Between Two Birthdays: The Year UNESCO Built Itself // Coupons, Cigarettes, and a Letter from a POW Camp (Part 3 of 4)

The logistics of sustaining an international Secretariat surface throughout the files. A shipping bill from Thomas Meadows & Co., dated July 1948, records the consignment of “3 caisses de cigarettes” (168 kg, via the steamship Jupiter, Compagnie Maritime de la Seine) to UNESCO’s Paris address - Craven Mixture, John Cotton’s, Three Nuns, No Name, and Capstan Navy Cut. 

Cigarettes were not the only commodity managed collectively. A list issued on 16 August 1946 by the Co-operative of the European Central Inland Transport Organisation (ECITO), the same body whose Champs-Élysées offices are mentioned in UNESCO’s own installation notice, set out the foodstuffs available to staff for the fortnight: butter, bacon, eggs, milk, tea, coffee, and sugar as “basic rations,” each quantified and priced, alongside a shorter list of “luxury items” (tinned fruit, marmalade, soup, salmon, salami) issued one unit per member of staff.

That these rations should travel under the same filing reference as the food orders and the office purchase receipts (bobines, agrafeuses, peinture) says something about what sustaining a Secretariat of international officials actually looked like in the aftermath of the Second World War.

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