ANGLO‐AMERICAN CONFERENCE 2014:
THE GREAT WAR AT HOME
ABSTRACTS
Thursday 3 July 2014
LATE AFTERNOON PANEL SESSIONS (4.30 pm)
PANEL 1: WHEN WEST SUSSEX WENT TO WAR
Chair: Keith Grieves (Kingston)
The Heritage Lottery Fund awarded a grant of £89,700 to West Sussex Library Service to
launch a two year project which would examine the impact of the First World War on the
residents of the county. It has worked with volunteers, teachers, schoolchildren and
students to develop publicly accessible resources for communities, schools, families and
individuals, to ensure that personal and local experiences of the Great War are made
available in a digital age. This major project involving the West Sussex Record Office, the
Royal Sussex Regimental Association, 150 volunteers, university students, numerous schools
and local history organisations is a multi-faceted response to public interest in the Great
War. As the centenary years approach, it will disseminate the outcomes across the county
and help people understand the impact of war in localities as an enduring legacy of the
project. The papers in this panel will explore the origins, developments and initial outcomes
of the project and acknowledges the enormous commitment made to its success by
librarians and archivists, volunteers, teachers, students and other participants.
Martin Hayes
County Local Studies Librarian, West Sussex County Council
An overview of a community based research project and the new opportunities presented
by the digital age
This paper will discuss the range of activities which comprise West Sussex and the Great
War project and the ways in which a multi-faceted public engagement programme has been
developed by West Sussex County Council Library Service. Key outcomes were the research
work involving community volunteers (see following presentation), digitisation of primary
and secondary sources, and the creation of educational resources delivered online.
Complete runs of 10 local newspapers for the years 1914-25 were digitised and optical
character recognition applied to enable keyword searching and the creation of indexes by
volunteers. An educational consultant developed educational resources and worked with
teachers to develop and refine them before publication on our new dedicated website.
Finally, the book produced by a team of 11 local authors, travelling exhibition, family history
events and new dedicated website will be discussed. The co-ordination of diverse
stakeholders in this process has brought challenges and benefits and throughout the project
delivery there has been an abiding sense that creative responses must be made to growing
public interest in the First World War. This paper will highlight some of the key outcomes of
the project and the ways in which they were obtained.
Emma White
Heritage Project Manager, West Sussex Great War
Digitisation Unit, West Sussex County Council
The challenges and benefits of working with community volunteers on a large scale local
history project
A significant feature of the project is our work with 120 community volunteers in the project
who have undertaken a variety of tasks including original research. One group digitised over
19,000 pages from regimental and local authority records, offering the potential to retrieve
social, economic and military microcosms of localities in a global war. Another group
indexed local newspapers for the years 1914-18 resulting in an astonishing 15,000+ index
entries describing Home Front events and people. Finally over 80 of the volunteers have
used primary and secondary sources to produce case studies of combatants, nurses,
conscientious objectors etc. and other topics, which are richly illuminative of family and
community histories in the war years. Examples will showcase the digital content described
above. Together these initiatives have created the potential for record linkage in ways that
have not been previously available to individual researchers. This paper will discuss the
challenges and benefits of rediscovering archive material and making it more widely
accessible in the digital age. It will show how the roles of local people might be pieced
together from diverse sources and understood more fully as a shared enterprise. Examples
from the project will be provided of new historical understandings which have arisen of the
Great War in West Sussex.
Keith Grieves
School of Education, University of Kingston
Revisiting local practices of post-war commemoration and remembrance
The documentary traces of war memorial committees in parochial and other records can
often be fragmentary and incomplete. Yet the tantalising survival of minute books, receipts
and ephemera suggest highly divergent decision-making processes in neighbouring
communities with all the embedded assumptions of those times which are now so hard to
reconstruct. This paper revisits earlier research into war memorial committees in Sussex by
benefiting from the digitalisation of 10 local newspapers in the county made available
through the West Sussex and the Great War Project. The possibility of extended record
linkage through newspaper reports to complement the parochial sources might allow more
insight to be gained into conflicted and consensual decision-making in small communities.
