[Chock]

Purely done for morale.

It wouldn't surprise me if that was true to be honest, but the scale of the effort involved in collecting stuff would seem a bit excessive for a morale booster, and while many materials collected were useless, that's not true for iron and steel, it was useful and used, and it still is today (see note at the bottom of this post). Of course it's obvious that rough pig iron would not exactly be useful in creating a Spitfire, and I don't think anyone seriously believed their gate would be a wing on one of them. Sort of in a manner similar to the 'Spitfire Funds' (more correctly, Presentation Spitfires) in which a nominal value was placed on an aircraft so that a group of people, town or borough could 'buy' one. In fact, they merely bought the opportunity to have their name added to a current model from the production lines. In reality, the money probably went to a US Aircraft manufacturer for a P-40 or any other aircraft the RAF was buying from the US, something of that nature, but to a Brit, that wouldn't sound patriotic...

I turned this up after a bit of a search on the 'net with regard to metal collecting from the populace, although it is mostly in reference to the US, it does show that it wasn't all purely for morale:

'In 1942, when the first scrap drives were organized, the war was far from won, and frightened civilians at all levels were anxious to do something, anything, to help. So campaigns were organized to collect not just metal and rubber but kitchen fat, newspapers, rags, and so on. These drives were extremely successful--millions of tons of material were collected. It was only afterward, contemplating the assembled mounds of junk, that those in charge of the war effort asked themselves: What are we going to do with all this crap?

World War II shortages weren't just home-front propaganda. Japanese conquests in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies cut off access to natural rubber supplies. President Roosevelt urged Americans to turn in "old tires, old rubber raincoats, old garden hose, rubber shoes, bathing caps, gloves," and so on at their local service stations. Just one problem: there wasn't (and still isn't) an efficient way of recycling rubber products. Rubber's complex chemistry and the variety of formulations in use made recycling slow and expensive and the resultant material inferior to virgin rubber. Although the rubber recycling industry did produce a fair amount of material throughout the war, the rubber scrap drive didn't significantly boost its output. The real solution to the rubber shortage was development of synthetic rubber and conservation--gas rationing was primarily meant to save tires, not gas.

Many of the other materials collected couldn't readily be recycled either. Many who lived through the war remember collecting old newspapers, but apart from using them as packing material and such there was little to be done with them. A 1941 aluminum-scrap drive to help the plucky Brits pulled in 70,000 tons of aluminum pots and pans, but only virgin aluminum could be used to manufacture aircraft.

Iron and steel were a different story. These metals could be easily melted down and used for munitions. It's not as if the U.S. lacked domestic sources of iron ore, though. The real challenge was gearing up American industry for war production. That meant everything from increasing steel-making capacity to building more factories and designing better weapons. Recycling of steel and iron unquestionably helped. One campaign netted five million tons of steel in just three weeks, and scrap-metal drives continued for most of the war.

Useful though recycled steel and iron were, some scrap drives went overboard. In addition to old streetcar tracks, wrought iron fences, church bells, and the like, people carted off relics of previous wars, including cannons, park statues, and other memorials. When the memorials were being rebuilt after the war, many wished they hadn't been so hasty.

There's no denying scrap drives and other World War II home-defense efforts were meant in part as morale builders. Some seem pretty loopy in retrospect--air-raid blackouts in Nebraska, for example. But a few were surprisingly effective. In 1943 victory gardens produced 40 percent of the country's fresh vegetables. Salvaged kitchen fat was used to produce glycerin, an ingredient in drugs and explosives. Then there's the Civil Air Patrol, organized in 1941 to watch the coasts and assist in search and rescue operations. Less help than hindrance, right? Not so. In the 18 months before the navy took over patrol duty, the CAP spotted 173 U-boats, located 363 survivors of sunken ships and downed aircraft, and reported 91 ships in distress. Lest you think all home-front volunteers were paunchy air-raid wardens in tin hats.'

So if all, or any, of that is true, I wonder if I can phone Gordon Brown up and ask him to put the railings back on my garden wall? If not, I'll settle for a free Spitfire:rotfl:

Oddly enough, the theft of metal in the UK has risen massively in recent months, and it is reckoned that China's expansion, and the worldwide demand for metal is at the heart of this trend.

Chock