The Children's War

Britain, 1914-1918

R. Kennedy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137319357
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

British children were mobilised for total war in 1914-18. It dominated their school experience and they enjoyed it as a source of entertainment. Their support was believed to be vital for Britain's present and future but their participation was motivated by a desire to remain connected to their absent fathers and brothers.

1

Introduction

Beatrice Curtis Brown believes that the outbreak of the First World War marked a turning point in her life, a moment when she ceased to be a child and recognised for the first time the significance of the outside world. She writes:

Infancy, I suppose, stopped with the war at least, home, London, became something different with the war. Though I was thirteen when it broke out, my memory of places, what we did and how we felt, is up to that time, tuned to the same key. Then some discordancy creeps in: one’s world was no longer apart and enclosed by its own walls. The day before war broke out is the first day I remember walking about London, as apart from Hampstead, streets. That is, it was the first time that I was conscious of being there in the middle of the city.¹

The historian A.L. Rowse, whose autobiography A Cornish Childhood was published in 1942, also believes that the start of the war was the point at which he realised there was a world outside his own:

It had a strange significance for me, which is not wholly explicable. It was a symbolic day. For the first time I became aware of the outer world, a world beyond the village and the town. I was ten years old.²

For both these writers the First World War was a dividing line in their lives. It marked the moment when a part of their childhood and innocence was left behind. They remember it as the first time the outside world had encroached on their private lives, and the experience of growing up during wartime features significantly in their memories of childhood. For the next four years children like Beatrice Curtis Brown and A.L. Rowse were members of a society at war. They were not shielded from its dramas, exempt from its hardships or immune to its tragedies. Children in Britain experienced the First World War alongside Britain’s adults. They participated in wartime society in a myriad of ways: as active volunteers, as students of a wartime education, and as children at play who found a place for the war in their books, toys and games. Perhaps most significantly, they participated in it as the children of families separated by war. An analysis of the experience of children, therefore, provides a fresh perspective for the study of British society at war.

When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 it had a standing army of just 244,260 men. By the time the war ended in November 1918, 5,215,162 men had served in the British Army.³ During over four years of war the families of these men faced significant social and economic dislocation, often enduring long periods of separation as men volunteered or were conscripted to fight. Despite this, support for the war remained strong and civilians were involved in all aspects of the home front war effort. The demands of war required the vast mobilisation of men as both soldiers and workers, while their wives, girlfriends, sisters and mothers worked in industry, on land, in hospitals and civil associations. As their parents were drawn into working for the war, so too were children, some serving as messengers or guards in public buildings and strategic locations, many, many more saving for war bonds and collecting vital materials for the war effort. But mobilisation for war was not just about physical mobilisation, and the ‘war effort’ was not just a physical effort; it required enormous mental participation as well. For the population of Britain to continue to support the war for over four years, there had to be imaginative engagement and organisational participation in the collective experience of being at war. It is this all-encompassing mobilisation that has been the focus of recent historians’ attempts to understand the experience of ‘total war’ in 1914–1918, and it is through an understanding of the ways in which children experienced this mobilisation that this book hopes to contribute towards the debate.

The theory that a ‘war culture’ existed in all the warring nations of Europe was developed by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, who have described it as

a collection of representations of the conflict which crystallised into a system of thought which gave the war its deep significance.⁴

Through the convergence of religious and secular ideologies, a ‘war culture’ developed in the combatant nations which permeated every aspect of daily life and sustained the military and civilian commitment to war. The acceptance of military engagement and social mobilisation was made possible in the belligerent nations because it seemed to most that it was not just the nation that was at stake but human civilisation itself.⁵ The Great War was imagined by each side as a struggle between civilisation and barbarity, confirmed, it seemed, by the sheer number of atrocity stories on each side, some real, many more invented.⁶ The populations engaged in the struggle believed that they were defending not only their family and community but also the values and beliefs at the heart of their nation. It was believed that it was only war itself that could rid the world of future war at the hands of the opposing aggressor.⁷

