The Flintham Museum, Flintham Museum, Inholms Road, Flintham (2026)

27/08/2026

Plum Perfect

Fred White and his daughter Muriel, village shopkeepers at Flintham, Nottinghamshire (1911-1982) left a wealth of unsold shop stock and supporting documentation, now housed at the Flintham Museum.

The collection is full of surprises. Among the paperwork detailing WWII food rationing from the shopkeepers’ point of view, there is a series of illustrated newsletters issued during the 1940s and 1950s by the Retail Fruit Trade Federation Ltd. In 1944 the Federation sent a poster listing the fruit and vegetables available in August and September that year with the maximum prices that could be charged for each category.

Plums were not priced and shopkeepers were asked to write in their own price. The surprise was that seven different types of named plums were widely available for sale in 1944. A bit of research unearthed the following details about the seven listed plums.

Yellow Egg; this was also known as Yellow Pershore and was grown in the Vale of Evesham. It was used to make preserves, although this would have been difficult during the war because sugar was rationed until September 1953. Many Womens’ Institutes were given a special sugar supply so that they could make jam for their local area.

Czars; a dark purple plum which was introduced in the 1870s and named after Tsar Alexander II. It was primarily a cooking plum, although if left to fully ripen it could be eaten as a dessert plum.

Mogul; used for jam making, it was also known as the Magnum Bonum or the Great Mogul.

Blaisden Red; Mr Dowding, who lived in the village of Blaisden, Gloucestershire in 1892, named this plum.

Gisborne; another yellow plum which dates back to the early 1800s.

Purple Pershore; a plum raised from a wild seedling found in Tiddesley Wood in Worcestershire, c.1877.

Kent Bush; this golden yellow plum was found in a hedge at Bobbing, Sittingbourne, Kent in 1836. The flesh was described as tasteless until it was cooked when its juice turned a deep red colour.

These plum varieties can still be bought from specialist fruit growers. But how many of them are sold in today’s supermarkets? When did you last buy plums which displayed the name of the variety?

Next time, we’ll look at the national food surveys that shopkeepers were expected to complete during WWII. The surveys began in 1941 and the list of stock at Whites Stores in June 1942 says a great deal about Flintham’s diet. Local plums would have been a treat to look forward to.

27/08/2026

Licenced To Sell?

The Flintham Museum looks at rural life through the eyes of a Nottinghamshire village shopkeeper, Fred White. Through Fred’s, and his daughter Muriel’s records, it is possible to see how rural retailing changed 1911-1982.

For example, we can watch how WWII food rationing affected small shopkeepers. Food rationing officially began on 8 January 1940. Between the outbreak of war, 3 September 1939, and early January all but the smallest parlour shops had been officially registered with their local Food Office; everyone throughout the country had received their own ration book, and women had decided with which shopkeepers the books would be registered.

As far as women were concerned, the system worked well and the foods stated on the ration books were available to collect each week from their designated shops.

From the other side of the counter, rationing took longer to settle down and make sense. The Ministry of Food, which from 1 September 1939, commandeered all food in transit, shops and warehouses, began sending out notices to shopkeepers. Information was issued about the constant system changes, how to keep the Ministry up to date with the number of rations that had been collected and the corresponding coupons handed over, and what to do in case of enemy action, such as dealing with contaminated food.

The notices were printed on small, flimsy pieces of paper and posted to shops from the local Food Office. Heaven help any shopkeeper whose eyesight wasn’t brilliant or who couldn’t remember which category of ration book the various abbreviations referred to. The notices were easily mislaid and once bombing began throughout the country, some notices probably never arrived at their destination or were received out of order making it difficult to know which instruction you were supposed to be following.

Shopkeepers were also expected to hold licences for different commodities. On Boxing Day, 26 December 1941, Muriel wrote a list of 51 items for which she needed a licence, giving a good indication of the food items stocked at White’s Stores. The shop was probably open on Boxing Day that year because in 1940 the Bank Holiday was cancelled so that factories could be kept running.

The next post will give some unexpected details about the varieties and names of fruits available in August/September 1944. From the list of different types of plums, see how many names (if any!) you recognise.

26/06/2026

Thank You, But No Thanks

The Flintham Museum looks at rural life through the eyes of a rural shopkeeper, Fred White, whose shop at Flintham, Nottinghamshire traded from 1911-1982. By 1939 and the outbreak of WWII, Fred’s daughter Muriel had taken over much of the day to day work in the shop. This meant that Fred, aged 69, had time to take on other roles to assist the community.

Previous posts have explained how the national food rationing system was put in place. In September 1939, local food committees began to be organised to oversee the system, in readiness for the first allocations of rationed food from 8 January 1940.

