not avail themselves of these restaurants if this arrangement was in place.46 When the issue was raised again in 1941 as to whether those on public assistance should be issued a special identity card entitling them to reduced tariffs, the MOF stood firm. If the “poorer classes of the community” could not afford the cost of a three-course midday meal paid for in cash, argued the assistant director of operations for the Wartime Meals Division, they could nevertheless purchase soup, bread, and sweet only or just take a main course, all of which were separately priced. This would prevent some patrons being singled out as recipients of relief and would avoid linking these meals services in the public’s mind to the government’s income assistance programs.47

Thus, the MOF officials were more sensitive to the long and stigmatizing history of poor relief than the Board of Education had been in the previous decade and paid attention to the inducements that they believed would bring their target population through the doors without branding them as either charity cases or recipients of state assistance.48 Woolton was a businessman who had been an executive at Lewis’s department store in Liverpool before the war. But he was also a philanthropist. As a young man, he had lived among the Liverpool poor as warden of a charitable society; during World War I, he and his wife had also helped to run a feeding program for the wives and children of servicemen.49 His personal experience structured his firm belief that public meals should only be provided as a cash service, as paying one’s own way had been a central tenet of working-class respectability since the early nineteenth century. This had been corroborated early in the war when it became apparent that the emergency rest centers supervised by the Public Assistance Authorities, where food was given gratuitously, were not being fully utilized by the general public because of a “supposed poor law taint.”50 The MOF was adamant that there could be “no question of a Means Test” for those wishing to make use of the meals services, insisting that customers pay their own way.

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