Britain and World War One

Alan G. V. Simmonds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136629969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The First World War appears as a fault line in Britain's twentieth-century history. Between August 1914 and November 1918 the titanic struggle against Imperial Germany and her allies consumed more people, more money and more resources than any other conflict that Britain had hitherto experienced. For the first time, it opened up a Home Front that stretched into all parts of the British polity, society and culture, touching the lives of every citizen regardless of age, gender and class: vegetables were even grown in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

Britain and World War One throws attention on these civilians who fought the war on the Home Front. Harnessing recent scholarship, and drawing on original documents, oral testimony and historical texts, this book casts a fresh look over different aspects of British society during the four long years of war. It revisits the early war enthusiasm and the making of Kitchener's new armies; the emotive debates over conscription; the relationships between politics, government and popular opinion; women working in wartime industries; the popular experience of war and the question of social change.

This book also explores areas of wartime Britain overlooked by recent histories, including the impact of the war on rural society; the mobilization of industry and the importance of technology; responses to air raids and food and housing shortages; and the challenges to traditional social and sexual mores and wartime culture. Britain and World War One is essential reading for all students and interested lay readers of the First World War.

1 Summer’s end

Britain’s pre-war years are troublesome for the historian. Poised between the conclusion of one war in South Africa in 1902 and the onset of another in Europe 12 years later, the period has been historically labelled the ‘Edwardian age’, although perhaps this is stretching a point. Strictly speaking, the so-called ‘Edwardian era’ ended with the death of Edward VII in 1910 and the succession of his son, George V. But historians have understandably refrained from calling these years the ‘Edwardian–Georgian age’, preferring to associate this time with Britain’s first twentieth-century male monarch, mainly in the interest of simplicity. This era is popularly remembered as one long, leisurely summer: an image nourished largely by the conspicuous consumption of Britain’s wealthier classes, whose sumptuous abodes, weekend shoots and what Harold Nicolson called ‘an unlimited addiction to food’ set new standards in vulgar opulence.¹ Politically, the period was dominated by the Liberals, who won a famous landslide election victory in 1906 and formed the government that would take the country to war in 1914. Their main opponents, the Conservatives, still remained an electoral force. They won a second term of office in 1900 and, despite a mauling at the polls in 1906, had, by 1910, staged a remarkable political recovery and stood every chance of defeating the Liberals in 1914. Nevertheless, both parties, as products of an older, rigidly hierarchical and patriarchal political and social order, struggled with the rising demands from more representative groups – the industrial working classes and, of course, women. The upshot was a Britain that sank into what Elie Halévy described as an age of ‘domestic anarchy’: when Victorian liberal values collided with an ambiguous Edwardian modernity expressing itself most dramatically through social reform, constitutional change, industrial militancy and belligerent feminism.² Some commentators have suggested that such tensions pushed Britain towards major social upheaval by 1914, to be saved only by European conflict.³ Subsequent studies are more sceptical.⁴ If anything, Edwardian Britain was, according to H.G. Wells, suffering from a case of ‘badly sprained optimism’: anxious about itself, its status and its power in the new twentieth century.⁵

Society, class and Empire

Britain’s aggregate population in 1911 (which at that time included the whole of Ireland) was approximately 45.2 million.⁶ Although the pace of growth had slowed considerably, death rates per 1,000 head of population had decreased from 22.6 to 13.8 between 1871 and 1913. Average life expectancy had levelled at 52 for men and 55 for women, while the 1911 census recorded a marked rise in the proportion of the population who were aged 65 and over. Some of these changes were the result of improvements in housing, sanitation and nutrition, though the pattern varied widely across the regions and the social classes. Otherwise, the decline can be attributed to the spread of inoculation. Vaccination against smallpox had virtually eliminated the disease in England and Wales between 1871 and 1905, and mass outbreaks of typhoid and cholera had declined. New methods of treatment and isolation for victims of whooping cough, measles and scarlet fever were also becoming increasingly effective, although TB remained a constant scourge.⁷ Falling death rates were matched by declining birth rates: from 32.4 births per 1,000 people between 1881 and 1890; to 29.9 between 1891 and 1900; and to 27.0 between 1900 and 1911.⁸ Contemporary enquiries could find no single cause for this decline. In 1906, the Registrar-General estimated that 14 per cent of the fall in birth rates could be attributed to a rise in the age of marriage (it was reported that only half of the male population was married by the age of 30 in the early 1900s), 7 per cent to a decrease in illegitimacy rates, but 79 per cent to the ‘deliberate restriction of child-bearing’.⁹ Subsequent studies have highlighted rising living standards, family economics and subtle social and cultural changes. The fall-off in child mortality and increased education and literacy, with higher school fees for the upper and middle classes and the spread of compulsory state education for the working classes, meant that children were a drain on the family budget for much longer. Furthermore, the means of limiting family size were more accessible with the availability of contraceptives, reflecting perhaps a belief that large families were no longer quite respectable. However, smaller broods often led parents to make a greater emotional investment in their children. In the more progressive middle-class Edwardian families, it is possible to detect the emergence of an ‘enhanced sense of the child’, where childhood itself was seen as a complicated condition that possessed unique sensitivity and behaviour patterns requiring special understanding and treatment.¹⁰

