Sir, We know the number of rats in Britain (letter, Aug 29) because Lord Woolton told us. My father, the author Julian Duguid, used in a BBC broadcast in the Fifties the statistic that there were 56 million rats in this country. A girl wrote in saying that her father didn’t know how many rats there were on his farm, so where did my father get his 56 million from? After some intense research my father traced the statistic back to a Second World War pamphlet about protecting grain stocks sent out by Lord Woolton’s Food Ministry which said: “If we assume that there is one rat per head of population . . .”.
LIZA GIBBON
Totnes, Devon
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Sir, The answer is classical and simple: Defra clearly had all its staff on night patrol counting their legs and, after going back to the office, dividing the resultant number by four.
J. M. L. STONE
London W1