The day after Britain declared war on Germany, Bradford’s Lord Mayor, Alderman John Arnold, just back from a Bank Holiday sojourn in Morecambe, issued a statement urging the public to resist panic buying.

He said: “It would, indeed, be very bad for the city at large if people with money at their ready command were allowed to denude grocers and provision dealers of their stocks, leaving little or nothing for those who have only a weekly wage...

“I trust tradesmen will do what is expedient at the present time and refuse to execute large orders from their customers, which they have reason to believe, are beyond immediate requirements or, at any rate, beyond a fortnight’s supply, and then deal with the demands of others.”

One of the causes of concern for the Bradford and District Chamber of Trade was tradesmen who had hiked their prices on news of Britain’s declaration of war. The cost of sugar and flour had rocketed.

More than 100 years before, Napoleon, through his Continental System shipping blockade, had tried to starve Britain into surrender. In the late 1840s Ireland’s potato crop failed. Hundreds of thousands of country people died, several millions more emigrated, principally to America and to Britain.

In short, the folk memory of food deprivation was comparatively fresh enough for Britain’s diverse population to prompt some of them, upon the declaration of war between the empires of Britain and Germany, to stockpile foodstuffs.

Germans from the southern district called Hohenlohe had been flourishing in and around Bradford since the mid-19th century. They were pork butchers who, over the next few decades, made a substantial contribution to the feeding of thousands.

Hard-working, innovative and determined, they quickly realised that industrialisation and population growth had opened a ready market for good value, ready-made basic foodstuffs.

These shopkeepers were well respected until the outbreak of the 1914-18 War. Subjected to animosity, only a few of these businesses managed to survive. On Friday, September 4, the Bradford Weekly Telegraph carried photographs of German pork butchers shops with smashed windows in Keighley.

The trouble had started on the previous Saturday night when an Irishman named Kelley reportedly went into the shop of Carl Andrassy and asked for a pie “without any poison in it”.

A row started and blows were exchanged. Before the night was out other shops in South Street and Church Street were attacked. The windows of Keighley police station were smashed.

The Telegraph said thousands of people were in the streets. Police charged with drawn batons, but only two men were arrested.

After the war had started, Britain’s food supply and the suggested regulation of prices was discussed by Cabinet committee on food supplies on August 5.

Britain continued to import raw materials and foodstuffs from the United States and Canada. Merchant ships steamed across the North Atlantic in relative safety until February 1, 1917, when Germany’s Kaiser signed the order for unrestricted submarine warfare.

That was in response to the Royal Navy’s successful blockade of German ports, which led to food shortages in Germany, malnutrition, riots and, reportedly, deaths.

Within three months of the Kaiser’s order, the amount of Allied and neutral tonnage sank by U-boats rose from 368,000 tonnes to 881,027 tonnes.

Writing from Cottingley, T&A reader John Fearnley said: “I think I am correct in saying that there was no official system of food rationing during the First World War. When there were shortages, people simply queued. This led to much abuse and no doubt led to a proper system during the Second World War, when everyone got something.”

The unrestricted U-boat campaign had three results on life on the home front: allotments, more land for farming and, from January 1918, rationing.

Allotments had been a subsidiary feature of life since the early 19th century. With the rise of the price of food and coal in the autumn of 1916, people were encouraged to grow their own food and keep chickens. Any bit of spare domestic ground was converted into an allotment.

In 1873 there were fewer than 245,000 allotments. By 1918 that had risen to an all-time high of 1.5m.

From 1917, under the 1915 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), David Lloyd George’s wartime coalition government of Liberals, Conservatives and Ulster Unionists took over 2.5m extra acres of land for farming. By the end of the war that figure had risen to three million acres.

Conscientious objectors and the Women’s Land Army helped to plant the fields and gather the harvest.

But allotments and farming were not enough to supply the population at home and the armed forces abroad. In January 1918, sugar was rationed. By the end of April, meat, butter and cheese were added to the list. Ration cards were issued; everybody had to register with a grocer and a butcher.

The pattern was established for the Second World War.