Year of the Plague 2020: a far from average year. Self-isolation diary week 19.

Nineteen weeks in chokey and it doesn’t seem a day too long. I get the feeling I’ve said something like this before. I realise it’s been easy for us. We’re used to being self-sufficient and let’s face it we’re both happy with our own company – or as some might express it – we’re anti-social. As that well-known Aberdeen salutation/godspeed goes – “Happy to meet, sorry to part but not too sorry – Bon Accord.” Well, that’s the version popular in our hoose.

We did break lockdown to visit ‘the young folk’ in Stonehaven as the wee one was having a birthday. He’s the nearest human contact we’ve had in 19 weeks – and very pleasant it was too. Of course this visit required a run over the bypass – a good outing for the car which is also in relative lockdown and it was a pleasure for us seeing parts of Aberdeenshire and Kincardine we haven’t seen for a bit. Still bonny.

I nearly forgot. On our way to the bypass, round about Mason Lodge I think, we drove past a field with a tall stone dyke and looking over the dyke was a coo (cow.) As the dyke was pretty high only the coo’s heid (head) could be seen; a bonny cream beastie. There were folk walking by and the coo’s heid followed them, watched them come, pass and move away. It turned to follow their movement and eyed them up and down. It reminded me of my late Aunty Isabel who we used to take for treatment to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. During the inevitable waits for and between treatment, Isabel (in her nineties) would inspect fellow patients walking by – eyeing them and the often weird clobber they wore or their hair styles and colours and half turn to me with a knowing nod and trace of a smile. I should add at this point that Isabel was complimented on her own appearance by a man at the hospital – totally out of the blue he remarked, maybe a bit uncalled for and personal but, along the lines of that’s a beautiful outfit you’re wearing. She did have an eye for quality – and mutton dressed up as lamb, as she might have thought but never said. I miss that shared look and smile that wasn’t meant unkindly but spoke volumes, none-the-less.  

This week I phoned my optician to place on record I’d phoned early in March to report my two new pairs of varifocals made the world spin so much I relegated them to the top of the desk in anticipation of returning them once the lurgy passed. Back in March it looked like that was a real possibility. Oh the innocence of early lockdown. The opticians isn’t back to full operation but said they would be happy to see me given that I’ve been using the old prescription specs. It was very good of them but apart from being willing to hand over the useless pair I wasn’t keen on submitting myself to face-to-face interaction in a closed space and said I’d get back in touch in a couple of months. A couple of months! Where will we be in a couple of months apart from bowling downhill towards winter?

More blackcurrants have gone into the freezer. And still they come. They are handy and most mornings a handful of blackcurrants or other fruit but mainly blackcurrants because we have tons of them is added to our breakfast porridge or cereal. Unfortunately, one morning this week husband announced there weren’t any in the fridge. Not possible. With an exasperated sigh I found the plastic container with its dark red contents in the fridge but when I opened it instead of blackcurrants found cooked aduki beans! I had somehow managed the night before to pick up the blackcurrants and put them into the freezer instead of the beans. I love aduki beans but am holding fire on trying them as a breakfast topping. You never know. Nah, I think we do.

Our sweet old cat was ill this week. As he’s getting on, about 112 in human equivalent years, we were preparing ourselves for the worst. Not that you ever are prepared. Next day he was as right as rain and our daughter suggested he might have been suffering from heatstroke. It has been hot and as soon as the sun’s up he’s out to laze under an apple tree or baking in his straw-packed kennel beside the greenhouse. I think I mentioned before that he loves a picnic so doesn’t even come in for grub until evening on the nicest of days.  

 We have a linnet in the garden. Fairly certain that’s what it is. Are they simple? This bird brain can’t find its way to the many sources of bird food we have scattered and dangling. Hope it hangs around. Lovely wee thing. Our house martins are still in residence high up on the gable. See them when we’re round that part of the house and every evening out of the sittingroom window we admire them darting through the air grazing on airborne insects. 

Yesterday I crossed paths with a tiny brown frog yesterday while walking. Thought it was a leaf blowing across the road but then the leaf began hopping and stopped for a moment for me to admire it before hopping off into the grass. A speckled brown butterfly occupied the same spot on my way back. Do frogs turn into butterflies? No? Are you certain of that?

