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The Diet of the Nation: The State, Family Budgets and the 1930s Nutritional Crisis in Britain
Ingrid Jeaclea
aThe University of Edinburgh Business School 29 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9JS, Scotland, United Kingdom
E-mail address: [email protected].: + 44-131-6508339Fax: + 44-131-6508337
Abstract
In 1930s Britain a new attention to physical culture emerged in the shape of a National
Fitness Campaign. At the same time a fierce political debate took place over the state of
nutritional health of the nation. Left wing activists argued that the working classes were
significantly malnourished due to an insufficiency of income. The government responded by
arguing that it was the domestic ignorance of the working class housewife that was the
problem. This debate raged in public forums from parliament to popular press – the term
‘Hungry England’ becoming a common catchphrase. It enrolled a host of medical experts,
public bodies and voluntary organisations. Surveys of poor neighbourhoods were conducted
to determine nutritional health. Based on family household budgets, these surveys revealed
that working class incomes were insufficient to achieve optimum dietary needs and
inferences were drawn regarding the nutritional state of the nation. Ultimately, a host of
welfare policies to combat these nutritional deficiencies were initiated and we witness the rise
of the British Welfare State. This paper examines the polarised political debates of this period
from a governmentality perspective (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992). The
framework facilitates an understanding of the way in which diverse actors became enrolled in
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the two nutritional discourses and the mediating role of experts in the process. It also reveals
the influential role of calculative technologies, particularly the budget, within the
programmatic of government. Finally, this theoretical approach highlights the governance of
the body inherent in these dietary and fitness interventions. The notion of the fit and healthy
disciplined body that emerged during this time period reflects the cultural trends to come in
terms of contemporary obsessions with diet and body image.
Keywords: Diet, calories, governmentality, household budget, nutrition, physical culture
1. Introduction
Obsession with diet and physical culture is omnipresent in contemporary society. The latest
sliming fad is a regular feature of women’s magazines while celebrity endorsement of fitness
programmes is pervasive. To understand this particular juncture in popular culture and the
position of the body within it, it is useful to reflect upon a period of history in which modern
concepts of diet and exercise were shaped. The free choice to engage with the discipline of
dieting or the pursuit of physical exercise presupposes certain conditions. To purposefully
reduce food intake assumes a surfeit of food in the first instance, an understanding of dietary
nutrition, and the means of measuring the calorific composition of food consumption.
Equally, an engagement with exercise assumes a degree of health and fitness and the leisure
time in which to pursue such physical activities. Both diet and exercise also presuppose the
cultural conditions under which it is not only socially acceptable to engage with these actions,
but that it is actually regarded as a form of good citizenship. From a Foucauldian perspective,
the lean, fit and healthy body is a public manifestation of self-discipline (Foucault, 1979).
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It is possible to trace the shaping of such contemporary perspectives to 1930s Britain, a
decade during which the diet and fitness of the population came under an unprecedented
degree of scrutiny. From the mid-nineteenth century, since the early advances in nutritional
research, there had been a growing awareness of the nation’s health and fitness (Zweiniger-
Bargielowska, 2010). By 1920, the formal offices of both state and profession associated with
health provision, such as the Ministry of Health and the British Medical Research Council,
were established (Webster, 1982, p.111). Consequently, the scene was set for a significant
surge of interest in all aspects of the citizen’s diet and physical culture during the 1930s. In
terms of exercise, the physical pursuits of the populace were promoted during this decade
through a host of newly formed clubs and voluntary organisations. Public spaces devoted to
sports and leisure activities opened up, while mass displays of gymnastics were a common
spectacle. The image of the fit and healthy citizen becomes a powerful propaganda symbol in
the government’s National Fitness Campaign. During the same period, a discourse on diet
becomes manifest in which the nutritional status of the poor becomes a subject of press and
political debate. Two polar camps, each supported by eminent experts, emerge to explain the
existence of malnutrition as either a problem of insufficient income or a problem of domestic
ignorance. Left wing activists call for significant welfare reforms while the government
pursue a low cost solution centred upon domestic education. Consequently, 1930s Britain
marks a fascinating period in which not only are the cultural conditions for contemporary
obsessions with food and exercise moulded, but also an era in which we witness the
emergence of the modern welfare state through government interventions into the diet and
fitness of the nation (Kamminga and Cunningham, 1995; Webster, 1982).
From an accounting perspective, this decade provides an opportunity to highlight the way in
which calculative technologies, in the form of the household budget, became entangled in
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political debate and controversy. The role of the household budget has previously been a
fruitful subject of inquiry within accounting scholarship (Walker and Carnegie, 2007;
Komori, 2012). In this particular case, drawing upon a mixture of contemporary literature and
1930s publications, the paper examines the use of the budget by left wing reformers in
confirming the problem of malnutrition amongst the working classes. Consequently the paper
seeks to illustrate the manner in which calculative practices became bound up with discourses
surrounding the diet of the nation.
In making this argument, the paper draws upon the governmentality framework based on the
seminal works of scholars Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and
Miller; 1992). Governmentality offers a useful theoretical lens from which to view the
nutritional debates of the 1930s; the polarised political approaches to the problem of
malnutrition can be seen to represent two programmes of government. It explains the
mediating role of an array of medical and dietary experts in the nutritional discourse, and it
facilitates an understanding of the role of calculative technologies within the programmatic of
government. The governmentality framework also provides the tools by which the macro
programmes of government can be linked to the actions of autonomous citizens, in this case
highlighting how the government’s National Fitness Campaign and dietary education
initiatives sought to promote the fit and healthy self-disciplining body.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The next section introduces the paper’s
theoretical framework and outlines the value of a governmentality lens in understanding the
means by which the self regulating citizen is cultivated in the modern state. Section 3
recounts a key political crisis that dominated 1930s Britain: the problem of a hungry nation.
Set against the background of an economic depression, this section outlines the political
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divide which emerged between the government and left wing activists over the nutritional
health of the poor and whether the problem was due to a deficit of income or ignorance.
Section 4 describes the government’s solution to the nation’s nutritional crisis in the shape of
a programme of domestic education and the launch of a National Fitness Campaign. Section
5 examines two significant surveys of family budgets which were conducted during this era
and assesses their role as technologies of government. In section 6 we see how the results of
these surveys were seen as objective evidence that malnutrition was an economic problem
rather than one which could simply be ascribed to the extravagance, ignorance and moral
failings of the working class housewife. Section 7 recounts the resulting programme of
welfare reform which led to the creation of the British Welfare State. Finally, section 8
discusses the insights of the paper for understanding contemporary obsessions with diet and
exercise and contains some concluding thoughts on the contribution of accounting
scholarship for cultural studies.
2. Governing the nation
The governmentality framework (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992) offers an
explanation of how power operates in contemporary liberal democracies. In other words, it
provides an insight into the indirect mechanisms by which the actions of free thinking,
autonomous citizens are influenced. Drawing upon the work of Foucault (1991), the
framework recognises that political power in contemporary society is embedded in the
myriad of techniques for knowing and governing the populace. To understand power then,
one needs to move “beyond the state” (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.173) and examine how
authorities regulate the lives of individuals in an indirect manner.
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Such shaping commences with an initial intervention, with a specific purpose or problem to
cure (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.181). Through discourse, a domain and space is opened up for
this problem such that it becomes defined and knowable (Miller and Rose, 1990, p.5).
Discourse also provides the “moral justifications” for intervention (Rose and Miller, 1992,
p.175). In this manner, governmentality possesses a programmatic character as it constructs a
realm in need of governing. A programme of government possesses the promise to remedy
the problem, it presents an “idealized schemata for the ordering of social and economic life”
(Miller and Rose, 1990, p.14).
Programmes in turn become enabled through technologies of government. These represent
the “calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which
authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions” (Rose and Miller,
1992, 175). It is this exhaustive array of techniques of inscription, notation and calculation
that make programmes operable, and accounting and other calculative practices constitute
prime examples of such technologies (Miller, 2001).
For governance to be achieved in an indirect and self-regulating manner, Miller and Rose
draw upon Latour (1986, 1987) and Callon’s (1986) work on the theory of translation. The
process of translation explains how a network of interests becomes aligned “such that the
problems of one and those of another seem intrinsically linked in their basis and their
solution” (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.184). Through the enrolment and mobilisation of such
diverse actors, governance at a distance becomes possible (Miller and Rose, 1990, p.34).
