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Books

Making do on frogs’ legs and 4,500 brace of grouse

The British beat second world war shortages at home by adapting inventively, and in some cases carrying on much as before, according to Duff Hart-Davis’s Our Land at War

27 June 2015

9:00 AM

27 June 2015

9:00 AM

Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain, 1939–45 Duff Hart-Davis

William Collins, pp.458, £20, ISBN: 9780007516537

This big, bristling, deeply-furrowed book kicks off with a picture of the British countryside just before the second world war. Apparently we then grew only 30 per cent of our food, horses did most of the work and a lot of the land, criss-crossed by empty roads featuring the occasional pony trap, had been abandoned to weeds and brambles.

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