Our blue salvias flowers are taking geological time to open. First saw the plant in a park somewhere in Germany. Can’t recall where but they were massed together and looked fabulous. We have only one or two plants and I suspect winter will be upon us before they fully open. Talking of blue – the wild chicory has been blooming for a good while now in the verges. It’s very pretty and one year I made the mistake of introducing seed into our garden. We are still trying to get rid of plants that spread like wildfire. Every year more spring up. Bloody stuff.

And on the subject of garden pests, although ones we are quite fond of – the badgers are still at it. The heavy pot and bird feeder stand goes over night after night. Now along with the peanuts having to be brought in overnight so, too, is the seed feeder for they pull it to pieces searching for seed. Not that there’s any left by the end of the day. 

The latest trend in lost jobs continues to pick up pace. Three out of five of one arm of our family have recently been made redundant. As they are anything but alone finding work is going to be a nightmare for them. And the knock-on consequences very serious.

It’s a while since I finished reading Ethel Mannin’s series of essays Brief Voices. It covers very many topics; far too many to comment on here so one or two points only. Mannin flirted with Buddhism but was hugely critical of Buddhists in Burma where her writings were banned as a result. She criticised their cruelty and claims of being against killing animals while happily consuming them on grounds they didn’t personally kill them – e.g. fishermen don’t kill fish only take them out of water – where they die, it was the servant who bought meat at market so nothing to do with them eating what was prepared while butchers who definitely did kill animals were, at this time, despised – yet not the meat they produced.

She was very much a woman of her time and class. Despite her radical political views – she was a member of the Communist Party for a time – Mannin was, nonetheless, a bit of a snob and was intolerant of things she didn’t understand or care to understand. She didn’t have much sympathy for aspects of working class lives and positively railed against Teddy Boys and the rock and roll generation (slack-jawed and joyless she described young people), beats and Angry Young Men literature. She thought the ‘atomic generation’ brought up on violent films would become inured to death. How wrong. The protests of the 1960s were just around the corner. Interesting and complex woman, nonetheless. I will look for more of her works in future.

 Stay safe.

 

Year of the Plague 2020: a far from average year. Self-isolation diary week 16

Week 16 has come and it’s gone. Covid 19 is as virulent as ever. Numbers affected are jumping in some parts where people are becoming bolder and re-entering society. We aren’t. Well, maybe a little. Wrote last time about meeting up with one or two family members outside. This week we had a rendezvous with our son in an Aberdeen cemetery. Readers of my blog will know I like being in cemeteries – just so long as I can leave when I want to – for they often offer fascinating insights into lives once lived in times past. And they tend to have benches for sitting on.

Back to the vet with our cat to get his eye checked again and see how the expensive eyedrops are succeeding. Quite well it seems. He threw up again on the journey. Because of very restricted access (none for humans) we had to wait outside for quite some time for our cat’s turn. That wasn’t a problem other than we shared the tiny carpark with a muckle great Jaguar 4X4 that had the engine running the twenty minutes and more we waited and as they were there before us I imagine the engine was running for well over half-an-hour. Forget air pollution. Forget folk with breathing and problems. Let’s just run our engine because we can. And, yes, we came away with yet more expensive eyedrops.

Covid19 has affected social interactions and we noticed a little curious piece of social behaviour this week – a man talking to a woman, neither masked, stood quite close to each other during their conversation but when my husband, masked, spoke with the same man – he, the man, stood more distant from my husband. Our thinking was that noticing my husband was taking precautions (wearing a mask) so he (the man) reciprocated by taking precautions, too (mirroring the behaviour.) Yet, that is counter-intuitive for you might think unmasked folk might keep a greater distance apart. We found it interesting.

Lying in bed unable to sleep one night it struck me that the large polystyrene lining that came in the box containing our new garden chairs (last week) would have been perfect to mount a painting of mine. But we (he) binned it so it’s gone. Never throw anything away.

The intergenerational radish growing contest was won by ME!! We measured them by photographing the best ones beside a teaspoon or rather three teaspoons as we were miles apart. It did cross my mind to use an egg spoon but then I thought what kind of example is that to set to the young and anyway I was confident of my crop. With good cause. However the fly in the ointment is that when we ate the two biggest radishes one was fine enough but the other was well teuch.

