ABSTRACT

After demobilization, the majority of white ex-servicemen joined the Memorable Order of the Tin Hats (MOTH), a veterans' movement whose practices, rhetoric and symbols were all rooted in the experience of white troops drawn from a colonial context. Social historian Robert Morrell's consideration of freemasonry in colonial Natal offers a useful comparative example of the sort of political and social organization represented by MOTH membership in the years after the Second World War. Leaders of the MOTH, most of whom were veterans of the First World War, were sensitive to the anxieties of their younger comrades. After the Second World War, MOTH leaders were severely critical of the levels of government support for veterans, and in voicing these criticisms, they transgressed the Order's code of political non-involvement. The MOTHs had a 'craze for building,' a tradition that MOTH 0 insisted was 'bom amidst the experience of frontline destruction.'.