Eighty years ago, Britain fighting for its life against a brutal enemy in World War II.
The Evening Chronicle's front page of March 23, 1942, provides a snapshot of truly global conflict: Royal Navy strikes in the Mediterranean; Allied raids on Japanese bomber bases in the Far East, and Soviet attacks in Northern Europe. For those on the British home front, with loved ones often away fighting and some even feeling the force of German air raids, there was the added privation of rationing.
These ration books, issued in Newcastle 80 years ago, were familiar day-to-day items used by our forbears who lived through the war. The drastic step to introduce rationing in Britain came four months into the war, in early January 1940, as German submarines began to target British merchant ships.
