The Home Front in Britain

Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences since 1914

Janis Lomas, M. Andrews

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137348999
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Home Front in Britain explores the British Home Front in the last 100 years since the outbreak of WW1. Case studies critically analyse the meaning and images of the British home and family in times war, challenging prevalent myths of how working and domesticlife wasshifted by national conflict.

1

Ideas and Ideals of Domesticity and Home in the First World War

Maggie Andrews (with thanks to Layla Byron)

Introduction

The munitions worker and the Women’s Land Army are familiar images of the Home Front in First World War and the number of women in paid employment increased during the conflict; however the majority of women remained in the home¹ or retained domestic roles and responsibilities alongside paid work. Nevertheless domestic life can still be categorised by Gilbert and Gubar as part of the ‘unofficial female history’ of First World War ² which has received limited academic attention. This chapter suggests that during the conflict, the home and women’s associated domestic and emotional responsibilities for nurturing and supporting men were sustained, reworked, stretched and developed in Britain. A range of letters, diaries, memories, newspapers and posters, particularly from the West Midlands, will be utilised to draw attention to the significance of the domestic activities women undertook in wartime. Women cared for or supported men in their domestic lives and in voluntary activities beyond their homes; hence gender roles and status were not fundamentally challenged. Indeed the seeds were sewn for a new privileging of the domestic³ within private life, the imagination and public discourses⁴ in the post-war era.

The idea of home has been utilised in numerous ways; as a place of emotional belonging, a domestic space to inhabit, a physical building or a homeland which is idealised, dreamed about and fought for. Ostensibly, one of the reasons men enlisted was to protect their homes and families. A recruitment poster which addressed the ‘Men of Essex’ and encouraged them to ‘Rally Round the Colours and Keep the Flag Flying’ by joining others in the Essex regiment went on to ask them: ‘Do you realise that these men are giving their lives to protect your homes from devastation, your wives and daughters from being dishonoured?’⁵ The connection drawn between enlisting in the armed forces and protecting home was more credible after the shelling of Whitby, Scarborough and Hartlepool on 16 December 1914. These raids were referred to specifically in the recruitment posters which followed; one bore an image of a young girl holding her sibling in her arms in front of a damaged house. The accompanying strapline asked: ‘Men of Britain! Will You Stand This?’ and went on to explain underneath:

No 2 Wykeham Street, Scarborough after the German bombardment on Dec 16th. It was the Home of a Working Man, four People were killed in this House including the Wife and Two Children the youngest aged 5. 78 Women & Children were killed and 228 Women & Children were wounded by the German Raiders. ENLIST NOW.⁶

The relationship between what became an idealised version of home to be protected and the lived experience of everyday domestic life could however be tenuous. Between 1914 and 1918, domestic roles and responsibilities expanded both within and beyond the home. Domesticity in wartime for women was varied, influenced by wealth, class, age and geographical location. Some women kept house not only for their families but also for billeted soldiers or Belgian refugees. Wives and children took on new roles and responsibilities in family farms, smallholdings and businesses when husbands or sons left for war. Some wealthier women were alarmed to discover the supply of domestic servants decreasing, whilst others with large houses converted part of their home into a convalescence hospital for wounded soldiers. As the conflict progressed it increasingly interfered with daily life in the home in ways unimaginable to previous generations, causing disruption and destruction. War fractured families, displaced people, destroyed homes and ended lives. Food shortages, queues and rationing, in the latter part of the war, added to the stress of housewives, as did the Zeppelin raids. Although arguably the civilian casualties in First World War were small, just under 1500 people, ‘the Zeppelin’s impact was more imaginative than factual’.⁷ However for many, concerns about bombing were outweighed by more immediate practical and financial problems or anxiety over their relations at the front.

