Keeping the Home Fires Burning

Entertaining the Troops at Home and Abroad During the Great War

Phil Carradice

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781399004428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

Keeping the Home Fires Burning tells the story of how the troops and the general public were kept happy and content during the First World War. Between 1914 and 1918 there was entertainment of the masses for the sole purpose of promotion of the war effort. It was the first time that a concerted effort to raise and sustain morale was ever made by any British government and was a combination of government sponsored ideas and lucky happenstance. It was all picked up and used by the new Propaganda Ministry. The range of activities was wide and varied, from poetry to cinema, from music hall singers and artists to the creation of battlefield heroes. There was postcard humour and deliberate veneration of philanthropists - and war participants - like Woodbine Willie. The theme of Keeping the Home Fires Burning is backed up by 40 illustrations from the time, including participants, posters, battlefield views and so on.

PART I

Keep Safe, Keep Believing

‘Patriotism (in peace-time an attitude best left to politicians, publicists and fools, but in the dark days of war an emotion that can wring the heart strings) patriotism made one do odd things.’

W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden

Chapter 1

To Have and Have Not

Use your imagination; let your mind drift back over a hundred years to the early years of the twentieth century. Whatever your station in life, whatever political or social views you hold, there is much to enjoy about British society at this time – but only if you have the money and the leisure to exploit it to the full. Without those two resources, money and time, you must fulminate, sweat and hope for a different future.

The early twentieth century is an age, metaphorically at least, of immense self-indulgence and hearty pats on the back for huge swathes of the British population. Let us imagine that you, the reader, are included in the privileged classes. So, for you, it is an age of having it all, having everything you ever wished or hoped for.

And yet, the situation in the summer of 1914 is deceptive as far as Britain and the British Empire are concerned. Many people, looking back from the present day, see it as a golden, idyllic age before the holocaust of 1914–18 ends for ever the pastoral visions of a perfect world – a perfect British world, of course. They are visions that are destined never to be anything more than pure pipe dreams, imagined glories contrasting with the terrors of death and a war such as no one has ever imagined, let alone witnessed.

By August 1914 Britain is in possession and control of, on the surface at least, the greatest empire the world has ever known. In a tide of jingoistic and gloating self-praise the British people wallow in self-righteous glory. The physical manifestations of owning and exploiting foreign territories are clear to see. There are plentiful supplies of tea and coffee in the shops, drinks that are now truly the opiate of the masses; there is an excess of crops and exotic fruits on the market stalls; in upmarket shops delicate silks and fragrant spices are readily available; in the less salubrious quarters of every city there are other, darker goods available like opium for which Britain has already engineered and fought several wars. It is all there and all taken very much for granted as the fruits of the British Empire.

In order to defend the Empire that is so essential to its well-being, Britain has created a magnificent fleet of Dreadnought battleships. In theory at least, it is the largest, most powerful naval force in the world, capable of crushing any enemy craft reckless enough to challenge its might.

On the domestic or home front all appears well. Since the days of the Stuarts the monarchy has been a constitutional body, deserving of respect but with little or no actual control over the destiny of the people. Over the previous two centuries, the country has developed a democratic system of government that is the envy of the civilized world.

Appearances, however, can be deceptive and below the surface danger lurks. By the end of the Victorian era an undertow of immense proportions has been gathering strength beneath the seemingly invincible prowess and power of the nation. Poverty lurks in the overcrowded cities and their festering tenement blocks. Nobody has yet worked out how best to solve the problem of poverty and overcrowding, let alone the delinquency and crime that goes with them. Trouble, when it arises, comes largely from industrial workers demanding better working conditions. It comes from Suffragettes screaming for the vote and from the faint beginnings of nationalism in the overseas colonies.

Most of the upper and middle classes hardly notice the danger; they are content to bask in Britain’s glory. The squalor of London’s East End, the slums of Birmingham and Manchester, the tenements of Glasgow’s Gorbals, they are almost another world. Summer picnics, bicycle rides out into the country, evenings at the theatre – that is what occupies the minds of most privileged people.

But in those seemingly idyllic pastoral surroundings destabilization, even violence, is building, preparing to explode. And the largely unsuspecting British people hurtle directly into its claws. Britain, what Shakespeare called ‘this precious stone set in a silver sea’, has such engrained self-belief that it borders on the reckless and deluded world of the sleepwalker.

The cornerstones of society, elements like the church which has for years provided structure and control, are beginning to creak – even if the vast majority of the population does not yet realize what is starting to happen. The questioning of creed and culture, the fall of long-established bastions, will take years to fully develop but will happen. It is just a case of waiting.