Accounting and calculative practices more generally play an important role in this process as
they construct centres of calculation which render distant domains knowable and calculable
(Rose and Miller, 1992, p.185). In this manner governance from afar is enabled.
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The process of governing also depends heavily on the role of experts. These knowledgeable
characters construct enclosures around a body of knowledge and seek to claim it as their own
(Rose and Miller, 1992, p.188). Offering objective opinion, experts act as vital linking
mechanisms between the goals of government and the thoughts and deeds of the free thinking
individual. “By means of expertise, self regulatory techniques can be installed in citizens that
will align their personal choices with the ends of government” (Rose and Miller, 1992,
p.189). Experts therefore mediate between the realms of the individual and the state.
In summary, in providing a framework for understanding the exercise of power in the modern
state, and the manner in which links are created between macro programmes of government
and the micro actions of autonomous citizens, the governmentality thesis is a powerful tool
for the qualitative researcher. It explains the “self-government of individuals” (Miller and
Rose, 1990, p.28). Indeed, such is the contribution of the governmentality perspective that
Rose and Miller’s (1992) paper has been recognised by the British Journal of Sociology as
one of the most influential articles in the field of sociology in the last 60 years. As McKinlay
and Pezet (2010, p.494) similarly observe, the combined works of Miller and Rose, whom
they refer to as ‘the London governmentalists’, has led to “the development of a coherent,
sustained research programme that has generated new theoretical and empirical insights about
a wide range of topics – from marketing to social welfare – and spanning two centuries.”
Perhaps one of the reasons for its significance is that governmentality is not confined to
government. While the institutions of education, health, and public planning form illustrative
instances of governance, it is important to note that the governmentality framework is not
restricted to understanding the influence of ‘the state’, but rather has a much broader reach in
explaining the many and varied modes for governing and regulating individual lives in
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contemporary society. Indeed, suggest Miller and Rose (2008, p.20) it is these non-state
modes of power that are “the defining features of our present”.
For the accounting researcher, the framework offers a valuable lens to view the role of
calculative technologies in the process of governing. Important contributions have already
been made in this regard by a number of scholars. Commencing with the seminal study of
Miller and O’Leary (1987), the possibilities of calculative practices for sociological research
have been theoretically debated by Vollmer (2003), while empirical insights into the self
regulating impact of accounting have been revealed in the works of Neu and Heincke 2004,
Graham (2010), and Spence and Rinaldi (2013). Such studies are important in order to
understand the far reaching influence of accounting within contemporary society. For
accounting is not confined to financial statements or factory processes, but is an active
participant in shaping the contours of an array of diverse domains. Governmentality
recognises this inherent role of calculative practices and hence embeds them within the
framework. In this manner, the governmentality framework facilitates an understanding of
the broader role of accounting within its social and organizational context (Hopwood, 1983).
The next sections deploy the governmentality framework in considering the exercise
initiatives and diet debates that dominated 1930s Britain.
3. Hungry Britain: a nation’s nutritional crisis
3.1 Setting the nutritional norm
The origins of modern nutrition date back to the work of the mid-nineteenth century German
chemist Justus von Liebig (Finlay, 1995, p.49) and in particular to his 1842 seminal study
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Animal Chemistry in which he illustrated chemistry’s significance for diet (Kamminga and
Cunningham, 1995 p.4). It was another German chemist, Karl Voit who established dietary
norms for the daily intake of protein, fat, and carbohydrate (Milles, 1995, p.78) while his
pupil Max Rubner subsequently determined the exact energy values of food in the form of
calories in the 1880s (Weatherall, 1995, p.190). Vitamin research was developed during the
period 1910-1920. A key pioneer in this field was US biochemist Elmer V. McCollum, who
in 1918 authored the popular text The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition (Aronson, 1986, p.638).
It was at this stage that the importance of a diet rich in vitamins in the prevention of disorders
such as rickets and scurvy was recognised. Consequently, by the 1920s, the dietary and
nutritional needs of the body had been calibrated and an early calculative technology of
calories and vitamins intake had been created.
Scientific research into this ‘newer knowledge of nutrition’ exploded during the 1920s and
1930s, with some 5,000 academic papers published in 1933 alone (Mayhew, 1988, p.446).
An increasing public awareness of the value of vitamins and good nutrition also becomes
evident. The ideas were popularised in the press, with some nutritional scientists, for
example, the Professor of Physiology at King’s College of Household and Social Science,
even contributing to features in magazines such as Homes & Gardens (Horrocks, 1995,
p.238). Food manufactures such as Cadburys and Heinz were also quick to flaunt the vitamin
content of their products in newspaper advertisements (Horrocks, 1995, p.245).
The British Medical Research Council (BMRC) recognising the importance of advancing
public awareness of the value of a nutritional diet, lobbied government throughout the 1920s
to promote the issue (Mayhew, 1988, p.447). The Ministry responded by creating an
Advisory Committee on Nutrition in 1931 comprising of leading experts in the field of
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nutrition and physiology (Petty, 1989, p.84). One of the Advisory Committee’s early reports,
The Criticism and Improvement of Diets (1932), set out a minimum diet of 3000 calories per
man per day (Petty, 1989, p.100). The Advisory Committee, however, under the specific
instructions of the Minister of Health, Sir Edward Hilton Young, did not translate these
minimum diets into cash terms, so the monetary cost of actually achieving this diet was
purposely left opaque (Mayhew, 1988, p.448).
At the same time as these early dietary standards began to emerge however, the country
entered a period of such deep depression and unemployment that the poor were soon
prevented from meeting even the most minimum of nutritional needs. The following sub-
section provides some context to the spectre of a hungry nation that was to subsequently
emerge.
3.2 Depression, poverty and hunger marches
The Wall Street crash of 1929 created significant ripples throughout global economies. While
Britain escaped its immediate effect, by 1931 it was feeling the repercussions fully (Flinn,
1963, p. 281). A report produced by the Committee on National Expenditure (the May
Committee) in July 1931 forecast a national budget deficit of £120 million, resulting in the
hasty acquisition of loans from Paris and New York (Graves and Hodge, 1950, p.255).
Foreign funds to the sum of £350 million had flown out of London by December 1931 (May,
1995, p.388). The crisis was so intense that it led to the collapse of the Labour government in
August 1931 (May, 1995, p.389) and a new National Government, comprising of a coalition
of Conservative, Liberal and Labour members, was quickly assembled (Graves and Hodge,
1950, p.255).
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The ensuing depression was particularly harsh during the years of 1932 and 1933 (Flinn,
1963, p. 281). In the latter year, for example, unemployment stood at just under three million,
with one worker in five unemployed (Stevenson, 1984, p.266). Traditional industries were
particularly affected by the depression. Demand for coal on the domestic front fell with the
availability of electricity, while foreign importers began to turn to oil based fuels (May, 1995,
p.366). As a consequence coal output fell by one fifth between 1929 and 1933 (Stevenson,
1984, p.108). The textile industry, a backbone of 19th century Britain, had been in decline for
some years due to the growth in Indian cotton markets, but the depression years brought
production down to half its 1910s level (May, 1995, p.367). Shipbuilding was severely hit
and “almost came to a complete standstill in 1932” (Stevenson, 1984, p.108). The impact of
the decline in shipbuilding is most keenly captured in the case of Jarrow, a town in County
Durham, where the closure of the shipyard in 1935 resulted in the unemployment of 73% of
the working male populace (Flinn, 1963, p. 286). This pattern was repeated across the
country in regions which were more reliant on these traditional industries (Stevenson, 1984,
p.270). For example, unemployment levels from 1929 to 1936 were double the national
average in North Britain and Wales (May, 1995, p.374).
Unemployment exacerbated the problems of the poor due to the lack of any comprehensive
and long term provision for unemployment benefit. It was the Liberal government of 1906-14
who first initiated a system of unemployment insurance (Stevenson, 1984, p. 277). Benefits
though were limited to fifteen weeks a year, rising to two sixteen weeks periods from 1921
(Flinn, 1963, p.268). Given the sheer scale of unemployment by the 1930s however, further
‘transitional’ benefits had to be introduced for those who required assistance for longer than
these statutory spells (Flinn, 1963, p.268). By 1931, the cost of unemployment payouts
exceeded contributions by some £80 million a year (May, 1995, p.381). Such financial
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pressure was one of the reasons leading to the collapse of the Labour government in August
1931 (Stevenson, 1984, p.298). Due to the country’s deepening financial crisis, the newly
formed National Government decided to subject any extra transitional payments to a means
test (Graves and Hodge, 1950, p.257). The implication of the means test was that the
applicant was turned over to their local Public Assistance Committee for consideration (May,
1995, p.388). The later body had the power to withdraw benefits from those who possessed
some savings or even relatives who could support them (Graves and Hodge, 1950, p.257). By
1932 the means test was being applied to almost one million unemployed workers
(Stevenson, 1984, p.277).