Flintham was in the Bingham Rural District and Fred applied, and was accepted, as a member of the new local Food Control Committee, one of 21 such committees in Nottinghamshire. Bingham’s first meeting was held at 2.45pm on 18 September 1939 to appoint a Chairman, a Deputy Chairman, the Food Executive Officer and a sub-committee. The latter’s role was to appoint staff and sort out the Food Office’s accommodation in Bingham along with their office requirements.

Fred made pencil notes on his agenda so we know that he was able to claim 1/- (12 old pence) for expenses, that the committee would meet every Wednesday at 2pm, that there was £428 available in the National Bank to run the office, and that Mr Shaw was elected as the Food Officer.

However, on 30 September, another letter was sent from the Bingham Food Office to Fred informing him that his name had been submitted to the Divisional Food Office (DFO). The DFO had decided that Fred could not be accepted as a consumer member of the committee because he was a grocer, so another person had been appointed. Perhaps this was as well because it meant that Fred had more time to concentrate on running the Special Constables and acting as the school secretary for both Flintham and Orston schools. And he was able to help Muriel run the rationing system, which as we will see was complex and exasperating.

In the next post we’ll start to investigate how rationing worked at shop level and discover how many licenses were necessary to sell rationed foods. You’ll be surprised!

01/06/2026

The Power Of The Ration Book

Seventy years after the end of food rationing in 1954, we know that shopping for limited food supplies during WWII and beyond was no fun for the housewife. However, it was equally as difficult, if not more so, on the other side of the shop counter. For 15 years, shopkeepers coped with mounds of official paperwork to ensure that the rationing system worked at every level, well before food reached a family’s table.

Fred White and his daughter Muriel ran White’s Stores at Flintham Nottinghamshire. During 1939, as war approached, women had begun to stockpile food ‘just in case’. Many shopkeepers bought extra food and put up their prices – hence the need for the Prices of Goods Act in 1939.

During 1939, Fred White’s ordering pattern was similar to previous years, but he sent his wholesaler a large order, just days before war was declared on 3 September. Unfortunately, his wholesaler was unable to deliver a number of the requested items, especially sugar, because their warehouse shelves were empty; shopkeepers had been stocking up for months.

In 1931, Flintham’s population was 242. By early 1940 people all round the country were on the move, and the exact number of people living in Flintham at the beginning of rationing, 8 January 1940, is not known. Shopkeepers realised that to ensure they received rationed items to sell they must persuade housewives to register with them. Many women, with memories of severe food shortages during WWI, and perhaps unsure of whether rationing would work, registered with more than one shopkeeper. This was not so easy for those who lived in rural areas where there was little or no choice of retail outlets.

Fred’s handwritten lists show that 133 people were registered with him in 1941 for sugar, jam, butter, fats and cheese. The population would have dropped as men left to join the Forces, but to what extent did Fred have to be especially nice to his female customers to ensure they placed their ration books at his shop? Did some younger women register with Newark grocers, especially if they worked at the ball bearing or munitions factories in Newark?

Come back to get a feel of the variety of instructions from the M*F, the continuous ‘do’s and don’ts’ issued on tiny slips of paper, and decide whether being a shopkeeper was more difficult than being a housewife with decreasing food resources.

15/04/2026

Ready, Steady, but not able to go!

The Flintham Museum looks at rural life through the eyes of Fred White, a 20th century village shopkeeper at Flintham, Nottinghamshire. He opened his shop in 1911 and handed it over to his daughter Muriel at the end of WWII. Muriel ran the shop until 1982 when it closed for good.

Food rationing began in January 1940 and ended in July 1954. Previous posts have explained how: in the mid-1930s, scientists had worked out the minimum food requirements to keep the population healthy and able to work; that ration books were sent for printing in September 1938; and returned to the Ministry of Food (M*F) in August 1939, just in time for distribution before war was declared the following month.

However, housewives had to register with one or more shopkeepers, who had to register their shops with the M*F before they could accept any ration books. Over four million ration books had to have a name written on the covers. But, at the beginning of the war, so many people were on the move that the authorities were not sure where anyone lived. Children were being evacuated and men were leaving home to join the Services.

At the end of September 1939 a national survey was taken, similar to the ten-yearly Census, so that the M*F knew who was living where and housewives could begin registering with shopkeepers. Hours were then spent writing names on to ration books which were posted out, until at last, everything was in place and rationing could finally begin in January 1940. Butter, bacon and sugar were the first rationed foods; followed by meat and preserves in March; and tea, margarine and cooking fats in July.

While families knew that they were guaranteed food, shopkeepers began to realise that their working lives were not going to be easy. Come back and find out about all the rules and regulations Fred and Muriel had to cope with to keep their customers fed.

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Flintham Museum, Inholms Road
Flintham
NG235LF

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https://www.flinthammuseum.org.uk/

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