The ethics of hunger and the assembly of society: The techno-politics of the school meal in modern Britain

American Historical Review

Volumn 110, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 693-725

  Vernon, James ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b Center for British Studies   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CATERING SERVICE; CONSTRUCTION WORK AND ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENA; EDUCATION; FEMALE; HISTORY; HUMAN; HUNGER; MALE; NUTRITION; NUTRITIONAL VALUE; SCHOOL; SCHOOL HEALTH SERVICE; SOCIALIZATION; UNITED KINGDOM;

FACILITY DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION; FEMALE; FOOD SERVICES; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; HUNGER; MALE; NUTRITION PHYSIOLOGY; NUTRITIVE VALUE; SCHOOL HEALTH SERVICES; SCHOOLS; SOCIALIZATION;

EID: 27744508704     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.110.3.693     Document Type: Review

References (249)

1. In the 1870s, local philanthropic school meals services began to emerge in Germany, France, and Britain, quickly spreading across Europe to America by 1914. Holland, Switzerland, and Britain were the first to make national provision for school meals, in 1900, 1903, and 1906, respectively. L. S. Bryant, School Feeding: Its History and Practice at Home and Abroad (London, 1913).
2. There are as yet no histories of the role of school meals in development programs. For an early indication of their centrality, see United Nations (FAO) Nutritional Studies, School Feeding: Its Contribution to Child Nutrition (Rome, 1953). In Britain, Margaret Thatcher first rose to prominence as the "milk snatcher" when she cut free milk in schools in 1971. A year after her election as prime minister, the 1980 Education Act removed the obligation for local authorities to provide school meals to children who were not entitled to free meals, while the 1986 Social Security Act limited the entitlement to free meals to those on income support.
3. Notable exceptions include Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York, 1979);
4. Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?" (Basingstoke, 1988);
5. George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1993);
6. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation (Chicago, 1995);
7. Janet R. Home, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Durham, N.C., 2002);
8. and Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002).
9. See F. Le Gros Clark, Social History of the School Meals Service (London, 1948);
10. John Hurt, "Feeding the Hungry Schoolchild in the First Half of the Twentieth Century," in D. J. Oddy and D. S. Miller, eds., Diet and Health in Modern Britain (London, 1985);
11. John Burnett, "The Rise and Decline of School Meals in Britain, 1860-1990," in J. Burnett and D. Oddy, eds., The Origins and Development of Food Policies in Europe (Leicester, 1994);
12. Bernard Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales (Buckingham, 1995);
13. Charles Webster, "Government Policy on School Meals and Welfare Foods, 1939-1970," in D. F. Smith, ed., Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century (London, 1997);
14. and John Stewart, " 'This Injurious Measure': Scotland and the 1906 Education (Provision of Meals) Act," Scottish Historical Review 78, no. 205 (April 1999): 76-94.1 have not been able to find a corresponding literature on school meals for any other country.
15. This is by no means confined to historians of the school meal; it remains a feature of even those accounts that address the politics of hunger. Hunger is always seen as a natural, material condition that generates disputes about the distribution of entitlement to food. See, for prominent examples, Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981);
16. F. Newman, ed., Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty and Deprivation (Oxford, 1990);
17. and Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000).
18. For other "culturalist" histories of hunger, see Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, Calif., 1992);
19. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, Calif., 1993);
20. Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge, Mass., 1993);
21. and Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J., 1995).
22. Michel Foucault, "On Governmentality," Ideology and Consciousness 6 (Autumn 1979): 5-22;
23. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 1999);
24. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999).
25. An argument well articulated in Chris Otter, "Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City," Social History 27, no. 1 (2002): 1-15;
26. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 2003).
27. David Scott, "Colonial Governmentality," Social Text 43 (1995): 191-220;
28. Cyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J., 1999);
29. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003).
30. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
31. Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1989)
32. and The Land of Hunger (Cambridge, 1996).
33. John Walter, "The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England," in J. Walter and R. Schofield, eds., Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989).
34. E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" and "The Moral Economy Revisited," in Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, 1991).
35. See also Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, eds., Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Basingstoke, 2000).
36. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1957 [1944]).
37. Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws by a Well-Wisher to Mankind (Berkeley, Calif., 1971 [1786]), 27.
38. Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London, 2004);
39. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865 (Cambridge, 1986);
40. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984);
41. Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty (London, 1991). My argument here concerns an ethical reorientation of hunger, not the varied and hybrid forms of poor relief or charitable action. On the latter,
42. see Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (Cambridge, 1998).
43. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York, 2001);
44. Sir Charles Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London, 1848), 320. Trevelyan, brother-in-law to Thomas Macaulay, was knighted for his work at the treasury administering relief to Ireland during the famine.
45. Valerie Johnston, Diets in Workhouses and Prisons (London, 1985);
46. T. C. Barker, D. J. Oddy, and John Yudkin, The Dietary Surveys of Dr Edward Smith, 1862-3 (London, 1971).
47. Dietary experiments on the army and factory workers had a rather later history, concerned as they were with maximizing production rather than the minimal levels of subsistence. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
48. Christopher Hamlin, "Could You Starve to Death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr Controversy and the Loss of the 'Social' in Public Health," American Journal of Public Health 85, no. 6 (1995): 856-66.
49. Ian Astruther, The Scandal of Andover Workhouse (London, 1973);
50. Parliamentary Papers, 1846 (663-1), Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union.
51. Hilton, The Age of Atonement, 108-14.
52. For the genealogy of this humanitarian narrative, see Thomas Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).
53. Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist was first published in 1837.
54. Peter Keating, ed., Into Unknown England, 1866-1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (London, 1976);
55. J. Marriot and M. Matsumura, eds., The Metropolitan Poor: Semifictional Accounts, 1795-1910, 6 vols. (London, 1999);
56. Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine (Durham, N.C., 1997).
57. At the height of the Cotton Famine in 1862 - a famine caused by the blockade of cotton supplies during the American Civil War - a quarter of the county's population was receiving relief. On the valorization of the industrious but unemployed working man, see M. E. Rose, "Rochdale Man and the Stalybridge Riot: Poor Relief during the Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861-1865," in A. P. Donajgrodzki, ed., Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1977).
58. For later accounts evoking sympathy for unemployed men, see A. S. Krausse, Starving London: The Story of a Three Weeks' Sojourn among the Destitute (1886),
59. and Bart Kennedy, The Hunger Line (London, 1908).
60. Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association, 1857-1886 (Cambridge, 2002).
61. Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914 (Oxford, 1987);
62. Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860-1931 (London, 1990).
63. The campaign for, and provision of, school meals was highly gendered from the outset, confirming Denise Riley's contention that by the late nineteenth century the social was frequently identified as a women's domain. Riley, "Am I That Name?"
64. Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question, 1884-1911 (Cambridge, 1996).
65. In fact, the ILP campaign for school meals in Bradford was an extension of the philanthropic activities of Bradford's Cinderella Club, established in response to the calls of Robert Blatchford's Clarion for a Cinderella movement to provide welfare for children. By January 1903 they were providing 1,000 free meals a day, half of the need they had identified. Keith Laybourn, "The Issue of School Feeding in Bradford, 1904-1907," Journal of Educational Administration and History 14, no. 2 (July 1982): 30-38.
66. Parliamentary Papers, 1904 (Cd.2175), xxxii, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 1: Report and Appendix;
67. Parliamentary Papers, 1906 (143), ii, 199, A Bill to Provide Secular Education and Periodical Medical Examination and Food for Children Attending State-Supported Schools.
68. John Stewart, "Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Party and Child Welfare, 1900-1914," Twentieth Century British History 4, no. 2 (1993): 105-25;
69. Stewart, " 'This Injurious Measure.' "
70. The now-classic account is Rabinbach's The Human Motor;
71. also H. Kamminga and A. Cunningham, eds., The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940 (Amsterdam, 1985).
72. Lyon Playfair, the distinguished chemist and student of Justus Liebig, advised the Poor Law Board in 1850, while Dr. Edward Smith, a medic with a keen interest in diet, was appointed its medical inspector in 1865. Johnston, Diets in Workhouses and Prisons, chap. 1.
73. The Society of Public Analysts was founded in 1874 largely to develop standards and laboratory procedures to test the purity of foods. Chris Otter, "The Government of the Eye: Light Technology, Liberalism and the Victorian City, 1840-1900" (Ph.D. diss., University of Manchester, 2002), 112-14;
74. M. French and J. Phillips, Cheated Not Poisoned? Food Regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875-1938 (Manchester, 2000).
75. J. A. Hobson, The Social Problem: Life and Work (London, 1901), 265, 267, 266.
76. An ill-fed and enervated population threatened social stability and the future of the race: "no civilisation," he warned, "can be sound or stable which has at its base this mass of stunted human life." No wonder, having concluded that a fourth of the population was living in poverty, Rowntree believed that he had identified "a social question of profound importance await[ing] solution." B. S. Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London, 1901), 304.