Not too far from home to be looked after

Men’s decisions to enlist presented their wives and mothers with challenges in continuing domestic management, provisioning and caring. Sylvia Pankhurst, who lived in the East End, noted that ‘a poor neighbour of ours ... got into debt to buy new underclothing for her husband when he went to camp’.⁸ Furthermore initial organisational problems meant that many women needed to provide their husbands and sons in the camps with food and other items whilst difficulties over the payment of separation allowances meant that working class women were themselves short of funds. Mothers who had relied upon their son’s contribution to the household struggled particularly in financial terms in the early days of the conflict. For some women, however, whose domestic arrangements were less than ideal, the war came as a welcome break:

One woman with a very bad husband owned frankly that she would not be sorry if he were killed. ‘But I suppose he’ll be spared, and others as’d be missed’ll be taken, for that’s the way of things.’ Said she, ‘It’s the only time as I and the children ’as peace, The war’s been appy time for us.⁹

For others wartime separation was a very different story. Nancy Huston has suggested that ‘women in the First World War were presented with a limited range of prescribed roles by propaganda, as mother, sweetheart, wife, sister or daughter’¹⁰ and as such, whether in paid work or not, they took on the main task of writing and sending parcels to men in the armed forces. In so doing they provided the ammunition to keep the idea, and the ideal, of home alive for their men. Women’s sometimes time-consuming emotional and practical labour was utilised to send letters and cigarettes, tobacco, chocolate or other comforts to the troops as they attempted to continue to nurture and care for the welfare of the men who were away from home.

As, Joanna Bourke has suggested: ‘men’s identities remained lodged within their civilian environment’.¹¹ Indeed the home and fighting fronts were intimately linked as recent scholarship has emphasised.¹² Adrian Gregory has pointed out one of the unfortunate consequences of the attention given by historians to the most famous First World War literature is an emphasis on the bond between soldiers whilst the strong bonds those in the armed forces maintained with their homes can be sidelined.¹³ Soldiers’ bonds and identification with their homes and communities were nurtured by a heavy traffic of letters; in 1916, for example, 5,000,000 letters were sent each week from the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium to Britain. One soldier claimed to have received ‘167 letters besides papers and parcels and [had] written 242 letters’¹⁴ in the preceding twelve months. Michael Roper observes the post was something tangible which enabled the receiver to ‘touch the very paper that the loved one had held.’¹⁵ Letters came from relatives and friends; they provided news but also acted as a space for emotional exchange, ensuring that the lines of communication were maintained between those at home and the men living in grim or alien circumstances whether in training camps, hospitals or theatres of war. The letters of William John Brown, who was only eighteen when he joined up (see Figure 1.1), demonstrates this. He wrote regularly to his mother in Worcester, mainly about life at home, asking after the health of his father who was ill, and constantly anxious for news of his beloved pigeons – who for him represented home and freedom.

Dear Mother and Sister

I had a letter off Frank and he has written the address on for me if you write again. We are expecting to move this week to Tidworth so write before Saturday.

I am getting on quite well but it’s a bit rough. We have plenty of food. The time I am writing this is Wednesday February 17th.

I am glad dad is getting better and I hope you are all in good health and happy. The other piece is for Ernie Noake as I want to know how the pigeons is getting on as there is no one down here only seagulls and a few german ships whats captured.

With best love to yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Ideas and Ideals of Domesticity and Home in the First World War
• 2  A Personal Account of the Home Front
• 3  Soldiering On: War Widows in First World War Britain
• 4  Mortality or Morality? Keeping Workers Safe in First World War
• 5  A Heroine at Home: The Housewife on the First World War Home Front
• 6  Female Agricultural Workers in Wales in the First World War
• 7  Ellen Wilkinson and Home Security 19401945
• 8  Guernsey Mothers and Children: Forgotten Evacuees
• 9  The Home Front as a Moment for Animals and Humans: Exploring the AnimalHuman Relationship in Contemporary Diaries and Letters
• 10  The Weak and the Wicked: Non-Conscripted Masculinities in 1940s British Cinema
• 11  Second World War Rationing: Creativity and Buying to Last
• 12  Idle Women: Challenging Gender Stereotypes on Britains Inland Waterways During the Second World War
• 13  Doing Your Bit: Women and the National Savings Movement in the Second World War
• 14  Contemporary Images and Ideas of the Home Front
• Index