Search

The women who served as trained and semi-trained nurses with Britain's military nursing services were women whose identity was greatly influenced by their nursing roles. Their activity as nurses has often been examined as though they were passive in the war, but the diaries and published memoirs indicate differently. Nurses saw their participation as active and just as importantly others viewed their participation as active as well which helped to influence the government over their right to disability compensation. Through the examination of disability pension records and service records pertaining to nurses held at the National Archives, London the level of agency these nurse veterans possessed as they sought compensation and treatment for war-related disabilities will be explored. Previous research has only examined the experiences of nurses with psychological disabilities leaving more than two-thirds of the pension record untouched by historians. A great many nurses suffered from debilitating illnesses and war-related psychological conditions as a result of their service. They encountered pathogens and parasites in every location that nurses served. The complex nature of their work with injured and ill servicemen left some physically and mentally exhausted. Those that were unable to cope with stress and strain went on to develop psychological conditions leaving them disabled and unable to carry on with their lives as they had pre-war. Nurses also endured physical dangers inherent with modern warfare. In particular the naval attacks on troop and hospital ships, of which many were lost and cost the lives of numerous nurses. While many nurses recuperated without lasting complications, it is probable that thousands suffered for years after they demobilised from military nursing service. With the support of campaigners and advocates disabled nurses were incorporated into the disability pension scheme and were pensioned through the officer's branch of the Ministry of Pensions. Nurses actively participated in the pension process and many had agency over their treatment options. The State, through the Ministry of Pensions acknowledged their war service and their sacrifices in the same manner that they acknowledged the service and sacrifice of servicemen.

The changes inscribed by a century of public interaction with local First World War memorials alter their messages and embody different values over time. This tells a sometimes-uneasy story of both change and continuity, stasis and transmutation, preservation and modification that negotiates people, place, and changing commemorative cultures. This thesis reveals and analyses a detailed picture of this century of changing war memorials, using innovative research foci and interdisciplinary methods. With a focus on material change and what it reveals about custodianship and community, it chronologises and characterises the dynamic interface between people and memorials across the century. Freestanding monuments across two counties for which excellent data exists were selected for examination due to their popular use as the primary site for remembrance activity and the need to restrict the sample (estimated at over 100,000 across the UK) to a manageable number (130 for the chosen counties). Given the expanse of theoretical approaches, the thesis is necessarily selective in its overall approach, choosing a material culture emphasis over others to enhance originality, increase the pragmatic relevance of findings, and to fill a gap in current paradigms. It examines changing or competing claims to heritage, memory and recognition, through community agency and intervention in the built environment against a backdrop of social, cultural, political and military change. This provides new insights into the 'long-view' of commemoration in the local setting in England, with specific attention to temporal, spatial and social context and the resulting changing commemorative intent and aesthetics. This research constructs a detailed and reliable chronology of changes made to memorials c.1918-2021 by sampling two Midlands counties, revealing a range of influences from the individual to the international. It defines the developments of a new aesthetic of remembrance that embodies changing attitudes to commemoration within communities.

In the last thirty years the appreciation of the First World War as 'the war of coalitions' has gained widespread recognition, and firmly established itself as one of the most prominent approaches to the evaluation of the military strategy of the First World War. However, due to inaccessibility of the archives and complexity of the language, Russian Empire's contribution to the Entente strategy has often been overlooked. This thesis attempts to remedy that and evaluates the role that the Russian high command played in developing the coalition strategy of the Entente from August 1914 until February 1917. It argues that after September 1915 Russia became one of the greatest advocates of a unified coalition strategy and was instrumental in the Entente's agreeing on a plan for a coordinated Allied offensive in 1915 and 1916. The driver for this development was the weakening of Russia's military power and the political crisis at home brought on by the Great Retreat in summer 1915. The new high command led by General Alekseev was anxious to achieve victory for Russia before it could be engulfed in political unrest. Alekseev also had his own original vision of strategy that involved using the Salonika and Ottoman fronts as launching grounds for a large-scale offensive designed to break the geographical unity of the Central Powers and deprive Germany of material resources of its allies. Although Alekseev's plans were never fulfilled, their existence proves that the Entente strategists often had a better understanding of coalition warfare and were more flexible in their planning than previously thought. By bringing Russia into the coalition narrative, this thesis questions existing preconceptions about the Entente developed as a result of research focused predominantly on Anglo-French relations and opens a path to a more balanced view of the 1914-1918 conflict.

During the First World War, the United States War Department assiduously regulated the sexuality of soldiers and many citizens residing in the vicinity of training camps - a task that it accomplished largely through an organization called the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA). Historians have generally focused on the repressive aspects of this agency's sexual control programs, and argued that their primary goal was to instill sexual morality among the soldiers and wider society. In a departure from this interpretation, this dissertation shows that while sexual morality rhetoric was certainly an important part of the War Department's strategy for combatting what they deemed to be wayward sexual activity, it was, for the agency's top leaders, less decisive than motivating soldiers to fight, which involved remaking the overall sexual environment of training camps in such a way that drafted men would be compelled to lean into their wartime roles. Drawing on the relatively neglected archival records of the Military Morale Section and the Morale Branch of the army's General Staff - which exercised control over the CTCA during the decisive final months of the war - as well as the publications of a number of morale strategists who formulated the CTCA's motivational strategy, this dissertation demonstrates that the War Department did not just repress sexuality, but actively sought to arouse, control and channel the soldiers' desire for it in order to build up their "vigor" and get them to fight and to endure. The dissertation traces the trajectory of the military's morale apparatus from mobilization through demobilization, and demonstrates the enduring significance of the agency's "parasexual" motivational strategy - from the centrality of sexual scarcity, frustration and manipulation, to the encouragement of women to be sexual gatekeepers, to the widespread advancement of racialized and classed sexual hierarchies and sexual racism more broadly.

This thesis examines Britain's provincial evening press during the era of voluntarism in the First World War. It uses as its example, the Express and Star, the evening newspaper in the Black Country industrial town of Wolverhampton. The newspaper harnessed the home front's fascination with the volunteer soldier for its own commercial purposes. The study demonstrates that the commercial nature of the press was a central element in shaping the newspaper's depiction of the volunteer soldier between the outbreak of war in August 1914 and the introduction of conscription in January 1916. Using both advertising and journalistic techniques, the Express and Star adopted the figure of the volunteer soldier as a commercial mascot in order to attract readership and generate favourable publicity to satisfy advertisers. The newspaper was fortunate in that the volunteer also fitted its Liberal tenets of self-determination and freedom of the individual. The study explains the significance of the wartime provincial evening press as being the daily newspaper reading of people in a working-class town like Wolverhampton. It sets the patriotic figure of the volunteer in the context of the commercial press, the development of human-interest journalism and the Liberal views held by the owners and Editor of the Express and Star. The evidence shows how the patriotic figure of the volunteer soldier was absorbed into, and then shaped by, the increasingly sophisticated business model of the provincial evening press. This required constant effort to maintain and increase readership to attract advertising. The volunteer soldier became a central figure in this sales drive.

