ABSTRACT
The changes which have occurred throughout Wessex since 1914 have been so rapid and so revolutionary that it is possible here to do no more than draw attention to some of the most important and far-reaching developments before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. In countless ways the Great War marked a more profound and abrupt break with the past than anything which had occurred before. The moment when the old, secure fabric of society was irretrievably split in one local community can be seen precisely in a photograph taken in August 1914 at Bratton near Westbury in Wiltshire. It shows the young men of Bratton, Edington, Tinhead and the neighbouring villages and hamlets along the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, being taken off to enlist as volunteers in the army at Devizes, in a cavalcade of the cars of local gentry families, amid scenes of great patriotic enthusiasm, flag-waving and fond farewells. In the background is the iron-foundry and agricultural implement works of R. and J. Reeves, the principal employers in the district, and the first car is being driven by one of the Reeves family. Many of these volunteers were never to return; the war memorials show that 20 men from Bratton died in the war, and 24 from Edington, and those men who did return came back to a new world of rapid change and upheaval very different from that which they had so gaily left on that sunny August afternoon in 1914. Even the implement works in which most of them had been employed and which supplied the farms throughout west Wiltshire and far beyond declined steadily after the war as large-scale production of tractors, balers and combineharvesters, beyond the manufacturing capacity of a local family-run business, destroyed much of the trade (Bettey 1977: 61).
