School's Out Forever! Dinner Ladies During Nuclear War

Rebecca Shaw

Dinner ladies loom large for many people in their memories of school days. Some are remembered fondly, as kindly grandma-like figures who smilingly served bubble and squeak and rice pudding to hungry kiddies. Other dinner ladies are recalled as tyrannical characters who were determined to see every morsel of meat devoured by every terrified child. I remember a lunch monitor – she shall remain anonymous – who scooped mashed potato out of a vat with her bare hands rather than a spoon, and who declared that any crumb dropped or blob of soup spilled would have to be licked off the floor by the guilty party. Yikes. These horrors would pale into insignificance, however, compared to the nightmarish role that dinner ladies would have played if nuclear war had ever broken out. For during the Cold War, plans were afoot that would have seen hair-netted school meals staff forced to serve ‘stew type’ meals to nuclear attack survivors, with the threat of punishment or starvation if they refused. Such plans were made all across the UK, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on those drawn up in Lancashire County Council’s 1983 War Plan. Form an orderly queue and await a generous serving of Cold War terrors…

(Not a real job advert...)

At some point in the early 1980s, a civil servant tasked with drawing up their county’s war plan had a brainwave, and realised that schools were perfectly equipped to feed hordes of starving nuclear attack survivors, owing to their industrial kitchens and large dining rooms. Before this point, emergency feeding plans involved the ladies of the Women’s Voluntary Service dragging themselves across a fallout strewn, war-ravaged landscape to the local playing field, where they would construct makeshift ovens from vermin-infested dustbins and salvaged bricks. Aside from the obvious lunacy of cooking al fresco while radioactive fallout dust descends from the sky, this plan’s major drawback was that it could not be prepared in advance of a nuclear attack; makeshift ovens, utensils and other cooking equipment would of course be incinerated by the fireball or blown away by the blast. A pre-existing school kitchen, on the other hand, could be forcibly requisitioned by the authorities during the run up to war and reinforced to withstand at least some of the immediate effects of a nuclear explosion. Once fallout had subsided to (supposedly) safe levels, conscripted staff could then whip out their pots and pans like any other school day, ready to cook up a storm. 

A member of Burnley WVS rustles up an apple pie using an outdoor oven during a nuclear attack simulation, 1954.

In war, schools would come to be known as Emergency Feeding Centres (EFCs). Lancashire’s War Plan contained lists of addresses, headteachers and telephone numbers for each school destined to become canteens for the walking dead after nuclear war. During the escalation period before an attack, the chosen schools would receive a somewhat awkward phone call from the former County Director of Education, who would have been recently promoted to District Food Officer in readiness for the coming apocalypse. During this friendly phone call, the Food Officer would make some general enquiries about how much food and drinking water was stored in the school kitchens, and have a nice chat about how many reliable cooks, dinner ladies and cleaners were employed there. He would then politely order the headteacher to send their pupils packing and indefinitely surrender control of their school. Any objections to the plan would be swiftly squashed by a visit from the District Manpower Officer and his armed cronies recruited from the police and territorial army. School meals staff would be ordered to report to the school fourteen days after a nuclear attack to commence emergency feeding work. If they refused? Their own rations would be withheld, as well as those allocated to their family. Extreme objectors could be corporally or even capitally punished under emergency government legislation.

Once the pupils had cleared off, work would begin to transform humble school kitchens into emergency warzone feeding stations. Windows would be barricaded with bricks. Doors would be sandbagged. To complement the existing ovens and cooking equipment – much of which would be rendered useless post-attack in the absence of mains gas and electricity – emergency cooking facilities would be delivered to the school by the Ministry of Food. Local councils kept a permanent stockpile of this equipment in their semi-secret food buffer depots, much of it being of Victorian design and battle-tested during the Second World War. Lancaster district’s stockpile was held in a Caton warehouse and in 1983 consisted of: 