July and August 1914 are dangerous months in a dangerous year. Britain does not have anything similar to the standing armies of Germany, France and Russia, each with massive forces capable of marauding like the warriors of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan across mainland Europe. The German army alone numbers nearly a million men with many more trained and experienced reservists who can be called on at a moment’s notice to answer the Kaiser’s call. Russia’s military might, on paper at least, is even greater and the French hide their strength behind a mask of Gallic imperturbability.

The relatively weak and diminutive British Army is a result of the pragmatic approach taken by successive British governments over many years. Since the Trafalgar days of Lord Nelson, Britain’s proudest boast has been that her navy rules the waves. And on the face of it, dominant power and control at sea does seem to be the most appropriate way to defend vital trade and supply routes.

The British Army, at best 250,000 strong, remains a policing force more than a military weapon and is spread across the globe protecting British interests. Policing the Empire is a vital task from which barely a single man can be spared but it is hardly a prime example of military prowess. The lessons of the recent Anglo-Boer War in southern Africa have not been learned; indeed, the disasters and the defeats have been hastily shovelled aside in the face of an eventual hard-earned victory which has been achieved as much by economic as military prowess.

That is not all. There are still more weaknesses, social rather than military, undermining the creaking edifice of British democracy. Very few of the privileged class realize how close to disaster they now sit; most of them do not seem to care, assuming that things will go on as they have always done and failing to see the brittle vulnerability of their positions.

Britain does not yet have universal suffrage or a health service for all and even its compulsory educational system is barely fifty years old. The class system remains in place, the fox-hunting few – the nobility, the gentry and the merchant bankers – clinging by their fingertips to the final vestiges of power and control.

Apart from the press, which has always prided itself on an independent stance, Britain has no propaganda machine or mechanism capable of enshrining the country’s core values while denigrating the strengths and weaknesses of opponents. A seemingly minor matter, in the weeks and months ahead, this will prove an increasingly dangerous situation for the British.

On 4 August 1914, war is declared against Germany. The action is hugely popular with the people who sing and scream their belief in King, Country and Empire. Before this point Britain has not needed any sort of propaganda service. The presence and the effect of the Empire have been enough to ‘puff up’ the country for an unwitting public who firmly believe that to be born British is to be born great.

But now it is early summer in the most fateful year of the century, the inevitable war against Germany has begun and the smug, self-satisfied world of the British people is about to change. That change will be permanent.

*

The war of 1914–18 was initially called the Great War. We know it now as the First World War but whatever you call it the war was different from any other conflict the British Empire had ever experienced. Up to and including the Second Anglo-Boer War, fought between 1899 and 1902, Britain’s overseas contests had always been undertaken by professional soldiers, ‘soldiers of the King’ as Kipling called them. The Boer War was the last and least successful military enterprise of the Victorian army but that was not how it was presented to the public.

In the aftermath of the war, parades of khaki-clad soldiers through London brought glory to the East and West Ends. The public thrilled to the sound of bugles and drums, little caring about the defeats and the creation of concentration camps that had finally worn down the Boers. The ultimate result was a British victory; that was all that mattered.

The soldiers who fought to create an empire were largely illiterate men who spent their lives in communal barracks or tented cities. They were men who fought and died in their hundreds in places whose names they could barely pronounce and almost certainly could never locate on a map. They had little or nothing in common with the ‘ordinary’ – middle and upper class – members of the British public.

Most of Britain’s defenders during the Napoleonic, Crimean and other wars of the nineteenth century had enlisted in the army for a variety of reasons which might now seem unfathomable, even alien, to us. Many of those reasons were more than a little dubious. Apart from the officers – who paid huge sums for their commissions – they certainly did not join up to make a career out of the military and often came to the colours in an attempt to escape starvation or avoid imprisonment and transportation. Conditions in both the army and navy were harsh, flogging being a common punishment for wrongdoing. If such beatings led to death or permanent disability, well there were always plenty more recruits waiting to fill the ranks.

Promotion was rare, leave almost non-existent and wages were inevitably late, delayed for reasons that were rarely explained to the grumbling soldiery. But, despite all that, there was still a degree of certainty and security in the ranks. The men were at least fed regularly and, depending on their posting, issued with suitably warm or cool clothing. In the navy, until very late in the day, there was always the possibility of prize money. The British Army, proud of its position and status, prohibited looting but everyone knew it went on.

In 1815, on the eve of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington had called his troops ‘the scum of the earth’. Watching them retreat in the rain after Quatre Bras, he declared that while he did not know what they would do to the French when it came to battle on the following day, they certainly managed to scare the living daylights out of him.