This thesis examines the creation of several ex-service organisations during and shortly after the First World War, the campaigns that preceded their formation, and the processes that led to the amalgamation of four of them into the British Legion in July 1921. Employing previously unutilised sources, it offers a new analysis of activities during the first two years of the war, a period that has not been addressed, to any significant extent, by previous scholarship in this context. Those activities were important as they led to the founding of the first two groups, the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers ('the Association'), and the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers ('the Federation'). These new bodies were quite different from traditional service charities, in that they were democratic membership organisations, run by the members for mutual support, and to press for better government treatment of them and their dependents. This thesis also re-examines the period from autumn 1916 to July 1921, which saw the growth of those two organisations, and the founding of two rival groups in particular, the Comrades of the Great War ('the Comrades'), and the Officers' Association. The whole process is also placed in the wider historical context of the development of what in recent years has become known as 'the Military Covenant', that is to say, the special obligation that has been observed to exist from the time of ancient Athens to the present day, for the state to support and care for those who take up arms on its behalf, and their dependents. While previous scholars have addressed aspects of the development of these groups, and subsequent ones, from late 1916 to July 1921, there is much new information and analysis here, with more complete coverage of regional developments across the whole United Kingdom, and a number of their assumptions and conclusions are challenged. The major sources employed in this study for the whole period 1914-21 are trades council archives, the papers of James Myles Hogge, Sir Ian Hamilton, Wilfrid Ashley (Baron Mount Temple), Lord Davies of Llandinam, Viscount (Waldorf) Astor, and the records of the Comrades in Scotland and Northern Ireland, all of which have received little attention previously, in relation to this subject. The approach is not that of a military historian, concerned with the prosecution of the war, but rather that of the social historian, examining the conditions of the millions of people who became service families for a few years, or veterans when their service was over, of the claims their organisations made on the British state, and the responses of the Government, Army, and Admiralty, to those demands. As such, it aims to contribute to the study of 'war and social change', as developed by historians such as, in particular, Arthur Marwick. The main new findings are as follows: • Trades councils' campaigns on behalf of service families, and ex-service men and women, from August 1914 to September 1916, were the foundation for their creation of the National Association. • James Hogge's concurrent but independent campaign for the same groups, in Parliament, in the Press, and through individual casework, from August 1914 to spring 1917, was similarly the foundation for his creation of the National Federation. • The two findings above, regarding trades councils, and James Hogge, are in contrast to previous studies that focus on the period after autumn 1916, thus overlooking the important roles their activities played in the founding of the first two organisations. • The fundamental demand of the trades councils, Hogge, the Association, and the Federation, was that these people should be supported by the British state as of right, not by Royal Bounty, or by charity. • Lord Derby, the War Secretary in 1917, is proven, with the help of newly discovered archive papers, to have been a prime mover in the creation of the Comrades, with the backing of the War Cabinet, and he largely succeeded in hiding his involvement from the public. • Hamilton's scheme for an Empire Services League did not fail, as asserted by Graham Wootton, because of opposition from the Association and the Federation, but because Viscount Peel and Wilfrid Ashley (a leading member of the Comrades) conspired to remove essential democratic principles from the proposed constitution, thus rendering it unacceptable to those two organisations. • The Federation did not abandon electoral politics after its disappointing results in the General Election of December 1918, as asserted by Stephen Ward, but continued its active involvement until the middle of 1920, when it dropped this, in order to facilitate amalgamation talks. • The creation of the Welsh Legion of Ex-Service Men in early 1920, not previously recognised, was an important early demonstration of the benefits of amalgamation, and a significant early use in the UK of the name 'Legion', as a collective term for ex-service men and women. • The failure of the Federation's long-awaited deputation to Prime Minister Lloyd George, in February 1920, along with plummeting membership and financial reserves during that year, and the earlier launch of Haig's Officers' Association, were major drivers towards the eventual amalgamation of the Association, the Federation, the Comrades, and the Officers' Association, as the British Legion.

This thesis offers a comparative study of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) during the First World War (WWI), examining how their music-making and their performances were affected between 1914 and 1918, how they attempted to support their countries and societies throughout the conflict, as well as how the groups of people associated with them - namely soloists, conductors, orchestral players, critics and concertgoers - contributed to, and also reflected, the identity of classical music in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and Germany. These two distinguished and admired musical institutions are also used as prisms to investigate two contrasting cultural configurations, specifically with regard to issues such as nationalism, patriotism and propaganda. It will be argued that the LSO and the BPO were also agents that made notable social, economic and political contributions to their countries at a time of total war. This thesis is structured in three parts. It first explores how the two orchestras performed and operated, as well as what it meant to be a music-making institution in London and Berlin, during WWI. Then the focus shifts to the symbiotic relationship between music-making and music-listening and how the LSO and the BPO entertained, educated and provided solace for their audiences. Finally, this thesis considers how the two orchestras' performances and extramusical activities interacted with the political, cultural, charitable and propaganda contexts at the time. This thesis seeks to contribute to four rich fields of historical inquiry, namely cultural history, music history, war history and orchestral history. It contributes to scholarly debates surrounding the role of music in fostering national identity, furthers our understanding of how music could be used to advance cultural and political nationalism and offers a fresh insight into Anglo-German cultural history at the time of WWI.

The human resource - or 'manpower' - problem faced by the British during the First World War is a topic that has been neglected and is therefore much misunderstood. This thesis sheds light on the ways in which the nation attempted to organise its citizens to serve four concomitant manpower needs: the sufficient supply of men for the armed forces, the workforce required for the munitions industry, the personnel needed to cater for the needs of the civilian population, and the people who worked to maintain the country's financial and economic stability. This is done through study of the implementation and administration of compulsory military service. The principal archival source is the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal archive, held at The National Archives in Kew. The urban district of Acton has been used as a data sample. This thesis examines five different occupations and considers the three groups of people involved in the tribunal process: the potential conscripts, their associated contemporaries and the tribunal members. This thesis demonstrates the complexities involved in balancing the nation's manpower needs. Indeed, many of the problems were never fully solved. With little overall central guidance the demands made by various government departments, the military authorities, trade associations, employers, the local populace, family members and the appellants themselves were often difficult for the military service tribunals to resolve. This thesis shows that home front imperatives were a fundamental aspect of the decision making with regard to the nation's manpower. A man's skill, his local influence and his health were important points to consider when deciding whether he should remain on the home front or serve in the armed forces. In addition it is clear that tribunals paid mere lip service to some central government advice, such as that related to one-man businesses. Much of Britain's manpower legislation was enacted as a reaction to the problems caused by the country's implementation of compulsory military service in the middle of the war. As this thesis demonstrates, tribunals were expected to implement a manpower policy that was constantly evolving to deal with the very conscription they were supposed to manage.

This thesis posits that although national defence strategy must ultimately be determined by civilian ministers its roots lie in the conceptual foundations of the professional armed services, which represent the primary sources of strategic advice. Consequently, the relative depth and coherence of these foundations are important factors in shaping options presented for political decision. These foundations comprise not only the body of doctrine that articulates the ways in which armed force can be applied most effectively to achieve specified ends, but also the institutions through which these ideas are assimilated within the services, and the staff structures that translate them into candidate strategies. To illustrate this process, this thesis evaluates the relative states of developments in the conceptual foundations of the Royal Navy and the British Army in the period from end of the war in South Africa in 1902 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The first chapter examines how, having come to dominate defence policy on the back of external conceptions of naval power, the Navy was slow to develop its own capacity for conceptual development. The second chapter goes on to examine how its further refusal to create a strategic planning staff affected its ability to adapt to strategic change and to engage in vital debates over national strategy. The third chapter charts how the Army, despite its subordinate status and the ignominy of its failings in South Africa, was able to draw upon, and further develop, the capacity for conceptual development enshrined in the Staff College. The fourth chapter then examines how this foundation enabled the establishment of a credible strategic planning staff, which was instrumental to the structural reform of the service and the adaptation and communication of military strategy in the light of strategic reorientation. Ultimately, the thesis concludes that the conceptual disparity between the Navy and the Army has been neglected as a material factor in determining British strategy prior to the First World War.

The thesis investigates the influence national WWI commemorations had on the urban landscape in capital cities, London, Paris and Budapest. It analyses how the urban space has changed its physical, symbolic and temporal layers during the hundred years between the end of WWI war and the WWI centenary celebrations, following the changes in national memory narratives. The research relies on memorials inaugurated in London, Paris and Budapest since 1914, newspapers published during the recent centenary years, archive documents, and commemorative events held during the Centenary Armistice Day in the capital cities studied. The mixed-method research applied Critical Discourse, Content and GIS Analyses to the collected sources, and has been facilitated by computational techniques. Regarding the theoretical framework, the thesis defines vertical and horizontal means of communicating memory narratives, as well as vertical and horizontal changes in the urban landscape. The thesis follows this verticality and horizontality in the three cities with the help of textual, visual, spatial and ethnographic sources.