Changes in Britain’s population structure were further complicated by migration patterns. Approximately six million Britons sought a better life in foreign lands between 1871 and 1911, mainly to the dominion countries of Canada and Australasia. Replacing them were over one million Irish immigrants and 400,000 Jewish refugees, mostly from Eastern Europe. Immigration from the Empire countries was surprisingly negligible. The 1911 census reported that 4,000 people of Asiatic origin had moved to Britain; similarly 9,000 Caribbean immigrants had settled mainly in Merseyside and South Wales. No doubt the influx of different races and nationalities added greatly to the cosmopolitan character of Britain’s urban centres. But growing public disquiet over foreign émigrés pushed the Conservative government into establishing a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1902, followed swiftly by the Aliens Act of 1905, granting power to refuse entry to those deemed to be criminals, paupers, insane or diseased: legislation that was not implemented by the succeeding Liberal government.¹¹

A central feature of Edwardian society was social class. The modern concept of ‘class’ in Britain is seen largely as a product of nineteenth-century industrialization. During the latter years of the 1800s societal organization had become polarized into two dominant class groupings: the land and property-owning ‘ruling class’ which broke down into various subgroupings embracing the aristocracy, industrial and financial capitalists and professionals; and a ‘property-less’ working class, that again could be subdivided into skilled artisans, semi-skilled labourers, the unskilled and the poor. Movement within these structures was relatively uncommon. The majority of property-owners (including the ranks of the new provincial, professional and industrial bourgeoisie) failed to breach the walls of aristocratic society, while progress from the ranks of the very poor to the upper working classes was practically non-existent. Positions between (and within) the social classes could not just be identified through wealth but were also reinforced through institutions, culture, social mores and modes of behaviour, which provided much room for snobbery, rivalry and spatial separation to take root. Class distinctions could be expressed in the most mundane of personal habits, such as whether one washed in the evening or morning and in the bedroom, bathroom or scullery; ate luncheon and dinner or dinner and tea; spent one’s leisure time at the pub, social club, music hall, theatre or opera house; or took holidays at the Cote d’Azur, Bournemouth or Blackpool.¹²

All the same, the Edwardian class structure was beginning to fray at the edges. This was partly aided by an unprecedented rise in the average Briton’s standard of living. Real wages grew by just over 1 per cent annually between 1873 and 1913 (although this figure is disputed), and improvements in domestic agricultural production and the growth of cheaper food imports, particularly wheat from Canada and frozen meat from Australasia, sparked a marked fall in food prices by the 1890s.¹³ Coupled with the growth of mass literacy and the creation of new opportunities in government services (specifically in teaching, clerical and low-grade administrative positions), the line between upper-working and lower-middle class could be more easily crossed, and even the landed classes were becoming more amenable to welcoming into their ranks a new middle-class metropolitan sect whose wealth was rooted in the City. Perhaps the blurring of social barriers was most evident in more humble manifestations, such as the Edwardian craze for cycling, which appealed to all classes and across the gender divide. Indeed, foreign observers were struck that, compared with European standards, the workers’ ‘Sunday-best’ differed little from the everyday attire of the middle classes, with the bowler hat, of a kind worn by all but the most fashion-conscious of the upper and middle classes, becoming the most popular article of working-class male headgear and with the outward demeanour of many young working-class women increasingly resembling that of their middle-class counterparts in the 1900s. ¹⁴

