Cultural Heritage of the Great War in Britain

Ross J. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138270701
• eBook ISBN: 9781317156451
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

As the hundredth anniversary approaches, it is timely to reflect not only upon the Great War itself and on the memorials which were erected to ensure it did not slip from national consciousness, but also to reflect upon its rich and substantial cultural legacy. This book examines the heritage of the Great War in contemporary Britain. It addresses how the war maintains a place and value within British society through the usage of phrases, references, metaphors and imagery within popular, media, heritage and political discourse. Whilst the representation of the war within historiography, literature, art, television and film has been examined by scholars seeking to understand the origins of the 'popular memory' of the conflict, these analyses have neglected how and why wider popular debate draws upon a war fought nearly a century ago to express ideas about identity, place and politics. By examining the history, usage and meanings of references to the Great War within local and national newspapers, historical societies, political publications and manifestos, the heritage sector, popular expressions, blogs and internet chat rooms, an analysis of the discourses which structure the remembrance of the war can be created. The book acknowledges the diversity within Britain as different regional and national identities draw upon the war as a means of expression. Whilst utilising the substantial field of heritage studies, this book puts forward a new methodology for assessing cultural heritage and creates an original perspective on the place of the Great War across contemporary British society.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315575292-1

The Great War appears to possess a pre-eminent place across the communities, regions and nations that constitute contemporary Britain. Indeed, it would not be hyperbole to state that this conflict which was fought at the outset of the twentieth century still haunts modern society (see Fussell 1975, Winter 1992). This legacy of the war, of the trenches, the mud, the large-scale death and the sea of apparently endless headstones and monuments on the former battlefields across Europe and the Middle East is still prominent. To speak of the Somme, Passchendaele or Gallipoli, particularly in certain areas and localities within Britain, is to evoke strong feelings of loss, pity, anger and pride. The aftermath of the world’s first global conflagration still reaches into the present. As the local memorials in the towns and villages of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland still stand witness and testify the loss of life in the war; materially and psychologically this is a war that is still lived with (Wilson 2009). However, with the passing of the last veterans of the conflict, the events of 1914–1918 could seem to be receding into the historical distance. Indeed, as the conflict has now slipped from ‘living memory’ to ‘remembered history’ one might also expect the Great War to fall from public consciousness (see Dyer 1994). On the contrary, as the anniversaries of the events of the war are still marked and the denouement of the conflict is remembered each November, the war appears to be still significant for individuals, communities and wider society. Despite the passing of the years, the place of the conflict within public life in Britain remains undimmed: this is a war which in many ways has not ended.

This apparently unyielding ‘popular memory’ of the Great War in Britain is the focus of this book. Through a detailed analysis of the local, regional and national remembrance of the war, the public and private commemoration of the dead and the subtle legacies of language, image and perspective, the ‘cultural heritage’ of the conflict within contemporary Britain will be detailed. The purpose of this investigation is to assess why the war has remained so significant within society; to detail why the conflict is still called to mind within the ‘public consciousness’ (after Connerton 1989). As such, this study will approach the issue of heritage and memory as a purposeful denotation and action within a wider socio-political context (after Smith 2004, 2006, Walsh 1992). In essence, remembering, valuing and using the past are activities which are undertaken for a specific purpose. Rather than simplistically assuming that the conflict is remembered because it ‘should be’, that the scale of death necessitates its remembrance, this analysis takes the stance that these events are remembered because of what it communicates to contemporary society about itself (after Wertsch 2002). In this assessment, therefore, the cultural heritage of the Great War is identified as it serves to inform, reflect upon and frame experiences for current groups and communities. The events of 1914–1918 are a means of illustrating and motivating issues in the present, to comprehend and explain notions of identity, place and politics. As this analysis will demonstrate, the processes of drawing upon the Great War as an aspect of a shared cultural heritage creates and sustains bonds within communities. Indeed, the First World War remains prominent within contemporary society in Britain because of its ability to be used to relay information to one another and to others. In this manner, this study will assess the entwining of the experience, history, memory and heritage of the Great War.

