Duty and Personal Advantage Combined: The War Savings Movement in Pembrokeshire During the First World War

Abstract

The waging of war in the twentieth century required a nation state to mobilise and employ its entire population into productive effort beyond those with direct involvement in the various branches of the armed forces. The First World War witnessed an unprecedented expansion in British munitions and armaments manufacture, transport and the effort to supply an army of five million while maintaining acceptable living standards on the home front. These vital, interconnected objectives required the belligerents to muster every economic and financial resource at their disposal, and expenditure on such an unprecedented scale would have budgetary consequences long after the Armistice in November 1918. Domestic borrowing facilitated the thirteen-fold increase in government, but exactly how communities responded to national savings campaigns, and how genuinely popular savings movements developed in rural counties like Pembrokeshire, have not attracted extensive scholarly research. The focus of this article is to examine how the county of Pembrokeshire reacted to war savings propaganda and what influenced citizens in lending to the state.