Fear, grief, sorrow: these are the overriding emotions of war. For men, women, and children confined to the home front between 1914 and 1918, exhilarating surges of patriotic energies and the evaporation of many restraints were fleeting thrills when set against the loss of loved ones. Children woke to find that their fathers had left for distant battlefields while they slept. 300,000 never saw their fathers again. 160,000 wives received the dreaded telegram informing them that their husbands had been killed. Countless others discovered the meaning of suffering. When Phyllis Kelly first heard that her lover Eric Appleby had been seriously wounded, she immediately put pen to paper. ‘My own darling Englishman’, she wrote from Dublin on 28 October 1915,
I wonder why I’m writing this, which you may never see – oh God, perhaps even now you have gone far away from your Lady – I wonder when another telegram will come; this knowing nothing is terrible, I don’t know what to do. I simply have sat and shivered with such an awful clutching fear at my heart…. Oh my love, my love, what shall I do – but I must be brave and believe all will be well – dear one, surely God won’t take you from me now. It will be the end of everything that matters… you are all the world and life to me.
The letter was never posted: Eric was already dead.
The ‘awful clutching fear’ that sapped morale presented the British government with the formidable task of rallying not only the troops but the entire nation to the war-effort. Loyalty was not guaranteed. The Independent Labour Party, No Conscription Fellowship, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Union of Democratic Control, and the Women’s International League opposed the war. In ‘Red Clydeside’, there were anti-war demonstrations, industrial action in essential industries, rent strikes, and even cries for a Marxist revolution. Irish republicans went ahead with an armed Rising at Easter 1916. After a week, they were crushed and their blood sacrifice denounced as pro-German but, on the Irish home front, support for Sinn Fein and resistance to the war began growing.
From the declaration of war, the authorities realised that they had to act decisively. They passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), which, after many amendments, gave the government unprecedented powers to intervene into people’s lives. They were empowered to take over any factory or workshop. Curfews and censorship were imposed. Severe restrictions on movement were introduced. Discussing military matters in public became a serious offence. Almost anyone could be arrested for ‘causing alarm’. In the interests of the work ethic, British Summer Time commenced, opening hours for pubs were cut, and beer was watered down. Women who were suspected of having venereal disease could be stopped by the police and subjected to a gynaecological examination. It even became illegal for a woman with VD to have sexual intercourse with a serviceman, even if he was her husband (and had given her the disease).
Suspicion of ‘outsiders’ was high. DORA and the Aliens Restriction Act severe curtailed the civil liberties of non-British-born subjects (even if they were naturalised citizens who had resided in the UK for decades). They were required to register, obtain permits if they intended to travel more than five miles, and were prohibited from entering certain areas. More than 35,000 were held in internment camps or repatriated. Most notably after the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in May 1915, anti-German sentiment erupted into riots in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Sheffield, Rotherham, Newcastle, South Wales, London, and elsewhere. In Liverpool, 200 businesses were destroyed. In London, of the 21 Metropolitan Police Districts, only two were free from riots. It was, as the Daily Record observed, ‘not an uplifting spectacle to see this country descending to trivial and hysterical methods of vengeance’. More typically, the author D. H. Lawrence admitted that ‘When I read of the Lusitania…. I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans – two millions’. Ironically, Lawrence’s German-born wife and his opposition to militarism placed him on the wrong side of DORA. He was accused of spying and forced out of his cottage in St Ives.
It would not have helped Lawrence that he was widely believed to have lax morals. Spy fever was only rivalled by concerns about women’s sexual fervour. Indeed, in the summer of 1918, the two fears bonded. Noel Pemberton Billing, MP for East Hertfordshire and publisher of right-wing newspapers, claimed to have a copy of a ‘Black List’ of 47,000 traitors and spies in high places in Britain. Many were, he insisted, inflamed by the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’, betraying the ‘sacred secrets of State’ in ‘Lesbian ecstasy’. Heterosexual passions were also said to have been kindled by wartime excitements. Freed from the masculine governance of fathers, husbands, and brothers, women were accused of khaki fever. As Private G. J. Dodd, a member of British West Indian Regiment, enthused while on leave in Seaford (East Sussex), ‘Plenty of girls. They love the boys in khaki. They detest walking with civilians. They love the darkies!’ The newly-established Women Police Volunteers, Women Police Service, and Women Patrol Committee did not share his enthusiasm.
Female breadwinning was thought to have helped sponsor women’s licentiousness and consumerism. As poet Madeline Ida Bedford expressed it, parodying the accents of munitions workers:
Earning high wages? Yus,
Five quid a week.
A woman, too, mind you,
I call it dim sweet….
I spends the whole racket
On good times and clothes….
I’ve bracelets and jewellery,
Rings envied by friends;
A sergeant to swank with,
And something to lend.
Jobs in the civil service, factories, docklands and arsenals, tramways, Post Office, and farms were feminised. In July 1914, 3.2 women were employed in industry; this had jumped to 4.8 million by April 1918. Forty per cent of these women were married (compared with only 14 per cent prior to the war). Many encountered hostility from male workers who were worried about competition and the de-skilling of their jobs. ‘Dilution’, or the breaking down of complex jobs into simpler tasks, was introduced to solve the problem of the shortage of skilled male workers, without threatening male wages.