This thesis assesses the learning process of the British Expeditionary Force by its participation in The Battle of Festubert 15 - 25 May 1915.The study of this battle offers an important insight in the development of the BEF during this period, despite it being neglected in much of the historiography concerning the British Army in the First World War. It focuses on how well the BEF's First Army, commanded by General Haig, was organised and equipped upon entering the battle. It draws upon First Army's experience of two previous battles, one in March 1915 and another only six days before commencing offensive action again, to determine what knowledge had been gained and used in developing their battle tactics. Its central argument is that there was very much to learn from this previous action and great effort was made to modify the tactics at Festubert, particularly from the obvious failure on 9 May. The thesis relies on primary source material created by the units at the time, such as army and divisional records and battalion war diaries. It also examines some secondary literature and personal memoirs of key political figures and those that took part, to examine the effect of both coalition and national strategy and the pressure that placed on the shoulders of the BEF's commander Sir John French as Festubert was taking place. This thesis argues that this pressure interfered with the ability of General Haig to fully realise the lessons of combat gained at Festubert, as he was pushed soon afterwards to launch in an even larger attack in the Battle of Loos (25 September - 8 October 1915), using tactics that contradicted what had just been learnt at Festubert. It will argue that some of the contribution to the learning process by key figures, such as Sir William Robertson and Major General Richard Haking has been missed in the historiography. This thesis asserts that despite not achieving any type of significant breakthrough at Festubert, the experience served the BEF well in that it supported the French Army as it fought in the Second Battle of Artois and it trialled new methods which would be further developed as the war progressed. Unfortunately for the BEF, by the time of the next Anglo-French offensive, the Battle of the Somme, German countermeasures had largely negated some of the lessons of Festubert and this has played a part its lack of examination in modern studies of the BEF's operational development.

The mobilisation of the British empire during the First World War created new spaces for encounter between British and Indian society. Between August 1914 and December 1915, the Indian army dispatched over 100,000 Indian servicemen to the Western Front as part of Indian Expeditionary Force A. The thesis's objective is to improve understanding of how Western and, more specifically, British society responded to the presence of these Indian servicemen. It reconsiders British perspectives of the Indian solider, reflects upon how these perspectives impacted the discourse which surrounded the sepoys, and the effect it had on the Indian army's colonial hierarchy. As a result, 'Eastern Presence' furthers understanding of British conceptions of racial identity and colonialism within the context of the First World War and demonstrates the impact that these conceptions had on the Indian army's hierarchical structure. To achieve this goal, the thesis uses the geographical and locational settings experienced by Indian servicemen during their stay in Western Europe to analyse their interactions with various parts of British and Western society. Through its analysis of these interactions, 'Eastern Presence' challenges much of the existing historiography by arguing that variances in conceptions of race can be identified, depending on the part of British society which experienced the encounter. It consequently concludes that British society demonstrated varying degrees of knowledge, empathy, and perception towards the colonial 'other' in its midst.

This thesis is a comparative investigation into the afterlives and legacies of dynastic monarchy in southern Germany. Within a few days in November 1918, Germany's monarchical edifice collapsed, suddenly and completely. In all twenty-two of the Kaiserreich's monarchical states, the sovereign was overthrown as councils of soldiers and workers assumed power and the people's flag was unfurled in triumph from castle turrets. Despite spelling the end for an ancient social and political order-and concurrently creating the first German republic-these events and their consequences are curiously under-researched. As Karl Ferdinand Werner observed in 1985, they remain historiographical "non-events." The present study addresses this lacuna by examining the processes, experiences, and consequences of what may be termed the 'de-monarchification' of Germany after 1918-namely, its transition from a patchwork of principalities to a centralised state of republican provinces. It asks how this change unfolded and under whose direction; how it was received by the deposed dynasties and their former subjects; which elements of the monarchy were repealed and replaced; and which were merely adopted and adapted. In short, by isolating how, when, and where the German people encountered and engaged with monarchy after 1918, the thesis seeks to determine how great a caesura the revolution truly was. These questions are approached from three perspectives in three states-Hessen, Bavaria, and Württemberg. Chapters one to three firstly consider the republican leaders unexpectedly brought to power and faced with the herculean task of dismantling and replacing their monarchical inheritance. Chapters four and five then investigate how the deposed royal dynasties experienced the revolution and the republic, both as individuals and as members of a wider national and transnational social class. Chapter six, finally, considers popular responses to the upheaval and the fate of monarchism and dynastic loyalty amongst the German people. The thesis concludes that November 1918 did not signal the end for monarchy in Germany. Whether through the dynasties, who remained visible and active in their states, or through questions of de-monarchification, which dominated government agendas, monarchy remained present and demanded attention. At the constitutional level, its removal had been almost total, but its cultural roots remained strong and were, in some cases, institutionalised and made part of the new republican order. The revolution thus inaugurated the twilight of the princes; their formal influence and power had passed beyond the historical horizon, but they continued to cast a light by which historians may examine continuities in recent German history and the political culture of its most familiar and critical period.

This study focuses on the collection and interpretation of English material magic by English museums in the modern era. Based on a survey of English amulets in English museums, the thesis addresses the question 'how have museum collections of English popular magic materialised relations between people and things in practice?' Melding two academic perspectives - historical interpretations of English magic and analyses of ethnographic collections - it contributes to both fields of study. Theoretical approaches from material culture studies, museology, anthropology and history are used. Building on four areas of current academic concern - magic, modernity, materiality and museums - the thesis explores four themes: changing attitudes to magic, shifting attitudes to the material world, the growth and definition of academic disciplines, and relationships between amateurism and professionalism. The thesis' temporal scope extends from 1850 to the present, with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when most of the collections were amassed, and on their re-interpretation in the second half of the twentieth century. Taking English amulets as its starting point, the thesis examines why and how these have been juxtaposed with artefacts from the rest of Britain, Europe and the world. It investigates networks of institutions, people, objects and ideas which formed and were formed by the collections. The study pivots around a number of key case studies, both of people who collected and interpreted amulets and of institutions that assembled them. Institutions encompass the Pitt Rivers Museum, Folklore Society, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Brighton Museum, and Museum of Witchcraft and Magic; individuals include General Pitt-Rivers, Edward Burnett Tylor, Frederick Elworthy, Edward Lovett, Henry Balfour, Alfred Cort Haddon, Herbert Toms, Beatrice Blackwood and Cecil Williamson. The thesis concludes that collections of English material magic have materialised relations between people and things in specific and significant ways.

This thesis is a study of the everyday lives of fifty working-class individuals in the first half of the twentieth century. These twenty-six women and twenty-four men were all born between 1899 and 1915 in England and self-identified as working class. These individuals were not politicians, influential historical figures or famous household names - such life histories have been recounted on many occasions - rather these are 'ordinary average' people, whose unpublished autobiographies this thesis draws upon to offer an insight into the everyday struggles, sacrifices and triumphs that the working class experienced between the years 1900 and 1945. By taking a microhistorical approach and focusing on this sample of fifty life stories, this thesis sheds light on wartime life, the impact of social change and the continued importance of working-class family values during the first half of the twentieth century. It uses these autobiographies to question the assumption that living through a period that witnessed two world wars would automatically equate to a life that was completely overshadowed by them. It also challenges the often accepted idea that wider social changes such as educational reform, the opening up of new employment opportunities and the fertility decline would have necessarily affected each working-class individual, suggesting instead that whilst change in these areas had certainly occurred by the end of the twentieth century, it was often too late to affect the lives of these autobiographers. Instead, the autobiographies suggest that the working-class lives were shaped by other issues of significance, most notably domesticity and the family life cycle. The thesis' chapters focus on the five topics that the autobiographers most frequently discussed: death, absence, family relationships, consumption (with a particular focus on leisure, food and housing), and education and employment opportunities. The reminiscences on these topics revealed much that confirmed existing academic insights into working-class life between the years 1900 and 1945, including the importance of domestic ideals to working-class family life and the continued popularity of marriage as an institution Yet, importantly, as this thesis argues, they also revealed a variety of differing, although equally relevant and noteworthy experiences that have thus far been overlooked. These include a distinct lack of war-related deaths or war-related absences of immediate family members despite living through two conflicts, the subtle shift towards a companionate style of marriage and the significance of expectations of the working-class family life cycle in responses to instances of death or absence.