The novelist Jane Austen is often criticized for writing in a bubble, for taking little or no notice of Napoleon and the conflict that was occurring on the Continent for almost the duration of her admittedly short adult life. The reason for that neglect is simple. Austen, like the rest of middle-class Britain, did not know anything about the soldiers or the sailors who were doing the fighting, apart from occasionally dancing with wealthier, well-groomed militia officers at country balls. She might partake in refined dinner parties when, following the meal, carpets would be rolled up and music played. Then more dancing would begin. Austen and the rest of her social class had nothing in common with the rough and ready defenders of the British Empire.

Life for Jane Austen and her people continued unabated at a leisurely pace and while unknown warriors might be dying agonizing deaths on the distant battlefields of Spain, Austria and Italy, such violence had no effect on Austen’s life. No effect that is apart from artificially elevating the price of silk or ribbons by a few pennies every season!

For many years soldiers and sailors were necessary evils, there to do a job but not really the sort of people you would invite home for tea. They existed purely to fight, one of the reasons that there are still so few war memorials to the ordinary rank and file from the period. The men who fought and died had done their jobs as soldiers of the Queen. They really did not need commemoration – admire their achievements, my dear, but best forget them now.

The First World War was different. Until 1916 – and arguably even after – it was largely a volunteer war, thousands of eager young men flocking to the recruiting stations to sign up and ‘do their bit’ in defeating the Kaiser’s Germany. It was, as the government hinted on its recruiting posters and in the newspapers, a game, a great game, a game you would regret should you happen to miss it.

It began, of course, in late June 1914 with an assassination. Nobody had expected the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria to lead to a war that would impact the entire known world. Franz Ferdinand? Most people in Britain did not even know who this obscure foreign dignitary was or have the faintest idea about his significance as heir to the throne of Austria–Hungary. Franz Ferdinand was shot by Serbian Gavrilo Princip, a determined assassin whose life was fuelled by fervent nationalistic pride and anger. In many ways his murderous passions reflected the chaos and confusion of the Balkans where the decrepit Austro-Hungarian Empire was desperately attempting to hold onto its few dominions. The shooting took place in Sarajevo as the visiting Archduke was being driven with Sophie, his wife, through the city streets. To the western world it was simply an unfortunate occurrence, a murder that was deserving of a few paragraphs at the bottom of page 2 in the morning paper. That was all.

The affairs of the Balkans and the Archduke’s part in the politics of the region were as unknown to people in Britain as his personality and way of life. The toy town operatic world of Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda with its quaint costumes and brocaded uniforms was about as close as most people came to knowing what went on in those farthest regions of Europe. From the outset the murder was a somewhat ludicrous affair. Earlier in the day a bomb thrown by one of Princip’s accomplices had hit the bonnet of the Archduke’s car and rolled away before exploding in the gutter. Franz Ferdinand was angry but did not call off his visit. Gavrilo Princip, like the other members of his group, was despairing of a second opportunity. Bored with standing about waiting, he was ready to abandon his efforts and head home. Franz Ferdinand came within range of Gavrilo Princip’s gun by accident. By the middle of the afternoon the formal visit was completed and after making his farewells, the Archduke set about returning to his accommodation. On the way out of Sarajevo his driver took the wrong route and was reversing the car to get back on the right road when they were spotted by the one remaining assassin. Princip, a member of the wonderfully named Black Hand, did not need a second opportunity. He seized his chance, fired and more by luck than judgement hit both the Archduke and his wife Sophie as they sat in pomp in the back of the car.

No one in Britain or Germany, Russia or France could ever have imagined Princip’s two shots would have led to such an opportunity – and there is no doubt that the young men of Britain did come to see the subsequent outbreak of war as an opportunity. To begin with the assassination was simply a remote event in a faraway country. The county cricket scores, the prognosis for the coming football season and the results of the Henley Regatta were far more interesting. People were always being murdered, blown up or knifed to death in the Balkans. It was to be expected, an occupational hazard in that part of the world and it certainly did not concern the British.

However, with his two shots, two shots that reverberated around the world, Gavrilo Princip altered the course of history. Like toppling stacks of dominoes, the nations of Europe shivered, hesitated and fell into the chasm that had been yawning in front of them for years. Desperate for revenge Austria seized the opportunity to flex her muscles and duly invaded Serbia. Russia, friend and patron of the Serbs, retaliated by declaring war on Austria. Germany, always eager for a chance to stretch her mighty limbs, decided to throw in her lot with her ally Austria. Before they knew it the whole of Europe was preparing for war. Meanwhile Princip escaped execution but died in prison, apparently from tuberculosis, in 1918.

For the young men of Britain, the situation soon became simple. Britain was not directly involved with the convoluted dealings of the Continent but anything that in any way threatened to promote German strength, German industry and German dominance in Europe was a concern for the British governm...