77. These sentiments are echoed, less carefully and scientifically, in Arnold White, Efficiency and Empire (Brighton, 1973 [1901]), 105,
78. and Richard Higgs, The Heart of the Social Problem: Twelve Millions Starving - How Can They Be Fed? (London, 1913).
79. These conditions were famously exposed during the Boer War, when "40 to 60 per cent of the men who presented] themselves for enlistment [were] found to be physically unfit for military service." Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, 1: v.
80. Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Ibid., 39.
81. The history of social investigation is often conceived in terms of the development and perfection of these techniques to make society legible and amenable to government. For recent examples, see David Englander and Rosemary O'Day, eds., Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914 (Aldershot, 1995),
82. and Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, 1995).
83. For references to nutritional research, see the evidence of Drs. Archibald K. Chalmers, W. L. Mackenzie, James Niven, and Alfred Eicholtz, as well as Rowntree and Loch, in Report of the InterDepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 2: Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration.
84. Hutchison's Food and the Principles of Dietetics was the standard work on nutrition in Britain. First published in 1900, it was reprinted three times in 1901, and again in 1902 and 1904. The second edition of 1905 was reprinted in 1906, 1909, and 1910; the third edition of 1911 was reprinted in 1913 and 1914; the fourth edition of 1916 was reprinted in 1918 and 1919; the fifth edition of 1922 was reprinted in 1923; the sixth edition of 1926 was reprinted in 1928 and 1931; and V. H. Mottram rewrote the first three chapters for the seventh edition of 1933. Robert Hutchison and V. H. Mottram, Food and the Principles of Dietetics (London, 1933).
85. Questioning Rowntree on these issues, the chair of the committee complained that they had heard so many "very different opinions expressed" that he was left "plunged into a morass of doubt." Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, 2: 111, 202.
86. David Smith, "Nutrition in Britain in the Twentieth Century" (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1986).
87. On the "Glasgow School," see D. Smith and M. Nicholson, "The 'Glasgow School' of Paton, Findlay and Cathcart: Conservative Thought in Chemical Physiology, Nutrition and Public Health," Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 195-238.
88. E. V. McCollum, The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition: The Use of Food for the Preservation of Vitality and Health (New York, 1918).
89. This cemented the position of the laboratory as the key site of nutritional calculation, a trend reflected in the creation of the Rowett Research Institute (1921) and the Dunn Nutritional Laboratory (1927). On the role of laboratory life in the development of nutritional science, and the ways in which its proliferating instruments, experimental procedures, and chemical formulas appeared to create a universal grid of knowledge across the world, see James Vernon, Modernity's Hunger: How Imperial Britain Created and Failed to Solve the Problem of Hunger in the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming), chap. 5.
90. Michael Worboys, "The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition between the Wars," in David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, 1988), 222;
91. David Arnold, "The 'Discovery' of Colonial Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India," Indian Economic and Social History Review 31, no. 1 (1994): 26.
92. Robert McCarrison, Studies in Deficiency Diseases (London, 1921);
93. H. M. Sinclair, The Work of Sir Robert McCarrison, with Additional Introductory Essays by W. R. Aykroyd and E. V. McCullom (London, 1953);
94. Sir Robert McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health: Being the Cantor Lectures Delivered before the Royal Society of Arts 1936 (London, 1944 [1936]), 17-18.
95. Robert McCarrison, "Problems of Nutrition in India" (1932), in Sinclair, The Work of Sir Robert McCarrison, 267-68;
96. McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health, 21;
97. Robert McCarrison, "Memorandum on Malnutrition as a Cause of Physical Inefficiency and Ill-Health among the Masses in India" (1926), in Sinclair, The Work of Sir Robert McCarrison, 261.
98. McCarrison, "Problems of Nutrition in India," 262;
99. Audrey I. Richards, Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe: A Functional Study of Nutrition among the Southern Bantu (Cleveland, Ohio, 1964 [1932]).
100. On colonial development, see Fred Cooper, "Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept," in F. Cooper and R. Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
101. McCarrison noted that mice fed on the "poor Britisher" diet were subject to a litany of woes: "stunted . badly proportioned . nervous and apt to bite the attendants . lived unhappily together and. began to kill and eat the weaker ones amongst them ... prone to pulmonary and gastro-intestinal disease." The prognosis for Britain's racial health and social stability was gloomy. McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health, 24-25.
