The British Home Front and the First World War

Acknowledgements Introduction 'Differences that Divide and Bind' From Fascism in Britain to World War: Dystopic Warnings 'The Future is our Business': Dystopic Visions of Hitler's Victory No Place Like Home: The British Home Front 'Perpetual Civil War': Domestic Romances of Britain's Fate Keeping Faith with the Conquered: Fictions of the European Home Front Defending Europe's Others Notes Bibliography Index

The dogs that didn't bark in the Blitz: transpecies and transpersonal emotional geographies on the British home front

Throughout the Second World War, the British government commissioned a number of artists to produce posters relevant to the British home front. These memorable posters have become emblems of how the people responded to the challenge of war. However, there exists a more detailed and reliable resource in the form of press advertisements by commercial organizations. Such companies placed a wide variety of advertisements throughout the war that sought to speak in the language of the people and reflect the nature of their experiences. This article explores the merits of commercial advertising as an accurate reflection of life on the home front. Based upon the premise that the practice of advertising had become advanced by the outbreak of war, it proposes that commercial advertising offers a more honest, frank and down‐to‐earth portrayal of everyday life in Britain between 1939 and 1945 than that displayed in propaganda posters.

The First World War required the mobilisation of entire societies, regardless of age or gender. The phrase 'home front' was itself a product of the war with parts of Britain literally a war front, coming under enemy attack from the sea and increasingly the air. However, the home front also conveyed the war's impact on almost every aspect of British life, economic, social and domestic. In the fullest account to-date, leading historians show how the war blurred the division between what was military and not, and how it made many conscious of their national identities for the first time. They reveal how its impact changed Britain for ever, transforming the monarchy, promoting systematic cabinet government, and prompting state intervention in a country which prided itself on its liberalism and its support for free trade. In many respects we still live with the consequences.

As has been demonstrated, the colonial home front was deeply affected by the Second World War, and many of the widely remembered images of the British home front can be applied to the scattered dependencies in which Britain’s 60 million colonial subjects lived.1 A summary of the war’s main impact on the home front is important for the balance of this study. The main areas are: wartime political developments; the economic effects of war; the food situation; development policy; the experience of the Franco-Mauritian community; and the story of the 1600 Central European Jews detained on Mauritius from 1940–1945.

This article examines the relationship between aesthetics and pedagogy in two recent historical novels for children about the British Home Front during the Second World War: Letters from the Lighthouse (2017) by Emma Carroll and Our Castle by the Sea (2019) by Lucy Strange. It argues that the representation of civilian life during the war in both novels is conditioned by recent socio-political events in Britain, namely, the recurrent appropriation of the wartime past in support of nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric. The texts discussed in this article seek to counter this narrative, foregrounding immigration as a vital part of Britain’s wartime past. Drawing upon historical fiction studies and cultural analysis, the article begins with an exploration of the aesthetic treatment of wartime Britain in the texts more broadly, arguing that Letters from the Lighthouse participates in and subverts idealised visions of the Home Front, while Our Castle by the Sea rejects nostalgia entirely. I conclude my discussion with an examination of the use of the wartime spy story as an aesthetic template for exploring concepts of xenophobia and prejudice in the two novels. Ultimately, this article contends that literary aesthetics perform a pedagogic function in both texts, presenting the contribution of immigrants and refugees as crucial to the story of the Britain Home Front.

This chapter makes a broad analysis of home front morale in Scotland during the Second World War. It sets the scene with a discussion of the history and development of popular cultural narratives about high morale, ‘Blitz Spirit’, and united British communities. The chapter argues that this traditional approach is London-centric, overlooking other regions and nations on the British home front. To address this historiographical oversight, the chapter focuses on Scottish archives to assess morale in Scotland. To assist in gauging Scottish morale, the reader is made familiar with the history and contemporary definitions of morale. Following this, the chapter splits into three sub-sections, each oriented around a factor that may have influenced morale: home front conditions, including responses to the Clydeside Blitz of March 1941; frontline events, including the Battle of El Alamein; and ‘Scottish concerns’, including the legacies of Depression and Whitehall’s perceived indifference towards Scotland.

Considered in the context of contemporary, upper-class mourning practices on the British home front, Lady Alda Hoare’s annotated sheet music collection symbolized a shrine to her son, who was killed in the First World War. Such use of material objects as sources of consolation became substitutes for the normal ritual of a burial, since soldiers’ bodies were not sent home. Departing from the existing literature’s focus on the public and professional musical responses to the War, Lady Alda’s music reveals an alternative, intensely private way in which music, as a symbol of memory, aided in the grieving process.

The mid-twentieth century in Britain ushered in a new age of anxiety with the development of total war and the aerial bombing of civilians. Rather than trying to chart and quantify levels of anxiety and fear on the British home front during the Blitz, this article's goal is to examine how these emotions were conceptualized by psychological experts immediately prior to and during the war. The essay follows the rising problematization of anxiety and fear as new concepts calling for professional knowledge and management. It emphasizes the contribution of psychoanalysts to this development while pointing to gradual change between the two world wars.

