Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War

Mobilizing Charity

Peter Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415704946
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134500383
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This book challenges scholarship which presents charity and voluntary activity during World War I as marking a downturn from the high point of the late Victorian period. Charitable donations rose to an all-time peak, and the scope and nature of charitable work shifted decisively. Far more working class activists, especially women, became involved, although there were significant differences between the suburban south and industrial north of England and Scotland. The book also corrects the idea that charitably-minded civilians' efforts alienated the men at the front, in contrast to the degree of negativity that surrounds much previous work on voluntary action in this period. Far from there being an unbridgeable gap in understanding or empathy between soldiers and civilians, the links were strong, and charitable contributions were enormously important in maintaining troop morale. This bond significantly contributed to the development and maintenance of social capital in Britain, which, in turn, strongly supported the war effort. This work draws on previously unused primary sources, notably those regarding the developing role of the UK's Director General of Voluntary Organizations and the regulatory legislation of the period.

1 Introduction

Voluntary Action and Transformation

The day after Britain declared war on Germany in 1914 the Labour Party called an emergency meeting of the Labour and Socialist movement ‘to consider the industrial and social position of the working classes as affected by the war.’¹ The outcome was not a condemnation of the war but the establishment of a new grouping, the War Emergency: Workers’ National Committee (WNC). The WNC soon comprised thirty-five members including leading figures from the trades unions (such as Ben Tillett), members of the Parliamentary Party (including Ramsay MacDonald), the Co-operative Movement, Fabian Society (one of whose representatives was Sidney Webb), the British Socialist Party and four women members (including Margaret Bondfield).² They issued what amounted to a ‘war manifesto’ to protect working class interests and drew up a programme of twelve demands:³

1. All war relief should be merged and administered by the Government.
2. Labour representation (both male and female) on all national and local committees established in connection with the war.
3. Full provision out of public funds both for dependant allowances and comforts for soldiers and sailors.
4. Rates of allowances and war pensions should be adequate (these were given in some detail).
5. Establishment of cooperative canteens in all camps and barracks.
6. Provision of public works for the unemployed displaced by the war.
7. Active government encouragement to increase home-grown food supplies.
8. Protection against exorbitant price increases, especially for food.
9. A comprehensive programme of municipal housing.
10. The establishment of maternity and infant centres for workers.
11. Provision of free school meals.
12. A continuation of state control of the railways, docks etc after the war.

At the time, depending upon one’s political persuasion, these demands were either utopian or a dangerous socialist threat. Yet by 1918, virtually all of them had been achieved and most had happened without direct popular action and many with the support of those entirely opposed to socialism.⁴ Moreover, the innovations were carried out either initially or entirely by voluntary organisations rather than government. In the process, the relationship between charities and the state was transformed.⁵ The transformation included the first direct state control of charities, through the creation of a Director General of Voluntary Organizations (DGVO) and the first compulsory registration of non-endowed charities. How this came about and what legacy it left is the subject of this book.