— 60 Soyer boilers (cookers designed in the 1840s to cope with the Irish potato famine)

— 22 field cookers

— 40 rectangular food containers 

— 625 cylindrical containers

— 100 milk churns 

— 80 tarpaulins

— 100 camp kettles

— 3,000 plastic spoons

— 35,000 plastic bowls

— 70 baking trays

The Victorian boilers would be fueled by burning whatever rubbish the conscripted ‘volunteer’ dinner ladies could lay their hands on. Fortunately, highly flammable school textbooks and children's finger paintings would be available in plentiful supply in the abandoned classrooms, ready and waiting to be set alight. The unlucky dogsbodies tasked with cooking with the Victorian equipment would of course have never used it before. Attempting to learn the ropes amidst smouldering rubble, surrounded by wounded people desperate for food, while you yourself likely suffered from extreme shock and radiation sickness would be very difficult indeed. 

CD exercise, Morecambe, 1962.

An additional horror facing EFC staff would be the unfortunate reality that the school building would not be used solely for feeding survivors post nuclear attack. With limited resources to reinforce buildings during the build up to war, local government could only attend to protecting a minimum of premises; resultantly, many schools would double as food storage depots, first aid posts, local government administrative controls and refugee holding pens. Worst of all, a significant number of schools allocated as EFCs were also listed as Casualty Collection Centres, a euphemistic phrase that translates to ‘morgue’ in everyday parlance. Many school playgrounds and sports fields were also designated as mass burial sites, to be dug up and filled with thousands of rotting corpses. The table below shows some of the overlaps in the planned post-war roles of Emergency Feeding Centre schools in the Morecambe and Lancaster area:

With rotting cadavers piling up in the playing field outside and gangrenous, bleeding people desperately seeking medical attention down the corridor, flies, maggots and rats would quickly find their way into the school kitchen. Fortunately, Lancashire’s War Plan looked ahead to the vermin infestation issue that would face the EFCs, in the provision of ‘volunteer assistance as required [in the kitchen] for waste disposal and sanitation improvement’. In other words, staffing would be bolstered by forcing a luckless survivor to bat away rats and flies from food preparation areas, ironically enough in return for food, as stated in a 1976 government circular: ‘Money would have no value, and initial rewards for labour might be a meal or extra food for the family. Inevitably, because of the coercive power of the labour force, and simple necessity, obedient workers, the police and military will get the food’. Forced labour would be essential if the EFC were to be fully staffed. Existing dinner ladies and other school staff, of course, could not be fully relied upon to abandon their families and report for duty after a nuclear attack, despite warnings of corporal (or even capital) punishment if they failed to do so. The 1983 Lancashire War Plan states the following: 

‘Where possible, staff will be drawn from the normal peacetime staff of the establishment concerned. However, it is envisaged that the full staff complement required will, in most cases, only be secured by the use of volunteer assistance.’

Rats: regular visitors to post-war kitchens.

Members of the public would be instructed on where to report for reconstruction duties by crackling radio broadcasts from the BBC’s Wartime Broadcasting Service. Required staffing per twelve hour shift for EFCs would be as follows:

— 1 x supervisor

— 1 x team leader

— 1 x head cook

— 2 x assistant cooks

— 7 x helpers (serving / washing up / stoking fires, etc)

— Additional volunteer assistance as required for construction and maintenance of improved cooking, waste disposal and sanitation facilities

— Guards (required at all times)

The aforementioned guards would flank the entrance to the school kitchens and food storage areas, armed with weapons and the authorisation to shoot any looters or rioters without asking questions first. They would also be tasked with ensuring that forced labourers were working hard and not taking liberties by eating the scarce, revolting food they were supposed to be cooking. Again, the power of life or death to enforce work would be at their disposal. The guards would not, however, be police officers or military personnel. They would themselves be ‘volunteers’ drawn from the local community, specially selected for their tough character, ruthlessness and enthusiasm for wielding a gun:

‘District Food Officers will maintain liaison with the police on [security] matters, but it is likely that the police will be heavily committed in meeting the demands upon them. It will, therefore, be necessary for Supervisors of local food depots and EFCs to be prepared to seek assistance from community leaders in providing adequate security for the premises for which they are responsible.’ (War Plan, Section 9)

Prior to the war beginning, prisons would have been emptied of inmates in order to ready the reinforced structures for their post-attack roles; top-level government planning suggested that released convicts would be particularly suited to security roles in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Thus, violent criminals could be among the vigilante guards enforcing law and order in a school kitchen, holding terrified dinner ladies at gun point while they served up stew and requisitioned, irradiated meat. 

Civil Defence emergency feeding exercise, Morecambe 1962

The meals which were planned to be served after a nuclear attack – and I’m stretching the meaning of the word ‘meal’ to the extremes, here – were worlds apart at the beginning and end of the Cold War, when the 1983 War Plan was written. In the optimistic early days of the 1950s and 1960s, plans for so-called ‘emergency meals’ more closely resembled Enid Blyton-style boarding school midnight feasts than warzone food. A Civil Defence exercise held in Lancaster in July 1954, for instance, saw the Women’s Voluntary Service serve up the following menu for hungry rescuers in an imagined Hydrogen bomb attack:

Main Course: Lamb chops, boiled potatoes, peas and carrots.

Dessert: Jam sponge pudding and custard.

To Drink: Tea and freshly ground coffee. 

The lady volunteers, dressed becomingly in frilly aprons and hairnets, cooked up their post-bomb buffet by burning old newspapers and using dustbin lids as frying pans. We can only hope that the bins were cleaned first. By the time the 1980s had come around, however, war planners had at last woken up to the reality that lamb chops would be in short supply after a nuclear war, with pre-slaughtered animal meat quickly rotting and any animals unfortunate enough to still be alive riddled with radiation and therefore inedible. And as comforting as a steamed jammy sponge might be to someone in an extreme state of shock, the nuclear landscape was no place for afternoon tea. To indulge in such a luxurious meal would mean hours of cooking and a great deal of relaxed time in the eating; precious time that would be better spent clearing the streets of bodies, cleaning up human waste and enforcing law and order. Meals had to be quick and ideally pre-prepared, needing only to be reheated by the conscripted dinner ladies. At least there would be no complicated recipes to follow after nuclear war! By the 1980s, the official government expectation was that the school meals service would serve ‘half a pint of stew-type meal’ per day to survivors. This stew lay pre-made in vats in Ministry of Food buffer depots, waiting for the fateful day that it would need to be reheated in a school kitchen. Disciplined labourers, the police and military would be given priority in the food queue; those unwilling to work, the sick and the disobedient would be pushed to the back and left to starve. 

Caton WVS takes part in a Civil Defence exercise, cooking with (hopefully clean) dustbins.

Just like in school, good behaviour would be rewarded in a world ravaged by thermonuclear war, while laziness, unauthorized absence and misbehavior would be punished in the harshest possible way. Forget being held back after school for an hour’s detention, after a nuclear attack it would be more than possible to be held back forever in school, breathing one's last breath in a corridor littered with other starving, festering attack victims. Even if one obeyed the rules laid down by the teacher-like authorities and earned the reward of a cup of stew, death would still follow as predictably as a school bell ringing each hour, on the hour. 

And an ever present figure looming above the whole nightmarish scene would be the doomsday dinner lady, ladling out second helpings of horror as the fallout dust settled. Ask not for whom the lunch bell tolls, it tolls for thee…

Sources 

• 'Lancashire War Plan, Section 9: Emergency Feeding', accessed at Lancashire Archives.
• Lancaster Guardian, 16 July 1954; 13 April 1962.
• Target North West, 1982. Robert Poole and Steve Wright.
• War Plan UK, Duncan Campbell.

Home page