The paper will reassess the expressions of place and identity in these debates, the
relationships of bereaved relatives and returning soldiers, the alternative sources of
memorialising activity, the extent of local and county symbolism and other traditional
ministering elements and the significance of beauty aesthetics in the location of wealden
and downland memorial sites. It will seek to make some sense of locally determined
commemorative processes in meaningful topographical settings before the agrarian flight
from the land.
PANEL 2: PUBLIC BUDGETS AND PRIVATE LIVES: THE WAR ECONOMY AT
HOME IN BRITAIN, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES
Chair: Julie Anderson (Kent)
This panel examines how the state mobilized private households during the Great War, with
particular attention to how governments deployed ideas in science, technology or health to
encourage economy on the homefront of scarce materials and resources crucial to the war
effort. As each paper argues, wartime states were able to harness individual feelings of
patriotism and duty towards the nation and direct them towards specific actions in their
local surroundings. Thus we demonstrate that during the war, governments in England,
Germany, and the United States re-defined the way that individuals understood their
relationships with the natural world around them. More importantly, they were able to
modify private behavior and household use of the limited resources in the natural
environment. What they did not realize, however, is that along with this shift in private
behavior, governments were also engendering new ideas of—and desires for—citizenship
within these very same spheres.
Heather Perry
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Mobilising the kitchen in WW1 Germany
This paper examines the management of food and nutrition on Germany's homefront.
Through an analysis of war-time cookbooks, nutritional studies, local newspapers, and the
War Foods Office (Kriegsernährungsamt), she analyzes how both military officials and local
health and philanthropic organizations encouraged German civilians to show their
patriotism and support for the war through the judicious and economical use of food. At the
same time, however, she reveals how the initial attempts at a national or "generic” food
mobilization failed and programs on food economy were not successful until they were
tailored to reflect regional tastes, local environments, and individual resources.
Peter Thorsheim
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Recycling and the British Home Front
This paper examines the operations of the National Salvage Council, an organization that the
British government established during the war to promote the recycling of household waste.
Making extensive use of unpublished records held at the National Archives at Kew as well as
contemporary publications, he argues that British officials viewed recycling not only as a
means of maximizing the efficient use of resources, but also of bolstering morale by making
the civilian population—particularly women who did not work outside the home—feel more
connected to the war effort. Many welcomed this program, but others saw it as an
unwarranted militarization of the private sphere.
Tait Keller
Rhodes College
Militarizing Home Gardens in the United States
This paper examines the rise of home gardening in the United States during the First World
War. Much attention has been paid to the expansion of industrialized agriculture to meet
the European demand for food during this time. What this narrative overlooks, however, is
family gardening and home food production. By analyzing materials from the US Food
Administration and the National War Garden Commission this paper argues that even as the
war expanded patterns of environmental exploitation, it also set standards for nature
conservation. These agencies published numerous pamphlets with advice and instructions
for amateur gardeners and encouraged the cultivation of gardens everywhere, including
backyards, schools grounds, and city parks. Along with encouraging these “war gardens,”
propaganda campaigns emphasized the importance of canning perishables, consuming local
produce, and preserving natural resources -- while also militarizing life in the private home
to an unprecedented degree.
PANEL 3: HEALTH AND THE HOME FRONT
Dee Hoole
University of Aberdeen
Mad, bad, or extremely dangerous? Soldiers admitted to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic
Asylum c.1914-1920
This new empirical study focuses on over two hundred servicemen admitted to the West
Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum (WRPLA) Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire c.19141920. These ‘service patients’ who found themselves incarcerated in the asylum, had been
enlisted in the Army or other services and were sent from military hospitals around Britain.
