This paper reassesses the food consumption and dietary impact of the regimes of food and food price control and eventually, food rationing, that were introduced in Britain during the First World War. At the end of the War the Sumner Committee was convened to investigate the effects of these...

This paper estimates and investigates the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in Britain between 1904 and 1937. To do this, it exploits two newly-digitised data sets. The paper is a statistical generalisation, to working families in the whole of...

We re-assess the changes in British working class diets through WW1. The 1918 Sumner Committee’s work on this was limited by a lack of consistency across household surveys. Our rediscovered 1904 data allow a cleaner comparison. Though calorie intake was maintained, we find a closing of the...

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was roughly halfway through a 60-year demographic transition with declining infant mortality and birth rates. Cities exhibited great and strongly correlated diversity in these rates. We demonstrate cross–section correlations with, for instance,...

This article re-examines the food consumption of working class households in 1904 and compares the nutritional content of these diets with modern measures of adequacy. We find a fairly steep gradient of nutritional attainment relative to economic class, with high levels of vitamin and mineral...