The Past and Present War: Political Cartoons and the Memory of the First World War in Britain

Ross J Wilson

doi:10.3167/eca.2015.080205

Abstract

This article examines the image of the First World War in British political cartoons, from the aftermath of the conflict to the present day, as an active process of remembrance. Through an analysis of cartoons in newspapers and periodicals in Britain, this study assesses how a distinct vision of the war is formed within society as a means of addressing contemporary concerns beyond the events of 1914–1918. The use of such war imagery in television, film and fiction has been recently critiqued by scholars who have lamented the way in which this popular memory obscures the history of the conflict. However, a study of political cartoons reveals that rather than constituting a cliché, specific representations of the war, namely the image of the battlefields, the trenches and suffering soldiers, acquire new meanings and constitute a dynamic process of remembrance which uses the past to critique and assess the present.

Highlights

The First World War possesses an evocative quality for contemporary British society
From the crowds gathered around the Cenotaph in London and local war memorial every Armistice Day on November 11, with the poppies sold by the British Legion for the benefit of all veterans of Britain’s war but symbolising the dead of the First World War, to the sea of headstones and the name upon name on the monuments to ‘the missing’ on the memorial landscape of France and Flanders, this is a practice and performance of memory which is intimately tied to the visual.[1]
Political cartoons and comic art in Britain have served as a means of mobilising opinion, values, and ideals from the outbreak of the First World War to its centenary

Summary

Introduction

The First World War possesses an evocative quality for contemporary British society. To speak of the trenches, no man’s land, the Somme, Passchendaele, Gallipoli or Ypres is to almost automatically conjure images of a war-torn landscape, drenched in mud, ridden with craters, where soldiers suffered both the maelstrom of industrialised warfare and the incompetence and indifference of the military and political elite who commanded them. Through an assessment of political cartoons and comic art within British newspapers from the period of the conflict itself to the present that reference the battlefields, ‘the trenches’ and the soldiers, the function of these representations can be examined.

Results

Conclusion