Not surprisingly, the dire unemployment levels and lack of insurance provision led to a wave
of protest ‘hunger marches’ throughout the early 1930s, many of them organised by the
National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), an organization with Communist
associations (Graves and Hodge, 1950, p.332). One of the most high profile marches was
organised by the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson in 1935 and became known as the Jarrow
March as it encompassed a 300 mile march to London by the unemployed workers of Jarrow
town (May, 1995, p.377). Given that the support base of the Labour Party came from the
country’s trade union movement, in particular the Trade Union Congress (TUC) (Flinn, 1963,
p.245), it was inevitable that Labour members would engage with this form of workers’
protest. The Labour Leader Clement Attlee even addressed the audience at one of the hunger
marches organised by the NUWM (Graves and Hodge, 1950, p.333). However, the power of
unionised labour during the 1930s was relatively weak due to the legacy of the 1926 General
Strike (Stevenson, 1984, p. 198), a strike of almost two and a half million workers which had
lasted for several months without any real success (May, 1995, p.388). Despite Attlee’s
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presence at an NUWM event, this did not lead to any affiliation between the Communists and
the Labour Party. Hence no power could be mobilised for the poor from such a united front.
3.3 The problem of the hungry nation
Events were to take a dramatic turn in the spring of 1933 when news of the death of a thirty-
seven-year-old London housewife reached the press: Mrs Annie Weaving had starved herself
in order to feed her seven children (Mayhew, 1988, p.449). The tragedy provided an
opportunity for left wing activists to attack the government’s welfare policies. For political
context, the National Government which had been formed in 1931 remained in power for the
rest of this decade. It comprised a coalition of Liberals, Conservatives and Labour, “a
concentration of all that was lovably stupid of all three parties” (Graves and Hodge, 1950,
p.331). It became increasingly Conservative dominated as the decade wore on; even a
trebling of Labour’s representation in the House of Commons following the 1935 General
Election failed to outweigh the Conservative majority (Hinton, 1983, p.155). Hence as Hinton
(1983, p.152) observes, the notion of the 1930s as a ‘red decade’ is somewhat of a myth. The
Labour Party during this period typically “lacked fire” (Graves and Hodge, 1950, p.332).
Critics of the government adopted the slogan of a ‘hungry’ nation in their public
pronouncements. For example, drawing on Fenner Brockway's publication Hungry England
(1932), prominent left wing commentators, such as Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, declared: “The stark reality is that in 1933, for the mass
of the population, Britain is a hungry Britain, badly fed, clothed and housed” (Pollitt, 1933,
p.x-xi). In this manner then, the problem of malnutrition amongst the working classes became
firmly embedded in political discourse.
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Also under the banner of ‘Hungry England’, the Week-End Review publication launched its
own inquiry into the state of malnutrition amongst the poor (Mayhew, 1988, p.449). This
investigation caused some embarrassment for the Ministry of Health, not only because it was
conducted by Professor V. H. Mottram, a member of their own Advisory Committee on
Nutrition, but also that it translated the dietary standards of the Advisory Committee into cash
form: 5 shillings a week for a man (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010, p.285).
Later in the year, the British Medical Association’s (BMA) drew on the expertise of its own
Nutrition Committee to pronounce minimum dietary needs of 3,400 calories per man per day.
In selecting a higher calorie consumption than that determined by the Ministry’s Advisory
Committee, the BMA were following the lead of the international body, the League of
Nations Health Organisation (LNHO). This move reflected a commitment to establish dietary
standards not just sufficient to survive but also for ensuring optimum health (Weindling,
1995, p.321). To this end, the BMA report established sample diets for families. These
nutritional norms were to subsequently form the basis of the popular cookery book Family
Meals and Catering (published in 1935), and menus from it were widely reproduced in
magazines and newspapers of the era (Horrocks, 1995, p.239). However, the most important
feature of the BMA report was that it placed a monetary value on its diets by calculating the
weekly expenditure required to meet these nutritional norms ((Zweiniger-Bargielowska,
2010, p.286). For example, the weekly cost of consuming 3,400 calories a day was set at 5
shillings 11 pence and the weekly cost for feeding a family of husband, wife and three
children amounted to 22 shillings and 6 and a half pence (M’Gonigle and Kirby, 1936,
p.173).
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In the context of the economic recession of the 1930s, the BMA’s report brought the issue of
family income, particularly working class income, to the centre of the nutritional debate. By
shedding light on the monetary cost of dietary needs, the BMA report was warmly welcomed
by welfare campaigners (Petty, 1989, p.100). It supported left wing advocacy of a programme
of welfare reform to solve the problem of poverty and malnutrition. However, it also opened
up a bitter divide between the two committees (BMA Nutrition Committee and Ministry of
Health Advisory Committee on Nutrition). The BMA report precipitated outrage at the
Ministry on a number of levels. The minimum standards advocated within the BMA report
were higher than the Ministry’s own recommendations, they had a cash equivalent, and they
were supported by two members of the Ministry’s own Advisory Committee - Dr Buchan and
Professor Mottram (Mayhew, 1988, p.450-1). The Ministry responded by labelling the BMA
report as ‘Labour party tract’ (Mayhew, 1988, p.451), and argued that the BMA’s daily
calorie standards were too generous (M’Gonigle and Kirby, 1936, p.166). Hence expert
knowledge came to be used and abused by both political camps.
Ultimately unfavourable press coverage prompted the Ministry to address the differences
between the two committees’ dietary recommendations in a more serious manner. Despite
advice from George Newman (the government’s Chief Medical Officer) against holding any
joint meeting between the two committees as it “will involve the Ministry in a far-reaching
economic issue, which is most important to avoid - an issue which might easily affect wages,
cost of food, doles etc.”, the Minister of Health, Hilton Young responded to public pressure
and agreed to a meeting between the two parties (cited in Mayhew, 1988, p.451). This joint
meeting occurred in February 1934 at which a compromised scale of minimum dietary needs
was agreed and published in the form of a Ministry of Health White Paper (Zweiniger-
Bargielowska (2010, p.287). However, dissatisfied with the workings of the Advisory
15
Committee, its Chairman, Major Greenwood, resigned shortly afterwards (Mayhew, 1988,
p.452). The Committee itself subsequently collapsed (Webster, 1982, p.120).
4 Income or ignorance: the political and programmatic divide
The rift between the two nutrition committees reflected a more general division in opinion
between those who believed malnutrition was due to ignorance or moral failings and those
who argued that the poor simply had insufficient income to address dietary needs (Smith and
Nicolson, 1995, p.300). As Zweiniger-Bargielowska (2010, p.286) observes “nutrition
science – a rapidly evolving discipline – became politicized.” In governmentality terms, we
witness two parallel but opposing problems: a problem of domestic ignorance on the part of
the working class house wife versus a problem of poverty. This section examines the
government’s response to the nutritional crisis in the form of a programme of domestic
education and a national fitness campaign, both of which were designed to construct the fit
and healthy self-regulating citizen.
4.1 A programme of domestic education
The government’s official position throughout the 1930s was one of optimism regarding the
improving health of the nation. The annual reports of the Ministry of Health emphasised
declining mortality rates as an indicator of this trend (Webster, 1982, p.111). Equally, a
positive stance is particularly evident in the pronouncements of Sir George Newman, who
occupied the role of the government’s Chief Medical Officer from 1919 until 1935
(Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010, p.287). For example, in a 1939 publication, he declares:
'English people, on the whole, are today better fed, better clothed, better housed and better
16
educated than at any time of which we have record; and they enjoy a larger life and
opportunity than ever before.” (Newman, 1939, p.353).