This thesis explores the role of Western Front battlefield landscapes between 1914 and 1929 in shaping memories of the First World War. It asks who visited the battlefields during the conflict, what impressions they formed, how they communicated these to others, and what influence these initial views had on post-war conceptions of the battlefield landscape. It explores how post-war visitors were guided to and through the battlefields, both by guidebooks and by tour operators, and how these sought to influence individual experiences. It examines how individual visitors sometimes went outside the framework of tours and published itineraries, and made their own attempts to connect with personal memories enshrined in the landscape. Section A of the thesis examines the itineraries offered by published guidebooks - firstly in the well-known Michelin guidebooks translated from the French, and secondly in the less widely-recognised British-authored guidebooks of the 1920s. Section B explores writing about the battlefields during the conflict itself, both through short articles in an Anglo-American periodical, and through full-length wartime books published by four influential authors - Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, John Masefield and Harry Lauder. Section C turns to the experiences of individual travellers, and the extent to which they followed or departed from the itineraries and experiences to which these published sources directed them. The thesis argues that over the period 1914-29 there was a gradual but significant shift in what visitors focussed on within the battlefield landscape as it was tidied and reconstructed - a shift from battlefields themselves towards cemeteries and memorials. However, it argues that alongside this trend, visitors experienced a growing urgency, notwithstanding the clearing of battlefields, to find moments of reconnection with an authentic battlefield landscape which was seen as enshrining deeply personal memories. It shows that for veterans, this often involved connecting with sites which held real wartime memories, whilst for non-combatants it was much more about connecting with a landscape of the imagination. In particular, this thesis challenges the conventional narrative that the most important changes to landscape in the post-war period were the construction of cemeteries and memorials, arguing that just as important in the formation of cultural memory were the organic changes to the wider battlefield landscape.

The ex-service community in the Irish Free State has been predominantly understood through the lens of commemoration and remembrance. While this is the most tangible display of unity, ex-servicemen were not a homogenous group and were distributed across all societal and political strata. With no state framework for the support of Irish veterans, the British Legion attempted to embody the 'brotherhood of the trenches' at a national level, however competing identities, class, gender and politics complicated the organisation's efforts to both organise and represent ex-servicemen in the Irish Free State. This study examines the role and impact of the Royal British Legion on the ex-service movement in Ireland during the period 1924 - 1934 and is structured in thematic chapters, each addressing a specific influencing factor. The Legion's approach to ex-servicemen and their dependents failed to take into consideration social changes caused by the war, and a rift in understanding existed between the leadership and the grassroots which was further exacerbated by the promotion of paternal and deferential relationships and conservative patriarchal discourses which dominated British Legion narratives of the war. Although its non-political stance was designed to appeal to all ex-servicemen, the vast majority were not members of the Legion and the symbolism it employed left veterans open to allegations of jingoistic imperialism. As such, the British Legion in the South of Ireland struggled to curate a unified and positive meaning for Irishmen's war service in a complex political environment.

This PhD thesis explores the multiple and complex ways in which women's experience of serving in the auxiliary corps in the First World War shaped their lives after 1918. It uses the journals of the Old Comrades Associations (OCAs), organisations established for former members of the Queen Mary Army Auxiliary Corps, the Women's Royal Naval Service and the Women's Royal Air Force, to explore the ways in which female veteran associations gave expression to a gendered, emotional memory of the First World War. The thesis works with Barbara Rosenwein's concept of the 'emotional community' to highlight the enduring importance of emotional norms and discourses in shaping the culture of female veteran associations in the inter-war period and the Second World War. Chapter 1 offers an assessment of the emotional values and vocabularies that defined the OCAs. It looks at the social and discursive spaces in which members constructed and fostered an emotional legacy of the war that was built around shared expressions of nostalgia and a collective investment in the enduring significance of military service. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the diverse ways in which women's 'service' identities flowed through different political arenas in the inter-war period. These chapters explore the ways in which leading women in the OCAs appealed to a shared emotional legacy of wartime service to promote political engagement with the inter-war feminist movement and the pacifist movement mobilized through the League of Nations Union. Chapter 4 investigates the ways in which ex-servicewomen negotiated the gendered and emotional landscapes of the commemoration of World War One in London and the regions between 1921 and 1936. It discusses the formation of a unique culture of remembrance within the emotional community of the OCAs and shows how the emotional norms promoted in these veteran associations led to the re-configuration of dominant cultural discourses related to Armistice Day celebrations. Chapter 5 considers the significance of the emotional responses of OCA members to the arrival of a new generation of servicewomen after 1939. It argues that feelings of loss, pride and nostalgia were crucial in defining the experiences of many ex-servicewomen on the home front whose age or responsibilities prevented them from enlisting once more with the women's auxiliary services. Overall, the thesis offers new insights into the dynamic relationship between war memory, emotion and politics in the lives of female veterans between 1919 and 1945.

Many Radical politicians believed that the regionalist programme, including regional assemblies, was a threat to the Third Republic. It implied a return to a traditional society, based on the provinces of the Ancien Régime and under the influence of the Catholic church. It might encourage separatism in areas with a different culture and language. This view set an interpretative framework for the historiography of French regionalism. Such a framework is open to question because it ignores a more pragmatic strand of regionalism which developed just before the Great War and which saw a shift of power to regional elites and their institutions as a way of modernising the French economy. This was a regionalism wholly compatible with Republican values. The thesis is based on the regions of Lorraine and the Auvergne 1900–1924. It starts by examining the attachment to a regional identity and culture among regional elites in the pre-war years and during the war. It then shows how those elites used regional solidarity to mobilise their populations behind the war effort. This attachment to a region among the local elites explains their actions post-war. The thesis examines the emergence of practical economic regionalism in the work of the French school of geography, which inspired Clémentel, the Minister of Commerce, in his regional reform of 1918, creating new economic regions by grouping together chambers of commerce. The thesis examines the economic programmes adopted by chambers of commerce after the war and the motives behind infrastructure projects undertaken for the benefit of each region’s economy. It demonstrates the degree of initiative they showed independent of central government. In a final chapter this new pragmatic regionalism is compared with other regional discourses—preserving the cultural identities of the past, decentralisation and particularism, and fear of a German revival, particularly economically.

Medical Concerns & Military Thinking investigates in how far and in which ways medical considerations influenced operational planning and combat action in the First World War. The study focuses on the Western Front and centres on the three main forces that were active on this theatre: the British Army, the French Armée de terre, and the German Heer. The dissertation follows on a two-step process. First, it investigates whether medical features did have an influence on decision making processes of combatant officers. It then inquires in how far battlefield reality allowed for these decisions to be implemented. The study shows that combatant officers did consider medical factors in several aspects of their work. In order to reduce wastage, officers had to take medical aspects of the war seriously; Otherwise, they risked that their formations might become inoperable due to high casualty rates. Medical factors were, however, not always compatible with military considerations. In such cases, officers had to weigh medical and military factors in order to decide which considerations should be given precedence in a specific situation. The study shows that defensive and offensive aspects were sometimes compromised in an effort to reduce wastage in the long run. The dissertation follows a chronological structure and lays special emphasis on the year 1916 and the Battles of Verdun and the Somme. While the dissertation embodies a wide range of primary sources, it is primarily based on operation plans, battle reports, and meeting minutes of the three Armies that are currently held at The National Archives, London (GBR), the Service Historique de la Défense, Paris (FRA), and the Bundesarchiv—Abteilung Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau (GER).

The First World War confronted German politicians with a range of unprecedented, vital questions in the spheres of domestic as well as foreign policy. As the fortunes of war shifted, so did borders, populations and national allegiances. In a period of acute and almost constant political crisis, the German government faced issues concerning citizenship, minority rights, religious identity, nationhood and statehood. My dissertation analyses these issues through the prism of the so-called 'Jewish Question'. The Jewish Question, I contend, casts important new light on Germany’s difficult path towards a new democratic and pluralistic constitution in 1919. Jewish questions revealed the paradoxes of German state-building and the difficulties of breaking down older forms of corporate identity for the sake of national-cultural homogeneity. My principal aim in this dissertation is to offer a novel interpretation of the role that the 'problem' of German Jewry played in the political debates and decisions that paved the way for the Weimar Republic. The relevant historiography still tends to read the Jewish Question with hindsight, that is, in the context of the Holocaust and from a social or cultural historical perspective. While it does not ignore the short- and long-term effects the Jewish Question had on the rise of German antisemitism, my dissertation stresses its contingency and ambivalence. It offers the first sustained examination of the ways in which questions about German-Jewish citizenship and religious as well as national identity shaped the politics of the last Imperial government and influenced the processes of parliamentarisation and democratisation in the final years of the war. The Jewish Question, I argue, affords revealing new perspectives on the difficult birth of the Weimar Republic.

