THE post-war food situation in Britain gave rise to considerable public frustration. War-time rationing had been continued, and one of the first acts made by John Strachey, Minister of Food in the Attlee Government, in the summer of 1946 had been to subject bread to further rationing. It did not go down well.
As Attlee’s latest biographer, John Bew, points out, there was a global food shortage at the time, caused by droughts in Europe, New Zealand and North Africa, and famines in India and Burma. Britain was also responsible for its Empire, and for a large part of keeping defeated Germany fed and secure. At home, however, there was continuing unhappiness.
In May 1947, a London doctor and physician declared bluntly that “Britain is dying from starvation,” and that it was the worst-fed nation in western Europe. The assertion was rejected by the Government, but housewives’ groups were already convinced that he was speaking the truth. The Pollokshields branch of the Glasgow and District Housewives’ Association was told by one member that the nation’s diet was “uninteresting, inadequate, and perilously near the limit of safety”, and warned Westminster not to ignore housewives.
Eventually, it was decided that a deputation of British housewives would present a petition to Attlee to demand the sacking of Strachey. In Glasgow on May 20, signatures were collected at various points across the city (right, top). Hundreds of names were collected, and in some streets, traffic was obstructed.
On June 5, 50 women from Scotland formed part of the delegation to the House of Commons, demanding the dismissal of both Strachey and fuel minister Manny Shinwell, but Strachey was unavailable, and the delegation was unsuccessful. “We only ask for a little more than lip-service from the Government,” said one Glasgow housewife.
Read more: Herald Diary
In February 1972 (main image, far right), 20 students from Glasgow School of Art, protesting about the effect of Glasgow’s ring road on the environment, greeted Gordon Campbell, the Scottish Secretary of State, as he opened the Charing Cross section. They held up banners for all to see on a flyover as Mr Campbell’s car passed beneath.
“The main point we were making,” said one of the students, “is that the motorway is completely despoiling the city. It has been rushed through without any regard to the effect on the surrounding area.”
The students said their protest was also aimed at a proposal to run the ring’s eastern flank on a course which, they feared, would cut the Cathedral off from the rest of the city.
In 1992 a Glasgow man, Colin MacLeod, who had been waging a determined battle to stop dozens of trees in Cowglen woods being felled to make way for the Glasgow section of the M77 Ayr route, was photographed (right, bottom) receiving the support of students from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. “It is a very nice part of the city,” Milos Ceman said of the woods.
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