ABSTRACT
In a country enduring an unexpectedly long war, Britons were never slow in taking time out to enjoy themselves. Amid an atmosphere of ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’, The Times reported in August 1915:
From Hastings to Bognor … the hotels and lodging-houses are full; indeed, they are fuller than in most years. People are spending their money, too, pretty freely; perhaps not quite so lavishly as of old, but … there are bands playing, and singers singing; the theatres and cinematographs are doing well, and every place has its little troupe of Funs or Drolls or Merries, giving open-air entertainments. 1
For those fortunate few who sheltered behind a wall of wealth, the war hovered on a distant horizon. The Bloomsbury Group – artists, poets, writers, pacifists one and all – had the means and motive to ignore the war. ‘The “Bloomsburies” were all doing war-work of “National Importance”’, commented Percy Wyndham Lewis, ‘down in some downy English county, under the wings of powerful pacifist friends; pruning trees, planting goosebury bushes, and haymaking, doubtless in large sunbonnets.’ 2 Yet the proclivity of some in the moneyed classes to let others make their sacrifices for them only emphasized the fact that wartime life for many ordinary home front Britons was becoming increasingly straitened. In their world the impact of war took many guises, sometimes in the shape of Zeppelin airship or Gotha bomber, or of shortages of fuel and food, and the disappearance of life’s little luxuries, from a half-decent cigarette to muffins. Some Britons accepted these unfamiliar circumstances as a necessary sacrifice. Others wreaked their frustrations on the small numbers of German émigrés who had made Britain their home before the war. For the government, mobilizing the country pulled the state into areas of work and welfare that had previously been regarded as the individual’s responsibility. In the meantime, the poor became less poor: the rich became less rich. Pre-war normalities were overturned. This was indeed an ironic war.