Description:The documents relating to the work of the Association provide a detailed insight into the motivation behind its foundation. A booklet about the Association states that following ‘the War in South Africa’:
‘recent publications on the question of our food supply in time of war have called renewed attention to that important question…‘An Association to “Promote an Official inquiry into the Security of our Food Supply in time of War” has in consequence been set on foot, and the names of those who have already joined it are sufficient proof that it numbers in its ranks, entirely apart from party politics, men of influence and position among all classes in the country’.
The document indicates that concern over England’s food supply centred upon:
‘The possible prevention for any reason of the export of corn from any of the foreign states from which we derive our food supplies; or the interception by an enemy of any of the seaborne cargoes of corn for our consumption’.
The Association’s booklet, and many of the pamphlets included with the Association Booklet in the Collection appear anxious that the price of wheat may rise too high for people to afford bread. The Association booklet adds:
‘It seems to us that with any shortage of supplies – and the price of food, in consequence, enormously enhanced – the position of great numbers of the poorer people would become intolerable’.
The main aim of the Association appears to have been to encourage an official enquiry into England’s wartime food supply. The booklet concludes:
‘of the points that we have raised there appears to be a complete dearth of official information for the guidance of the country; and they should, all of them, we think, be made the subject of a careful and a full inquiry, instituted by the Government’
The collection includes notices advertising the public meetings at the Mansion House such as one held on Friday February 27th 1903 to encourage an enquiry into whether sufficient food could be sourced to ‘meet the needs of the population, especially the poorer classes.’
Newspaper cuttings kept alongside the Association booklets indicate that concern over food supply in wartime was widespread in the early twentieth century. The Staffordshire Advertiser for 7th May 1900 states that ‘everybody knew that this country was dependent on foreign states for the greater part of its food supply’. Another newspaper cutting dated February 3rd 1903 from the Morning Post written by J. H. Dunne suggests that ‘surely every patriotic Briton is bound to join the Duke of Sutherland’s association to induce the Government to take some immediate action.