The government were particularly keen to refute the idea that any malnutrition within the
population was due to a deficiency of income. For example, in Parliament, Hilton Young, the
Minister for Health, stated that there was “no available medical evidence of any general
increase in physical impairment, sickness or mortality as a result of the economic depression
or unemployment” (cited in Mayhew, 1988, p.452). To support such claims, he drew on the
results of a wide scale medical examination of school children, which by 1932 had indicated
such a decline in those numbers categorised as ‘bad’ so as to suggest that the problem of
malnutrition had virtually disappeared (Webster, 1982, p.112). However critics argued that
these statistics were meaningless due to the large variability of results across regions.
Subjective concepts of normalcy, based for example on a child’s pallor or hair condition,
meant that local medical officers could report vastly varied returns (Zweiniger-Bargielowska,
2010, p.288). In addition, some of the returns by the more ‘loyal’ of local officers were
simply unbelievable in nature, reporting such positive results in depressed areas that they
ultimately became an embarrassment to the government and a source of further evidence for
their critics (Webster, 1982, p.114).
Nutritional inquiries and surveys by Ministry officials which revealed results not compatible
with the government position were quietly buried. For example, the Ministry were eager to
squash any reference to the positive impact on maternal mortality rates as a result of extra
food in a report produced by the Medical Officer for Health of South Wales (Mayhew, 1988,
p.455). Equally external parties which suggested a link between malnutrition and income,
17
such as the Committee against Malnutrition, a grouping comprising doctors and the
Children's Minimum Council, “were frozen out from their inception” (Mayhew, 1988, p.455).
If pockets of malnutrition existed, argued the Ministry, it was due to the domestic ignorance
and wastefulness of the working class housewife. This position can be clearly seen in the
statements of key officials of the era. For example, Sir Arthur Robinson, permanent secretary
to the Minister of Health, claimed in 1933 that “malnutrition is ignorance quite as much as
insufficient income” (Petty, 1989, p.100), while E.P. Cathcart, a prominent member of the
Ministry’s Advisory Committee on Nutrition, argued that “bad cooking, bad marketing, bad
household economy, plays a bigger part than shortage of cash in the majority of cases of
malnutrition” (cited in Mayhew, 1988, p.450). From these statements it is evident that
charges of domestic ignorance are also tightly coupled with insinuations regarding moral
failure on the part of the working class housewife. As Kamminga and Cummingham (1995,
p.12) observe, a “moralizing, rhetorical dimension within nutritional discourse” becomes
evident.
Education was seen as the remedy to the problem, the means by which ignorance, the root of
diet related ill health could be weeded out. This stance was particularly advocated by the
government’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir George Newman, who used his annual reports as a
means by which he disseminated this message (Smith and Nicolson, 1995, p.297). In this
manner, the government’s response to the problem of malnutrition through ignorance was to
support a programme of domestic education. An example of this type of education was the
initiative of Elwin Nash (Medical Officer of Health for Heston and Isleworth) to provide a
series of cookery demonstrations to the poor. Funded by the Carnegie Trust, the
demonstrations were to be supervised by the Ministry of Health’s Advisory Committee on
Nutrition (Mayhew, 1988, p.450). For the government, intervention in the form of nutritional
18
education initiatives offered a low cost alternative to expensive reforms in the shape of
increased welfare benefits (Petty, 1989, p.99). As Smith and Nicolson (1995, p.298) have
argued, state intervention could be easily avoided if “health problems were moral and
individualistic, rather than economic”. From a governmentality perspective, the government’s
programme of domestic education was designed to create the self disciplining housewife, the
good citizen who cooked responsibly for her family’s dietary needs without recourse to state
benefits.
4.2 A programme of fitness and physical culture
Alongside the government’s domestic education initiatives, a programme of national fitness
was launched. During the 1930s in Britain, more generally, a new attention to the fitness and
physical culture of the nation’s citizens emerges (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010). We
witness this is a variety of ways. For example, a host of clubs and voluntary organisations
devoted to sports and recreation spring up during this period while existing ones, such as the
Football Association, experience a huge surge in members (Holt, 1987). Expenditure on
public recreational spaces such parks and lidos rises to reflect the growth in outdoor leisure
pursuits (Worpole, 2000). Local authority initiatives were also supported by voluntary
organisations such as the National Playing Fields Association which raised funds for both
play grounds and playing fields (Jones, 1988). The formation of the Youth Hostel
Association in 1930 encouraged the pursuit of hiking and cycling activities (Walker, 2000),
while the passing of holidays with pay legislation facilitated such experiences in the first
instance (Bray and Raitz, 2001). Camping flourished under the leadership of the Boy Scouts
organisation (Proctor, 2002) while female activities took the form of mass displays of
gymnastics and dancing staged by the Girl Guides and the newly established Women’s
League of Health and Beauty (Matthews, 1990).
19
All this activity reached a peak in the form of the Physical Training and Recreation Act of
1937. The new act established a National Fitness Council which launched a National Fitness
Campaign (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010, p.280). This government campaign sought,
together with voluntary organisations, to fund and promote the health and fitness of the
nation (Jones, 1987). Initiated by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain through the Ministry
of Health and the Board of Education, the campaign was a response Britain’s poor
performance in the 1936 Olympics, but it also addressed a political concern regarding the
fitness of the population for war. Military defeats during the Boer War (Funnell, 2006) and
public outcry at the rejection rates for recruits for the First World War had made national
fitness a political issue (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010). Hence the new campaign was
supported by a significant publicity drive which even successfully enrolled King George VI,
a keen camper and supporter of physical activity (Grant, 1994). It encompassed not only
high-profile spectacles, such as the Festival of Youth held at Wembley Stadium in July 1937,
but also hundreds of local events (Evans, 1974). Consequently, fitness becomes official
government policy and part of the “patriotic duty” of the good citizen (Zweiniger-
Bargielowska, 2010, p.293). In governmentality terms, the National Fitness Campaign can be
viewed as a programme of government which enrolled a diverse array of actors, from royalty
to road sweeper, in the pursuit of physical activities. Mediated through the expertise of a host
of clubs and sporting organisations, the programmatic of fitness rippled through the populace
such that the individual citizen becomes willingly indoctrinated into the virtues of exercise. In
this manner, the 1930s National Fitness Campaign cultivates the cult of physical culture and
the notion of the fit and healthy self disciplining body.
20
5 Family budgets as technologies of government
Left wing campaigners were vehemently opposed to the government’s domestic education
policies as they argued that income and not ignorance was the central issue in solving the
problem of malnutrition. Equally, the irony of a government campaign to promote the
physical culture of the nation when significant sections of the population were insufficiently
fed to pursue such activities was not lost on the government’s critics. By contrast, left wing
campaigners sought a more direct and costly form of intervention to solve the problem of
malnutrition, they advocated a programme of welfare reform. Indeed, this tension between
individual responsibility and state duty was a defining feature of the political discourse of the
decade (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010, p.268).
Increasingly the problem of malnutrition became a problem of measurement. The statistics
used to support the official government line began to be questioned by a host of welfare
bodies and independent experts (Webster, 1982, p.118). As noted above, the findings of
surveys of school children were viewed with suspicion due to their high degree of variability
and subjectivity. Equally, the Ministry’s much lauded decline in average mortality rates,
critics argued, failed to capture the great diversity between regional, occupational and class
groupings (Webster, 1982, p.116). What was needed was a reliable and seemingly objective
measure of malnutrition.
The measurement of poverty of course had its early roots in the work of social researchers
Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth before him. Booth’s investigation of conditions in
London’s East End in the late nineteenth century was one of the first to recognise the
existence of serious poverty (Flinn, 1963). Rowntree’s later study (1901) of 11,560 families
in York supported Booth’s findings (Ward, 2000, p.207). Specifically he concluded that thirty
21
per cent of the population was existing at a level unable to maintain ‘physical efficiency’
(Harris, 2000, p.61). Both studies were influential in that they attempted to establish that
poverty was an economic problem, rather than one of moral failing (Bowpitt, 2000, p.25).
Rowntree’s work was particularly important as it established poverty “as a scientifically
measurable phenomenon” (Bowpitt, 2000, p.23).
Over thirty years on, the family budget emerged once again as a measure of malnutrition, a
technology of government in a programmatic of welfare reform. Specifically, analysis of the
family household budget would reveal whether the poor had sufficient financial resources to
feed themselves in accordance with minimum dietary standards. In this manner, “the
nutritional state of the nation could be determined quite straightforwardly” (Webster, 1982,
p.121). In governmentality terms, it made the nation’s diet measurable and knowable.