102. "Hungry England: An Inquiry," Week-End Review 7, no. 157 (March 1, 1933): 264.
103. Ministry of Health, Nutrition: Report of Conference between Representatives of the Advisory Committee on Nutrition and Representatives of a Committee Appointed by the British Medical Association (London, 1934), 4, 7.
104. "Statement of Aims," Bulletin of the Committee against Malnutrition 1 (March 1934): 1-2.
105. F. Le Gros Clark and Marjorie Green were the respective secretaries of these organizations. On the formation of the Children's Minimum Council, see Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 234-35.
106. McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health;
107. John Boyd Orr, Food, Health and Income: Report on Adequacy of Diet in Relation to Income (London, 1936).
108. Orr's position had been earlier rehearsed in his The National Food Supply and Its Influence on Public Health: The Chadwick Lecture (London, 1934).
109. See also G. C. M. McGonigle and J. Kirby, Poverty and Public Health (London, 1936).
110. McGonigle and Kirby, Poverty and Public Health, 142;
111. Political and Economic Planning (PEP), "The Malnutrition Controversy," Planning 88 (December 15, 1936): 8.
112. E. Burnett and W. R. Aykroyd, "Nutrition and Public Health," Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation of the League of Nations 4, no. 2 (1935): 323-474.
113. Aykroyd succeeded McCarrison as director at Coonor in 1935. Vitamin deficiency tests were being developed by the late 1930s, but they were limited in their application to large-scale investigations. E. J. Bigwood, Guiding Principles for Studies on the Nutrition of Populations (Geneva, 1939), 147.
114. Burnett and Aykroyd, "Nutrition and Public Health," 360-62.
115. On margins of error, see Bigwood, Guiding Principles, 155.
116. Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (London, 1967 [1940]), 281.
117. On the delicacy of the issue of parental responsibility, and MacDonald's attempt to distance the Labour Party from the idea of state maintenance, see Stewart, "Ramsay MacDonald."
118. Needy children were identified by teachers, attendance officers, and philanthropists, or by requests from parents. Inquiries into the family's means were then conducted by care committees (or their paid investigators) or attendance officers, with varying degrees of thoroughness - from simply accepting parental statements to checking them with employers and Poor Law guardians. While some localities used differing scales of income per head after rent, others left the final decision on need to care, canteen, or education committees (or their chairs), as well as to headmasters or individual teachers. Mildred Emily Bulkley, The Feeding of School Children (London, 1914), 64-69.
119. See also Parliamentary Papers, 1905 (Cd.2779), xivii, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Medical Inspection and Feeding of Children Attending Public Elementary Schools, vol. 1: Report and Appendices.
120. Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild, 78.
121. By 1909 there were only 284 full-time and 32 part-time school medical officers, and only 44 of them had been appointed solely in that capacity (with 22 of those working on a part-time basis). In 1920 there were a total of 2,003 doctors working as school medical officers or their assistants and 2,650 school nurses; those numbers had risen to 3,592 and 6,149 respectively by 1938. Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild, 56, 123-24.
122. Drawing upon Hutchison's characterization of the diverse clinical indicators of poor nutrition, Newman instructed school medical officers to attend to the functional efficiency and well-being of the schoolchild's whole body. It was "reasonable to suppose," he suggested, that they were "as capable of assessing the nutrition of his patients, as the teacher is of judging the intelligence of members of his class." Health of the School Child: Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education for 1908 (1909), Cd. 5426, xxiii.
123. Hutchison, Food and the Principles of Dietetics, chap. 3.
124. Bulkley, The Feeding of School Children, 170-71;
125. Barbara Drake, Starvation in the Midst of Plenty: A New Plan for the State Feeding of School Children (London, 1933), 9-10;
126. Save the Children Fund, Unemployment and the Child (London, 1933), 76-77;
127. Wal Hannington, The Problem of the Distressed Areas (London, 1937), 82.
128. Alarmed at the criticism being directed at Newman and his medical officers, the BMA defended them on the grounds that there was neither a "satisfactory and accepted routine method" to assess an individual's nutritional condition nor "a satisfactory standard of 'normal nutrition.'" Cited in Hurt, "Feeding the Hungry Schoolchild," 195.
129. Even the Medical Officer despairingly noted: "We must find out the clinical signs of malnutrition, for these we do not know." Cited in Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild, 130-31.
