BY JOHN FITZGERALD
(Part one)
A few months ago I recounted how Callan man Seamus O’ Brien, a future newspaper correspondent, took the train with friends to Dublin for the famous Thunder and Lightning All-Ireland of 1939.
While the storm had been belting away over Dublin that day, the Dail was in session to tackle the deadly challenge to Ireland’s security and wellbeing that seemed to be brewing in Europe. After an intense but necessarily brief debate, it passed the Emergency Powers Act to secure the nation’s neutrality in the upcoming conflict.
The Germans quickly overran Poland, and, following their victory, the war seemed to “settle down” a bit, with no great land battles, but plenty of activity on the high seas as the dreaded U-boats sank British ships on a daily basis.
The war on the oceans affected Ireland badly. With imports taking a big hit from submarine warfare, and aerial bombing of anything flying an English flag in the Atlantic and Irish seas, rationing was introduced in an effort to ensure a reasonably fair distribution of imported foodstuffs.
At first the rationing was not compulsory, but as the war progressed, it became a legally binding measure affecting a range of goods and fuels. Petrol, oil, coal, timber, and clothing became scarce too. Travel passes and identity cards were issued to citizens.
When Ireland’s petrol pumps ran dry early in 1941 after the British distributors indicated they might be cutting off supplies, the government instigated an immediate clampdown on petrol usage. When the petrol started to flow again it was severely rationed.
Ration books were distributed to every citizen of the State. The government asked people to tighten their belts and knuckle down to what promised to be an austere and frugal existence. Not a very pleasant message for a nation still reeling from the ravages of the 1930s worldwide depression. And nobody knew how long the war, and its accompanying threat to Irish neutrality, would last.
In Callan, as elsewhere, a few far-seeing and possibly greedy individuals acquired huge stocks of tea and sugar, among other commodities, to offset the big squeeze they saw coming.
Under the draconian rationing regime, every citizen was allocated a half-ounce of tea and a half-pound of sugar. This wasn’t so bad for large families, but people living alone were badly hit and many tried, some more successfully than others, to switch to drinking cocoa.
Rita O’ Neill, in her essay for the Callan 800 book on the affairs of a local grocery in the 1940s, mentions that each of Somers’s 501 registered customers was allocated two ounces of tea, six ounces of sugar, and four ounces of butter, per week during the Emergency.
Grocer/publican Jimmy Somers in Bridge Street was a very considerate man and ensured that customers afflicted by the dreaded TB received more generous rations: They received Health Board coupons for one and a half pounds of butter, weekly, and an egg and a half pint of milk per day.
The milk came from Fennelly’s dairy herd next door, as mentioned in the opening chapter on Upper Bridge Street in the 1920s. Mrs. Tobin of Castletobin got an extra twenty pounds of sugar per month as she ran a small business making sugar candy.
Quite a few Callanites, in Seamus O’ Brien’s recollection, attempted a kind of Irish solution to an Irish problem by mixing the puny pinch of tea they were given with either coffee or cocoa- or both, to produce a new taste.
Some found the resulting concoction acceptable-or bearable, but many were revolted by it and opted to either not mix beverages or, or in the cases of a courageous few, go in search of a “fix” of their beloved tea on the flourishing black market. This could prove more trouble than it was worth.
Firstly, the tea might cost a great deal more than its normal shop value as no price control restriction applied in the black economy.
Secondly, there was a risk involved in such shady dealing. If you were caught procuring illicit tea you could end up in jail, possibly for months. Any breach of the rationing laws was mercilessly chastised.
A Kilkenny newspaper editorial of 1942 slammed illegal purchasing of tea as a “glaring and immoral transaction…not just a violation of the law of the land, but of the moral law.”
It went on to ask: “what chance have poor people of getting their miserable ration of tea if such rapacious and scandalous profiteering is allowed to proceed unchecked?”
The editor urged people with knowledge of illegal tea transactions to report the culprits to the Gardai, adding that, while those who sold the tea were the more dangerous and irresponsible law-breakers, the buyers were keeping the “dreadful” practise alive by dealing with those “rapscallions”.
To underline the supposed ethical issues involved, the editorial quoted an old rhyme:
Great fleas have little fleas
On their backs to bite ’em.
And little fleas have lesser fleas
And so add infinitum.
(Extract from my book Are We Invaded Yet?)
To be continued…