5.1 The John Boyd Orr study
One of the first, and most prominent, surveys of family budgets during this era was
undertaken by John Boyd Orr. His book Food, Health and Income, which was first published
in 1936, was an attempt “to estimate the diets of different classes, including the whole
population, according to family income” (Orr, 1937, p.5). Orr first determined individual
dietary requirements by adopting those standards established by the US government’s Bureau
of Home Economics (ibid., p.18). This choice reflected Orr’s wish to use standards which
went beyond minimum requirements for existence to those which ensured an optimum state
of health and well being (ibid., p.7). In this regard, his standards were not generous in terms
of calories, requiring a calorie intake of only 2,810, but were comprehensive in terms of their
mineral and vitamin composition (ibid., p.18).
22
Orr then divided the population into six groups according to family income. Surveys were
conducted during the years 1932 to 1935 and 1,152 family budgets collected (Orr, 1937,
p.59). Then using the data from these budgets an estimate was made of the weekly food
expenditure by each income group of the population- see Table 1.
Insert Table 1
An analysis of the weekly expenditure on food contained within the 1,152 budgets allowed an
estimate to be made of the quantity of an array of foodstuffs consumed per week across
income groups – see Table 2. This information was insightful in that it revealed that while the
consumption of bread and potatoes was reasonably consistent across groups, there was a wide
variation in the consumption of foods such as meat, cheese, fish, eggs, fresh fruit and
vegetables with greater levels of consumption occurring at the higher income bands.
Insert Table 2
Orr then calculated the calorific quantities associated with these foodstuffs and compared
them with his optimum dietary standards – see Table 3. This comparison revealed
inadequacies in diet across the first three income groups of the population: the first two
groups consumed below the optimum level of calories (2,810), while the third group was
inadequate with regard to vitamins and mineral intake.
Insert Table 3
23
Hence Orr’s analysis of family budgets led to conclusions that were both stark and
depressing, finding “that a diet completely adequate for health, according to modern
standards, is reached at an income level above that of 50 per cent of the population” (ibid.,
p.11).
Not surprisingly, Orr’s publication attracted a significant amount of press attention (Petty,
1989, p.106). Indeed, even before its publication, Orr’s work had generated a great deal of
controversy. For example, in order to ensure publicity for his findings, Orr presented his
results at a British Medical Association lecture in Norwich in 1935 to which the press had
been invited. He also, proceeded with a public broadcast on the issue despite threats that he
would be brought before the Medical Council where his ability to practice medicine would be
revoked (Mayhew, 1988, p.458).
Conscious of the political nature of his findings, Orr also opted to publish his book
independently of the government with Macmillan publishers. His instincts in this regard
proved right as the Ministry’s Advisory Committee on Nutrition quickly appointed a
Statistical Sub-Committee to review Orr’s findings. These statisticians queried the reliability
of Orr’s results on the basis of only 1,152 family budgets (Orr, 1937, p.5). Orr’s use of
optimum dietary standards was also a subject of criticism, particularly his inclusion of
vitamin and mineral requirements. As Zweiniger-Bargielowska (2010, p.289) observes,
“vitamins acquired a political identity in the 1930s”. Orr countered such criticism by arguing
that his dietary requirements were in line with those international standards that had been
established by the League of Nations subsequent to his own publication (Orr, 1937, p.7).
24
Regardless of such criticism, Orr’s profound findings regarding the diet deficits of the poor
quickly became a political issue as evidenced by a seven-and-a-half hour Commons debate
on the theme of malnutrition in the summer of 1936 (Mayhew, 1988, p.458). Labour used
Orr’s findings to criticise the government’s level of welfare provision. Sir Kingsley Wood,
the Minister of Health, responded by drawing upon the work of Edward Cathcart, Professor
of Chemical Physiology at Glasgow University, who claimed that the health of the working
class was dependent on the character and education of the housewife as opposed to the level
of income (Smith and Nicolson, 1995, p.300-301). As a consequence, the publication did not
have any immediate impact on government policy. In the absence of widespread medical
evidence of malnutrition, the government maintained its stance that the issue of family
income was irrelevant to discussions regarding the health of the nation (Petty, 1989, p.106).
5.2 The M’Gonigle and Kirby study
A further seminal investigation into the population’s diet, which similarly drew on household
budgets, was conducted by M’Gonigle and Kirby. Their 1936 book, Poverty and Public
Health, examined the diet of the population of Stockton-on-Tees, an area of particular
poverty and high death rates, and the region for which M’Gonigle was the Medical Officer of
Health. Like Orr, M’Gonigle had been subject to the threat of removal from the Medical
Register if he participated in a public broadcast on the problem of malnutrition (Webster,
1982, p.112). As a practising medic, he had to succumb to that threat, but found an alternative
vehicle for his findings in the form of Poverty and Public Health, a book which received a
strong endorsement, in the form of its foreword from the Nobel Prize winning biochemist
Frederick Hopkins.
25
In their book, M’Gonigle and Kirby analysed the household budgets of 141 families in
Stockton-on-Tees (M’Gonigle and Kirby, 1936, p.194). The Budget Inquiry Schedule Form,
which they used to gather the data during the summer of 1935, sought a wealth of detail from
participants. For example, in addition to information on income, trade union subscriptions
and travelling expenses, the form asked for specifics regarding fourteen items of non-food
related household expenditure, from rent and fuel costs to clothing and cleaning products.
Deducting all expenditure from income, revealed the available monies for food purchases –
this generally equated with 45% of family income (M’Gonigle and Kirby, 1936, p.238). The
authors were careful to note that none of the non-food related expenditure was extravagant in
nature (ibid.). They then compared these funds with the income required to purchase the
minimum food rations as established by the British Medical Association’s Nutrition
Committee in 1933. This comparison revealed that only those families with the highest
household income (of between 70 and 80 shillings per week) had the available funds to meet
the BMA standards (M’Gonigle and Kirby, 1936, p.246). This led the authors to declare:
“It must be obvious, if a family is unable to allocate a weekly sum of money sufficient to
purchase the minimum diet considered necessary by the British Medical Association
Nutrition Committee to maintain health and working capacity, that there must be deficiencies
in the diet consumed” (M’Gonigle and Kirby, 1936, p.252).
Assuming that the conditions found in Stockton-on-Tees were replicated across the country,
M’Gonigle and Kirby (1936, p.263) consequently proposed that “nearly one half of the
population of England and Wales subsists, to a greater or lesser extent, below the safety line
of nutrition”. This depressing declaration stood in sharp contrast to the buoyant postulations
of the government of the day.
26
5.3 The housewife as a focus of expert study
M’Gonigle and Kirby (1936) also drew on their budget surveys to strongly counter the
government’s position that poor diet was due to the ignorance of the working class housewife
by arguing that “careful analysis of family budgets shows that such statements are, to a very
large extent, wide of the mark” (M’Gonigle and Kirby (1936, p.193).
This stance was reiterated a year later, when Wal Hannington, Secretary of the Unemployed
Workers Movement, published his book The Problem of the Distressed Areas. In this work,
Hannington (1937, p.60) fiercely criticised the “insidious propaganda” of the Ministry of
Health in diverting attention away from the issue of income to that of the ignorant working
class housewife. Similarly, the 1938 publication National Fitness by Le Gros Clark dismissed
the notion that it was the housewife’s ignorance or laziness that caused malnutrition, but
rather a lack of economic purchasing power.
As noted throughout this paper, the housewife was a prime focus of attack by the Ministry of
Health in the 1930s, with comments such as “malnutrition is perhaps as much a question of
ignorance as £.s.d.” by the Ministry’s Dr R.H. Simpson (Mayhew, 1988, p.453), a common
occurrence. One of the tasks of the Ministry’s Nutritional Committee therefore was seen to be
the dissemination of nutritional information, particularly in order to educate the working-
class housewife (ibid, p.448). Certainly, as Harris (1993, p.73) notes: “it was the wife’s skill or
ineptitude in making ends meet that largely determined the comfort or dereliction of working-class
homes.” Yet, domestic skill alone could not overcome an absence of income. Hence at the same time
as the Ministry of Health were making their pronouncements, the charitable organization, the
Pilgrim Trust, was raising concerns over the health of the housewife in the face of
unemployment and poverty, stating that women were “literally starving themselves in order
27
to feed and clothe the children reasonably well” (Stevenson, 1984, p.284). Such claims were
given substance in the results of studies of maternal mortality, such as those by Lady Rhys
Williams, which concluded that rates decreased significantly when pregnant women in South
Wales received extra food (Mayhew, 1988, p.455).
