Veterans of the First World War

Ex-Servicemen and Ex-Servicewomen in Post-War Britain and Ireland

David Swift, Oliver Wilkinson, David Swift, Oliver Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367174620
• eBook ISBN: 9780429614941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume synthesises the latest scholarship on First World War veterans in post-war Britain and Ireland, investigating the topic through its political, social and cultural dynamics. It examines the post-war experiences of those men and women who served and illuminates the nature of the post-war society for which service had been given. Complicating the homogenising tendency in existing scholarship it offers comparison of the experiences of veterans in different regions of Britain, including perspectives drawn from Ireland. Further nuance is offered by the assessment of the experiences of ex-servicewomen alongside those of ex-servicemen, such focus deeping understanding into the gendered specificities of post-war veteran activities and experiences. Moreover, case studies of specific cohorts of veterans are offered, including focus on disabled veterans and ex-prisoners of war.

In these regards the collection offers vital updates to existing scholarship while bringing important new departures and challenges to the current interpretive frameworks of veteran experiences in post-war Britain and Ireland.

1 The deep roots of the British Legion

The emergence of First World War British veterans’ organisations

Mike Hally

Our God and soldiers we alike adore

Ev’n at the brink of danger; not before;

After deliverance, both alike requited,

Our God’s forgotten,

and our soldiers slighted.

Francis Quarks, 1592–1644

I Introduction

On 25 September 1914, Private J. D. Burgess was killed in action while serving with the British Army in East Africa. His widow was left to bring up their two children on a war pension of 14/- a week, a calamitous fall in household income, given that her husband had been earning £9 a week as an engineer before the war. The case was raised in Parliament as an example of the kind of social problem brought about by the recruitment of millions of men for the British Army in response to the First World War.¹ Mass recruitment marked a dramatic shift from the small regular army that the United Kingdom had maintained over previous centuries, and, as a result, there is a substantial historiography about the operational consequences of large-scale recruitment.² Much less has been written about the impact on the wives, children and other dependants of those enlisted, or on the legacy of service on the men themselves after their discharge. The emergence of new organisations comprised of such ex-servicemen, notably the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers (the Association), the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers (NFDDSS), the Comrades of the Great War (the Comrades), the Officers’ Association (OA) and the National Union of Ex-Servicemen (NUX) has received some scholarly attention. However, such accounts tend to be preludes to the history of the creation of the British Legion in 1921, focusing mainly on that later organisation.³ A few historians, notably Stephen R. Ward and Charles Kimball, have made attempts to go into more detail, but they limit themselves by starting with the foundation of the first group in September 1916, failing to consider what had led to that radical new step. Moreover, both of them restrict their accounts to developments in England and Wales, omitting parallel processes in Scotland and Ireland.⁴

It is the contention of this chapter, that to understand the origins of the veterans’ movement in Great Britain and Ireland, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of the war. Indeed, it will be shown that two major campaigns by the trades councils⁵ and by Liberal MP James Myles Hogge, run independently but in parallel, led to the formation of the first national veterans’ groups, the Association and the Federation respectively. The vital work of the councils and Hogge between 1914–17 will be set against the role and remit of these groups thereafter. Moreover, I will consider the emergence of subsequent ex-service organisations which, as will be shown, were reactions to these initial developments. Finally, the process of convergence of these groups in the cause of unity will be assessed. The first part of this account is based almost entirely on primary sources comprising trades council archives, parliamentary records and contemporary newspaper reports, as very little secondary literature addresses these activities prior to late 1916.⁶ The second half of the chapter is rooted equally in primary sources and in the existing material of Wootton, Barr, Ward and Kimball, which is concerned with the later history, and notably the unification, of veterans’ organisations in the UK.

II Campaigning for veterans and their dependants

Before Britain declared war on 4 August 1914, trades councils were almost united in their opposition to war in principle, frequently calling for a general strike should war break out.⁷ Long-established international contacts reinforced their belief that the working classes of Europe would not fight each other and, even on the weekend before 4 August, their leaders played host in London to visiting trade unionists from Berlin.⁸ That same weekend, a sizeable protest in Trafalgar Square demonstrated trade union and labour movement opposition to war with Germany,⁹ the speakers including Henry Hyndman,¹⁰ a leading socialist voice in favour of re-armament but only in the interests of peace not war.

