Make Do And Mend was published in the UK in 1943, by the Ministry of Information, at a time when food and clothes were rationed. The Make Do And Mend slogan summed up British life perfectly: every citizen was permitted one egg a week, a modest cube of cheese and unlimited bread and vegetables. Coupons for clothes were cut from allowance books; enterprising women supplemented these rations with garments cut from curtains, and kohl pencil lines up the backs of their legs, to look like stockings. Their cookware was handed over to be turned into aeroplanes. (And if all this wasn’t bad enough, their towns and cities were being bombed at night.)
The frugal tradition promoted by Make Do and Mend continued beyond the Second World War and into the 1950s, when the Manchester Evening News published Take a Tip : a collection of readers’ money saving titbits.
It’s funny, isn’t it? These little booklets have been hanging around for decades, unwanted and unread, gathering dust in attics and mouldering on charity shop shelves while we’ve been out spending and splurging on overpriced frivolites and cheap tat.
Now that we’re headed for a recession - a Depression, even, if the doomiest of the doom-mongers are to be believed – all these pearls of wisdom are suddenly relevant again. With our financial indexes plummeting, our markets in turmoil and our elected representatives banging heads with one another, this seems as good a time as any to dust off Make Do And Mend and revisit some of our forebears’ handiest household hints
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