Free A Child's War by Mike Brown

eggs; 2 for adults, 4 for green ration book holders. 4 Pods of the wild rose. 5 7 pints a week for green ration book holders. 6 b) and e).

SEVEN
Clothing
    Children’s clothes were far more formal in the 1930s and 1940s than they are today; their versions of trainers, track-suits and sports wear were strictly limited to the games field. For younger boys, perhaps 4 to 14 years old, normal dress consisted of short trousers, long socks, worn with sandals or boots, a shirt and tie (usually a school tie, often knitted), worn with a v-necked jumper and a jacket or school blazer. The whole outfit was finished off with a cap, usually from school or the Cubs. The illustrations to Richmal Crompton’s Just William depict this perfectly.
    For younger girls of school age, cotton frocks (dresses) in summer and gym-slips and blouses in winter were standard, worn with long socks or lisle stockings, sandals or shoes, topped with cardigans or jumpers, and either a school beret or a hat (straw in summer, felt in winter).
    In winter, boys and girls would add overcoats or raincoats, with knitted woollen scarves, knitted gloves and, perhaps, wellington boots.
    The passage from childhood to adulthood was very different at this time; at about 14 or 15 children suddenly became adults. The concept of the teenager appeared only in the 1950s as a reflection of the increased spending power of the age group brought about by post-war prosperity.
    Fashions reflected this: teenage boys wore smaller versions of men’s suits, which were sold with the option of long or short trousers; similarly teenage girls began to wear smaller versions of their mothers’s day dresses, and stockings instead of socks.
    Some items of clothing were introduced, or made fashionable, by the war. Trousers, totally a male preserve before the war, were worn by more and more women, along with the ‘siren suit’ – what we might today call a boiler suit or overalls – and a head scarf. These were worn by factory workers and so wearers had the air of doing their patriotic duty; as such the clothes became fashionable, especially among the middle classes. Another item of wartime ‘clothing’ was the helmet: gentlemen’s hatters, such as Dunn’s, sold bakelite versions of the steel helmet, and every boy, including William, wanted their own. In William and the Evacuees (published in 1940), Richmal Crompton showed William in urgent need of 1 s 6 d – but penniless:
    William wanted a tin hat. All the other Outlaws, all the other boys he knew, had tin hats of one sort or another, but it so happened that William was without either a tin hat or the money to buy one. Very inferior ones could be bought for as little as sixpence in Hadley, but William did not want an inferior one, and in any case he did not possess sixpence. The one he wanted cost one and six, but he was as likely to possess the moon as one and six, he told himself, adding with bitter sarcasm, ‘a jolly sight likelier’.
R ATIONING
    Clothes rationing was announced on 1 June 1941 as coming into force immediately. unlike food rationing, it was not primarily brought in as a result of shortages of raw materials, but in order to release factories and factory workers for war work. There were no separate ration books available, but people were told to use the spare coupons in their food ration books for the first year. Separate clothing ration books were first issued on 1 June 1942, these having red covers.
    Rationing was extremely tight. The following suggested plans from a book printed at the time show how little you could get (children’s outfits would be similar, with just a few changes, for example, girls socks instead of stockings).
Four-year Plan for a Woman’s Wardrobe
First year
Second year
1 pair shoes
1 pair shoes
6 pairs stockings
6 pairs stockings
10 ounces wool or 2.5 yards material
8 ounces wool or 2 yards material
1 suit
1 silk dress
1 overcoat
underwear: cami-knickers or vest and
2 slips
knickers (2 or 3