130. The "more precise, uniform, and comparable classification[s]" approved were "excellent," "normal," "slightly subnormal," and "bad"; the older supplementary categories of malnutrition "requiring observation" and "requiring treatment" were scrapped. Board of Education, "Minutes of Meeting of Medical Staff Committee, 28 Sept 1934," PRO ED 50/78 (M456/171).
131. A memo to Newman acknowledged that the report confirmed what "we have recognised for some time that the summary of these returns published annually will not bear detailed examination." Board of Education, "Memo to Sir G. Newman from Cecil Maudsley 10.4.34 on Dr Simpson's Report on Standards of Nutrition," PRO ED 50/51 (M456/150).
132. For just two examples: "The Official Meaning of Malnutrition," Bulletin of the Committee against Malnutrition 9 (July 1935): 28-31;
133. R. H. Jones, "Physical Indices and Clinical Assessments of the Nutrition of Schoolchildren," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 101, no. 1 (1938): 1-52.
134. J. A. Glover, "A Critical Examination of the Nutrition Returns over a Period of Five Years," 23,
135. PRO ED 50/204. For an earlier indication of doubt, in response to the criticisms of the CAM, see Maudsley's memo "Deputation of Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's Organisations, 22 Oct 36," PRO ED 50/216 (167A).
136. F. Le Gros Clark, ed., National Fitness: A Brief Essay on Contemporary Britain (London, 1938).
137. Charles Segal, Penn'orth of Chips: Backward Children in the Making, with an Introductory Note by Dr Cyril Burt (London, 1939), 122-23;
138. Drake, Starvation in the Midst of Plenty, 15-16.
139. We know even less about factory canteens and community restaurants than we do about school meals, but for a preliminary charting of their connections, see Vernon, Modernity's Hunger, chap. 7.
140. Although the number of school meals served daily had risen slightly between 1935 and 1939, from 143,000 to 160,000, it had fallen back to 130,000 by July 1940 before rising to a wartime peak of 1,650,000 by February 1945. Richard Titmuss neatly summarizes that whereas one child in thirty was fed at school at the beginning of the war, by its end one in three were receiving meals, even if only 14 percent of those were free. Richard Morris Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London, 1950), 510.
141. Burnett, "Rise and Decline," 66;
142. Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild, 196-97.
143. Le Gros Clark, Social History of the School Meals Service, 2.
144. Drake, Starvation in the Midst of Plenty, 16.
145. Eddie Williams, School Milk and Meals (Rogerstone, 1944), 3;
146. Bulkley, The Feeding of School Children, 199.
147. Quoted in Bryant, School Feeding, 74;
148. Austin Priestman, The Work of the School Medical Officer (London, 1914), 4;
149. Williams, School Milk and Meals, 3.
150. The initial 1906 Report on the Education (Provision of Meals) Act noted: "To many of the poorest children a well ordered meal, with its accompaniments of clean table-cloths, clean crockery, and seemliness of behaviour, is almost unknown; and it is hoped, with some confidence, that the object lessons supplied by the meals provided ... will have more than a transitory effect upon the behaviour of the children who have received them." Quoted in Charles E. Hecht, Rearing an Imperial Race: Containing a Full Report of the Second Guildhall Conference on Diet, Cookery and Hygiene, with Dietaries (London, 1913), 17.
151. National Union of Teachers and the Gloucestershire Training College of Domestic Science, School Canteen Handbook (Toddington, 1940), 8.
152. This was a consistent theme among educationalists: see Millicent MacKenzie, "The School Meal," in Hecht, Rearing an Imperial Race, 18,
153. and Cyril Norwood, Headmaster of Harrow School, in National Union of Teachers, The Schools at Work: Being a Pictorial Survey of National Education in England and Wales (London, 1935), 9.
154. Bulkley, The Feeding of School Children, 169.
155. Hecht, Rearing an Imperial Race, 398;
156. Board of Education, "Memorandum on Methods of Providing Meals for Children in Connection with Public Elementary Schools and on Dietaries Suitable for the Present Circumstances," Circular 856, 15 August 1914, 6, Labour History Museum, WNC.26/ 1/1/1 .
157. Board of Education, "Memorandum on Methods";
158. see also Nancy Sharman, Nothing to Steal: The Story of a Southampton Childhood (London, 1977), 39.
159. As Millicent MacKenze put it: "It is, of course, necessary to instruct the pupils, but once they understand their work, it is educationally better to make them as responsible as possible for the organization and carrying out of arrangements." Hecht, Rearing an Imperial Race, 20.
