Britain & the Great War: lecture notes
General
- Like no other war in history. Main theatre of war, the Western front, deadlocked
from soon after the war’s start in 1914, to shortly before its end in 1918. Front
stretched in continuous line of trenches from English Channel to Swiss frontier
- By 1916, forces of Germany, France and the British Empire spread across Western
Front in millions, measuring advances in terms of a few miles gained over several
months (often immediately reversed). Vast casualties for each big ‘push’
- The crater-ridden, corpse-strewn landscape that this created became a benchmark for
militarised horror, exerting extraordinary pressures on fighting men of all sides
- a demonstration of the strength, resilience and killing power of the modern
industrialised nation state, & its ability to mass produce war materiel. Total war, & its
demands on the civilian population to advance the war effort
- War of attrition: cost British 700,000+ dead & 2 ½ million wounded in total
- Conflict also encompassed: Middle East, Africa, North Atlantic, North Sea etc
- At the time & since, the war was presumed to have had a transformative effect on
British national life & culture. Eg, the last golden summer of 1914 with its certainties
and confidence becoming the irony, bitterness & disillusionment of 1918
- New ways of thinking & feeling articulated by soldier poets & novelists
- But, historians have found it difficult to agree about what exactly the war changed
in terms of British culture, society & nationhood. What happened, for instance, to
notions of progress, civilisation, militarism & the roles of men & women in society?
- Current historical work on WW1 very extensive, stretching from battle tactics to
shell shock, psychiatry & wartime feminist thought
Masculinity, nationalism, patriotism
a) pre-war anxieties
- Fears existed around 1900 in Britain re. the perceived physical deterioration of race:
poor quality of Boer War conscripts seen to have physical & moral implications
- Commentators raised doubts about Britain’s racial vitality, and its ability to stand
up to other nations. Degeneracy conflated with ideas of decadence & effeminacy
- Physical and moral degeneracy was identified within the urban working classes.
Their fitness was doubted & so, too, was their patriotism and loyalty
b) pre-war militarism
- In reality, militarist ideas were broadly accepted within British society.
- Youth organisations such as the Scouts and the Church Lads Brigade used military
practices like drill to bring middle-class order and discipline to working-class boys
- Boys & young men of all class backgrounds familiar with the idealisation of
militarism through popular culture (authors such as G.A. Henty & Rider Haggard etc)
- Military comradeship as the high point of male friendship: an opportunity to play
out key male virtues of gallantry, pluck, and stoicism (compared to team sport)
- Social Darwinist thought also framed war as a purifying, cleansing struggle, that
would create a stronger, healthier race
- Before WW1, war was habitually seen as a masculine proving ground, & in many
ways as its noblest expression. The desire & pressure to conform to these masculine
qualities were surely significant in the decisions of men to volunteer in 1914
c) defending home, family & nation
- Until early 1916: British soldiers were volunteers not conscripts (2 million in total)
- Duty of the soldier to protect the nation frequently conveyed through idealised male
responsibility of protecting home & family. Women conflated with children and
elderly & portrayed as helpless, defenceless & domestic
- Patriotism & the strength of the nation were thus frequently coded as male. The
nation defined through stereotypes of masculinity
- Contours of this patriotism placed in sharper relief by defining German soldiers as
representing the opposite of Br values: delighting in senseless violence, rape etc
- Further used to define the war as the protection of women & family from Germany:
an uncivilised plague, & an irrefutable moral imperative to fight
d) ‘Tommy’ the hero
- With ideas of the barbarous Hun lodged in the public mind, the British soldier was
represented as combining fighting spirit with civilised conduct, especially to women
- The 19th century British soldier had been seen as the disreputable dregs of society
- But this period saw British culture transfigure the ‘Tommy’ into the embodiment of
morality: a noble and trustworthy guardian/avenger/defender
- This lionising of soldiery, in combination with the fact that so many ordinary men
had willingly volunteered, fuelled the political power of the working class, and
influenced the granting of full adult male suffrage in 1918
f) stratification of masculinity through class
- This picture of the patriotic Tommy did not, of course, mean that divisions of class
were abandoned within the armed forces or even on the battlefield.
- Officers within the armed forces were overwhelmingly middle- or upper-class
- British battle tactics influenced by middle- and upper-class attitudes towards
working-class people. Most officers convinced that soldiers, like civilian workingclass men, should be supervised & directed at all times, & that they would be unable
to exercise initiative or judgement by themselves
g) dislocation of soldiers from home/nation/women/older generation
- Growing belief among soldiers that their experiences were incomprehensible to &
misrepresented by civilian society: a race apart
- Unbridgeable gulf of ignorance re. the horrors of war generated anger & hostility
towards jingoists and war enthusiasts at home (see Sassoon’s ‘music hall’ poem)
- Novels/poems by Graves, Sassoon, Blunden, Sherriff etc demonstrate the intense
male comradeship of the front, but we should remember that these accounts (with
their depictions of the older generation & women pushing men to the front etc) were
mostly written a decade after the war had ended
e) shell shock & masculine ‘others’
- Great War also severely strained presupposition that men were naturally equipped
with the qualities required to fight & kill for their country
- Men unprepared for the impersonal, powerless stalemate of trench warfare. Terrible
scenes of combat & battlefield exhaustion made mental disorders very common
- Symptoms (uncontrollable shaking & tremors, inability to function etc) contradicted
the dominant masculine ideal of physical & emotional self control
- Closeness of condition to hysteria (coded as female) threatened gender boundaries
- Condition suggested a failure of manliness: unsurprisingly a reassuringly physical
explanation was found identifying proximity to explosions as the trigger
- Various prejudices were used to explain the phenomenon focusing on imaginative
or artistic types (often a code for homosexuality), Jews, Irishmen and lowland Scots.
