Title:MR ROBERT MIDDLEMAS'S FOOD PRODUCTION AT ILFORD [Main Title]
Film Number:IWM 531
Other titles:
Summary: Part-time and volunteer food production schemes at Ilford, Essex, with an exhortation to surpass them, 1918 (?).
Description: Mr Middlemas has set up shop in the centre of Ilford where rabbits can be bought and bred for food. Men work "twitching", spiking the ground to employ drainage. Men, women and Boy Scouts work cultivating the hospital grounds. Boys, including "Ilford's champion digger", work on allotments. On the common a horse-drawn plough is followed by men scattering potato seeds. One month later the men work hoeing out the weeds from the patch. Sea Scouts pick blackfly off growing broad bean plants, pausing for their own meal by a tent. Men cut waste grass for hay with sickles, others work on allotments. Sea Scouts and Boy Scouts collect refuse for pigs from door to door. The sty is built and creosoted, then the pigs arrive by cart and car. The Ilford Boys Pig Club owns 10 breeding sows and 77 store and young pigs. A few months later, the fattened pigs and piglets are shown together in the sty.