This thesis tells the story of how German art was transformed into a tool of cultural propaganda and then 'mobilised' as a form of foreign cultural policy in Weimar Germany from 1917 until 1933. It questions how, why and with what intentions the German Federal Foreign Office pursued an official representation of the new Republic abroad through art, at a time when the visual arts were increasingly seen as important in Germany's foreign affairs. The thesis is divided into four chapters. It starts by looking at the first official German art propaganda exhibition mounted in Zurich by Paul Cassirer and Harry Count Kessler in 1917, which marked Germany's entry into modernist *Kunstpropaganda* in the neutral countries. It then outlines how the institutional organisation of foreign cultural propaganda and *Kunstdiplomatie* took form at the Wilhelmstrasse in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1920 the newly founded Cultural Department included a *Kunstreferat*, supervised by the art historian and civil servant Johannes Sievers, who together with the *Reichskunstwart* and the Prussian *Kultusministerium* aimed to take control of the newly emerging foreign art policy. In chapter 3 the thesis turns to the practice of Weimar Germany's foreign *Kunstpolitik*, especially the involvement of a set of Germany's most eminent museum directors with whom the Foreign Office sought to control and stage multiple official and semi-official German art exhibitions during the period 1919-1926. In its fourth and final chapter the thesis reviews how in the second half of the 1920s dozens of artists who felt excluded from Weimar Germany's official art exhibits, began to voice their dissent, before the *Kunstreferat* was taken out of the Foreign Office, and integrated in the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 1 April 1933. The thesis concludes that Germany's foreign cultural policy towards the visual arts was modernist as well as traditional, internationalist yet patriotic, and firmly rooted in a Wilhelmine belief in the German *Kulturnation*.

Despite recent development in the study of the First World War (WWI), research on China’s experiences in WWI is still largely limited to the discussion of several discrete topics: the war participation debate, the Chinese Labour Corps, and the May Fourth Movement. This dissertation argues that the First World War was a transformative event that significantly shaped the constitutional trajectory of the nascent Republic of China. The outbreak of the First World War shifted the balance- of-power in East Asia, which had important bearings on China’s domestic politics. The retreat of Western financial and diplomatic support as well as Japan’s increasing leverage in China created considerable obstacles to the Beijing government’s centralisation project and formed the international context of subsequent constitutional crises. China’s war participation debate went far beyond the realm of foreign affairs. It became an arena for competing proposals about how to reorganise national politics in a fragmented political landscape. China was also deeply influenced by and actively participated in the making of the WWI Zeitgeist. The shifting intellectual and social trends during the period provided momentum for new ways of political participation in Chinese politics, influencing both the central government and its challengers. By portraying the close interaction between international and domestic developments, this dissertation tries to highlight the international context of the failure of the constitutional experiments under the Beijing government, something that has often been overlooked in the revolutionary narrative of modern Chinese history. Apart from providing a new perspective from which to revisit early Republican history, the depiction of China’s encounter with WWI can also serve as a case to enrich our understanding of the First World War as a truly global war that shaped the modern world.

A great deal has been written on Scotland and the First World War, yet there has been no study on criminality amongst ex-servicemen after the war. This thesis considers both the 'societal' effect the war had on crime, as well as the 'individual' criminality of ex-servicemen. The 'societal' effect is gauged via an analysis of national crime statistics before, after and during the war. From a statistical point of view, many crimes, such as bigamy, murder and procurement, increased after the war and remained above pre-war levels for some time, a pattern that can be attributed to the disruptive effects of the war. The discussion of the 'individual' effect begins with a sample analysis of 162 interviews given by imprisoned exservicemen to the prison commissioners. These interviews illustrate that war experience had an impact on offending, with many interviewees admitting to problem drinking, and committing violent offences, especially wife assault. This last point is explored in greater depth, with reference to the return of veterans to their families. Trials involving ex-servicemen charged with domestic violence, including three cases of murder, are compared so as to find any commonalties. It is revealed that outcome of these trials was dependent on the character of the victim; common justifications being that the she had been unfaithful during the war, was intemperate, or exhibited behaviour otherwise below that expected of a wife. Emsley's work on the 'shell shock defence', wherein only former officers could use mental illness as a mitigating factor for criminality, will also be tested with respect to Scotland. Of the five murder trials involving ex-servicemen who claimed to be mentally ill during this period, the one defendant found not guilty, was an ex-officer. Finally the role played by ex-servicemen in illegal land occupations after the war is discussed. Land raiding was the only example of Scottish ex-servicemen breaking the law en masse, yet in contrast to other veterans who broke the law, the land raiders received a great deal of sympathy from both the general public and politicians.

This thesis studies British relief efforts for German civilians in Britain during the Great War and in Germany from the war's conclusion through to the mid-1920s. The main charities it examines are the two Quaker organisations the Friends' Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians in Distress and its successor the Friends' Emergency and War Victims' Relief Committee, as well as the Save the Children Fund. These relief efforts drew together a variety of individuals and organisations from across Britain, Germany, and the wider world, who possessed a range of different ideas regarding peacebuilding, religion, international relations, and 'organised compassion' in the context of total war and the breakdown of international relations. This thesis uncovers how British humanitarian work for Germany emerged and operated through the interaction of these actors and ideas. In particular, a dominant thread running through this thesis is how aid work was viewed by its practitioners not simply as a way for saving lives, but a tool for bettering the world itself: not simply carrying out acts of humanity in a world at war, they sought to create a more humane and progressive world. In effect, while these workers were motivated by other religious and political beliefs, they held 'faith' in humanitarianism itself as an ethical and effective force in a chaotic and violent world. By studying how this 'faith' emerged and developed over the course of these relief efforts, this thesis makes two main scholarly interventions. Firstly, it explores the possibilities and the limitations which humanitarianism offered in navigating and overcoming the currents of violence, nationalism, and hatred the Great War unleashed. Paying attention to humanitarian work as a form of peacebuilding in the war and its aftermath, it will demonstrate the repeated frustrations and tensions which relief workers faced in balancing their peacebuilding agendas with the requisites of material relief work. Secondly, by exploring how relief efforts expressed a 'faith' in humanitarianism, this thesis will seek a more nuanced examination of the development of early twentieth century humanitarianism than literature which has narrated this history in terms of 'modernisation' or 'secularisation', narratives which overlook the complex ideas and strategies which nominally 'religious' and 'secular' humanitarians utilised over the course of this period.

The First World War allowed for two sources of Pan-Islamism to mature in East Africa: the German Empire and East Africans and the African diaspora. The former had an incentive to develop Pan-Islamism as an element of the 'special feature' policy they were employing to assist in securing victory in the First World War. This was a policy 'to foster and encourage any movements of unrest and sedition', including the Pan-Islamic movement, 'directed against the British Empire'.1 The latter, who, due to the military needs of the European empires, had been forced to converge in East Africa in a manner never previously seen, conversed about Pan-Islamism amongst themselves. Officials of the British Empire identified that Pan-Islamism had manifested itself into two threats: Pan-Islamic unity and the use of the machinery developed by Pan-Islamism by those who advocated for Pan-Africanism. The developing counter-intelligence arm of the British imperial intelligence establishment worked to counter these threats. This development resulted in the institution of the East African Intelligence Centre in 1917. They were successful: to a point. The British Empire in East Africa was not destroyed by Pan-Islamism during the First World War. But they were unable to remove the threat posed by Pan-Islamism from the East African region. In the early Twentieth Century the United Kingdom had revolutionised its intelligence establishment, but it had failed to realise that counter-intelligence in the British Empire had not been accounted for. Consequently, the British Empire was forced to institute a colonial counter-intelligence establishment during the hostilities of the Great War. With little previous work to build upon, the British Empire was faced with a severe shortage in relevant expertise.

