The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Castleford Advert 2
Advertisements for tripe, cow heels, trotters and milk – those were the days! It was a time of food rationing, but going to the cinema wasn’t.
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Overview
Tripe was probably considered a luxury back in the days of wartime rationing, but this didn’t stop the local butcher from getting locals to part, not with their money, but with their weekly quota of meat rationing. Fortunately for the Co-op, milk wasn’t rationed in 1941 when this cinema ad in Castleford was made.
Meat was rationed from early on in the war, March 1940 – although bacon was among the first officially rationed items, beginning on 8 January 1940, together with butter and sugar. But unlike other foodstuffs, meat was rationed by money, 1s.2d per week, rather than by weight. Rationing, with some redistribution towards the poor, actually had a beneficial health effect for many. Milk wasn’t rationed until 1942 to 3 pints, sometimes to just 2, although the government promoted milk on posters, and by 1943 4 million children were receiving milk at school, preceding the 1946 School Milk Act. Although the Co-op has taken up the ethical mantle, the pasteurisation of milk has done nothing for the wellbeing of cows.
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