Munitions work elicited particular anxieties. In ‘Women at Munitions Making’, Mary Gabrielle Collins maintained that women’s hands
should minister unto the flame of life,
Their fingers guide
The rosy teat, swelling with milk,
To the eager mouth of the suckling babe.
Instead, she lamented, their hands were being ‘coarsened’ in the factories and
Their thoughts….
Are bruised against the law,
‘Kill, kill’.
Givers of life were being trained to take it. In the words of a woman writing for the magazine of a projectile factory, ‘the fact that I am using my life’s energy to destroy human souls gets on my nerves’. She was proud that she was ‘doing what I can to bring this horrible affair to an end. But once the War is over, never in creation will I do the same thing again’. Propagandists attempted to reconcile women’s dual roles as life-givers and manufacturers of death-dealing weapons. Thus, in Our Girls: Their Work for the War (1916), Hall Caine adopted the language of trashy romances, pointing out that munitions workers had learned to show a ‘proper respect’ for their machine’s ‘impetuous organisms’. By learning their machine’s ‘whims’, munitions women speedily ‘wooed and won this new kind of male monster’. Making bombs was as ‘perfectly natural’ to women as making love.
The effect of widening employment opportunities for women was ambiguous. On the one hand, women were admitted into industry under strict conditions, including the fact that they did not actually ‘replace’ the men but were allowed to perform only certain tasks. Feminist lobbying for equal wages never succeeded: women were paid about half that of men. In munitions factories, they risked dying in explosions or suffering TNT poisoning. After the war was over, they were expected to return to traditional roles. The pervasive theme of feminine self-sacrifice meant that they lacked the economic and political power after the war to transform their world.
On the other hand, many women revelled in a new sense of purpose and emancipation. As Naomi Loughnan admitted in 1917, she was ‘sick of frivolling’ and ‘wanted to do something big and hard, because of our boys and of England’. Factories offered better conditions, higher wages, more interesting work, and greater freedoms than domestic service had done. Female factory workers challenged the gender order: they were earning much more than previously (three times more in some cases), were able to demonstrate their ability to carry out skilled work in areas previously barred to them, and were allowed greater leeway in the way they comported themselves publicly. As Mary Macarthur, trade union leader, concluded in 1918,
No longer are we told that ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’. To-day it is the hand that drills the shell that determines the destiny of the world; and those who did not hesitate to refuse the rights of citizenship to the mothers of men, are ready and anxious to concede these rights to the makers of machine-guns.
Macarthur believed that women’s war-work would make female suffrage politically unavoidable. The suffragettes (that is, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the more militant wing of the suffrage movement) who only a few months before had been torching churches and cricket pavilions became patriotic war-workers. Although a sizeable minority of the more moderate members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (‘suffragists’) joined the peace movement, most also threw themselves into the war effort in an attempt to link their demands for citizenship with service during a national emergency. By June 1917, a combination of admiration for women’s war-work, judicious lobbying by suffragists, and debates about re-enfranchising men who were serving in the armed services abroad, convinced parliament to pass the Representation of the People’s Bill by 385 votes to 55. This gave the vote to an additional five million men and nearly nine million women. Crucially, however, the vote was granted only to women over the age of thirty years who were householders, wives of householders, occupiers of property of an annual value of not less than £5, or university graduates. Ironically, the young women who had toiled in war industries or in the Land Army did not gain the vote on the same terms as their male counterparts until 1928.
The effect of the war on working-class standards of living was more encouraging. Civilians had a relatively low rate of being killed in enemy raids. Only 1,300 civilians were killed when Zeppelins rained bombs on London in 1915 and Gotha-Giant bombers followed in 1917 (a single raid during the Second World War would have a resulted in a similar number of deaths). Full employment, rationing (which was introduced in the last year of the war), rent control, rising bacon imports and increased consumption of milk and eggs, and improved social provision meant that working-class families were better off. Indeed, working-class incomes increased by an average of 100 per cent between 1914 and 1920 and, in the aftermath of war when price levels dropped, this war-enhanced wage level was successfully defended.
In contrast to the improved life expectancy of working-class men who had been old enough to evade war service, servicemen and servicewomen returning from the front-lines were physically devastated. Writing in 1917 about Brighton, pacifist Caroline Payne admitted to being full of ‘sickness and horror’ at the ‘sights of hundreds of men on crutches going about in groups.’ Over 41,000 men had their limbs amputated during the war. Another 272,000 suffered injuries in the legs or arms that did not require amputation. 60,500 were wounded in the head or eyes. 89,000 sustained other serious damage to their bodies. The home front eventually welcomed back men and women whose war service abroad had left scars, both visible and invisible, which were often difficult to speak about. As author Vera Brittain put it in her memoir, Testament of Youth (1933), the war had erected a ‘barrier of indescribable experience between men and the women they loved’. Brittain’s brother, fiancé, and two close male friends were killed in the war, but she rightly observed that ‘The War kills other things besides physical life’. Phyllis Kelly who mourned the death of her beloved Eric would have agreed.
Comments