The weekend family quiz took the form of 20 questions mystery object/concept. It worked very well, lots of laughs and rolling eyes but was more exhausting than the normal quiz for some reason, maybe because it’s a bit more interactive. Modesty prevents me telling you who won. I’ll come clean after proudly declaring how quickly I finished the FT Magazine crossword a couple of weeks back  for I’ve struggled with the latest two so that on average I’ve got a long way to go to claim any aptitude for this fairly new hobby (more a Sudoku and word puzzle person.)

Pheasant chicks are growing fast. Other than that not much to report on the bird front. Lots of them as usual – great tits, blue tits, longtail tits, blackbirds, chaffinches, spurdies (sparrows), jackdaws, wood pigeons, collar doves, greenfinches, woodpeckers, goldfinches, robins, wrens, starlings, another fly catcher I’m glad to report, and on Saturday evening during our quiz session the heron flew very close to the window veered away and circled back again. Magnificent in a prehistoric way. Crikey, I almost forgot the house martins.

Still worries on the jobs front for the family. As you know our granddaughter was summarily sacked at 11.30pm one night but our grandson has been retained and begins work again soon. Two of his colleagues lost their jobs such is the weakness of Aberdeen’s dependence on oil and gas now that this industry is falling out of favour in the 21st century.

Oh, and the Tories were out clapping their greedy little paws for the NHS on its 70th anniversary – while planning to privatise it. Ah well, no-none ever said becoming a Tory came with scruples. Or if they did they were lying. Tories – never short of a stunt or two. Our local MP is a Tory. He was in hospital – for a small procedure. Suspicion in this house is he was having the last piece of conscience removed.

Said last time I would say more about Walter Benjamin’s biography but I’ve already forgotten it so won’t be. Having raided our bookshelves I dusted off another volume from around the same time (Benjamin a little earlier)  Ethel Mannin’s German Journey.

Ethel Mannin, a prolific English writer, returned to Germany and Austria post-war, in 1947, where she was appalled by the imperious attitudes of the British authorities and journalists there; what she described as the Poonah* attitude of the British in divided Berlin.

Thoroughly enjoying her book for Mannin is engaging in both style and what she has to say about the destruction she found there and attitudes of the conquerors and the vanquished. Germany gained such notoriety in the run up and during WW2 – with good cause but Mannin does not lump every German into a basket marked Evil Germans. A great traveller, Mannin, was familiar with Germany (and Austria) before the war and was an acquaintance of  several natives of both countries. She points out many Germans were, themselves, victims of the Nazis and were the first interned in camps and executed in great numbers. She questions the collective guilt the German people were expected to accept – questioning how the British public would react if held responsible for the shameful treatment of Irish people by the Black and Tans, the massacre of thousands in Amritsar by the British, the degradations and killings of Kenyans. Her point being individual Britons would argue they knew nothing or next to nothing about any of these horrors while they were happening yet it’s assumed every single German knew precisely what outrages the Nazis were perpetrating and so should be held collectively responsible.

Mannin saved her own rationed food which she took with her from Britain to give to German friends expected to survive on 1200 calories a day of mostly of inferior quality. When she was in Germany and Austria she ate what her fellow Brits were eating – quantities of food and drink available far in excess of rations back in Britain – comprising of at least three large meals of several courses daily.  All British military, relief workers, journalists etc enjoyed a high standard of food and drink in Germany, far too much in Mannin’s view, and she would keep back some of what was served up to distribute to desperate Germans, including undernourished children, shrunken from lack of food. On a visit to a friend she discovered his only food that day was half a tin of sardines. She encouraged her fellow-Brits there to see what was under their noses if they chose to look – which they didn’t. Haughty indifference to all German suffering irrespective of age was not confined to conquering Brits and the US position was, perhaps, summed up in her description of one guy she came across as “six feet of over-fed American manhood…”

I’ve been to Germany several times on holiday and love the place. Her warm descriptions of exquisite little red-roofed towns with tall slender spired churches as seen from trains rattling through the countryside matches my own observations to a tee.

No time for our viewing this week – not really worth speaking about other than the old film Hoppity goes to Town. A wee classic.

*A high-handed attitude associated with the town of Poona or Pune in India.

Stay well.

