Epilogue

Summary

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.