They were eventually allowed certain privileges not open to other classes of asylum patient,
but all were initially certified as dangerous lunatics by army medics. Yet, these patients were
not a homogeneous group, it is clear from their military records that some of the men had
seen combat whilst others had not. Their length of service in the military ranged from one
week to over four years. This research allows an insight into understanding the
psychological pressures and the effects of industrialised warfare on soldiers. Most of these
men were ‘civilian soldiers’ plucked from their home surroundings and sent to fight, after
only rudimentary training, into the alien, bewildering, and difficult environment of the
trenches - it was sink or swim and many sank.
This study has utilised a mix of sources including military, civil, and asylum records and the
medical discourse of the time. Service patients within this asylum have not been
investigated previously and their ‘voices’ and individual stories are being re-discovered for
the first time in almost a century. The care of these ex-servicemen, their treatment, the
duration of their incarceration, and the eventual ‘outcome’ for many of these men is
addressed. One central question explored is whether any of these men were ‘weak minded’
before their exposure to the battlefield? This is significant since this was a retrospective
conclusion of the Commission enquiring into Shell Shock which reported in 1922. Some of
the extant records include testimony from families, who often experienced frightening and
difficult problems in their attempts to cope at home with a mentally damaged loved one
after their war service. What can be determined from the records is that there was no single
psychological experience that can be generalised - there was no collective understanding of
the mental condition of these patients. Were the servicemen within the WRPLA suffering
from the effects of shell shock, neurasthenia, or something quite different? Indeed, were
they mad, bad or extremely dangerous? This research has begun to reveal some of the
answers to such questions.
Alison Kay
National Railway Museum
‘That vile train’: World War One ambulance train travel
Ambulance trains were used throughout World War One on both foreign soil and the home
front. This paper explores the experiences of the people who travelled on home the trains;
using archives from The National Railway Museum, The Imperial War Museum, The Liddle
Archive held at Leeds University, as well as published accounts.
Existing published research into ambulance trains focuses heavily on the technical aspects of
ambulance train manufacturing, and the strategic mobilisation of the trains by railway
companies during the war.
The paper tracks the journey from injury or incapacitation back to Britain. Were images of
pristine, well organised hospital carriages generated by railway companies accurate? When
contrasted with personal accounts we see a much more frantic and disorganised picture of
heavily overloaded trains, dirty conditions and crudely converted wagons. Patients and staff
talk of the choking cigarette smoke that filled carriages, in part masking the smell of
gangrenous wounds and bad food. Despite these sometimes awful conditions we
continually see reports of the ‘‘blighty smile’’; the sheer relief and comfort on finding ones
self on a train home.
We are able to explore relationships between patient and carer; by the end of the war four
out of 25 ambulance trains were staffed by the Friends Ambulance Unit; conscientious
objectors tended to men who had sacrificed themselves to fight with what it seems was
little or no animosity. We see evidence of the interaction between British patients, German
prisoners of war and their carers as they travelled back to Britain.
This paper combines technical information and records with personal experiences to
provide a unique insight into a relatively unexplored form of wartime travel. It suggests
further avenues of research that will further expand on this fascinating story.
Christine Handley
British Association for Local History
Thelma Griffiths
National Trust
Ian Rotherham
Sheffield Hallam
Sphagnum moss: a harvest of healing
There is evidence that species of Sphagnum have been used for medicinal and other
purposes for thousands of years. It is able to act like a sponge and can absorb many times it
own volume of liquid and re-absorb liquid when it has been dried. It is also mildly antiseptic.
These qualities make it ideal for dressing wounds. The growth of the cotton industry in the
UK and other countries meant that cotton dressings for wounds and ‘cotton wool’ was
developed as an alternative and sphagnum was superseded. Cotton production could not
keep pace with the huge demand for field and surgical dressings to treat casualties of the
First World War and sphagnum was again used, this time on an industrial scale. Different
grades of sphagnum were collected and used for bedding, pillows and pads as well as for
dressings. The collection and processing was largely the result of volunteer effort within
local communities linked to distribution centres. The presentation focuses on volunteer
efforts which took place in Britain with a local example from Sheffield and also gives
examples from across North America and the British Empire but similar operations for
harvesting sphagnum also occurred in Germany. After the First World War, the antiseptic
and absorbent qualities of sphagnum were used for other products such as soap. The
collection of sphagnum was re-started in the Second World War in the UK but on a smallerscale. The story of using sphagnum has largely been forgotten and the impact that the
harvest had on the landscape un-recognised. This presentation will start to redress the
balance.