Rather than such isolated reports however, what was needed was a comprehensive study of
the working-class house wife, and an important step in achieving this end was reached with
the 1939 publication of Working-Class Wives: Their Health & Conditions. As the report’s
author, Margery Spring Rice observed, this publication addressed a neglect of the housewife
as a particular focus of inquiry:
Expert committees have examined and continue to examine problems of nutrition, the
essential needs of children, the improvement of recreational facilities, housing,
conditions of work, the effects moral and physical, of unemployment, and last but not
least the needs of the mother in pregnancy and child-birth. But currently little
attention is paid, and no scientific method is applied to the problems and needs of the
woman as housewife, as family chancellor, as friend, companion, nurse to her
husband and children, or even as mere human being (Spring Rice, 1929, p.27).
The report presents the results of a survey of the conditions of 1,250 married working class
women from 42 locations across Britain. The study was undertaken by the Women’s Health
Enquiry Committee which was established in 1933 by representatives from various women’s
organisations. For example, committee members included representatives from the Midwives
Institute, Women’s Co-Operative Guild, and Women Public Health Officers’ Association.
The author, Margery Spring Rice, was the first Secretary of the League of Nations Society
28
(the forerunner of the League of Nations Union) and was co-founder of the North Kensington
Women’s Welfare Centre, the largest of the London Voluntary Clinics for women. The data
for the study was collected by city and country Health Visitors using a questionnaire.
The results of the survey indicated the “deplorable extent” to which the housewife would
starve herself in order to feed her children (Spring Rice, 1929, p.157), or was simply too
exhausted to feed herself properly (ibid., p.161). In the great debate between income or
ignorance, the report was firmly on the side of a lack of income as the cause of this distress,
declaring: “Much might be done with more education and better facilities but the basic
difficulty of the great majority of these 1,250 mothers is the lack of financial resources.”
(Spring Rice, 1929, p.170). The current lack of such resources, it was argued, implied that
working-class housewives were unable to meet “basic nutritional needs” (ibid., p.156). The
report concluded with a range of recommendations to help the plight of these women.
Domestic education for young wives, to be provided by local Education Authorities, was
suggested as a useful means of ensuring the health and hygiene of the family. However, more
fundamental reforms to alleviate poverty were suggested which included support for a rise in
wages and a system of family allowances (payable to the mother). An extension of the system
of national insurance to cover the whole family and more maternal health care facilities were
also recommended. Consequently this study, alongside the results of household budgetary
surveys, provided further support for the introduction of a new system of welfare provision.
6 Governing the diet of the nation
It became increasingly difficult to ignore the issue of income and assume that good
housekeeping alone could solve nutritional needs in the light of further corroborating
inquiries such as those by Sir William Crawford and Herbert Broadley, whose 1938 study
29
The People’s Food was based on a sample of 5,000 family budgets. Similarly, a 1936 follow
up investigation by Seebohm Rowntree to his classic study of York determined that
household income was simply insufficient to sustain health and wellbeing in the 16,362
families surveyed (Briggs, 1964, p.292). Specifically, Rowntree established the notion of a
‘poverty line’ – a minimum income level needed to achieve the dietary requirements set out
by the British Medical Association (Briggs, 2000; Veit-Wilson, 2000, p.43). Together these
surveys and polemics provided a strong case that income, not ignorance, was a crucial factor
in malnutrition, and that significant sections of the working class were simply unable to
properly feed themselves from their meagre income (Webster, 1982, p.121). As Stevenson
(1984, p.283), observes: “by the end of the thirties there was an impressive catalogue of
evidence from the depressed areas that unemployment was producing poor nutrition and ill-
health”. Additionally, contrary to previous and potentially subjective investigations, the
budgetary surveys of Orr and others produced “an ‘objective’ measure of the cost of a
minimum diet” (Petty, 1989, p.106). As such, the budget provided an illustrative example of
a calculative technology by translating the subjective issue of a nation’s diet into “the
“elegance of the single figure” (Miller, 2001, p.382). In governmentality terms, the budget
gave credence to the existence of a problem of malnutrition due to poverty and hence
provided the moral justification for intervention. It supported and enabled the programme of
welfare reform advocated by left wing activists.
Such a programme of reform stood in stark contrast to the propaganda of the government’s
National Fitness Campaign and the construct of the fit and healthy citizen. As Zweiniger-
Bargielowska (2010, p.329) aptly observes:
30
The National Government’s celebration of healthy, fit, and happy citizens served as a
counterpoint to the figure of the hunger marcher and the stunted, malnourished bodies
of the unemployed and the poor. These representations literally embodied the
competing policies and ideologies of the right and the left.
As a political ploy though, the government’s fitness campaign was a successful distraction to
the ‘Hungry England’ debate, and similar to the promotion of domestic education to the
working class housewife, offered a low cost alternative to more significant welfare reform
(Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010, p.281). Gradually, however, the Ministry of Health began to
recognise the problems revealed by the various surveys of family budgets and investigations
of working class conditions, particularly in the wake of the appointment of George
Newman’s successor as Chief Medical Officer in 1935 (Webster, 1982, p.122). Under the
new Chief, a second Advisory Committee on Nutrition was appointed by the Ministry
(Mayhew, 1988, p.459). Although its first report published in 1937 did not set out the cash
equivalents for dietary standards, its recommendations regarding the daily milk needs of
pregnant women and children obviously carried an economic consequence (Mayhew, 1988,
p.459).
Beyond the formal political arena, various bodies began to emerge during the 1930s with an
agenda for social reform, such as the Next Five Years Group (founded in 1934 and of which
Seebohn Rowntree was a member) and the policy think tank the Political and Economic
Planning group (founded in 1931) (Stevenson, 1984, p.322). Another important player was
the New Fabian Research Bureau which produced numerous research pamphlets on the
socialist cause throughout the decade (Graves and Hodge, 1950, p.259). Indeed, support for
social reform often brought together traditionally diverse camps: the Communist paper the
31
Daily Worker flourished on the basis of financial support from wealthy patrons (Graves and
Hodge, 1950, p.258).
The outbreak of war and a change in government in the spring of 1940, however, brought
about new initiatives which substantially improved the welfare and diet of the nation
(Webster, 1985, p.229). The new coalition government formed between the Conservatives
and Labour under Winston Churchill (Hinton, 1983, p.160), introduced food rationing which
immediately raised the food intake of poor families to that of the pre-war skilled craftsman
(May, 1995). As Zweiniger-Bargielowska (2010, p.339) observes “rationing was one of the
great home front successes”. The debates of the 1930s helped shape such war time welfare
feeding policies and launch state programmes of nutritional supplementation (Petty, 1989,
p.102). For example, a National Milk Scheme offering free or cheap milk to pregnant women
and children was launched (ibid.). Its effectiveness was perhaps evidenced in the fact that
1944 recorded the lowest infant mortality rate (May, 1995, p.403). By 1948, one third of a
pint of milk was being consumed daily by each of the nation’s schoolchildren, who were also
receiving free school meals (May, 1995, p.403, p.424). Such initiatives were no doubt
facilitated by the fact that Boyd Orr, the former bane of the Ministry, had now stepped into an
important advisory position to government following the appointment of his friend Walter
Elliot as Minister of Health (Mayhew, 1988, p.461). Orr’s main objective in formulating a
war time food policy was to increase the population’s consumption of vital protective foods
(dairy, vegetables, fruit and eggs) (Orr and Lubbock, 1940, p.34). In this manner, Orr came to
have a profound influence on the diet of the nation in the 1940s (Zweiniger-Bargielowska,
2010, p.289).
32
However, one final political shift was required to comprehensively convert left wing calls for
social reform into a formal programmatic of government.
7 A programme of reform: the rise of the welfare state
The new Labour government which swept into power in the 1945 General Election
“inaugurated the ‘welfare state’” (May, 1995, p.419). In practice, the Welfare State
comprised of a number of individual acts which together revolutionised access to not only
food and health, but also education and housing. Much of the origins of this legislation lay in
the work of Sir William Beveridge who, in 1941, was appointed to chair an interdepartmental
Committee of Social Insurance and Allied Services with a remit to review social insurance
policy (Harris, 1997, p.371). As noted earlier, the country’s system of insurance benefits had
been woefully inadequate to deal with the depth of the earlier economic recession. Pressure to
review the archaic and complex system came from a number of sources, but particularly the
general council of the Trades Union Congress (Briggs, 1964, p.307).