It was a belief in the virtues of empire, however, that united many Britons. Covering nearly ten million square miles of the world’s habitable land surface, the British Empire in 1900 was at its peak, embracing the largely self-governing ‘White Dominions’ – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and later South Africa – and the Indian subcontinent, a land of 300 million people, encompassing a staggering diversity of regions and cultures, still ruled in some states by the remnants of an older royalty and in others by a handful of upper-class British administrators, aided by a network of Indian clerks and police, and held in place by the British and Indian armies. This was accompanied by a miscellany of smaller ‘colonies’, some located in Africa, as a series of minor regions pulled together in a single entity, as in Nigeria; old ‘missionary’ states such as Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda; Victorian imperial ‘creations’ such as Rhodesia; and ‘protectorates’ such as Egypt (occupied to safeguard the Suez Canal, a vital trade route). This arrangement was reflected in the Far East in states such as Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong and Singapore and in older slave colonies in the West Indies. The Empire allowed the Edwardian economy to become highly specialized. British trade and manufacture focused its energies on exporting goods and services in exchange for commodities such as raw materials and food, which could be secured more cheaply and in larger quantities in other parts of the world. Thus food, drink and tobacco formed nearly half the country’s imports by 1910, raw materials up to onethird, and manufactures nearly a quarter. On the other hand, 10 per cent of Britain’s exports comprised of iron and steel (mostly in the form of railway rolling stock and infrastructure); coal (Britain was producing 287 million tons by 1913, 98 million of which went for export); and, most importantly, cotton.¹⁵

All this was supported by Britain’s pivotal position in international trade and finance. Throughout the pre-war years the City of London stood at the centre of a worldwide network of banking, insurance and investment services. All national currencies were valued against sterling. Backed by the Gold Standard, a system through which the Bank of England guaranteed the pound for a prescribed weight of gold (a promise still made, but never kept, on English banknotes), sterling dominated international exchange. Import and export prices were set in sterling; settlements were made through British banks. Most of this financial trade was classed as ‘invisible exports’, which were crucial in keeping the national balance sheet in the black. Britain’s economic strength was sustained further by the income accrued from her considerable overseas investments and by the domination of global trade routes by the British merchant marine, indisputably the world’s largest trading fleet. The task of protecting this complex but vital system rested with the Royal ¹⁶ For many Edwardian Britons, the Empire was a source of wealth, industry and employment, made Britain a leading world power, and helped to nurture a supreme selfconfidence that often transmuted into attitudes of effortless superiority. It was much loathed by Britain’s rivals, but also much coveted.

Facing decline

Yet Britain’s international position was more precarious than it looked. One blow to national self-confidence was delivered by the protracted war in South Africa. British attempts to annex the goldfields in the republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1899 had met with surprisingly effective resistance from the Boers (a nation of small farmers descended from early Dutch settlers), and the ensuing conflict cost Britain nearly 30,000 casualties and almost £200 million by the time peace was restored in 1902. Rising suspicions of administrative incompetence and fears over the country’s social conditions were fuelled by revelations that large numbers of applicants for military service had been rejected as physically unfit.¹⁷ This new sense of vulnerability was amplified by signs that Britain’s long-held worldwide economic dominance was beginning to slide. Faced with competition from the rapidly growing new economies of Germany and the United States of America, Britain’s percentage share of world manufacturing production was declining significantly – from 31.8 per cent in 1870, to 19.5 per cent in 1900; whilst her share of world trade fell from 35.8 per cent in 1883 to 28.4 per cent in just 17 years. The slippage was reflected most visibly in the growth of imported goods, which increased from 5.5 per cent of the country’s balance of trade in 1860, to 17.3 per cent in 1880 and 25 per cent in 1900, casting doubts over Britain’s claims to be the ‘workshop of the world’.¹⁸

Explaining Britain’s malaise began to preoccupy the Edwardian intelligentsia. The Times argued that the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Summer’s end
• 2. For King and Country
• 3. The industry of conflict
• 4. The eclipse of party government
• 5. Workplace women
• 6. Society, family and welfare
• 7. Food, farming and rural society
• 8. A question of propaganda
• 9. War culture
• 10. After rejoicing
• Index