“Up Fittie down with the Hun”: 1920s xenophobia and trade

Guest post by Textor

On April 2nd as many as 3000 gathered at the fish market intent on stopping all landings. Fish was dumped, boats cast adrift and strike breakers intimidated. At one point police threw a cordon between Torry and the town in an attempt to stop fishermen moving en-masse to the centre. Baton charges were made. Not to be outdone the women of Torry gathered bowls, jars and stones to pelt the police. When police cleared the streets men and women took refuge in tenements reappearing as the waves of law and order moved on, all the better to attack from the rear. Meanwhile across on the north side of the harbour the families of Fittie gathered crying Up Fittie Down with the Hun. With creels and baskets full of stones they proceeded to pelt boats entering or leaving the harbour, forcing skippers to the south side of the channel where they were met by a barrage from the Torry men and women. The police were undone by this pincer movement.

At a time when the unpleasant whiff of xenophobia drifts over the stinking frame of crises ridden economies it’s worth recalling that there is nothing new in this. It’s what the class divided beast does; cling to backward-looking, mythologised national identity; to blame others for what are in fact consequences of the endemic conditions of international competition is so much easier than seeking out the social foundations of crises.

This is not to say that xenophobic opinion has no location in objective reality, that it is necessarily the manifestation of mad psychologies. No. The current spectre haunting Europe and beyond draws on ways in which the “free movement” of labour has increased competition between workers and helped keep wages down. In other words “foreign” workers are in a sense a threat to older labour markets. But it is the underpinning forces which mobilise them.

In the 1920s Aberdeen was hit by problems and disputes across two of the most important sectors of the local economy: trawling and granite. The foundation of both lay in intensification of international competition and the legacies of the Great War, and both centred on foreign labour undermining British industry.

 

Trawling

It was hardly surprising that when the German trawler Bremerhaven attempted to dock and land fish in Aberdeen in 1919 that there was a wave of revulsion. The war had just ended and Aberdonians, like so many others, had suffered deeply in the slaughter of 1914-18. Men gathered at the quayside to refuse the Germans the right to land. Following its search for a berth the trawler eventually grounded and its crew stoned with the demand the German flag be run down. The local paper described the skipper’s attempt to land as brazen insolence and sinister and making clear its animosity to German trade said it was an unfriendly act of a nation not penitent but revengeful. The editor went so far as to sneer at the country’s Kultur of dried raw fish as a delicacy. Bremerhaven was forced out of Aberdeen, eventually landing at its home port where the Social Democrat Party came to its fishermen’s defence and denounced the Aberdeen men as an English rabble claiming Aberdonian screamed Baby killers. Pigs. Shoot down the Huns.

Three years later the trawler Else Kunkel II steamed into Aberdeen hoping to land its fish; again there was opposition to former enemy, now called alien exploiters who were threatening the livelihoods of local families. Aberdeen’s fishermen were said to hold bitter hostility against their former enemy. However their fish was landed and so the trade was continued sporadically through the year. Skippers and mates appealed to the Government for enforcement of the Reparations [Recovery] Act and that it applied 26% duty on German fish. No help was forthcoming. Matters were made more difficult when the particular interests of buyers and fish processors opposed the embargo demanded by trawlermen; and there was local bitterness when Peterhead harbour offered to give room to German boats, not through internationalism but for the money to be made. The local newspaper acknowledged the need for Europe-wide trade in fish but realised with more powerful trawlers and crews able and willing to fish dangerous Icelandic waters the local industry faced a serious threat: A German monopoly of the fish trade of Aberdeen would leave the consumer in the grip of alien exploiters and would mean a disaster to a great local industry.

 

So matters simmered until February 1923 when skippers and mates voted to strike. Once again the rhetoric of wartime found a voice: you are fighting the Hun a second time for your rights. By the end of the first week of March 100 boats were tied up with hundreds of men out of work. Share fishermen, skippers and mates, led the dispute fearing for their livelihoods. Waged men, deckhands and engineers, were what you might call victims rather than being instrumental in this strike. Although local communists mobilised meetings around the notion of the internationalism of the working class as distinct from men such as skippers and mates there is no evidence that any significant animosity split the ranks nor that the waged men felt kinship with the German crews despite rumblings about some share men having avoided service in the war and making money out of wartime demand.