Charles Spicer
Institute of Historical Research
From banqueting hall to military hospital: the Fishmongers’ Hall Hospital (1914-1918)
Abstract not available
PANEL 4: THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN LONDON: MINORITIES, MOBILITY AND
THE WOUNDED
Chair: Matthew Davies (CMH/IHR)
Jerry White
Birkbeck, University of London
‘The all-invading alien’: minorities in London during the First World War
The First World War was a turbulent time for London’s minorities. The long-established
German community suffered most grievously, with large numbers of single young men
leaving London before war was declared, and married and elderly men subject to
internment and even deportation. Anti-German hostility revealed itself through
discrimination and some collective violence throughout the course of the war, with the net
effect that the German-speaking communities of London had been drastically diminished by
1918. But all foreigners were affected to some extent by a popular xenophobia that
sometimes had difficulty in telling allies from enemies. Worst treated among citizens of a
friendly nation were the Russian Jews, clustered predominantly in the East End of London,
who were subject to much vilification and sporadic violence after conscription was
established in early 1916. The French and Italian communities shrunk in size during the war,
mainly from the migration of young men to fight for their nations on the continent, and
would not recover their strength until the Second World War and after. And the black and
Chinese communities in the East End dockside areas grew slightly in numbers but provoked
a backlash among local residents, trade unions and the press. Even the Belgian refugees,
who received a frenzied welcome in the last months of 1914, lost much sympathy during the
course of the years that followed. This paper explores the Londoners’ complex response to
the diverse ‘aliens’ in their midst and the resulting impact of the war on London’s minority
communities.
Sam Mullins
London Transport Museum
London’s war through the lens of its transport
Transport provides a revealing lens on London during the First World War. The capital was a
focal point of the war effort - recruits leaving for France, wounded returning, soldiers on
leave and the industrial support of the war thronged its streets and filled its buses, trains
and the Tube. Transport companies were obliged to be both innovative and adaptable to
keep London on the move, the streets, buses and trains city being busier than ever, with
many bus and Tube passengers new to the system and its ways of operating. Innovation was
seen in the rapid development of the motor bus, in signage, publicity and demand
management, and the recruitment of women into most areas of the workforce for the first
time. The departure for the front of over one thousand buses from the London General
Omnibus Company, together with their drivers, the substitution of women for men in the
workforce and sheltering in the Tube from air attack provide an fresh insight into London
and the home front of the wartime capital between 1914 and 1918.
Emily Mayhew
Imperial College, London
‘Gassed all the way to Waterloo’: the invisible war of the London Ambulance Column
Badly wounded soldiers from the Western Front in France and Belgium were transported
back to Britain along a complex rail network that, for most, ended on a platform at one of
the great mainline stations in the capital or other regional cities. There, on a stretcher or
help up by colleagues, they waited for a motor ambulance that would take them to a
general hospital for their treatment. In the early months of the war, despite having made
it back safely to Blighty, this last leg of their journey was often disorganised to the point of
chaos as it was not always clear who was responsible for getting them from the station to
the hospitals. Voluntary organisations stepped into the breach. The London Ambulance
Column was founded by the Dent family, whose private fortune paid for a fleet of motor
ambulances, the training and organisation of teams of nurses and stretcher bearers, and
motorcycle despatch riders to notify the Column of impending arrivals. Approved at speed
by the British Red Cross, the LAC worked every night of the war, their tasks often
complicated by the British public’s enthusiastic, sometimes ghoulish interest in their
charges. Only one comprehensive account of the Column’s work exists in any national
archive collection, that of Claire Tisdall. It is a clear and well-organised memoir, giving
moving detail about the last link in a long chain of casualty provision that ended in little
ambulances, speeding through the dark streets of the city, and stands as the only memorial
to an extraordinary group of Londoners.