160. On the proliferation of working-class memoirs and testimonies, see Chris Waters, "Autobiography, Nostalgia, and the Changing Practices of Working Class Selfhood," in G. K. Behlmer and F. M. Levanthall, eds., Singular Continuities (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 178-95;
161. and James Vernon, "Telling the Subaltern to Speak: Mass Observation and the Formation of Social History in Post-war Britain," in Actas del II Congreso International: Historia a Debate (Coruna, Spain, 2000), 139-50.
162. "London County Council Education (Provision of Meals) Act 1906: Rules to Be Observed in Connection with the Management of Dining Centres," reproduced in Hecht, Rearing an Imperial Race, 267.
163. See the detailed correspondence in "Provision in Rural Areas: Supervision, 1936-1943," PRO ED 11/300.
164. Many teachers appear to have already been freely offering their voluntary services; they were rewarded with the dubious pleasure of a free meal. "Particulars Regarding the Provision of School Canteens," 6, PRO ED 50/219.
165. The National Union of Teachers, which had wanted teachers to receive extra payment for "dinner duty," lost this battle, if not the war. In 1968, supervising meals was finally classed as voluntary duty. Nan Berger, The School Meals Service: From Its Beginnings to the Present Day (Plymouth, 1990), 24.
166. During the 1950s, the Ministry of Education was fond of blaming the lack of support by teachers for the poor uptake of school meals. See "Special Services General Files: Inquiry into the Take Up of School Meals, 1954-1955," PRO ED 50/431.
167. This was especially the case in rural areas; see "School Dinners from Central Kitchens or Depots," Herefordshire County Council, Education Committee, March 1947, in Herefordshire Record Office, Llanwarne Parish Records, G52/83.
168. Bulkley, The Feeding of School Children, 76-106.
169. At one such center in London in 1913, children were forced to "scramble for a dozen mugs, in complete contradiction to any lessons in manners of hygiene they may have been taught," while at another they were "packed like sardines without elbow room to feed themselves properly." George Rainey, "Paris and London," in Hecht, Rearing an Imperial Race, 421.
170. On their association with the workhouse, see Williams, School Milk and Meals, 5.
171. Segal, Penn'orth of Chips, 92.
172. The majority of these (at 347 schools) were in county boroughs where children lived at a greater distance from school, and thus returning home for a midday meal was difficult. "Particulars Regarding the Provision of School Canteens (as Distinct from Feeding Centres), 1936," ED 50/219.
173. Of fifty-four areas inspected, only 5 percent were found to be "really good" and 20 percent were "entirely unsatisfactory," with the remainder having so "many serious defects" that they could "not be looked upon as up to any reasonable standard." "Provision of Meals," Report of Edna Langley to Dr Glover, 4 April 1939, M 501/262.
174. "On other days, a spoon only is given the children." Segal, Penn'orth of Chips, 92.
175. These designs probably originated from the Ministry of Works Experimental Building Research Station in Watford. One of these model canteen kitchens, complete with all the latest equipment from the newly produced Catalogue of School Canteen Equipment and sample wall finishes, was exhibited behind the Täte Gallery, where district school inspectors and LEA officials were invited to inspect it. See September 1943 memos from Agnes Miller and Miss Langley, as well as circular letter to LEAs, 13 October 1943, ED 50/219.
176. See C. Cameron, "School Canteens and Kitchens," 20 September 1943,
177. and "Comments on the Draft Explanatory Memorandum to the proposed Town and Country Planning Order," 8 January 1944, HLG 71/899.
178. For a general consideration of the new conception of the social at the center of this program, see Andrew Saint, Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School-Building in Post-war England (New Haven, Conn., 1987).
179. "Particulars of Proposals Noted in Buildings Section for Building Schools by Experimental and Demonstration Methods," ED 150/23;
180. "Ministry of Works Organisation: The Present Position," 1, ED 150/156;
181. "The Standards for School Premises Regulations, 1951," Statutory Instruments, no. 1753;
182. Medical Research Council and Building Research Group, "Joint Committee on Lighting and Vision: Proposed New Regulations for the Lighting of Schools," ED 150/25.
183. By 1956, every scheme of permanent construction was calculated in terms of costs per square foot. Nine square feet were allowed for each primary dining space, ten square feet at secondary school. "Planning Requirements (General): Canteen Provision," 1951-56, ED 150/104,
184. G. L. Thornton to Sir Arthur Binns, 4 September 1956, "School Meals Service: Building Programme," ED 50/760;
185. "Tables to Show Approximate Costs of Ks, K.D.Rs and D.Rs of Various Sizes in Permanent Construction," ED 50/760.