In fact solidarity within and across the fishing communities of Torry and Fittie was strong enough to draw them together to fight German landings, strike-breakers and police. When one local boat decided to scab hundreds turned out from Torry to confront the skipper and turn him back. Boats were sabotaged including the German trawler Senator Sache; while its crew slept the moorings were cut; eventually saved from grounding by the local pilot. Porters landing German fish were threatened with violence and police were defied. On April 2nd as many as 3000 gathered at the fish market intent on stopping all landings. Fish was dumped, boats cast adrift and strike breakers intimidated. At one point police threw a cordon between Torry and the town in an attempt to stop fishermen moving en-masse to the centre. Baton charges were made. Not to be outdone the women of Torry gathered bowls, jars and stones to pelt the police. When police cleared the streets men and women took refuge in tenements reappearing as the waves of law and order moved on, all the better to attack from the rear. Meanwhile across on the north side of the harbour the families of Fittie gathered crying Up Fittie Down with the Hun. With creels and baskets full of stones they proceeded to pelt boats entering or leaving the harbour, forcing skippers to the south side of the channel where they were met by a barrage from the Torry men and women. The police were undone by this pincer movement.

But so much conspired against the lcoal trawling industry, both men and forces of international trade. Trawl owners looked for compromise, buyers needed the Icelandic fish brought by Germans, the herring industry needed access to the German market and the British government was unwilling to hamper this sector of international trade. From the German side it made so much sense to continue coming to Aberdeen or failing this perhaps Peterhead. With the German Mark devalued, and the hyperinflation of 1923, the prices realised at British ports easily covered the costs of labour and coal. Stones and insults were little compared to the high explosives of the Great War.

 

Granite

Much less militant but driven by very similar forces Aberdeen’s granite industry also found itself in 1923 under threat from German competition. It is probably the case that much of the militancy of the fishermen and their families was born from the closeness of their communities with so many of them living together in the tenements of Torry and Fittie. Granite workers had a much more fragmented life style.

Granite like fish was as open to international competition. And like the owners of trawler Bremerhaven German manufacturers could and did take advantage of the opportunities afforded by devaluation. Selling in the British market was more profitable and vitally gave payment in Sterling, then an important international currency.

Just as the trawler dispute had at times adopted a stance of being anti-German as opposed to anti German competition so also did the dispute with foreign granite traders. Not that Aberdeen’s stone trade was against the import of foreign granite in fact since the later 19th century the trade had depended on imports to meet the fashion for greater variety of colour in memorials. What disturbed Aberdeen’s granite manufacturers was the threat of dressed stone being sold to British customers.

The first hint that there might be competition coming from Germany was reported in 1921when the defeated nation was found to be trading in France. Bad enough there being a competitor on the block but made worse by the belief that monuments made by the one-time enemy were to be erected over the graves of dead French soldiers. In the following year one Friederich Hagelauer of Fürth was said to have been offering memorial crosses for British graves.

By 1923 the “scandal” was being highlighted in Aberdeen’s Press & Journal with German’s accused of dumping fish and dumping granite. The Sunday Post took up the cry of an insult to our heroic dead the stones being erected where woman pray . . . and children weep. Aberdeen’s granite manufacturers sided with the newspapers and led the way in Scotland to enforcing an embargo on this foreign stone. However, it was one thing to achieve success in the home country it was another to get English dealers and customers to agree to a boycott. For customers there was the incentive of cheaper stone, if they were willing to turn a blind eye to origins; and for dealers there was the carrot of more profit. With the English market still accepting German imports Aberdeen’s trade with the south was threatened.

The difficulties Aberdeen’s stone trade faced were nothing compared to the chaos hitting Germany as it struggled to meet reparation demands of the Versailles Treaty. Its economy had all but collapsed, made worse when France occupied the Ruhr bringing its vast coal industry to a halt. Compared with the French the British state favoured a more conciliatory attitude to the defeated enemy, favoured international trade and stabilisation of the German economy.

Consequently when the granite traders approached the Government and asked for an increased tariff on German stone, like the trawlermen they met with refusal, indeed they faced the prospect that the existing tariff might be cut. The Press & Journal argued the local case, believing (and this sounds eerily like opinion in 2017) that by giving up free trade and enforcing tariffs the grave menace of foreign competition could be brought to heal. Regardless of the clout the local press had in the North East its opinion failed to sway the government and into 1926 imports continued.