PANEL 5: FOOD, FAIRNESS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Chair: Julie Moore (University of Hertfordshire)
Karen Hunt
Keele University
Women and food control during the Great War in Britain
From the outset of hostilities there were widespread calls to nationalise the food supply. Yet
for two years the government paid little attention, believing that the maintenance of a free
market would meet the country’s requirements. However, the situation deteriorated and
the woman shopper bore the brunt of this. By 1917, the Commissioners on Industrial Unrest
were reporting that rising prices as well as inadequate distribution were sources of
dangerous discontent, and in the spring Parliament was informed that the country had only
three or four weeks’ supply of food in stock. As a consequence, in the summer of 1917 a
new initiative was taken at the local level to address the increasing tension. With it came a
new possibility for articulating a woman-focused politics of food.
Each local authority had to set up a Food Control Committee (FCC) with a clear duty to
safeguard the interests of consumers, indeed each committee had to have at least one
representative of labour and one woman. This paper explores who the women were who
took part in FCCs, how they approached their work, and the degree to which they sought to
connect with the experiences of the housewives who were now spending many, often
fruitless hours in food queues. To what extent were women able to shape the actions of
their local FCCs and to make a difference to the ordinary women who were trying to feed
their families as the cost of living escalated and the food crisis deepened? The number,
class, political affiliations and place in neighbourhood networks were all factors in the
effectiveness of FCC women, but so too were the links to external pressure groups such as
the local Food Vigilance Committees which sought “to make the views of working class
consumers more effectively heard”. Was tackling waste or prosecuting hoarders more
important than finding fairer means of sharing meagre resources or setting up national
kitchens? These women were part of the invention of food rationing in Britain and, as FCC
members, oversaw its implementation in local neighbourhoods. This paper will re-assess
this neglected aspect of the wartime home front and consider whether the arguments and
practices of women in the wartime system of food control constitute a woman-focused
politics of food.
Rachel Duffett
University of Essex
First call? Soldiers, families and their food
Edie Bennett’s letters to her soldier husband were packed with complaints about the food
shortages on the home front. She bemoaned the queues, the absence of milk, cheese and
the ingredients for plum pudding, the effect on their children’s health and her own weight
loss and on 24 January 1918 she wrote ‘Oh God if only it [the war] would end, ‘peace at any
price’ is the cry before we are starved.’ Lack of food fuelled Edie Bennett’s general anxieties
about the war and her husband’s absence and appeared to override any wider sense of duty
to the nation. Throughout the conflict, food proved to be both a trigger and a vehicle for
strong emotions, ranging from the fears of mothers such as Mrs Bennett to the anger of
soldiers in the British Army home training camps. Poor diet was one of the concerns that led
to the creation of a Soldiers’ Council at Tunbridge Wells in 1917 - a semi-revolutionary
response to what was perceived as a military and governmental lack of care.
Using personal accounts as well as official records, this paper will explore the role of food in
mediating the relationships between soldiers, their families and the state on the home
front. At the outset of the war military intervention in the nation’s provisioning processes
established the ‘soldiers’ first’ rule, but descriptions of disturbances in army camps indicate
that the policy was not wholly successful and breakdowns in discipline were often
associated with failures in the rations. Even if the army could satisfy the hunger of its men,
their obedience and willingness to serve could be undermined by letters telling stories of
hunger at home.
Nick Mansfield
University of Central Lancashire
Farmworkers, food and politics, 1914-1923
In 1914 British agriculture was in a reasonable shape, though much food was imported from
overseas. But most of those that grew British produce rarely ate well. Farmworkers were
amongst the most poorly paid and unorganised workers in the country. Though disruptions
– mainly through the requisitioning of horses – occurred in 1914, for most farmers it was
‘business as usual’, and with food imports cut off, prices rose and farm incomes soared.