The First World War saw the greatest act of volunteering ever in Britain. Two-and-a-half million men volunteered to fight in a conflict that cost more than 700,000 of them their lives. There was, however, another act of volunteering between 1914 and 1918 on at least the same scale, though without the same life-and-death consequences. This was the voluntary effort at home especially to support the men at the front, in health and sickness, but also to aid numerous other causes. In 1929 one commentator on the war suggested, in relation to wartime voluntary activities that ‘a book might be written on the conduct of these activities, which, as social life ceased to exist, absorbed the energies of people in all ranks of life.’⁶ Yet it remains a phenomenon about which little has been written. Even in the relatively few publications that cover the home front, it is not given significant space. Most scholarly works also give little account of non-uniformed voluntary action, its immediate impact on the war effort nor its longer-term effects on social welfare.⁷ Though there is a mountain of memoirs written by men at the front there are few recording the lives of those who stayed at home.⁸ Where charity is mentioned (usually fleetingly) it is seen in terms of an outbreak of sock knitting in 1914 carried out exclusively by middle and upper class women and having no impact whatsoever on the course of the war. This misrepresentation began during the war itself with Punch quick to satirise the aristocratic lady fumbling with her needles and has been repeated ever since. Early culprits include Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth and she has been followed by E.S. Turner’s Dear Old Blighty which, where it does mention charity, does so disparagingly.⁹ Gerard DeGroot in Blighty repeats the comments and Samuel Hynes too is patronising and derogatory.¹⁰ Even very recent works suggest the impact of philanthropic activities was negligible.¹¹ The approach of much of the existing literature to non-uniformed voluntary action has, therefore, been superficial at best. Its conclusions are consistent across the literature and can perhaps be summed up as concluding that charitable activity mushroomed on the outbreak of war being primarily directed towards the National Relief Fund, Belgian Refugees and the Red Cross. It was mainly a middle class phenomenon characterised by those ladies who undertook a frenzied spate of sock knitting. Overall, it was an amateurish exercise that had little real impact either on the home front or with the troops. As the war dragged on charitable activity significantly declined and there was little long-term impact either on individuals or upon the transition of social welfare from the private to the state realm.

It is certainly true that there was a phase of frenetic knitting and stitching which spread throughout the country in 1914 and what they produced was sometimes not exactly what was needed. However, even shoddily produced goods could be helpful because ‘many men in the trenches used these unwanted, and often unsuitable, items for cleaning their rifles and wiping their cups and plates.’¹² Yet despite the tone of condescension in some contemporary writings on the subject, the production of most comforts quickly became better organised. To characterise First World War charitable activity as a whole in terms of middle class sock-knitters is akin to depicting the British Army’s approach to the war solely in terms of its organisation in August 1914. A key perpetrator of this image has been Arthur Marwick, still perhaps the leading historian to cover the home front of 1914–18. His seminal work The Deluge: British Society and the First World War was published in 1965 during the intense revival of interest in the war that encompassed the mammoth BBC television series The Great War (1964) as well as the Theatre Workshop’s highly influential musical entertainment Oh! What a Lovely War (1963), later filmed by Richard Attenborough (1969). The Deluge has little to say about charitable voluntary action other than in relation to work for Belgian refugees and prisoners of war and is dismissive on the topic, considering it too trivial to be worth recording or investigating in more detail. Even in 1977 when Marwick wrote Women at War 1914–1918 to accompany the major Imperial War Museum exhibition on the subject he was still, largely, condescending.¹³

One could perhaps forgive these misreadings if the primary sources available to refute them were non-existent or even hard to find. Yet this is not the case. Though archives generally do not have easily referenced sections on ‘Charity’ or ‘Voluntary Action’, many key documents from the period survive. The National Archives, for example, contain copies of the application forms of (virtually) every organisation that registered under the 1916 War Charities Act. These forms give the names, addresses and, sometimes, occupations of the officers of the charity. These can be supplemented by searches through the census records, thus building a picture of the gender and class of these people. In London the Metropolitan Archives contain eighty-nine volumes of correspondence and documentation relating to war charities in the capital. Here, the archivist confirmed that I was the first person to use the collection systematically.

A prime purpose of this book is to demonstrate that the middle class, sock-knitting image of First World War charity is yet another of the myths that has surrounded that traumatic period of British history. There was a massive increase in charitable voluntary action during the First World War. Around 18,000 new charities were created, a 50 percent increase on the number in existence pre-war. The value of their fund-raising was significantly more than £100 million (probably reaching at least £150 million), equivalent to the income for ‘good causes’ through today’s National Lottery, and their legacy was significant. Charitable activity in the war was, especially in many industrial towns and cities, a manifestation of working class solidarity with many more organisations run by ordinary women and men than by well-to-do matrons. It was easily the most significant charitable cause that had ever been supported in Britain and it had profound effects upon both the war effort and the relationship between voluntary organisations and the state.

Figure 1.1 Sir Edward Ward in the uniform of Commandant-in-Chief of the Metropolitan Special Constabulary (Artist: Walter Stoneman; © National Portrait Gallery, London).