Employers led the way in this dispute. There were no bands of granite-cutters and families guarding cemeteries, dinging doon German memorials; the nature of the trade simply did not lend itself to this form of action. But labour did have a voice which put itself behind the demands of the masters. George Murray, who lost a son in the Great War said it made his blood boil that German stone should even be offered as suitable material for British graves. Putting a stop to this, he said, was not only the correct thing to do but also good for the industry and what was good for business was good for workers: We in Belmont Street [offices of the Trades Council] are always favourable to the bosses . . . but of course we expect a good living wage from them in return.

 

 

Apart from the notable success in Scotland the best legislative advance made was to seek the protection of the Merchandise Marks Act, at one point speaking to Sidney Webb at the Board of Trade arguing that the granite imports should be marked “Made in Germany”. Eventually in 1929, after extensive evidence given including opposition from granite retailers, the Government decided that stone should be marked with its country of origin. Although important to local communities across Britain the Government had decided the granite industry was of no great significance in the national economy hence refusal to “safeguard” it from overseas competition. Marking stone was the most it would concede but even here it was niggardly in the eyes of merchants as only the slightest of marks-stencilled- was insisted on, not the heavily-cut lettering asked for by manufacturers.

The year after being given nominal protection the complaints continued. Germans were accused of stealing designs, appropriating the names of granites made famous by the Aberdeen industry and despite the legislation they palm off cheaply produced monuments . . . as British made.

British made; a rallying cry of the period as the United Kingdom hoped to engender patriotism in consumers and at the same time draw from the still important empire preferential treatment for manufacturers. But even here, with the cold wind of protectionism blowing across economies dealing with slump and the fall-out from the Crash of 1929, even here Aberdeen’s granite merchants struggled. Canada, for instance, did a curtsy to the “Mother Country” but refused to bow the knee. Canada gave some slight advantage to British granite but it still bore a tariff of 27% thus favouring Canadian manufacturers.

 

And so the Aberdeen granite industry, along with other British manufacturers, found the battle largely lost, found its markets shrinking and in an increasingly unstable world was forced to look to improving its competitive position by reorganising the use of labour and introducing new technology to raise productivity. And where in 1936 did Aberdonians go to see how granite could and should be handled? Germany.

Under the auspices of the British Institute of Quarrying a deputation representing the trade plus engineer Frank Cassie were content to take lessons from “the enemy”. At one site near Dresden they visited a quarry where 2000 men were said to be employed, where 250 men working at stone-splitting machines produced thousands of granite setts. Although Frank Cassie believed Aberdeen granite was unsuitable for mechanical sett-making overall the deputation was impressed by the thoroughness with which the German does the job, and the importance attached to organisation. Three years into Hitler’s rule the British deputation was envious of Germany’s road and bridge building – a policy they said the British government should put in hand. Whether the deputation witnessed other aspects of the young Nazi regime is not recorded.

 

The pressures of social disruption and global economic crises exposed the trawling and granite industries as poorly equipped to meet the threat of external competition. Trawl owners were content to fish middle-distance waters using an ageing fleet and granite merchants managed an industry characterised by a few large employers in a sea of small businesses, far from ideal when foreign competition became very keen.

The Ersatz World of Germany

Throughout Europe and large parts of the world the 1930s was an era of extreme levels of poverty and suffering. The Hungry Thirties as they were called followed on from the hardships of the post-Great War twenties. The twenties, following the huge expenditure of that obscene war 1914-18, and the misguided peace settlement that the French President insisted would squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked did just that, creating economic, social and political chaos in Germany.

German scientists looked to the country’s greatest natural resource – timber to provide solutions to its increasing shortages of food and other products. It is just incredible what could be produced from felled trees during pressing times and with a high level of imagination; sugar and sweets and bread, cellulose clothing, wooden shoes, mattresses, bedding, chair covers and cushions stuffed with wood-pulp. Coal and chalk were turned into glass. Nettle fibres replaced wool to make jumpers. String was made out of cellulose. Fish skin was turned into slippers (there’s a great coat made of fishskin at Aberdeen University) and can you believe it? Germany’s most loved food, the sausage was made from fish (all of the fish, not just the skin). And on the subject of fish it was pulverised and mixed with flour to create an egg substitute when stocks of eggs disappeared – only the flour wasn’t so much grain flour as potato flour (also used as a substitute for wheat flour for bread in Scotland during the Great War when importing flour from Canada was problematic) combined with a pinch of wood-fibre.