200,000 younger farmworkers, eager to escape poverty, joined the regiments of Kitcheners’
New Armies. They ate well and sent money home. They were often officered by the local
gentry. Farmers stayed at home and made money, whilst the rural poor found high food
prices difficult.
The farmers’ biggest problem was a shortage of labour which they solved with returning
women workers and through the curtailing of village children’s education. After the
introduction of conscription for the armed forces in 1916, farmers also successfully argued
that their sons were needed on the farm. The labour shortages though also saw the growth
of farmworkers’ unions and farm wages increased for the older employees still at home.
By 1917 German U boats caused an acute food crisis which resulted in major government
intervention with guaranteed farm prices and minimum wage legislation. As the war ended
large scale trades unionism was able to force wages to a new high and at the same time
wealthier farmers were able to purchase their tenancies. But the 1921 economic slump
caused a fall in prices, government legislation was repealed and farmworkers’ wages were
reduced. Though a series of bitter strikes in 1923 stabilised wages, and the rural poor began
to support the Labour Party, British agriculture entered a period of stagnation not ended
until 1939.
RESEARCH SHOWCASE
I HOME FRONT STUDIES: A SHARE ANGLO-AMERICAN AGENDA?
Chair: Kate Tiller (University of Oxford/British Association for Local History)
This working session will bring together local and community historians from the US and
Britain to discuss shared research interests emerging from World War One centenary
initiatives, and to consider possible joint activities.
Carol Kammen
Cornell University
Bob Beatty
American Association for State and Local History
Transatlantic conversations: World War One in real-time and memory
A discussion of American perspectives in three key areas:
1. Available primary sources (those from 1914-1918 and those from 1919 and beyond)
and ways to maximize the use of the sources in commemorating WWI’s Centennial—
examining contemporary views of World War I as well as its memory.
2. World War I memorials across the globe (the UK, US, France, Germany, &c),
particularly how their purpose/meaning has changed over time.
3. Ways to develop some commemorative strategies to share the impact of World War
I on communities. (This is in contrast to a more global or national study of the war)
Sue Smith
Great War Project Co-ordinator
UK contexts: the Home Front 1914-15 project of the Family and Community Historical
Research Society
The Family and Community Historical Research Society was founded in 1998 by former
students of the Open University’s family and community history courses and others. Its
members carry out joint research projects related to families and communities of all kinds,
and organised via a network of members across the UK. Projects are co-ordinated by a
committee member and guided by an academic adviser. See www.fachrs.com
FACHRS’s latest and current project is on The Home Front 1914-15. The investigation, being
undertaken as a series of micro-studies by research volunteers, is of the extent of activities
embarked on by local communities in the early stages of the war, and to test the current
popular assumption that support for the war effort was nationwide. Many project members
are undertaking research in conjunction with their local history or University of the Third
Age group. This work in progress will be outlined, including methods (among them
dedicated web pages on the Society’s website for project members, use of workbooks),
contemporary sources being used, and emerging themes.
Alun Edward and Ylva Berglund Prytz
University of Oxford
Using digital technologies to support local and community history: Europeana 1914-1918,
RunCoCo and other projects
With the centenary anniversaries of the First World War, projects are engaging the public in
education, remembrance and commemorations. In the 21st century digital is a key
component to this engagement, and Europeana 1914-1918 harnesses the power of these
technologies. Launched in 2011, the project collects memories and artefacts through the
innovative Oxford Community Collection Model. This combines online and face-to-face
engagement to crowdsource digital collections of items held in homes of the public from
across Europe. The initiative has, to date, revealed over 60,000 digital items (ranging from
oral histories, paintings, photographs and memorabilia to unpublished memoirs, diaries,
maps and letters) previously hidden from researchers and from heritage. All material is
released under an open license for reuse worldwide, forming a rich collection of primary
source material to drive new avenues of research and education. This paper presents
Europeana 1914-1918, the Oxford Community Collection Model, and the RunCoCo advisory
service, and the value of community collections in providing rich sites of exchange between
academics, the heritage sector and the wider public. URLs:
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/ and http://europeana1914-1918.eu/