Figure 1.2 Sir Edward Willis Duncan Ward, 1st Bt (printed by Vincent Brooks, Day & Son, after Sir Leslie Ward, chromolithograph, published 30 May 1901; © National Portrait Gallery, London).

Figure 1.3 Sir Edward Ward and his staff at Ladysmith, Ward seated centre right (one of sixteen photographs collected by Arthur Hutton, the Reuters representative at Ladysmith, 1899–1900; courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London).

Though there were moves in the direction of state control of charitable activity in support of the war effort, this was not a coherently developed policy of government nor was it by any means a steady, linear process. Rather it was motivated by specific events, or crises, such as concerns as to wasted effort or lack of coordination in the supply of comforts for the troops. In 1915 this, together with public pressure and embarrassments over perceived shortages, led to the establishment of the post of DGVO under Sir Edward Ward. However, Ward’s remit was coordination of supply, not regulation of abuses. Legislation, in the form of the 1916 War Charities Act, was almost a last resort entered into when abuses of the charitable system became a significant public issue. Where state intervention did occur, it was often due to a failure to integrate the dual charitable impulses of mutual aid and philanthropy with the requirements of a budding state welfare system.

Philanthropy and voluntary action also provided Britain with a distinct advantage over her main adversary, Germany, in the reservoir of social capital on which it was able to draw. In relation to this issue I examine the notion of philanthropy as a means of social control. Did it act ‘as a means by which the dominant professional and commercial classes confirmed their power and status’?¹⁴ There is some support for this thesis in the pre-war context but I argue that voluntary action in Britain during the war acted as an integrating mechanism between social classes that helped initiate changes in the relationship between ‘top-down’ philanthropy and ‘bottom-up’ mutual aid and that this trend continued into the post-war period. Voluntary action contributed significantly both to maintaining morale at home (a visible sign of ‘pulling one’s weight’) and with troops and prisoners of war. Contrary to received opinion, through war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves and writers including Paul Fussell and Eric Leed, the vast majority of troops welcomed charitable efforts on their behalf and were kindly disposed towards benevolence on the home front. In contrast German social control of voluntary action strengthened under an increasingly militaristic government and this led to a serious weakening of social capital.

Charitable Voluntary Action in Previous Conflicts

The earliest charitable support connected with Britain’s armed conflicts was not the result of voluntary action but of state intervention. In 1681, Charles II established the Royal Hospital Chelsea for army veterans. This was followed thirteen years later, during the reign of William and Mary, with the equivalent institution for seamen at Greenwich. The first notable public support had to wait until the Napoleonic Wars, the first time since the Civil War that a conflict impinged upon the daily lives of significant numbers of the British public. The Lloyd’s Insurance Market raised the Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund in 1803 to support impoverished servicemen and their families, a role it continues to provide to this day.

In many respects the Crimean War of 1854–56 was a watershed in the conduct of modern warfare, not least in its relationship to charitable causes. The graphic despatches of Times correspondent William Russell exposed the gross mismanagement of the war together with its impact on the welfare of the troops. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Charity, Philanthropy and the Voluntary Sector in 1914: A ‘Golden Age’?
• Case Study 1: Newspaper and Sporting Appeals
• 3. The Outbreak of War and Early Charitable Efforts
• Case Study 2: ‘Private Tom’ and Other Animals
• 4. Supporting Tommy: Charity Goes to War
• Case Study 3: ‘My Good Lady, Go Home and Sit Still’—Militant Women
• 5. The Comforts Crisis and the Director General of Voluntary Organizations
• Case Study 4: Croydon War Supplies Clearing House
• 6. Concerns and Legislation: Scandal, Fraud and the 1916 War Charities Act
• Case Study 5: ‘Nothing Like a Book’—The Camps Library
• 7. The Extent and Impact of Wartime Charitable Giving
• Case Study 6: ‘The Biggest Communal Arts Project Ever Attempted’—War Memorials
• 8. Conclusions
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index