The Great War: Experience

The summons detailed in Laurence Binyon’s (1922: 70) poem, For the Fallen, which was written in 1914 before the major loss of life that occurred with the Battle of the Somme or the conflicts that raged around the Flemish city of Ieper, is one that calls for remembrance:

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

The poem is intended to provide instruction for a population, perhaps long removed psychologically or chronologically from the events of 1914–1918, to maintain the memory of the dead. It commands its audience to remember the war, to bear a responsibility to those who gave their lives for their country. Binyon’s poem is, therefore, a dedication to the sacrifice for which the nation mourns. In some respects, this invocation provides a frame through which subsequent generations have recalled the war (see Heffernan 1995). This sense of responsibility for remembrance appears to emerge in the post-war era and comes to dominate commemorative ceremonies (see Gregory 1994). The ‘burden of memory’ and the solemn nature of remembrance could be considered to be borne from the sheer size of fatalities during the war and the subsequent trauma brought to families and communities throughout Britain (see Winter 1986). During the four years of war, the deaths of British Army servicemen and women numbered over 700,000. Over a million individuals from Britain were also wounded during the conflict and in some cases suffered lifelong injuries from the effects of the industrialised war; whether blinded or choked by gas fumes, mutilated by shell fragments, struck sightless or deafened by high explosives or rendered mentally incapacitated from the effects of their wartime service. The sheer size of these figures would themselves appear to validate Binyon’s call to remember. However, such an approach has been critiqued as obscuring the historical circumstances in which these deaths and injuries occurred (see Sheffield 2002). Indeed, recent historians have asserted that a lack of historical perspective is largely responsible for what is critically termed the ‘myths and memory’ of the war, or perhaps, more kindly, the ‘popular perception’ of the conflict in Britain (after Bond 2002). Therefore, to place these losses into context in order to assess the popular memory and the cultural heritage of the war, the history of the conflict must be considered.

Whilst some scholars have argued that the United States Civil War (1861–1865) was the first ‘modern war’, fought with the products of an industrialised society, the Great War can nevertheless be asserted as the first war fought on an international and industrial scale (see Griffith 1994). The conflict encompassed land, sea and air on three continents and drew in millions of men and women to serve the competing national interests of the combatants (Keegan 1998, Strachan 2005). The war which originated in Eastern Europe then spread to Western Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australasia and Asia as the colonial powers of Britain, France and Germany mobilised their empires in the pursuit of victory (Morrow 2004: 8–12). The well-known battlefields of the Western Front in France and Flanders were just one theatre of war alongside the fields of conflict in Salonika (Greece), Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), East Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi) and the Eastern Front (Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia, Hungary) (see Beckett 2001: 20–25). As the Entente of France, Britain, Russia, Italy, and after 1917 the United States, sought a breakthrough against the Central Powers of Germany, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary, vast amounts of manpower and material were expended. In total, approximately 10 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of the war (see Tucker 1998).

As an international conflict, the war brought soldiers and civilians from all over the world into contact with one another (Das 2011; Winegard 2012). As labourers, soldiers and nurses, men and women from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas volunteered or were enlisted by nation states and imperial governments to help the war effort (Grundlingh 1987, Guoqi 2005, Howe 2002). This great congregation in and around the battlefields of the Great War has often been highlighted as the origins of nationalism and political autonomy for the dependencies and colonies of the European powers (Thomson 1994, Vance 1998). Forged in the ‘crucible of war’ this movement for self-determination has ensured that in this respect the conflict’s repercussions have been experienced throughout the twentieth century (see Dunn and Fraser 1996). Aiding this movement towards independence was the substantial economic costs of the war for the combatant nations (Wrigley 2000). The high level of borrowing that the Entente Powers engaged in during the war, principally from the United States, alongside the crippling financial penalties inflicted upon Germany after its defeat, ensured that the age of European dominance over the globe began to recede (Silverman 1982). Politically, financially, and as the level of fatalities increased, morally, European hegemony was to be challenged in the post-war world and never again achieve the same level of pre-eminence.