A study of the impact of the the First World War on the civilian population of Glasgow with reference to poverty, living standards and health. The study also considers the impact and responses to the influenza epidemic of 1918/19. Glasgow experienced significant industrial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which brought wealth to the city but also structural social problems, such as poor housing, widespread poverty, and low life expectancy. During the First World War, Glasgow's industrial base was redirected towards the manufacture of war materials. This led to a buoyant labour market with opportunities for regular and well-paid work in the war industries. This study of Glasgow seeks to provide a new perspective on the impact of the war on the well-being of the civilian population of a regional industrial city. It will be argued that the war had, overall, a positive impact on social conditions. However, not all benefited from these positive changes. The principal beneficiaries were unskilled and casual workers, both male and female, who found work in the war industries thus improving the social conditions for a third of the families in Glasgow. This was contingent on wives and older children, as well as main wage earners, being able to undertake war-work. A further third of families in Glasgow suffered increasing hardship during the war. These were families reliant on fixed incomes, such as soldiers' dependants, whose income was progressively eroded by price inflation. The remaining third of families, skilled workers on time rates and the middle classes, either maintained their standard of living or suffered some erosion with little change in their health. It will be concluded that the overall improvement in health in Glasgow during the war resulted from the marked improvement in the standard of living, and health, among the poorest families who could secure work in the war industries. The war economy benefited the areas of greatest deprivation and lowest life expectancy and halved the health penalty of being poor.

The use of temporary, prefabricated buildings in Britain during the twentieth century arose from wartime need to provide better, and perhaps more importantly, portable shelter for troops and equipment. This thesis provides the first comprehensive list of hut designs for the First and Second World Wars. The full lists and descriptions of each hut are given in the appendices. These lists, 20 types for the First World War and 52 from the Second World War, show the huge range and scope of the huts used and is the major contribution of this thesis. The concentration here is on generic types. Some huts were designed as one-offs and there is no possible way to catalogue these. This thesis has focused instead on those designs or industrially-produced types, which were meant to be produced en-masse as generic solutions to the problem: the sort of hut that might justifiably be given a name (such as a ‘Tarran’, a ‘Seco’, etc.). This thesis provides essential information enabling historians to be able to identify these types. It uses primary and secondary sources to trace the development of these huts and the effect that wartime shortages had on their design. Beginning with the earliest examples of temporary military building, it then focuses on the huts of the First and Second World Wars followed by a study of huts grouped in chapters by material. This research shows that the wartime period pushed industry to make giant leaps forward with construction methods and materials in just a few short years, where otherwise it may have taken decades. This thesis aims to provide the first overview of this process and to enable future researchers to identify and understand the development of these important wartime structures, many of which survive to this day.

Prior study of Craiglockhart War Hospital has focused on the hospital's two most famous patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, along with the work of the psychotherapist W. H. R. Rivers. Craiglockhart's literary culture is studied in detail for the first time in this thesis and the hospital's therapeutic ethos used as a framework by which the creative work produced at the hospital can be examined. This thesis argues that the British Army's lack of consensus regarding the best treatment of war neuroses facilitated the development of Craiglockhart's expressive culture, in which patients were encouraged both to articulate their wartime memories and return to purposeful activity. The hospital's magazine, The Hydra, is examined at length; both in terms of its links to the wider genre of wartime soldier publications and as a telling document of the hospital's therapies in action. Owen and Sassoon's time at the hospital is also discussed, with particular emphasis on the hospital's central importance in Owen's poetic development and its troubling legacy in the post-war life of Sassoon. Finally, readers are introduced to George Henry Bonner, a patient of the hospital whose creative work is discussed here for the first time. This study makes clear the fact that, for the hospital's literary-minded patients, creative endeavour was an ideal means by which to negotiate the movement away from repression to the articulation of their wartime experiences.

In terms of the British Army in the Great War, the study of whether or how the army learned has become the dominant historiographical theme in the past thirty years. Previous studies have often viewed learning and institutional change through the lens of the 'learning curve', a concept which emphasises that the high command of the British Army learned to win the war through a combination of trial and error in battle planning, and through careful consideration of their collective and individual experiences. This thesis demonstrates that in order to understand the complexities of institutional change in the Great War, we must look beyond ill-defined concepts such as the learning curve and adopt a more rigid framework. This thesis examines institutional change in the British First Army in the 1915 campaign on the western front. It applies concepts more commonly found in business studies, such as organisational culture, knowledge management and organisational memory, to understand how the First Army developed as an institution in 1915. It presents a five-stage model - termed the Organisational Development Model - which demonstrates how the high command of the First Army considered their experiences and changed their operational practices in response. This thesis finds that the 'war managers' decision-making was affected by a number of institutional and personal 'inputs' which shaped their approach to understanding warfare. This thesis examines the manner in which new knowledge was created and collated in the immediate post-battle period, before studying how the war managers considered new information, disseminated it across the force and institutionalised it in the organisation's formal practices, structures and routines. In a broad sense, this thesis does three things. First, by examining how the army learned it moves beyond standard narratives of learning in the British Army in the Great War and highlights the complex interplay between personal and institutional learning processes. Second, by focusing on institutional change in the 1915 campaign, it sheds new light on an understudied yet crucial part of the British war experience. Finally, in creating the Organisational Development Model, it provides a robust platform on which future research can be built.

This research aims to illuminate how and why war challenges the limits of poetic representation, through an analysis of non-combatant poetry of the Second World War. It is motivated by the question: how can one portray, represent, or talk about war? Literature on war poetry tends to concentrate on the combatant poets of the First World War, or their influence, while literature on the Second World War tends to focus on prose as the only expression of literary war experience. With a historicist approach, this thesis advances our understanding of both the Second World War, and our inherited notions of 'war poetry,' by parsing its historiography, and investigating the role critical appraisals have played in marginalising this area of poetic response. This thesis examines four poets as case studies in this field of research-W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and Stevie Smith-and evaluates them on both their individual explorations of poetic tone, faith systems, linguistic innovations, subversive performativity, and their collective trajectory towards a commitment to represent the war in their poetry. The findings from this research illustrate how too many critical appraisals have minimised or misrepresented Second World War poetry, and how the poets responded with a self-reflexivity that bespoke a deeper concern with how war is remembered and represented. The significance of these findings is breaking down the notion of objective fact in poetic representations of war, which are ineluctably subjective texts. These findings also offer insight into the 'failure' of poetry to represent war as a necessary part of war representation and prompt a rethinking of who has the 'right' experience-or simply the right-to talk about war.

This thesis – ‘Cinema on the Front Line: A History of Military Cinema Exhibition and Soldier Spectatorship during the First World War’ - provides an overview and examination of an element of British cinema history that remains largely undocumented within the disciplines of Film Studies and military history. Built upon highly original and extensive research, the thesis documents how the cinema intersected with the lives of British and dominion soldiers at practically every stage of their military career: from recruitment drives to the front line and, finally, in the convalescent hospitals and camps that attempted to rehabilitate an entire generation. By bringing this largely unknown history to light, the thesis dismantles many previously held assumptions regarding British cinema exhibition during the First World War, documenting how a significant percentage of the cinema-going public – British soldiers – still engaged with cinema entertainment outside of the commercial theatrical venue. As a study of historical exhibition, it documents the scale and orchestration of the British Expeditionary Force’s implementation of cinema entertainment on the Western front between 1914 and 1918. Significantly, it is also argued that, as a historically specific demographic, British soldiers represented an actively discerning and uniquely positioned body of wartime spectators, particularly in relation to the output of topical films and newsreels which purported to document the realities of the conflict. Accounting for this hidden history of wartime film spectatorship within extraordinary and unconventional sites of exhibition, the thesis challenges established ideas regarding the practices and concerns of film exhibitors, the behaviour and preferences of wartime audiences, and the significance and impact of the material conditions in which films were exhibited.