But, by 1918, psychiatric techniques for treating ‘neurasthenia’ were gaining ground
- 1920: 65,000 drawing disability pension for neurasthenia, 9000 still in hospital
- War thus confirmed and destabilised equation of masculinity with patriotism
War, femininity & patriotism
- Women in WW1 not a coherent group: stratified by area/trade/age/class etc
- Images of femininity frequently used to pressure men to enlist
- Women also adopted this role within civilian society, stigmatising unconscripted
men through derogatory symbols such as the white feather or petticoat
- Demonstrated that masculinity alone was an inadequate marker of patriotism.
Undermined idea that patriotism and masculinity were coterminous, particularly in the
context of female war work
- If service to nation & war effort were the criterion for citizenship, then women
could claim patriotism & citizenship for themselves
- This demonstration of female worth to the nation acknowledged through granting of
vote to women over 30 in 1918 (9 million new fem voters)
- But, gains for women in status and public profile far from secure post-war
d) nature of work done by women in WW1
- Largest numbers of women drawn into non-industrial sectors:
finance/commerce/national & local government/transport/service sector
- More than 700,000 in metal/chemicals/munitions industries
- 400,000 women left domestic service during the war, most for war industry work
- Women initially seen, & often saw themselves, as ‘standing in’ for men. After
1915, their move into the workplace was made more formal
e) limitations & longevity of this work
- Most women had some experience of employment from before the war
- Women paid less, excluded from many skilled areas of work considered male;
given little training & restricted to unskilled tasks
- Unions fought hard for continued division of labour & separate wage scales
- Press admiration for female war workers & their contribution to the nation was
typically mingled with derision, hostility and anxiety
- Growth of female uniformed auxiliary services such as the Women’s Army
Auxiliary Corps, generated particular misgivings among civilians & soldiers alike
- Women made limited inroads into professions; & swift changes post 1918
- 600,000 women left paid employment, Nov 1918 – Apr 1920
- post 1921, depression/unemployment got worse: backlash v. women in industry
- Clerical/white-collar work perhaps a longer term winner for women, but rising
female employment in this sector was underway before war, & a glass ceiling existed
- Role of WW1 in recasting relationship of femininity & national identity is complex
Social & cultural changes to British civilian society during war
- War saw a decline in social inequality & a compression of the class structure. Share
of wealth of richest declined; modest redistribution of income
- Economic/cultural homogeneity between middle & upper class increased; as it did
within the working class, propelled by falling unemployment & a closing of the gap
between skilled & unskilled wages
- Working-class families observed increased material comfort & buying power
- Life expectancy for civilians rose after 1914. Poorest sections of working class
made greatest gains: in life expectancy, nutrition, health, medical care
- Considerable extension of social welfare payments & new precedents in
unemployment provision. Eg, demobilisation of 5 million servicemen was met with
an ‘Out of Work Donation’ (also to laid-off workers); this benefit took account of
dependents & was universal & not means tested
- Unemployment Insurance Act of 1920 extended limited pre-war insurance scheme
to all industrial workers, & was extended in scope in 1921
- So, in 1914 the state relied on private charity. By 1918: understanding that
government should provide a guaranteed minimum payment to unemployed workers
& ex-servicemen & their families. This was the blueprint for further developments.
The spectre of absolute destitution haunting the Edwardian poor was banished
- WW1 had also transformed the relationship between state & society. Notions of
state intervention, citizenship & national identity had all shifted
- Historians have nonetheless characterised the immediate post-war period as one of
dashed hopes for improvement, especially in terms of housing & public health
War & empire
- 1914: appearance of considerable imperial unity & cooperation
- Massive wartime claims were made on the loyalty & resources of empire &
imperial forces were engaged around world
- 450,000 Canadians, 330,000 Australians & 110,000 New Zealanders served
overseas; & there were 1.5 million additional recruits to the Indian Army
- But pre-war tensions were in fact accelerated & exacerbated by war, fuelled by
political change & economic dislocation.
- The 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland proclaimed an Irish Republic & the brutal British
response radicalised Irish opinion
- Dec 1918 election saw a great increase of the Sinn Fein vote, launching Ireland into
a war of independence. Popular support strained in Canada, Australia & New Zealand
- An illusion of unity, but increasing consciousness of separate nationhoods
Patriotism conclusion
a) pre-war & during war
- WW1 presented as fight for civilization as defined in British terms. Sense of
national difference greatly increased by war. Considerable national unity across class
lines: pre-war fears of class war were shown to be exaggerated
b) post-war
- Better wages & prospects removed much of the problematic underclass that had
fuelled the Social Darwinist Edwardian obsession with racial degeneracy
- Narrower & more introspective national identity. More English, less imperial?
What happens to ideas of military and imperial masculinity?
- The war was also used to manufacture unity through remembrance and
memorialisation of shared sacrifice: ideas of a patriotic death cult – something around
which the nation can join together irrespective of political/social frictions