Eighty Years Ago: Local Life, 1946
Eighty years ago, as 1945 moved into 1946, the older generation of our parents and grandparents must have felt great relief and optimism. Six long years of war had ended. Green shoots of ‘normal life again’ were sprouting. For example, a London housewife recorded in her diary: ‘The clocks were put back tonight (marking the end of wartime double-summer time) and the lights came up! I was thrilled. No more the groping along with a torch looking for steps and obstacles; no longer the windows of buses and trains covered with black gauze and only a slit to see where one is.’
But the prevailing experience was ‘We’re so short of everything’ – of food and accommodation especially. Thousands of families bombed out of their homes were enduring cramped and unsatisfactory living arrangements, often squeezed in with relatives or in houses of multiple occupation where different families had a room or two each, with a single shared bathroom and toilet. Each family had a single gas ring to cook on. In the novels of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark or many of the old black & white films on the Talking Pictures channel the settings are drab post-war London bedsit communities. In real life Barbara Pym wrote in her diary that she and her sister Hilary had found a flat. ‘It’s in Pimlico, not a very nice area, but we are so lucky to get anywhere and you really can’t choose at all.’ An American reporter noted that ‘The personal columns of The Times are filled with ex-servicemen desperately seeking somewhere to live.’
Food rationing and food shortage compelled Irene Lovelock and Alfreda Landau (married to a vicar and a rabbi) to start the British Housewives League. As a pressure group it helped fuel public protest when the Labour government reluctantly had to announce new privations. February 1946 brought cuts to the bacon, poultry and egg rations – the latter made worse by the decision to stop importing the wartime substitute staple dried eggs. ‘This shopping! This queuing! All housewives are fed up to the eyebrows with it!’ wrote an Essex mother seeking meat only to find after a long tiring comb of the local shops that she might have purchased some rabbit if she had started earlier. Two months later a Brixton mother complained: ‘Owing to wheat shortage the 2lb loaf is to be cut to 1¾lbs but price is to be 4½d just the same!’
Eighty years ago, as 1945 moved into 1946, the older generation of our parents and grandparents must have felt great relief and optimism. Six long years of war had ended. Green shoots of ‘normal life again’ were sprouting. For example, a London housewife recorded in her diary: ‘The clocks were put back tonight (marking the end of wartime double-summer time) and the lights came up! I was thrilled. No more the groping along with a torch looking for steps and obstacles; no longer the windows of buses and trains covered with black gauze and only a slit to see where one is.’
But the prevailing experience was ‘We’re so short of everything’ – of food and accommodation especially. Thousands of families bombed out of their homes were enduring cramped and unsatisfactory living arrangements, often squeezed in with relatives or in houses of multiple occupation where different families had a room or two each, with a single shared bathroom and toilet. Each family had a single gas ring to cook on. In the novels of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark or many of the old black & white films on the Talking Pictures channel the settings are drab post-war London bedsit communities. In real life Barbara Pym wrote in her diary that she and her sister Hilary had found a flat. ‘It’s in Pimlico, not a very nice area, but we are so lucky to get anywhere and you really can’t choose at all.’ An American reporter noted that ‘The personal columns of The Times are filled with ex-servicemen desperately seeking somewhere to live.’
Food rationing and food shortage compelled Irene Lovelock and Alfreda Landau (married to a vicar and a rabbi) to start the British Housewives League. As a pressure group it helped fuel public protest when the Labour government reluctantly had to announce new privations. February 1946 brought cuts to the bacon, poultry and egg rations – the latter made worse by the decision to stop importing the wartime substitute staple dried eggs. ‘This shopping! This queuing! All housewives are fed up to the eyebrows with it!’ wrote an Essex mother seeking meat only to find after a long tiring comb of the local shops that she might have purchased some rabbit if she had started earlier. Two months later a Brixton mother complained: ‘Owing to wheat shortage the 2lb loaf is to be cut to 1¾lbs but price is to be 4½d just the same!’
In our locality of Orpington we can note two impacts. Firstly starting in 1948 there came the building of a mass new housing estate in St Paul’s Cray to the west side of the A224 Sevenoaks Way. There were 6,000 new houses taking 10,000 residents mainly relocated from bombed-out dockland areas like Bermondsey and Deptford. In this phase of ‘new towns’ or ‘London overspill’ estates being built in the Home Counties, ours was the only one that came to Kent. Meanwhile an entry in Hansard for 1949 shows Sir Waldron Smithers MP for Orpington addressing the Minister of Food in Parliament to complain on behalf of Mr Hackett-Jones of Cockmannings Farm regarding the shortage of flour. Strange to say, bread was not rationed during the war. Rationing only began in 1946 due to shortage of flour.
Winston Churchill at Chartwell
One of the best local Yuletide treats is a visit to Chartwell near Westerham to see Sir Winston Churchill’s former house dressed in festive finery. In what mood did ‘Winnie’ celebrate Christmas 1945, I wonder? Did he grumble that an ungrateful electorate had voted him out of 10 Downing Street in the summer? Or did he enjoy the respite while the Labour landslide government grappled with the austerity years of the late 1940s that incurred public impatience and wrath? Would he have guessed that he would serve again as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955, taking office at the age of 77? Food rationing finally ended in 1954..For Christmas just gone in 2025 British households thankfully could improve on Spam and dried egg for dinner!
One of the best local Yuletide treats is a visit to Chartwell near Westerham to see Sir Winston Churchill’s former house dressed in festive finery. In what mood did ‘Winnie’ celebrate Christmas 1945, I wonder? Did he grumble that an ungrateful electorate had voted him out of 10 Downing Street in the summer? Or did he enjoy the respite while the Labour landslide government grappled with the austerity years of the late 1940s that incurred public impatience and wrath? Would he have guessed that he would serve again as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955, taking office at the age of 77? Food rationing finally ended in 1954..For Christmas just gone in 2025 British households thankfully could improve on Spam and dried egg for dinner!
This article by Jerry Dowlen is published in the December 2025 / January 2026 issue of The Link magazine, Orpington Methodist Church.