Once war was declared and recruitment got underway, accompanied by the rapid mobilisation of a ‘War Culture’ in Britain, which sought to represent the ‘frightfulness’ of the Germans in order to create and maintain popular support for the war, opinions amongst the councils fluctuated and divided. In mid-August, London Trades Council passed a resolution declaring that ‘the war is a war of rulers and not of the peoples’.¹¹ Yet within weeks this same council voted to provide speakers for a public meeting organised by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, with the aim of encouraging enlistment.¹² Trades council minutes, meanwhile, reveal considerable internal disagreement about the war. Where consensus did emerge, however, was on the need to support the wives, children and other dependants of the men who had volunteered. While trades councils had been set up during the nineteenth century as local forums for trade unionists to debate and coordinate their activities, their constitutions went further than this, with their ‘Objects’ typically including ‘the well-being of the Working Class’.¹³ Hence, where working-class dependants of sailors and soldiers were now facing poverty or eviction, whether members of the council or not, this was an issue that was perceived to be within their remit. Before the war, only three per cent of soldiers’ wives got ‘separation allowances’ while their husbands were away, and sailors’ wives got no separation allowance at all,¹⁴ so most service wives received, at best, just a voluntary allocation from their husbands’ pay. When the Army was small, and the ranks recruited substantially from the poorest in society, this situation did not trouble the public. From August 1914, however, many of those now enlisting were skilled or clerical workers,¹⁵ previously earning three or four pounds a week or, as in the case of Mr Burgess, much more. By contrast, the long-established army pay of ‘a shilling a day’ equated to a basic agricultural wage, far below typical earnings.

Indeed, the Government realised this was a serious disincentive to recruitment and, in response, Prime Minister Asquith announced on 10 August 1914 that separation allowances would be extended to all soldiers’ and sailors’ wives.¹⁶ Yet the measure was simply not enough to keep separated families out of poverty and, in any case, the criteria for and processing of payments were inadequate. The payment systems themselves were severely under-resourced and many dependants did not fit neatly into qualifying categories such as ‘wife’ or ‘son’. As a result, many sought help from long-established military charities, in particular the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association (SSFA),¹⁷ an organisation which was, as shown by Paul Huddie in Chapter 2, itself undergoing changes due to the needs of the war with important post-war consequences for itself and for veteran welfare. During the war, however, not only was such charitable assistance quickly overstretched but there was also deep resistance amongst the working classes to asking for charity, especially when the cause of their need was national service.¹⁸ Class further impacted upon such concerns, the working-class men and women in need resenting what were sometimes perceived as the judgmental attitudes of the middle-class, often female, volunteers who assessed claimants’ needs.¹⁹ MPs too objected to sailors’ and soldiers’ dependants being forced to rely on ‘the cold hand of charity’,²⁰ particularly as pre-war social legislation had established the principle of the State, not charity, providing for the welfare of its citizens.

Accordingly, from August 1914, trades councils began to provide organisational support for service families, on both an individual and collective basis. In Lancashire, Rawtenstall Trades Council unanimously passed a resolution that ‘the new scale of pensions for soldiers and their dependents … is still inadequate’.²¹ The resolution was then sent to ‘the Prime Minister, Mr. Harcourt [MP for Rossendale] and Mr. J. Parker, MP for Halifax’, arriving just a week before the issue was debated in the Commons and a Select Committee established.²² Nor was this a lone petition, Labour MP George Barnes citing in debate ‘the perfect avalanche of resolutions that have reached us’ in support of improved pensions and allowances.²³ Indeed, the trades councils formed a highly efficient network in prompting that avalanche, speedily circulating resolutions to other branches, and sometimes every trades council in the country, to prompt collective weight to their petitions. They also took up individual cases, like Glasgow Trades Council’s call for assistance for a ‘widow with children whose relief of 19/- per week had been reduced to 14/-’.²⁴ Here the support of the trades council network was of considerable help to service families and, moreover, differentiated the actions of the councils from existi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: British veterans after the First World War
• 1 The deep roots of the British Legion: the emergence of First World War British veterans’ organisations
• 2 Ex-servicemen and the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen’s Families Association, 1919–21
• 3 Between workers and soldiers: the relationship between the Labour Party and ex-servicemen after the First World War
• 4 ‘A fighting man and a thinking man’: the British Left, ex-servicemen and working-class culture, 1914–24
• 5 Revolution, ex-servicemen and the Cork Branch of the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers, 1918–21
• 6 ‘It’s up to you now to fight for your own country’: Ireland’s Great War veterans in the War of Independence, 1919–21
• 7 ‘Still in the ranks of the old Corps, though not on active service’: women’s veteran organisations in interwar Britain
• 8 Paternalism and prosthetics: life for disabled veterans and their families on a post-war settlement
• 9 Wounded in a mentionable place: the (in)visibility of the disabled ex-serviceman in interwar Britain
• 10 Ex-Prisoners of War, 1914–18: veteran association, assimilation and disassociation after the First World War
• Bibliography
• Index