186. Only 25.5 percent of schools boasted their own purpose-built dining rooms, with a further 48.6 percent using assembly halls or other dual-function rooms and 12.1 percent still serving dinner in classrooms (a figure that rose to 30.4 percent in rural schools) - a factor acknowledged to deter some "from staying to dinner at school." Some 13.8 percent of children dined away from their own schools, the vast majority (10 percent) in hired premises such as village or church halls. Ministry of Education, Report of an Inquiry into the Working of the School Meals Service (1955-56) (London, 1956).
187. On the competing merits of different materials and arrangements, see Willard Stanley Ford, Some Administrative Problems of the High School Cafeteria (New York, 1926). Laminated and stackable tables and chairs became the focus from the 1950s;
188. see London County Council, School Furniture (London, 1958).
189. Bryant, School Feeding, 56;
190. Priestman, The Work of the School Medical Officer, 3;
191. Hecht, Rearing an Imperial Race, 400.
192. The work was overseen by its senior engineer in conjunction with its senior catering adviser. "Ministry of Works Organisation: The Present Position," 1, ED 150/156.
193. See, for example, Ministry of Education, School Meals Service: Equipment Catalogue, 1947 (London, 1947).
194. See the entire file of correspondence in "Wartime Meals: School Canteen Equipment, West Bromwich," 1943, MAP 900/103.
195. See also "Care and Maintenance of Insulated Containers," School Meals Service: Canteen Leaflet, no. 4 (1951).
196. J. W. Beeson (Director of Education, Norwich) to W. D. Pile, 19 June 1952; also Norwich City Architect, "Memorandum, School Meals Service - Kitchen and Dining Rooms. Insulation and Prevention of Condensation," 23 May 1952, ED 150/104.
197. By the mid-1950s, the kitchens' wooden working surfaces had also run afoul of the Ministry of Health's new food hygiene regulations, which recommended the use of Formica or stainless steel tops. W. B. Ashplant to A & B General, "Food Hygiene Regulations, 1955," 12 October 1956, ED 150/156,
198. For instance, anthropometric studies informed the new British standards for tables and chairs drawn up in 1955. With a sloping design to "fit the children" and prevent "bad posture," they were produced in five sizes to accommodate the stages of child development and ensured a minimum table area allowance for each child. Strength and durability were stressed (wood or aluminum frames were subjected to performance tests), but so too was convenience (stackable for easy storage), hygiene (materials were "durable, non-absorbent, hygienic, and easily cleaned"), and silence (cushioned legs reduced noise and floor scratches). A. F. B. Nail (Assistant Technical Director, BSI) to Johnston Marshall (Chief Architect, Ministry of Education), 5 November 1953, ED 150/80; G. Weston (Technical Director, BSI) to W. D. Pile, "School Furniture Press Conference," 7 October 1955, ED 150/80;
199. BSI, "Sub-Committee - Dining Tables and Chairs of Technical Committee - School Furniture, Revised Draft Standard for School Dining Tables and Chairs," April 1955, ED 150/80.
200. Drake, Starvation in the Midst of Plenty, 16.
201. London County Council, Meals for School Children (London, 1947), 5.
202. See also London County Council, Education in London, 1945-1954: A Report by the Education Officer (London, 1954), 87.
203. Bryant, School Feeding, 50-51.
204. F. Le Gros Clark, The School Child's Taste in Vegetables: An Inquiry Undertaken by F. Le Gros Clark, BA, and Presented to the Education Committee, Foreword by J. C. Drummond (Hertford, 1943), 13, 14.
205. Priestman, The Work of the School Medical Officer, 13, 4.
206. On the growing popularity of porridge at home given its use at school breakfasts, see Bulkley, The Feeding of School Children, 200.
207. Ernie Benson, To Struggle Is to Live: A Working Class Autobiography in Two Volumes (Newcastle, 1979), 1: 39.
208. Le Gros Clark, The School Child's Taste in Vegetables, 11.
209. Kathleen Dayus, Her People (London, 1982), 15;
210. Sharman, Nothing to Steal, 39;
211. Benson, To Struggle Is to Live, 1: 44-45;
212. J. G. Atherton, Home to Stay: Stretford in the Second World War (Manchester, 1991), 6, 15.
213. E. R. Hartley, How to Feed the Children: Bradford's Example (Bradford, 1908),
214. quoted in Laura Mason, "Learning How to Eat in Public: School Dinners," in Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery: Public Eating (London, 1991), 208.