The Committee’s investigations (commonly termed the Beveridge Report) were published in
December 1942 (Stevenson, 1984, p.455). It recommended a range of welfare initiatives
with regard to health, education, employment and social insurance. Essentially the Report
sought to provide all citizens with five freedoms: freedom from want, disease, ignorance,
squalor and idleness (Flinn, 1963, p.268). In arriving at these recommendations, Beveridge
was much influenced by the work and thoughts of Seebohm Rowntree, particularly
Rowntree’s advocacy of a system of family allowances to alleviate poverty in large families
(Briggs, 1964, p.275), and publicly acknowledged his reliance on Rowntree’s “scientific”
expertise (Stevenson, 1984, p.305). Rowntree in turn was an ardent advocate of the
Beveridge Report and an activist for its implementation (Briggs, 1964, p.309).
33
The Report was well publicised by the Ministry of Information (Harris, 1997, p.415); it sold
100,000 copies within a month of publication and enjoyed widespread popular appeal (May,
1995, p.406). The Report’s recommendations gave rise to a number of government White
Papers on health, employment, and national insurance (Stevenson, 1984, p.457). However, no
legislation was enacted on these issues by the Coalition government of the time; Churchill, in
particular, advocating for a deferral until the post war period (Harris, 1997, p.422). This tactic
ultimately created one of the conditions for the subsequent Labour Party election success
(May, 1995, p.407).
Labour achieved a landslide victory in 1945 (Hinton, 1983, p.160). It provided the party with
an overall majority for the first time since it had emerged as a political party in 1906 (Flinn,
1963, p.245), capturing 393 seats compared to the Conservatives’ 213 seats (May, 1995,
p.411). The new government quickly enacted a range of reforms. The National Insurance Act
of 1946 ensured that for the first time all persons were entitled to claim unemployment
benefits (Flinn, 1963, p.306). However, Beveridge’s recommendations were not fully
implemented with regard to the level of benefits, hence many still had to resort to means
testing (Hinton, 1983, p.161). The Beveridge Report’s recommendation regarding a system
of family allowances though was adopted in the shape of the 1945 Family Allowance Act.
This policy was viewed as a less expensive option of alleviating poverty, particularly in large
families, than the introduction of a minimum wage (Stevenson, 1984, p.305). The National
Health Insurance Act of 1946 introduced free health care for all while the Education Act of
1944 opened access to a system of national secondary schooling (Flinn, 1963, p.306). In
terms of housing, A New Towns Act in 1946 resulted in the creation of 29 new towns to deal
with the problem of overcrowding in city slums (May, 1995, p.424).
34
In total these wide ranging social reforms contributed to “an irreversible change for the better
in the position of the working class in Britain” (Hinton, 1983, p.161). Evidence of such a
societal shift, and its repercussions for the diet of poor in particular, is seen in the results of
Rowntree’s 1951 survey of York. Compared with a 31.1% incidence of poverty among the
working class of the town in 1936, by 1951 this figure had dropped dramatically to 2.8%
(Stevenson, 1984, p.142).
Other factors also facilitated further growth and prosperity during the 1940s. The economy
began to grow strong again with the adoption of Keynesian policy in the War Budget of 1941
(Stevenson, 1984, p.447). Keynes’ classic text, the General Theory of Employment, Interest
and Money, had been only recently published (1936) and was to have a significant influence
on government spending and market intervention (May, 1995, p.378). Employment rose by
2.9 million between 1939 and 1943 (Stevenson, 1984, p.448). This growth could be traced
not only to the redevelopment of traditional industries such as coal, steel and shipbuilding as
a result of war activity (Stevenson, 1984, p.449), but also to the rise of new areas of
manufacture such as motor vehicles, plastics and rayons (Stevenson, 1984, p.111). Full
employment, in turn, created stronger unions with effective bargaining power for workers’
rights (Stevenson, 1984, p.199). Such changes together with the new welfare policies were to
transform British life. As Briggs (1964) observes, there was a significant change in mentality
towards social welfare from the 1940s onwards; a shift which saw the focus of social policy
widen to all of society and not just the poor and homeless. The transition from the Poor Law
of the 19th century, in which poverty was viewed as a moral problem and a failing of the
pauper (Flinn, 1963, p.268), to the so called Welfare State of the 1940s captures the essence
of this social transformation.
35
As welfare reform began to address the problem of malnutrition, the debates began to shift
from income levels and minimum dietary needs toward the issue of domestic education.
Traditionally left wing activists had been vehemently opposed to the government’s education
initiatives, but they now embraced it as a means to achieve scientific rationalization in diet
(Kamminga and Cunningham, 1995, p.12). For example, communist author Frederick le Gros
Clark, a key figure in the pressure group, the Committee against Malnutrition, and left wing
commentators George and Margaret Cole, both ardently advocated the dissemination of
scientific knowledge of nutrition as a means of maximising the health of the nation (Smith
and Nicolson, 1995, p.305). Women’s associations proved a useful medium through which
such knowledge could be communicated. For example, Women’s Voluntary Services, a
voluntary association of mainly middle class women, launched a ‘food leader’ scheme which
sought to enrol housewives (both middle and working class) into the task of spreading, by
word of mouth, government information on preparing economically nutritious meals (Hinton,
2002, p.168).
In this manner, the two previously opposing programmes of government became aligned. In
an environment of employment and welfare provision, domestic education, and even fitness
campaigns, sat easily alongside issues of income and minimum dietary standards.
8 Discussion and concluding comments
Governmentality offers a useful theoretical framework to understand the nutritional debates
of the 1930s. The two opposing political camps essentially reflected two diverse programmes
of government (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992). In the absence of medical
evidence to the contrary, the official position of the coalition government was one which
denied the existence of a problem of malnutrition due to poverty. The optimistic tone of
36
successive Ministry of Health reports and pronouncements regarding the health of the nation
gave credence to government social welfare policy. Rather, malnutrition, it was argued was a
problem of ignorance or extravagance on the part of the working class housewife. In
governmentality terms, domestic arrangements represented the domain in need of curing
(Miller and Rose, 1990). Consequently the programmatic of government becomes education,
a low cost alternative to expensive welfare reforms. A further programmatic of the coalition
government was the National Fitness Campaign aimed at producing the fit and healthy body.
In this campaign we witness governmentality in the shape of the successful enrolment of a
range of diverse individuals, clubs and organisations into a network mobilised in the pursuit
of physical fitness (Rose and Miller, 1992). Both programmes sought to influence behaviour
indirectly by equating domestic education and exercise with good citizenship. This chimes
with Miller and Rose’s (1990, p.48) concept of government in liberal democracies where the
free thinking individual becomes self-regulating and citizenship is “active and individualistic
rather than passive and dependent”.
By contrast, left wing commentators mocked the notion of a fitness campaign aimed at a
starving nation. For them, the problem of malnutrition was tightly bound up with
insufficiency of income. In governmentality terms, starvation arising from poverty
represented the “difficulties and failures” which campaigners sought to rectify (Rose and
Miller, 1992, p.181). Pioneering nutritional research had enabled optimum dietary needs to be
made calculable and normalised, the complexity of food and the body had become translated
into a single calorific figure (Miller, 2001, p.381) What remained unknown however, was the
ability of the working classes to meet these dietary norms. Surveys of family household
budgets revealed the extent of malnutrition and its link to insufficiency of income, and this
knowledge was powerful to welfare campaigners. As Turner (1982a, p.268) remarks, “the
37
social survey of working-class diet represents an important illustration of Foucault's analysis
of knowledge/power”. The subjectivity of previous measures of malnutrition was instantly
displaced by the objectivity of a calculative regime. Through this calculative technology, the
dietary deficits of citizens across geographically distant spaces became knowable and
calculable (Miller and Rose, 1994; Miller and Napier, 1993). In this manner, the budget gave
shape to the problem of poverty and malnutrition of the nation as a whole and therefore
supported a programmatic for welfare reform. As Miller and Rose (1993, p.189) argue: “to
have problematized a particular activity or technique is part and parcel of that process of
articulating a new set of proposals that promise to remedy the deficiencies of existing ways of
managing and calculating.” Hence the budget represented a technology of government, a
means by which welfare activists sought “to embody and give effect to governmental
ambitions” (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.175). Only when the problem of income was cured
could the citizen become self disciplining with regard to diet. Consequently, left wing
campaigners were vehemently opposed to the coalition government’s programme of domestic
and nutritional education.