This thesis compares adolescent engagement with the First World War in Ireland and New Zealand between 1914 and 1918. Twenty-five elite boys' secondary schools are used as case studies, including Catholic and Protestant institutions. This approach not only captures a common adolescent cohort, but also brings transnational connections to the fore; Catholics comprised approximately 14 percent of New Zealand's population, at least nine-tenths of whom were of Irish descent. In addition to differentiating student behaviour from adult-articulated expectations, boys' responses to the war are juxtaposed against those of their teachers. Using school periodicals, newspapers, and memoirs, this thesis partially recovers the neglected history of adolescent wartime experiences in two under-researched regions of the British Empire. It also elucidates the ways in which hostilities disrupted age-specific concerns and practices in elite school settings. Age was critical in shaping how male non-combatants were impacted by, and reacted to, the conflict. This argument is substantiated by in-depth analyses of several related themes, including 'war enthusiasm', death, dissent, and cultural 're-mobilization'. While the First World War was near-uniformly identified as a crucial event, staff responses were mediated by longstanding orientations and responsibilities. Teachers prioritised institutional concerns such as state funding and school status throughout. Irish and New Zealand adolescents also engaged with hostilities on their own terms; 'boy culture' and age-related interests provided a constant baseline against which external interventions into daily life were evaluated. These cross-national similarities were modulated by immediate contexts. Coercive measures implemented by the state did not always receive popular support, contributing to new political trajectories and visions of the future within particular communities. National parameters also had the final say as to when students could legally enlist. This intersection of age and place ultimately proved pivotal in determining civilian reactions to major global developments during the 1910s.

This thesis examines the work of Wilfred Owen in the context of his lifelong compulsion to present himself as an outsider possessed of elevated knowledge - as one who transcends the expectations of his social background and allies himself with groups who value esoteric knowledge. Though these tendencies have previously been noted by biographers and literary critics, this thesis posits that they are more influential on his poetry than has been previously observed, and explores the different outsider groups with which Owen aligns himself. This thesis also discusses Owen as an influential artistic figure alongside recent historical criticisms of myths about the First World War. As new perspectives on the conflict are explored, Owen's place in collective memory has increasingly been questioned and criticized as limited, and the reasons behind this, as well as the validity of the central place Owen holds in the conception of the 'War Myth' are investigated. These two elements are connected by the central assertion of this thesis, which is that while it can be shown that Owen is disproportionately influential and provides only a limited, personal account of a very complex historical event, when his work and his personal philosophy are taken into account, Owen in fact presents himself as representational only of outsider groups that consider themselves separate and elevated. It therefore becomes apparent from his writing, correspondence and from the proclivities made apparent by the decisions he made in the course of his short life that he should not be considered as an everyman, nor as a spokesperson for all soldiers. This was neither his intention, nor an appropriate didactic use for his writing. Through this interpretation, this thesis asserts that in tandem with expressing caution when confronted with widespread acceptance of the myths of the First World War, the informed observer must also be cautious about accepting the myths about Owen himself.

This thesis examines the relationship between the First World War and housing conditions in Britain. The Housing, Town Planning, &c.; Act, 1919 - passed immediately after the war following years of investigation and formulation by Christopher Addison and the Ministry of Reconstruction - completely changed the face of British state housing policy. The importance of the war in engendering the first major foray of the state in to the provision of dwellings for the working classes is widely acknowledged, yet the importance of the specific conditions which engendered the policy has not previously been explored. This thesis enriches our scholarly understandings of both the Addison Act and state housing in Britain more widely by closely examining the reciprocal relationship between housing and the First World War in Britain. It builds a more comprehensive picture of the deterioration of housing conditions during the war, and tracks the specific impact they had both on war policy and the plans for reconstruction; in particular, it demonstrates that the Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, 1915, was the single most important element in determining the scale of the post-war housing programme. In doing so, it elucidates the myriad challenges the Addison Act faced, and highlights the approaches the Ministry of Reconstruction considered and implemented in an attempt to address them. It draws attention to the hitherto neglected importance of women in the creation of the post-war programme and highlights the influence of pronatalism and the ideas of a healthier future nation on the planning process. Furthermore, closer investigation highlights that for policy-makers in the Ministry of Reconstruction, the housing programme was a 'silver bullet': not only did they seek to repair a market irreparably broken by the 1915 Rent Act, but they saw the post-war housing programme as an opportunity through which to fix a wide number of societal problems.

This thesis is a historical study of the Ottoman Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1918-1923. It seeks to delineate how the Ottoman Armenians reorganised their political position against the massive socio-political crises that led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The thesis analyses the transformation of the Armenian political position by examining the Ottoman Turkish and Armenian press. The study contends that the Ottoman Armenians struggled to reorganise their political and social life after the First World War and established alliances with the Allied Powers to create an independent 'Western Armenia', which would ultimately unite with the Armenian state in the Caucasus. The Ottoman Armenians developed a patriotic approach that sought unification with their compatriots in the Caucasus. However, after the defeat of the Greek army by the Nationalist troops in Anatolia in 1922, the collective approach among the Ottoman Armenians changed significantly. After the Nationalist victory had become inevitable, the Ottoman Armenians sought reconciliation and peace with the Turks. This reconciliation was only possible through the acceptance of 'Turkish supremacy' by the Ottoman Armenians. In other words, the Armenians who chose to remain within the boundaries of Turkey preferred to pledge loyalty to the newly established Nationalist government in Ankara. The establishment of the Türk-Ermeni Teali Cemiyeti (Turkish Armenian Ascent Association) and the reconciliation attempts of the Ottoman Armenians with the Muslim Turks is an example of the transformation of the Armenian collective position among the Ottoman Armenians. This study employs Armenian and Ottoman Turkish media sources published in Istanbul and Anatolia during the Armistice years (1918-1923) to track the post-war interrelationship of Ottoman society in general and the Armenian community in particular, the social and political reorganisations of the Armenian community and the transformation of the Armenian political position in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. By doing so, the thesis challenges both Ottoman/Turkish and Armenian historiographies, and attempts to bring these two historiographic approaches together with a new approach to understand this historical period.

Massage was professionalised in Britain in 1895 by the Society of Trained Masseuses (STM), a small group of nurses and midwives mainly concerned with giving general massage to neurasthenic women. By the end of the First World War the massage profession had been transformed - a key participant in the rehabilitation of the nation’s wounded soldiers; publically, medically and politically acclaimed; and a specialism fully embryonic of physiotherapy. This thesis examines the professionalisation of massage from c.1880-1920. It argues that in order to fully understand the development of the profession in this period we have to move away from institutional teleologies, linear narratives of ‘medical control’ and embrace the myriad of socio-cultural, economic, political and professional forces driving and shaping this process. To explore these wider forces this thesis looks beyond internal institutional dynamics and examines a number of locations where massage was practised. Beginning with an examination of how massage was translated from a traditionally lay-treatment into the language of medical orthodoxy, this thesis considers its adoption into British medicine, its development as a practice and a profession, and its entry into the First World War. Fiercely contested both medically and ethically throughout the period, the practice of massage offers a new lens through which to examine the complex socio-cultural and professional negotiations shaping the course of professionalisation. This thesis argues that debates about massage, gender and intimacy were intricately woven into the formulation of professional boundaries, conditioning the relationship between patient and masseuse as well as the masseuse and medical practitioner. Focus on practice also yields insights into broader socio-economic and political concerns about disability, productivity and military efficiency. It situates the evolution of massage, practically and professionally, as part of the wider development of rehabilitation within society and medicine during this period. By contextualising the early professionalisation of massage in this way, this thesis offers new perspectives on the complex interplay between the development of physiotherapy, society and medicine.

