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Rationing in Britain during the Second World War inevitably led to the development of a 'black market'. In this cartoon, Shepard likened the black marketeer to a highwayman lying in wait for a traveller, who looks very like Thomas Robert Marquis, Lord Woolton (1883-1964), the Minister of Food. On 19 September 1941, a month after the publication of the cartoon in Punch, Lord Woolton would call the black market 'a thorn in our side'.