While pursuing divergent programmes of government, both political camps were united in
their use of expertise, a defining feature of the governmentality framework. Experts create
enclosures around bodies of knowledge and act as “vital links between socio-political
objectives and the minutia of daily existence” (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.188). This mediating
role is essential to ensure indirect rule in liberal democracies. The nutritional discourses of
the 1930s were significantly shaped by expert opinion in the form of the members of the
nutritional committees of the Ministry of Health and the British Medical Association.
Medical expertise was inherent in the respective budgetary surveys by Orr and M’Gonigle
while the expertise of women’s associations constructed representations of the working class
38
housewife. Both sides drew on this expert knowledge to make claims and counter claims
regarding the diet of the nation.
Consequently, the governmentality framework provides a fruitful lens through which to view
the nutritional crisis of the 1930s, and more importantly, to understand the role of calculative
technologies therein. As noted at the outset of the paper, such an understanding is useful as
the debates surrounding diet and exercise during this decade were to significantly shape
subsequent cultural trends. In terms of diet, the nutritional advances of the interwar period
regarding vitamin intake and optimum calorific requirements cultivated notions of ‘good’
versus ‘bad’ foods – essentially a “food morality” began to emerge (Horrocks, 1995, p.238).
Nutritionally deficient diets come to be equated with moral failings (Kamminga and
Cunningham, 1995). Such conceptions are pervasive in contemporary discourses regarding
food and diet. For example, popular culture, in all its varied forms, is saturated with the
nutritional benefits of so called ‘super foods’ and equalled repelled by the fast food diet. The
inherent lifestyle insinuations associated with each dietary choice is nothing if not moralistic
in character. Additionally, preoccupation with diet and body size has led to the “production of
self-monitoring and self-disciplining ‘docile bodies’” (Bordo, 1993, p.186). Diet, and its
associated arsenal of calorie counting and measurement, argues Turner (1982b, p.24)
represents another form of “government of the body”.
In terms of exercise, the fitness campaign of the 1930s brought physical culture to the fore.
Whether it was cycling, hiking, or camping, a national enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits was
promoted. Most importantly, physical exertion for pleasure moved beyond the realm of men
only, and through public spaces such as lidos and organised activities such as gymnastic
displays, enrolled women too in the fad for fitness (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010). These
early initiatives have spawned a global industry based on physical culture. From local gyms
39
to personal trainers, the cult of the body beautiful is a pervasive theme in contemporary
society. The sense of good citizenship cultivated by the coalition government’s National
Fitness Campaign has been further refined and consolidated. For example, public concerns
over the rising cost of treating obesity related illness are laced with accusations regarding the
undisciplined body. As Benson (1997, p.123) so aptly observes:
The bad body is fat, slack, uncared for; it demonstrates a lazy and undisciplined ‘self’.
The good body is sleek, thin and toned. To have such a body is to project to those
around you - as well as to yourself - that you are morally as well as physically ‘in
shape’.
This paper argues that such contemporary cultural perspectives on diet and exercise have
been shaped by the debates and initiatives of the 1930s. Together, the National Fitness
Campaign and the nutritional discourses of this decade cultivated contemporary obsessions
with calorie counting and physical fitness. The paper seeks to highlight, in particular, the role
of calculative technologies within this cultural trend. The humble household budget made the
nutritional deficiencies of the nation calculable and knowable and hence became a powerful
tool for welfare campaigners in promoting dietary reform. An adequately fed nation in turn
creates the cultural preconditions for dieting and bodily self regulation.
Cultural theorists have traditionally dominated all discourse relating to the body, diet and
exercise. However, the accounting discipline can contribute its own cultural insights. In
particular, if we as a community seek to awaken an interest in accounting by scholars beyond
our immediate domain (Chapman, Cooper & Miller, 2009), then engagement with the
cultural field becomes all the more crucial.
40
41
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Table 1 Estimated Weekly Expenditure on Food per Income Group
Income Group
Proportion of the Population
Weekly Income per head Weekly expenditure on Food
I 10% 10 shillings and under 4 shillingsII 20% 10 to 15 shillings 6 shillingsIII 20% 15 to 20 shillings 8 shillingsIV 20% 20 to 30 shillings 10 shillingsV 20% 30 to 45 shillings 12 shillingsVI 10% Over 45 shillings 14 shillings
Data from Orr, 1937, pp.65-67.
Table 2 Estimated Food Consumption per Week per Income Group
Income Group
Group I Group II Group III Group IV Group V Group VI
Beef & veal (ozs)
10.5 14.5 17.2 18.9 19.5 18.9
Mutton & lamb (ozs)
3.1 5.6 7.2 9.4 11.6 13.9
Bacon & ham (ozs)
4.3 6.3 6.8 7.3 7.8 9.4
Other meat (ozs)
5.2 5.2 5.9 5.9 5.9 7.2
Bread & cakes (ozs)
66.0 68.0 68.0 67.0 65.0 60.0
Milk fresh (pints)
1.1 2.1 2.6 3.1 4.2 5.5
Milk cond. (pints)
0.7 0.6 0.55 0.5 0.4 0.3
Eggs (no.) 1.5 2.1 2.6 3.2 3.6 4.5Butter (ozs) 3.0 6.5 7.5 8.5 9.5 11.0Cheese (ozs) 1.8 2.5 3.1 3.6 3.6 2.6Margarine (ozs)
4.5 3.5 2.5 2.0 1.6 1.3
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Tea (ozs) 2.2 2.7 2.9 3.0 2.9 2.7Potatoes (ozs) 53.0 56.0 57.0 57.0 57.0 54.0Lard (ozs) 2.7 3.6 4.2 4.4 4.3 3.5Fish (ozs) 2.7 5.5 8.2 10.4 12.2 13.5Sugar (ozs) 13.5 16.0 18.0 19.0 19.5 19.5Jam (ozs) 4.3 5.3 5.2 5.4 5.8 5.5Other sugar (ozs)
6.5 7.5 8.5 9.5 10.5 11.5
Fruit (ozs) 14.0 21.7 25.8 27.9 30.5 39.3Vegetables (ozs)
16.0 20.0 30.6 30.6 32.3 34.0
Data from Orr, 1937, p.73.Table 3 Comparison of Diet as Revealed by Family Budgets with Diet for Optimum Health
Income Group Group I Group II Group III Group IV
Group V Group VI
Calories in Family Budgets
2,317 2,768 2,962 3,119 3,249 3,326
Calories for optimum health
2,810 2,810 2,810 2,810 2,810 2,810
(Deficit)/Surplus (493) (42) 152 309 439 516Calcium in Family Budgets (grams)
0.37 0.52 0.61 0.71 0.83 0.95
Calcium for optimum health (grams)
0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6
(Deficit)/Surplus (grams)
(0.23) (0.08) 0.01 0.11 0.23 0.35
Phosphorus in Family Budgets (grams)
0.81 1.04 1.17 1.28 1.42 1.54
Phosphorus for optimum health (grams)
1.23 1.23 1.23 1.23 1.23 1.23
(Deficit)/Surplus (grams)
(0.42) (0.19) (0.06) 0.05 0.19 0.31
Iron in Family Budgets (grams)
0.008 0.0099 0.011 0.012 0.0127 0.0137
Iron for optimum health (grams)
0.0115 0.0115 0.0115 0.0115 0.0115 0.0115
(Deficit)/Surplus (grams)
(0.0035) (0.0016) (0.0005) 0.0005 0.0012 0.0022
Vitamin A in Family Budgets (units)
1,548 2,500 3,248 4,030 4,420 5,750
Vitamin A for optimum health (units)
3,800 3,800 3,800 3,800 3,800 3,800
(Deficit)/Surplus (units)
(2,252) (1,300) (552) 230 620 1,950
Vitamin C in Family 57 78 90 108 126 158
48
Budgets (units)Vitamin C for optimum health (units)
95 95 95 95 95 95
(Deficit)/Surplus (units)
(38) (17) (5) 13 31 63
Data from Orr, 1937, p.40.
49