In the development of this theory, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker reject the emphasis placed in the past on seeing the soldiers and civilians of the First World War as victims. They believe that this emphasis has obscured the essential question of ‘why and how millions of Europeans and Westerners acquiesced in the war of 1914–18’.⁸ Instead, Becker points to the widespread belief by all parties that God was on their side, and describes a process whereby even nonbelievers came to see the war as a crusade for civilisation.⁹ Wartime spirituality, including traditional Christian practice and the revival of ancient superstitions and the belief in the supernatural, helped ordinary people face the agony of both temporary and permanent separation.¹⁰

Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker have also been amongst a group of historians demonstrating how the study of childhood in the belligerent countries provides a way of analysing a nation’s war culture. They suggest that the representations of war offered by adults to children, through books, periodicals, toys and images used at home, at school and in church, allow us to understand what society wanted to communicate to its children about the war. They argue that these representations, whether suggested or imposed, are like the ‘inner core’ of a nation’s war culture.¹¹ They identify the study of children’s experience of war as an opportunity for understanding the national response to war, saying:

The behaviour of children in the belligerent societies is a reliable yardstick of the extent of the spontaneously mobilised support of the war and the extreme, largely self-imposed tension that prevailed during the four-year conflict. The children’s involvement is the symptom of the ways in which the Great War was a crusade.¹²

Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker’s research on France suggests that, on the whole, it was felt that no aspect of the war should be concealed from children. In fact, the very opposite should be encouraged. The reasoning, they explain, was that, while war itself was evil, this war was a war from which good would emerge. This war would, in fact, be good for children, not only now but in the future, by educating future adults ‘rid forever of the obligation to wage war’.¹³

French schools used the war to impose responsibility on children. The soldier’s duty in warfare was held up as an example to inspire duty to work in the classroom. As in Britain, as we shall see, lessons in all subjects were linked to the war. However, its saturation of the curriculum meant that the war became an everyday matter and the propaganda aimed at children failed to maintain the initial tension over the four and a half years of war.¹⁴ Similarly, the wartime disruption to school and family life meant that the discipline needed to achieve the total mobilisation of children was missing. The school system, Audoin-Rouzeau believes, was trying to mobilise childhood intellectually and morally, just as children were becoming harder to reach.¹⁵

More work has been done on children’s lives and schooling in Italy, where Andrea Fava has looked at the involvement of Italian teachers and unions in the pro-war education of children both inside and outside the official classroom. Fava has shown how Italian children became the ‘active witnesses and symbolic bearers of the idea of nationalism’.¹⁶ Through dissemination of propagandist material and the involvement of schools in organising children’s presence at wartime ceremonies, both schools and children’s charitable institutions reassured the public that Italy’s children were a ‘precious “well” of new, strong patriotism’.¹⁷ The existence of, and strength of support for, these children’s charitable institutions, Fava believes, illustrate a broader phenomenon in the history of children’s wartime significance. In Italy, supporting children through charitable organisations became an act of solicitude towards the soldiers themselves and acted as a ‘symbol of the nation’s gratitude towards their brothers at war’.¹⁸

War culture has been analysed in Canada by Susan R. Fisher in her study of children’s literature on the First World War, both contemporary and modern. Fisher adopts Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker’s analysis to claim that the facts and interpretations Canadians wanted to transmit to their children about the war are evident in Canadian wartime children’s literature. She believes that the themes of children’s literature suggest that adults hoped that the terrible costs of war could be offset by the values war had taught children. It was believed that, if Canadian children could learn, from the example of the soldiers and from their own involvement in war work, the true meaning of service and sacrifice – ‘those two great watchwords invariably invoked in discussions of children and the war’ – the struggle would not have been in vain.¹⁹

Fisher also builds on George Mosse’s theory of the brutalising effects of the trivialisation of war in the combatant nations. Mosse has argued that the mobilisation of children for war antedated 1914 and that the popularity of tin soldiers and war games in Germany and of boys’ adventure fiction in England points to an identification with the concept of warfare amongst children in pre-war Europe.²⁰ Mosse believes that the existence and popularity of children’s toys, games and ephemera during the war itself helped to trivialise the war in people’s minds, but that this trivialisation ‘helped people to confront war, just as its glorification did’.²¹ For Fisher, the narrative patterns employed in children’s reading about the war were similarly trivialising; ‘they subsumed the unspeakable horrors of mass death within familiar plot structures that guaranteed a happy or at least reassuring ending’.²²