The early twenties saw German workers collecting their pay by the barrow load, sometimes twice daily, because hyperinflation had eroded the value of the mark and hourly depreciations of the currency meant as soon as wages were received they had to be spent on buying essentials for even an hour or so later the cash value would have reduced still further and the barrow full of near useless paper might buy a fraction of what it could have earlier in the day.

In 1914 four marks was equivalent to one US dollar but by July 1923 one dollar cost 160, 000 marks and by November you needed 4, 200, 000, 000, 000 marks to exchange for one dollar. The impact on Germany was devastating. The country was not able to produce enough food to feed its own population and had no currency to purchase imports. Then in 1929 there came the Wall Street crash and the Depression affecting much of the world just got deeper. In Germany it was no longer hyperinflation that caused widespread unemployment and poverty but deflation which had much the same effect.

The middle classes had lost all their savings, the working classes were impoverished still further. These people looked for political solutions from the left, right and centre. A message offering an escape from their predicament and swallowed by many came  came from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. By 1938 when Leonard O. Mosley’s piece appeared in the Press & Journal Hitler’s Nazi party had been in government for five years. While some commentators warned of impending war Mosley did not believe this. He was sympathetic to Germany’s struggles over two decades and looked to that country for lessons on how to cope with crisis.

People had to eat and where there wasn’t food something to fill their bellies had to be found. So ersatz became the means of tackling hunger and shortages.

Mention ersatz and it is generally ersatz coffee that springs to mind but there was more, much more to the imitation business going on there than that. I would use ersatz as an adjective but in Germany it is a noun, being strung together with whatever it refers to: Ersatz – a substitute becomes Ersatzkaffee – ein kaffee, bitte became ein Ersatz, bitte. Germans became fairly adept at ersatz nearly everything it seems.

Mr Mosley report on Germany shrugged off the opinion of some that the work of its scientist producing inspired ersatz goods was part of the preparations for self-sufficiency during what some feared was impending war in Europe. Mosley explained that Germany had a long track-record of being creative with, well, resources. Mind you so were food producers in Britain who thought nothing of adding floor sweepings to loose tea, alum and plaster of Paris to flour and strychnine to beer to enhance its flavour. That was adulteration and fraudulent. What Germany was doing was creating cheap as-near-as. Everyone knew, I’m supposing, what it was and was not.

The writer was impressed, not for the sake of it of the ingenuity but its capacity to deal with the growing mountains of rubbish accumulating in European countries not least Britain and the prospect of turning that waste into something wonderful, or close to it, was welcomed by him. The German government went as far as introducing laws against waste – clothing rags, items containing metals such as copper, nickel, tine, aluminium, lead, iron and steel including toothpaste tubes, paper, glass bottles, rabbit skins, bones were collected and reused or transformed into something else. Unwanted food redistributed. What was unsuitable for human consumption went to feed what pigs remained on farms.

Shop bought jam used to be notorious in Britain for using neep (cheap) to bulk out more expensive fruit. I’ve even heard of wood shavings for pips to create the illusion of authenticity so it may surprise you to discover German jam did actually contain fruit though of course not real sugar but Germans love their meat and jam proved less than popular spread on their neep flour bread than you might imagine.

 

 

The article claimed around 90% clothes and furniture in Germany were ersatz by the late thirties and nearly 50% of the country’s food. There were drawbacks, for example a man caught wearing timber-sourced trousers in a shower of rain could expect 20% shrinkage which wouldn’t be a great look. Coats were often paper which restricted their use. German men had to endure getting a baldy with each visit to the barber for human hair was saved and used for manufacturing carpets and felts. The country’s buses ran on tyres made from coal and limestone which were not as good as rubber but then Germany did not produce its own rubber.

Oh and the coffee? It was might be made from, well virtually anything – ground acorns or sugar beet or barley or oats – roasted of course – or chicory or carrots or the old standby, the neep. The bland flavour enhanced by a soupçon of coal tar.

 

Germany doesn’t waste even Barbers’ Clippings The Aberdeen Press & Journal Friday June 3, 1938