As the battlefields of France, Flanders, the Italian Alps, Eastern Europe, Gallipoli and Salonika testified this was also a conflict which broke new ground in the conditions of warfare (Kramer 2007). As developments in military technology had led to relative stalemate between opposing armies, troops were compelled to ‘dig in’ (after Henig 1989: 10). Across the war landscape, soldiers constructed a network of trenches, dugouts and tunnels to hold positions and to launch attacks (Ellis 1989: 9). Military officials responded to the changes in warfare by employing policies of attrition. Attacks and raids designed to wear down the enemy’s defences, deplete important reserves of morale and result in a greater loss of life than the attacking army were the tactics used by all belligerent nations in the conflict (Ashworth 1980: 5–7). Such policies led to the substantial scale of death in the now well-remembered bloody engagements on the Somme, Passchendaele, Verdun, Vimy Ridge and the Dardanelles Campaign. For example, in the Battle of the Somme, during the first day of attacks on 1 July 1916, the British Army sustained 38,000 fatalities and 19,000 casualties (see Middlebrook 1971). For the Battle of Passchendaele, between July and November 1917, the scale of death has been difficult to assess, such were the conditions of warfare. Most estimates place the number of fatalities as over 225,000 for the British Army and 250,000 for the Germany Army (see Macdonald 1978). Modern warfare had also ensured that many of these deaths were painfully unheroic; bodies were mutilated by shrapnel, disintegrated by high explosives or lost in a sea of mud as artillery bombardments transformed the war landscape (Van Bergen 2009). Another consequence of this stalemate was the frequently appalling conditions of the trench systems in all theatres of war (Saunders 2012). Exposed to the elements, littered with the detritus of war and often the remains of the dead, the ‘trenches’ possessed a double-edged quality for the soldiers; they protected them from attack but confined them to a narrow strip of space. As the war poet Siegfried Sassoon (1983: 137) remarked in his poem Memorial Tablet these battlefields could be reduced to nightmarish visions:

I died in hell –

(They called it Passchendaele).

These conditions were experienced by armies which had been raised from a civilian population (Proctor 2010). In Britain, with a small standing army in 1914 and no tradition of compulsory military service, volunteers were marched into military camps at the outset of the war and sent off to serve ‘King and Country’ (McCartney 2005; Beckett and Simpson 1985). Throughout Britain, local communities and businesses raised ‘Pals Battalion’, enabling workmates and neighbours to serve together in the armed forces (Simkins 1988). Evidence suggests that these volunteers were enthusiastic and patriotic, desiring to ‘see the war’ before it ended (Bourne 1989: 30–35, De Groot 1996: 8–12). After the true nature of the war had been made clear as one of bloody deadlock, conscription was introduced in Britain, though not in Ireland, to ensure victory in the field (see Bet-El 1999). Able-bodied men aged 18 to 45 were recruited into service and overwhelmingly accepted their role as soldiers (see Bourke 1996, 1999). Indeed, throughout the war, incidents of disobedience and mutiny within the British Army were infrequent (after Corns and Hughes-Wilson 2002). This absence of indiscipline, perhaps a product of the rigid enforcement of military law and the oppressive class structure of society as much as patriotism and devotion to duty, is also surprising when considering the colossal mobilisation of the British population. In total, over five million individuals served in the armed forces during wartime. These soldiers, artillerymen, medical staff and labourers were part of a wider service where women contributed to the war work. As members of the Queen Mary Auxiliary Army Corps, the Land Army or charitable organisations such as the Red Cross and the Young Men’s Christian Association, women as well as men assisted in the drive for victory (see War Office 1922).

During the four years of war, civilian populations from all combatant nations suffered the privations of war as well as the devastation and bereavement on the news of the death of a loved one (Beckett 2006, Bilton 2003). In Britain, despite the Zeppelin Raids that occurred during the early years of the conflict, which terrorised the East Coast of the country, killing civilians in East Anglia and Yorkshire, the ‘cold bite’ of war was not as harsh as that experienced in Germany, Belgian, France and Russia (Darrow 2000, Ziemann 2011). Nevertheless, across Britain, the war brought political intrusion into daily life, propaganda, rationing and the terrible threat of bad news delivered from the General Staff by telegraph (see Van Emden and Humphries 2004). The closed curtains in daytime informed neighbours and relatives that a father, son or brother had been killed or was ‘missing’ in action and presumed dead. Indeed, such was the constitution of the British Army with the formation of ‘Pals Battalions’ that entire streets within towns and villages could be similarly touched by loss after a particularly bloody and costly engagement at the front (see Moorcroft 1992). Therefore, the war was brough...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Slang and Sayings – War Discourse
• 3 Framing the Past – Imagery and the Great War
• 4 Views from the Trenches – Perspectives on the Great War
• 5 Myths of the War – Imagining the Great War
• 6 Museums, Memorials and Memory – Remembering the Great War
• 7 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index