For George Mosse, this process of trivialisation, rendering the war commonplace and ordinary, began a process in the minds of the warring populations which led to what he terms the ‘domestication’ of modern war, to the acceptance of war as a natural part of political and social life.²³ Thus ‘brutalised’, the combatant populations emerged from the First World War dulled in their response to the importance of individual human life, making them more accepting of the possibility of future war.²⁴ Pierre Purseigle believes that, when Mosse’s theory of brutalisation and Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker’s concept of a ‘war culture’ are combined, the First World War takes on a new significance, and sees it as

the harbinger of the industrialized massacres of the Second World War, and as the midwife of the barbaric ‘short twentieth century’.²⁵

∗ ∗ ∗

While war undoubtedly destroys human life, it can, and did in the case of Britain during the First World War, provide some unforeseen health benefits. Jay Winter has shown how, in fact, some of the worst features of urban poverty which lay behind the high death rates of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain were eliminated as a result of the war. Winter has shown that one of the most important demographic effects of the First World War was the compression of the class structure, so that the gap in survival chances between different classes and between different sections within classes was reduced.²⁶ It was the very young, particularly, who were to benefit from the consequences of wartime interest in the health of the civilian population. Britain saw a massive expansion in its infant welfare work during the war. In 1914 local authorities employed just 600 health visitors, but by 1918 that figure had more than quadrupled to 2,577.²⁷ Local authority spending on child welfare clinics also rose from £96,000 to £279,000 between 1916 and 1918. This growth in interest and spending on infant and child health has led Deborah Dwork to conclude that

the public and professional protective reaction towards the youngest members of society when putting at risk the lives of those on the verge of realising their potential and reaching productivity meant, in short, that war was good for babies.²⁸

But this interest in infant and child health was not entirely brought on by war, or, at least, not by the First World War. The declining birth rate and fears over national efficiency in the years immediately preceding the war had provoked research and legislation designed to promote the health and welfare of Britain’s future imperial leaders and workers. It was Britain’s poor performance in the South African War (1899–1902) that prompted the 1904 Report of the Physical Deterioration Committee. The report was significant, as it rejected the then popular eugenicists’ view, which argued that degenerative stock was responsible for the perceived physical deterioration of the race. Instead, it put forward a more optimistic neo-hygienist view, which stressed that improvements could be made to the health of the population if attention was paid to the diet, health and hygiene of young people.²⁹

The welfare legislation of the Liberal government after its 1906 election victory was in part a recognition of this view. The 1906 Education (Provision of School Meals) Act and the 1907 Education (Administrative Provisions) Act provided for the feeding and medical inspection of school children, making the state partially responsible for the health and welfare of the nation’s children.

At the same time a new and exciting conception of the child was developing in Britain. Eighteenth-century Rousseauian ideas about the ‘naturalness’ of childhood and the innocence of children were being complemented by a growing understanding on the part of psychologists, psychoanalysts and the medical profession of children’s particular physical and mental development.³⁰ Under the influence of educational psychology, schools began to develop more child-centred teaching methods. Old methods of instruction were abandoned in favour of new techniques based on the work of Friedrich Froebel, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and others, which encouraged children to discover learning for themselves rather than having it imposed on them by adults.

So, then, when war broke out in 1914, state and professional interest in children in Britain had never been higher. Children were seen as both the problem and the solution for the strength and security of the British Empire. The war reinforced this vision, but with an added urgency that placed children at the heart of a national desire to both physically and psychologically repair the damage of war. It was hoped to replace the ‘lost generation’ with a happier, healthier, better-educated new generation, ready and willing to rebuild a stronger Britain.

For children themselves, the war meant something different. It was at times the cause of both great grief and great excitement. It could mean the separation for years at a time from dearly loved fathers and brothers, or the opportunity to play an active role in helping the wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Families at War
• 3. War Imagined
• 4. Children in Uniform
• 5. War in the Classroom
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index