The British Army and the First World War

Beckett, Ian F. W.; Bowman, Timothy; Connelly, Mark

doi:10.1017/9780511794377

Cited by 40 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…The myth of the Great War generation, bound together by the shared experience of the trenches, has often obscured the multiplicity of soldiers' wartime experiences, which in practice could vary widely-not least between officers and men, volunteers and conscripts, members of different services, and those serving in different theaters. 77 This diversity of experience was well represented during the 1920s in the publishing boom in war memoirs, a genre to which several ex-service MPs contributed. 78 While wartime propaganda celebrated the soldier, sailor, or airman as the epitome of British manhood and the embodiment of bravery and patriotism, the encounter with an unprecedented form of industrialized warfare put considerable strain on conventional codes and expectations of manliness and the heroic ideal.…”

Section: Electioneering: Military Service Masculinity and Patriotismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tensions also developed between ex-servicemen and the bereaved civilian relatives of the fallen, over the form and content of ceremonial commemorations of the war-which many veterans regarded as focusing on the "honoured dead" to the exclusion of the "neglected living." 76 At the same time, many of those who had passed through the ranks of the British army during the war were themselves ambivalent about their identity as soldiers, and about the extent to which this separated them from wider civilian society. The myth of the Great War generation, bound together by the shared experience of the trenches, has often obscured the multiplicity of soldiers' wartime experiences, which in practice could vary widely-not least between officers and men, volunteers and conscripts, members of different services, and those serving in different theaters.…”

Section: Electioneering: Military Service Masculinity and Patriotismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Send a Soldier to Parliament”: Ex-servicemen, Masculinity, and the Legacies of the Great War in Liberal Electoral and Parliamentary Politics

Johnson¹

2023

J. Br. Stud.

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The spectacular collapse of the Liberal Party in Britain has often been regarded as the result of a crisis in Liberal values, supposedly provoked by the unprecedented militarization of British society during the Great War. However, this interpretation typically fails to recognize the extent to which the most important and visible legacies of that process of militarization were accommodated within the Liberal Party itself. Between 1918 and 1929, more than a hundred ex-servicemen were elected to Parliament as Liberal MPs, and scores more stood as Liberal candidates. This article examines how these men negotiated, presented, and performed their military identities within the framework of postwar electoral politics; analyzes how they operated in Parliament; and traces the longer-term trajectories of their political careers. It challenges the assumption that Liberals were temperamentally or ideologically incapable of engaging with the war's legacies, demonstrating the ability of Liberal candidates to exploit the iconography and rhetorical tropes of military service when appealing to an electorate that had been profoundly shaped by the experience of war and military mobilization. Liberals sought to contest Conservative Party attempts to monopolize the politics of patriotism after 1918 by constructing gendered electoral appeals that acknowledged the unstable meanings of the Great War and the ambiguous status of the men who had fought in it. However, the inability of Liberal politicians to unite around a shared understanding of what the war had meant ultimately prevented them from exploiting the memory of the conflict as effectively as their Conservative and Labour rivals.

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Section: Electioneering: Military Service Masculinity and Patriotismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Electioneering: Military Service Masculinity and Patriotismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Send a Soldier to Parliament”: Ex-servicemen, Masculinity, and the Legacies of the Great War in Liberal Electoral and Parliamentary Politics

Johnson¹

2023

J. Br. Stud.

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“…At this point, and in contrast to many of its continental neighbours, Britain relied entirely on voluntary means of recruitment, an arrangement that prompted the retired Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts to warn parliament that ‘our military system is hopelessly inadequate; we have neither a Home Army such as is needed for the defence of this country, nor an effective Regular Army to protect our Imperial interests abroad’ (Hansard, 3 April 1911: 821). By 1913, wastage, the rate at which men left the military, ran at 12.4 percent per annum in the Territorials and 6 percent in the Regular Army, with both forces seriously undermanned as a result (Beckett et al, 2017: 11–12, 32; Holmes, 2005: 130). To resolve this problem, some observers, including Roberts and the National Service League he had co-founded (Adams, 1985: 61–62), called for some form of compulsory military training.…”

Section: ‘What the Army Offers’: Selling Service In The Army 1913–1914mentioning

confidence: 99%

Your Country Needs You? Advertising, Public Relations and the Promotion of Military Service in Peacetime Britain

Maartens

2019

Media, War & Conflict

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Historians have long taken an interest in military recruitment advertising and public relations. Much of their attention, however, has been directed towards promotion in wartime, with a lot less known about how governments used media to attract civilians in peacetime or during the many so-called ‘limited wars’ of the post-war era. This article addresses this shortcoming by exploring three separate recruitment campaigns waged in Britain at different moments in the 20th century. Giving a sense of the scale of official recruiting work, it highlights the central role played by commercial advertising and public relations professionals in the planning and development of campaigns and investigates whether recruiters were actually successful in convincing civilians to join up. The evidence presented here suggests that they had a negligible effect on enrolment rates. Yet, it also indicates that different types of appeal were used to attract civilians in peacetime, with material rewards typically taking precedence over notions of patriotic duty. Suggesting that such appeals effectively commodified military service, this article concludes by reflecting on their broader legacy to studies of media, war and conflict.

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From Common Reader to Canon: Memorialising the Shakespeare-Reading British Soldier During the First World War

King

2021

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies

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In 1916, at the same time as Shakespearean tercentenary addresses were claiming that Shakespeare epitomised British national ideals, numerous press dispatches ‘from the field’ appeared in British newspapers seeming to prove the existence of a large audience of Shakespearean readers among those fighting for those ‘ideals’ in active zones. This chapter examines some of these claims. It asks how the image of the Shakespeare-reading soldier was deployed within book-trade and charity publicity and capitalised upon by educators and other members of Britain’s cultural and intellectual elites. It assesses the ways in which press anecdotes about soldiers reading the classics contributed to larger discourses of national identity and cultural and aesthetic mobilisation. Finally, it asks how these accounts may have contributed to the conflict’s transmutation into a ‘literary war’ in post-war collective memory, one in which literature came to assume an outsized role in how the conflict was subsequently memorialised.

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The British Army and the First World War

Cited by 40 publications

References 5 publications

“Send a Soldier to Parliament”: Ex-servicemen, Masculinity, and the Legacies of the Great War in Liberal Electoral and Parliamentary Politics

“Send a Soldier to Parliament”: Ex-servicemen, Masculinity, and the Legacies of the Great War in Liberal Electoral and Parliamentary Politics

Your Country Needs You? Advertising, Public Relations and the Promotion of Military Service in Peacetime Britain

From Common Reader to Canon: Memorialising the Shakespeare-Reading British Soldier During the First World War

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