ABSTRACT
The ‘trench club’ is a hand held weapon resembling a medieval mace that was used for close-quarter fighting during the Great War. Despite its widespread use (particularly by British soldiers in ‘trench raids’), its ironically primitive design in a war of industrialized technology, and its anachronistic but brutal effectiveness, little attention has been paid to this object, either as a weapon of choice, or as a distinctive expression of the material culture of war. In this chapter, I will develop a preliminary typology of these weapons – an initial classification that will document the variety in size, shape and materials used, and enable an exploration of the relationships between function and meaning for the soldiers who used them. The sample is 63 trench clubs that were selected from six London museums. 1