Although the outbreak of the First World War caused economic hardship for Britain’s professional musicians, they were still often asked to perform for free in the service of charity. The public debate about the morality of asking financially vulnerable musicians to perform without the expectation of payment led to some attempts to address these difficulties, with new programs founded expressly to help musicians in wartime Britain. Two principal organizations—the Music in War-Time Committee and the War Emergency Entertainments—proved successful in providing work for struggling musicians, either in public concerts or private performances for hospitalized soldiers, and in the process produced benefits far more complex, valuable, and far-reaching—in terms of both those employed to give the concerts and the effect on those who received them—than merely the monetary value of the sums involved.

Focusing on the British home front during the First World War, this article explores civilians’ motives for acquiring and wearing military garments and accoutrements to which they were not entitled. It suggests that uniforms could be donned either to avoid the attentions of recruiting sergeants, or to perpetrate criminal deceptions. That said, individuals did not always wear illicit uniforms in order to ‘disguise’ their civilian identity. Rather, many men claimed a sense of entitlement to such items, either on the basis of previous war service, or, more often, on the basis of their contributions to the war effort on the home front. The acquisition of military items could also reflect men's roles as consumers: for many civilians, acquiring and wearing the newly glamorous uniforms was a consumer choice that could also open the door to further leisure and consumer opportunities. Overall, illicitly wearing military items undermined the uniform's link with service and sacrifice on the battle fronts: it allowed individuals to assume the appearance of combatants or to assert their patriotic identities without actually exposing themselves to military duties or dangers. It also reflected (some) men's continued perception of themselves as consumers, keen, even in wartime, to adopt what they saw as the most desirable sartorial option.

This article presents a model and method for investigating hotels on the British home front during and after the First World War. It explores the roles of hotels and other places of commercial accommodation in wartime—as shapers of the contours of conflict and its aftermath, as well as conduits for, and sites of, political, economic and social contest. In so doing, it adopts an innovative and influential theoretical model used for exploring the roles of hotels in more recent conflicts developed by Fregonese and Ramadan (2015). The wider study highlights how hotels were implicated within the infrastructure of war and details how the machinery of the British central government grappled with programmes of hotel requisition, adaptation and compensation. In particular, it argues for the value of identifying establishments and districts in which hotels were enrolled for wartime uses and outlines a project that is systematically comparing their functions and operations in wartime and the transition to peace.

What was the mood of the British people during the middle and later years of the Second World War?How did they react to the major military and domestic events of the period? What issues were uppermost in their minds? What incidents caused particular public interest and controversy? These are some of the insights provided by this remarkable collection of contemporary wartime documents. During the Second World War, Home Intelligence, a unit of the Ministry of Information, closely monitored British public attitudes on the home front and compiled secret reports on the state of popular morale which were circulated around Whitehall. In this volume, leading historian of the period, Jeremy Crang, brings together selected Home Intelligence reports from June 1941 to December 1944 to offer us a fascinating ‘real time’ glimpse into the mindset of the British people during these long years of struggle. The reports provide a unique window into public responses to the shifting military fortunes of the war, including the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British and Commonwealth victory at El Alamein, the strategic bombing of Germany, the defeat of Italy, and the Allied landings in Normandy. They also include much valuable information on the continuing stresses and strains of wartime life such as the blackout, rationing, fuel economy and strikes – as well as the V-weapon attacks of 1944 which brought back all the horrors of the Blitz. Alongside this, hopes and fears about the post-war world come to feature strongly and Home Intelligence carefully documented attitudes to the Beveridge report, as well as other aspects of reconstruction. Introduced by the editor, and incorporating an extensive glossary, this collection is an exceptional record of popular opinion on the British home front as the tide of war gradually turned from defeat to victory. It is indispensable in understanding both the unity and diversity of wartime Britain, as well as the many-sided experience of living through ‘Our People’s War’.

Old Age and the Great War: J. M. Barrie’s Plays about the British Home Front

I n The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) Paul Fussell famously argued that the dominant effect that the war produced on writers was a mood of irony and disillusionment.2 Yet the impact of the Zeppelin on the imagination of home-front writers belies the general mood of dread that Fussell indicates, and initially shows instead an intoxication or exhilaration by war.3 As Guillaume de Syon writes, artists and intellectuals were particularly taken with the contradictory mix of fascination and repulsion that the airship evoked.4 The effect ofthe Zeppelin was not simply traumatic; it inspired awe as well as fear, excitement as well as dread. The Zeppelin simultaneously displaced attention from soldiers at the front and allowed civilians to identify with soldiers, to feel their own roles in the war as central, and their own lives at risk. As new objects appearing in the sky, the Zeppelins helped trigger the eschatological language which Jay Winter claims assumed renewed prevalence during the war.5 They changed the social fabric of the wartime city, sent city dwellers to the coun? try, and employers to the cellar along with their servants. The Zeppelin changed the meaning of