School Dinners

School Dinners in the 1950s and 1960s by Ellen Castellow The first story is a general article about school dinners in post-war Britain which I found online I have added my own reminiscences about school meals at WLBHS , from 1959 to '66. I am a bit hazy about some of the details so if you want to add your own comments or correct mine please contact me via the e-mail link.
School dinners… love them or hate them they were an integral part of life for most children in the 1950s and 1960s… We all remember the smell of overcooked cabbage that haunted the halls and corridors of our schools in the 1950s and 1960s. School dinners - loved or loathed, they have left us with many memories! If you lived within walking distance of your school, and your mother or a neighbour was willing to make you lunch, you could go home rather than stay school dinners, returning in time for afternoon lessons. Everyone else had school dinners. Dinner money was collected every Monday for the week, a shilling a day in the late 1950s rising to 1s 6d in the mid 1960s. Free school meals were available to those in need.
Cooked from scratch on the premises, these dinners were planned to give children a hot, nutritious meal in the middle of the day. In the 1950s and 1960s many a child lived in poverty and a hot meal was often not possible. School milk had also been introduced to improve the poor diet of many children.
Children sat at tables, sometimes in the school hall that doubled as the gym. Often there was an adult on each table who would coach the children in table manners, 'please pass the salt' etc. as well as encouraging them to eat the less delicious but still nutritious dishes on the menu. If no adult, then often a prefect or older child would be 'head of table'. Following rationing, which continued until 1953, this was plain cooking. Weekly staples would include minced beef and carrots in gravy with mashed potatoes, for example, or hotpot. Friday lunch was always fish, often a piece of white fish in parsley sauce or fish and chips, and in the 1960s, maybe fish fingers. Steak and kidney pie, liver and onions, corned beef and toad in the hole also appeared frequently on the menu and were accompanied by tinned peas or seasonal vegetables, more often than not cabbage that had been boiled into a soggy mush. In the summer there might be ham salad, consisting of a slice of ham, round lettuce, cucumber and half a tomato, served with boiled potatoes.
You were generally expected to eat everything on the plate, even if that meant the dinner lady or teacher keeping you behind until you had finished the now cold, congealed plate of food in front of you. Many have been permanently scarred by the experience! It was best to chew quickly, swallow hard and flush down with a glass of water. For around the 50% of children who stayed school dinners in the 1950s, it was the main meal of the day. Whether you remember them fondly or not, nutritionally these were balanced meals: a main course of protein, vegetables and carbohydrates, with puddings either made with milk or served with milky custard. Prepared from fresh each day, there were no artificial additives. [e-numbers had yet to be invented ] Whilst the plainly cooked main courses and overcooked cabbage may have filled many with dread, the vast majority remember the puddings with great affection. Chocolate sponge pudding with chocolate custard, for example - nectar of the gods.
Puddings were the saving grace of school dinners. Sponge puddings were served with hot custard, usually yellow in colour but not always; sometimes there was green custard or pink. The school dinner ladies must have made gallons of custard; if not homemade (and invariably lumpy) it was made from Bird's custard powder mixed with milk. Suet puddings such as spotted dick and jam roly poly were tasty and filling, perfect for those who had struggled through a less than appetising first course. Prunes and custard kept the children 'regular': it was fun to count the prune stones with the rhyme, "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…". Apple crumble and apple pie were always popular. And then there were the milk puddings: blancmange or rice pudding, tapioca or sago ("frogspawn"), usually served with a spoonful of jam.
OK you 've had the starter now for the main course ! My recollections of School Dinners at West Leeds. - John Swash
We always knew them as dinners, even though they were eaten at lunchtime. The word lunch sounded far too flimsy. In most Leeds households of the 1960s, meals were breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper - with the possible exception of Harewood House, where they may well have said luncheon. I first encountered the delights of LEA school dinners in my final year at Brownhills Junior School in Harehills. Our meals were served in the neighbouring Methodist church hall on Harehills Lane, and the fare was much as described in the earlier article — hearty, simple, and unmistakably of its time. The dining experience at WLBHS differed in several respects. The "dinner hut" (dining hall. or refectory), stood apart from the main redbrick building in a concrete structure that probably dated from the 1940s. It had seating for only about half the school, so dinner was served in two sittings. I believe, though I can’t say for certain, that the food was delivered from a central kitchen elsewhere, as there seemed to be very little actual cooking done on site.[1] I don't remember queuing to be served by the dinner ladies at a serving hatch . I think the food was delivered to our tables on a trolley and we served ourselves from the large metal containers and jugs.
School dinners were a sea of potatoes, pastry, and bread. We never saw rice (except in rice pudding), and pasta rarely ventured beyond macaroni cheese - it was the 1960s, after all. Stodge ruled. Thick suet sponge over a rich layer of steak and kidney; thick slabs of jam sponge, sprinkled with desiccated coconut and drowned in custard- these were just some of the ways they filled us up. Meals were unapologetically high in calories. Stodge was considered essential. Every pie had more crust than filling, and every crumble had a thicker topping than fruit, but that suited this hungry boy perfectly. Bad days were rare, but unforgettable. The worst was liver with a greenish hue and flavour that rendered it inedible to me and the dreaded sago, universally known as "frog spawn". Gooseberry pie for desert divided opinion, but it was - and remains - one of my favourites, with its sugar-dusted pastry and layer of sweet-sour filling.
This photo is pretty much how I remember school dinners at WLBHS. Eight of us on a table, seated on benches often with a teacher at the head of the table to keep order. No table cloth - just wipe clean Formica. Table manners weren't too bad, just the occasional flicking of peas with a spoon at another table when the teacher was otherwise engaged. Food was served in metal baking tins and metal jugs for gravy and custard. Nothing to drink except good old Leeds tap water from a jug. For some reason the drinking glasses were always the same with a "Duralex - Made in France" logo. I noticed this in primary school and it was the same at WLBHS . I always wondered why the LEA bought its glassware from a French manufacturer.[2} To ensure that puddings served in the metal tins were divided fairly between eight of us, the person who cut the pudding in the tin always got the last slice. As for the custard, those metal jugs were notorious for heat loss, which accelerated the formation of that thick "skin" on the surface . While most of us found it off-putting, luckily every table seemed to have at least one designated "skin eater" who treated it like a delicacy.
[1] As I suspected, many UK Local Education Authorities (LEAs), including Leeds, used to rely on central kitchens, often called production or catering units, to cook school meals in bulk. The food was prepared in one place, packed into insulated containers, and sent out to individual schools where it was simply served by the dinner ladies. This approach which helped keep costs down and standards consistent was common from the mid 20th century until it was phased out in the 1990s. I remember seeing the collection of the leftovers at my primary school. The slops were collected in steel bins and used to feed pigs! [2] The mystery of the French glassware has a simple explanation: Duralex was the industry standard because it used a tempering process that made the glass virtually unbreakable. The Duralex Picardie and Gigogne designs were chosen by Local Education Authorities (LEAs) across the UK because they could survive being dropped on stone floors or stacked aggressively by kitchen staff.