The latest issue of The Historian, the magazine of The Historical Association, has a fascinating article on “child health and school meals: Nottingham 1906-1945”. It is not that the meals themselves are fascinating – “meat, potatoes and pudding” for “dinner” (what I’d call lunch – but then that’s a whole other social history) features with extraordinary prominence (presumably no vegetables).
But the origins of the meal, in the 1906 Education (Provision of Meals) Act are fascinating – despite lots of reports of children being too ill-fed to learn, the state was extremely reluctant to intervene because “this would be interpreted as extending provisions to the poor and would intimate that the state would provide for all their material needs”. So when meals were provided there was much effort to stress that this was purely to aid the children’s education.
The school medical service (founded 1908) found in Nottingham in 1913 (when the town was suffering a particularly bad trade period, conditions that sounds like what we might expect in Africa today “septic condition of the mouth, chronic gastric disturbance, bilious attacks, constipation, everted costal margins [?] and protrubent abdomen”.
And when you look at the typical home diet — breakfast: tea/coffee, bread and lard; dinner bread and lard, sometimes jam pudding; supper bread and lard or jam. On Sunday bacon and tomatoes added at breakfast and meat and potatoes to the midday meal — it isn’t hard to see why.
Issue No 92, Winter 2006, pp. 12-19.
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