Churchill's electoral defeat in July 1945 was ensured in late September 1942.
To prove that it really did reject the soon to be released Beveridge Report, the British (Conservative Party-dominated) government's all-powerful Ministry of Supply (MOS), together with representatives of the academic-military-civil servant medical science establishment, met on that date to set the British Commonwealth's production levels for penicillin for the remainder of the war.
(And first let us remind ourselves, because today's English academics - save only David Edgerton - never do , that the civilian and military populations of the 1940s British Commonwealth cum Empire were larger than those of America.)
This was eight months before America's (New Deal/liberal Democrat oriented) War Production Board (WPB) did the same penicillin goal-setting for the US.
Until mid-1943, the British had produced at least as much penicillin as America had.
But in the last six months of 1943, the Americans pulled far ahead and the gap really widened in 1944 , with Britain producing a few percent of what the Americans were doing.
This result has been bewailed ever since by all manner of Britons --- as a failure to which blame must be laid on someone or something.
For the first fifteen years after humans discovered penicillin , British historians have scapegoated blame upon the supposedly rebellious penicillium for British medicine's failure to treat more than a handful with the world's best lifesaver.
But when the Americans produced thousands of times as much penicillin from the self same awkward penicillium spores, that Big Lie had to be be bowler-hatted and the blame laid upon British industry for failing to meet its agreed upon targets.
Blaming British industry - that's a fresh new excuse, isn't it ?
But the real failure was not that the industry failed to meet its goals unlike the Americans, because in fact they did met the MOS-directed goals.
Rather it is that the MOS (along with advisors like Fleming and Florey) set those goals (labelled "TOP SECRET") so absurdly low that most British servicemen and POWs, let alone civilians in Britain and in her Dominions and Colonies , won't see any of the stuff while the war was on.
With the little money saved by that decision, the British government created two additional heavy bomber squadrons so that the dust of destroyed French, Dutch, German et al cities could be shifted about a little more.
We know what the goals set by the American WPB in May-June 1943, because they were freely given out to the technical media and later the public media.
The WPB wanted America to go from producing 95 million units of penicillin a month to producing 380 billion units a month.
Four thousand times as much as before !
The British government never publicly said how much penicillin it wanted produced per month in 1943-1944.
But it indirectly indicated that level by telling the House of Commons on October 4 1944, that it had authorized and helped finance the seven existing plants , six which were still only of pilot plant size more than five years into the war !
And we do know the MOS had turned down financing or approving much bigger plants a year and a half earlier - a decision it now had to reverse.
We know that all these relatively small plants were working well and working at capacity - that they were quietly and economically meeting the absurdly low levels that the government and Florey and Fleming had set.
They were doing so using unused factory space and unskilled labour and not requiring much scarce high tech materials.
Making more penicillin only required the MOS to permit the British drug industry to open more of these low tech plants.
It required merely a moral commitment from British conservatives - like that made by the New Deal-oriented WPB - that wars are won best when all share the burdens and benefits equally.
I deliberately say British conservatives rather than the British Conservative Party because the blame lies equally with the members of Britain's medical science elite who fails to push for "wartime penicillin for all".
In the summer of 1945, "the voters" finally got a chance to respond to the 1942-set British penicillin goals as they saw them - by kicking out Churchill's government in a historically decisive defeat...
To prove that it really did reject the soon to be released Beveridge Report, the British (Conservative Party-dominated) government's all-powerful Ministry of Supply (MOS), together with representatives of the academic-military-civil servant medical science establishment, met on that date to set the British Commonwealth's production levels for penicillin for the remainder of the war.
(And first let us remind ourselves, because today's English academics - save only David Edgerton - never do , that the civilian and military populations of the 1940s British Commonwealth cum Empire were larger than those of America.)
This was eight months before America's (New Deal/liberal Democrat oriented) War Production Board (WPB) did the same penicillin goal-setting for the US.
Until mid-1943, the British had produced at least as much penicillin as America had.
But in the last six months of 1943, the Americans pulled far ahead and the gap really widened in 1944 , with Britain producing a few percent of what the Americans were doing.
This result has been bewailed ever since by all manner of Britons --- as a failure to which blame must be laid on someone or something.
For the first fifteen years after humans discovered penicillin , British historians have scapegoated blame upon the supposedly rebellious penicillium for British medicine's failure to treat more than a handful with the world's best lifesaver.
But when the Americans produced thousands of times as much penicillin from the self same awkward penicillium spores, that Big Lie had to be be bowler-hatted and the blame laid upon British industry for failing to meet its agreed upon targets.
Blaming British industry - that's a fresh new excuse, isn't it ?
But the real failure was not that the industry failed to meet its goals unlike the Americans, because in fact they did met the MOS-directed goals.
Rather it is that the MOS (along with advisors like Fleming and Florey) set those goals (labelled "TOP SECRET") so absurdly low that most British servicemen and POWs, let alone civilians in Britain and in her Dominions and Colonies , won't see any of the stuff while the war was on.
With the little money saved by that decision, the British government created two additional heavy bomber squadrons so that the dust of destroyed French, Dutch, German et al cities could be shifted about a little more.
We know what the goals set by the American WPB in May-June 1943, because they were freely given out to the technical media and later the public media.
The WPB wanted America to go from producing 95 million units of penicillin a month to producing 380 billion units a month.
Four thousand times as much as before !
The British government never publicly said how much penicillin it wanted produced per month in 1943-1944.
But it indirectly indicated that level by telling the House of Commons on October 4 1944, that it had authorized and helped finance the seven existing plants , six which were still only of pilot plant size more than five years into the war !
And we do know the MOS had turned down financing or approving much bigger plants a year and a half earlier - a decision it now had to reverse.
We know that all these relatively small plants were working well and working at capacity - that they were quietly and economically meeting the absurdly low levels that the government and Florey and Fleming had set.
They were doing so using unused factory space and unskilled labour and not requiring much scarce high tech materials.
Making more penicillin only required the MOS to permit the British drug industry to open more of these low tech plants.
It required merely a moral commitment from British conservatives - like that made by the New Deal-oriented WPB - that wars are won best when all share the burdens and benefits equally.
I deliberately say British conservatives rather than the British Conservative Party because the blame lies equally with the members of Britain's medical science elite who fails to push for "wartime penicillin for all".
In the summer of 1945, "the voters" finally got a chance to respond to the 1942-set British penicillin goals as they saw them - by kicking out Churchill's government in a historically decisive defeat...
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