Drawing on a diverse collection of both published and unpublished First World War diaries and letters, this thesis investigates the role of composition in war, examining the ways in which the act of writing itself - imposing narrative order on chaotic experience - functions in creating, securing, and repairing one's multiple identities in war. Indeed, through narration, the individual can connect to, challenge, or reconfigure, the war's prescribed social scripts - of soldier, nurse, spouse, parent, and/or patriotic citizen. This process or writing, and thereby re-asserting, one's identity was a fundamental component of men and women's emotional survival. In the midst of the First World War's chaos, life-writing held heightened significance on both home and battlefront. The diary and letter were appropriate generic vehicles through which men and women could express and negotiate the new facets and fragments of self; they were also sites where different social scripts could be tried and rehearsed, and venues for the navigation of war's trauma, suffering, and grief. Through the act of writing, the individual imposes some level of control over this otherwise chaotic experience. The 'I' on the page - whatever the length or descriptive quality of the words that surround it - is an assertion of the individual in a culture of sweeping propagandist claims, mass movement, and mass death. By putting pen to paper, the newly enlisted man could attempt to navigate the seemingly rapid transition from ordinary civilian to heroic soldier; the home front mother could confess fears and frustrations on the diary page, in turn mitigating grief and navigating the sense of self - as mother, as wife, as patriotic citizen - in the face of loss; from his trench, the frontline combatant could find distraction and escape through writing a letter home. The civilian man, in turn, could seek refuge in the diary's pages - his search to secure and validate alternate forms of ‘manliness' often being particularly fraught.

This PhD thesis comprises a section of my novel, Heroism in the Abstract and a concomitant critical analysis of the research carried out in its creation and development. The critical analysis investigates, in the light of evidence-based research, why it might be that the second Battle of Loos (or Battle of the Hohenzollern Redoubt) has not been represented in previous works of fiction, being eclipsed by the later conflicts of the Somme and Passchendaele. There is also enquiry as to the reasons for the absence of Leicestershire and in particular the Leicestershire Regiment, from fiction set during the Great War. This critical reflection further considers the use of realism in writing about war, weighs some of the myths, legends and clichés associated with the Great War against historical fact and concludes with an examination of the writer's ethical responsibilities when writing about 'real people'.

This is a study of the creation and evolution of state forestry within colonial Kenya in social, economic, and political terms. Spanning Kenya’s entire colonial period, it offers a chronological account of how forestry came to Kenya and grew to the extent of controlling almost two million hectares of land in the country, approximately 20 per cent of the most fertile and most populated upland (above 1,500 metres) region of central Kenya . The position of forestry within a colonial state apparatus that paradoxically sought to both ‘protect’ Africans from modernisation while exploiting them to establish Kenya as a ‘white man’s country’ is underexplored in the country’s historiography. This thesis therefore clarifies this role through an examination of the relationship between the Forest Department and its African workers, Kenya’s white settlers, and the colonial government. In essence, how each of these was engaged in a pursuit for their own idealised ‘good forest’. Kenya was the site of a strong conservationist argument for the establishment of forestry that typecast the country’s indigenous population as rapidly destroying the forests. This argument was bolstered against critics of the financial extravagance of forestry by the need to maintain and develop the forests of Kenya for the express purpose of supporting the Uganda railway. It was this argument that led the colony’s Forest Department along a path through the contradictions of colonial rule. The European settlers of Kenya are shown as being more than just a mere thorn in the side of the Forest Department, as their political power represented a very real threat to the department’s hegemony over the forests. Moreover, Kenya’s Forest Department deeply mistrusted private enterprise and constantly sought to control and limit the unsustainable exploitation of the forests. The department was seriously underfunded and understaffed until the second colonial occupation of the 1950s, a situation that resulted in a general ad hoc approach to forest policy. The department espoused the rhetoric of sustainable exploitation, but had no way of knowing whether the felling it authorised was actually sustainable, which was reflected in the underdevelopment of the sawmilling industry in Kenya. The agroforestry system, shamba, (previously unexplored in Kenya’s colonial historiography) is shown as being at the heart of forestry in Kenya and extremely significant as perhaps the most successful deployment of agroforestry by the British in colonial Africa. Shamba provided numerous opportunities to farm and receive education to landless Kikuyu in the colony, but also displayed very strong paternalistic aspects of control, with consequential African protest, as the Forest Department sought to create for itself a loyal and permanent forest workforce. Shamba was the keystone of forestry development in the 1950s, and its expansion cemented the position of forestry in Kenya as a top-down, state-centric agent of economic and social development.

Rowland Kenney was a British propaganda agent operating in Norway during both the First World War and the Second World War. He has been forgotten by history but the re-discovery of his private collection of materials allows for an analysis of his work. Kenney was deeply involved in the development of propaganda policy and practice. In the First World War, his work in Norway resulted in thousands of pro-British articles appearing in the Norwegian press as well as the realignment of the Norwegian national news agency. In the interwar years, in spite of severe medical difficulties, Kenney continued to work within the field of propaganda, becoming instrumental in the establishment of the British Council. At the start of the Second World War, he returned again to Norway, but was forced to flee during the German invasion of April 1940. During the Second World War, Kenney became the Director of the Northern Section of the Foreign Division in the Ministry of Information where he continued to affect policy-creation and the development of propaganda. There is no doubt that Kenney was a key figure in this development. His professional network and his varied roles within the propaganda bureaucracy speak to his level of involvement, and his documented accomplishments even more so. Finally discovering Kenney's story and his impact illustrates vividly a few aspects of how the practice of propaganda mutated and changed between 1916 and 1942.

F.W. Harvey’s poetry was more popular during the First World War than many – if not most – of those whom we celebrate as ‘the war poets’ today. He is unique among the poets of that war for his insight into the life of the British POW in Germany, and for the influence of his work in the first of the British trench journals, the 5th Gloucester Gazette. Yet, he has received little national attention since his death in 1957, and scholarly work on his life is lacking, largely owing to a deficit of publicly-available primary sources and original material regarding his life and works. This has resulted in a failure to place him properly within the literary canon of the First World War. The recent discovery of Harvey’s papers allows us to examine his life and his contemporary cultural impact, and more fully to evaluate the value of his work and what it tells us about the First World War experience. Using Harvey’s papers, this biographical study will reconstruct the historical details of his life as they relate to the First World War. Concurrently, it will develop our understanding of his war-related work. This will demonstrate Harvey’s influence during the war, first as a trench poet, then as the poetic voice of the British POW. It will also examine how Harvey’s work continued to be affected by the war in the years after the armistice. The result will be a greater appreciation of the life and importance of a First World War poet whose voice was in danger of being lost to time.

This thesis explores representations of the First World War in English theatre, Theatre in Education (TIE), and Living History between 2014 and 2015. By employing an interdisciplinary approach it evaluates these performance genres in relation to responses sought from Key Stage 3 History pupils. The beginning of the centenary created a cultural outpouring and provided opportunities for secondary schools to include field trips and creative learning about the war. Examination of this commemorative period is contextualised by examining pupils’ interaction with cultural works since 1914, showing that the centenary moment stemmed from a tradition of creatively remembering and teaching the conflict. This perspective highlights long-standing complexities in the relationship between creative practitioners, teachers and education authorities. It also confronts the divide that has grown between some creative practitioners and revisionist historians of the First World War. Revisionist historians’ reassessment of the conduct and necessity of the war has led some to harshly judge cultural works, such as performances, for misleading audiences. Yet little research has been conducted into twenty-first century productions about the war and their reception by school audiences. An investigation of these performances problematizes scholarly notions about how and who has the authority to communicate the First World War to the next generation. Whilst the providers, gatekeepers, and critics of learning through performance are of central consideration, this thesis also values the pupil’s voice. Ten Key Stage 3 cohorts are used as case studies, providing a snapshot of the creative activities and field trips employed by schools in 2014 and 2015. Interviews and questionnaires provide pupils’ feedback on what they thought and how they felt about studying history through performance. Observations of History lessons and performances also remove the debate from the hypothetical to the realities of history teaching. They reveal that pupils’ cultural backgrounds, schooling, and exposure to cultural works shaped their responses to performances about the First World War. Pupils also assigned the performances varying degrees of historical authority, some viewed them as merely entertainment, others as educational sources and several as a mixture of the two. Performances brought immediacy and life to the historical topic and provoked an empathetic response from many pupils. Yet some struggled with the symbolism of theatre and others feared the participation that came with TIE and Living History. Consequently, this thesis explores pupil’s critical, personal and emotional engagement with performances, raising questions about what criteria should be used to evaluate the success of such non-formal learning on the war.