215. Quoted in Mason, "Learning How to Eat in Public," 208.
216. For characteristic examples from the testimonies of the poor, see Grace Foakes, Between High Walls: A London Childhood (London, 1972), 39;
217. Benson, To Struggle Is to Live, 1: 39;
218. and Fenner Brockway, Hungry England (London, 1932), 32.
219. On the hated visit of the school doctor or nurse, see Barbara Vaughan, Growing Up in Salford, 1919-1928 (Manchester, 1983), 9,
220. and Mary H. Dagnah, Castle Hall Revisited: Stalybridge in the Nineteen-thirties (Manchester, 1995), 5.
221. See Richards, Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe, 8,
222. and Audrey I. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe (London, 1939), 6.
223. This was an understanding that became central to the policies of the Ministry of Food, especially its Food Advice Division, during World War II. Its chief scientific adviser, Jack Drummond, insisted from the outset that the ministry acknowledge "the psychological importance of traditional foods." Ministry of Food, How Britain Was Fed in War Time (London, 1946), 46.
224. Quoted in Segal, Penn'orth of Chips, 93.
225. See, for example, Board of Education, "Memorandum on Methods," 7-10.
226. Brinson to Maudsley, 23 March 1937, in Board of Education, "Dietaries; the Oslo Breakfast; the London Health Dinner," 1937-1943, ED 50/219.
227. A rare success for Edna Langley, the inspector of provision of meals arrangements, who had previously failed to ensure the general adoption of the "Health Dinner" developed by the London County Council as a modified version of the Oslo Breakfast. Board of Education, "Dietaries; the Oslo Breakfast; the London Health Dinner." On the Oslo Breakfast, developed by Oslo's professor of hygiene Carl Schiøtz, see Inger Johanne Lyngo, "The Oslo Breakfast: An Optimal Diet in One Meal - On the Scientification of Everyday Life as Exemplified by Food," Ethnologia Scandinavica 28 (1998): 62-76.
228. For example, supervisors, cook-supervisors, cook caterers, cooks-in-charge, cooks, assistant cooks, kitchen assistants, and storekeepers. Board of Education, "Staff for the School Meals Service," Circular 1631 (24 June 1943);
229. "Special Services General Files: Staffing of School Canteens and Kitchens, 1947-52," ED 50/502.
230. Note that both the already cited School Canteen Handbook (1940)
231. and Balanced Menus for School Canteen Dinners (London, 1947; 2nd ed., 1958) were written in collaboration with domestic science experts (in addition to being the Surrey County Council's school meals officer, Morkam was the former head of the Domestic Science Department at Wimbledon Technical College).
232. The London County Council's Meals for School Children was written by W. J. O. Newton, the council's chief officer of meals services.
233. For other canteen manuals, see M. B. Neary, Canteen Management and Cookery (London, 1940);
234. Catherine H. MacGibbon, Canteen Management (Christchurch, 1941);
235. F. Le Gros Clark, The School Child and the School Canteen (Hertford, 1942);
236. John Douglas Mitchell, Successful Canteen Management (London, 1946);
237. Empire Tea Bureau, The Small Canteen: How to Plan and Operate a Modern Meal Service (London, 1947);
238. Dick T. Kennedy, Industrial Catering and Canteen Management (London, 1949);
239. and Jack Hampton, Canteen Cookery (London, 1953).
240. See also the journal Nutrition and Canteen Catering, published in London from 1946.
241. Mason, "Learning How to Eat in Public," 209. The survey was conducted by www.friendsreunited.com and BBC Good Food magazine, which published the results in September 2003, 105.
242. Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild, 200, 201.
243. These are areas where recent work has begun to trace different histories of the social in Britain: Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (Cambridge, 1998);
244. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom;
245. Philippa Grand, " 'Between Work and Sleep': The Problem of Leisure and Civil Society in Interwar Britain" (Ph.D. diss., University of Manchester, 2002);
246. and Daniel Ussishkin, "Morale: A Concept for Democracy" (Ph.D. diss., forthcoming, Berkeley, 2006).
247. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London, 1986), 122.
248. Gareth Stedman Jones, "Why Is the Labour Party in a Mess?" in Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983), 246.
249. On the persistence of the stigma of free school meals, see Frank Field, The Stigma of Free School Meals: A Child Poverty Action Group Report (London, 1974).