Introduction

Writing a history of Britain’s Home Front during the First World War is like trying to ride a bicycle backwards: the landscape looks enticing, but navigation is a constant challenge. Sensible historians have resisted the temptation. Some have preferred to settle in a quiet corner of historical scholarship, producing works of originality and importance on a diversity of specified topics, social, political and cultural, in an attempt to understand the war as it affected Britain’s civilians. Though this corpus of academic endeavour has been vastly outweighed by military histories, it has, nonetheless, a lengthy pedigree that stretches back to the 1920s, and, since 1945, has been reinvigorated by the injection of fresh ideas and changing interpretations, occasionally overturning familiar debates. The work of historians during the 1960s and 1970s, for example, including Trevor Wilson, Cameron Hazlehurst and Zara Steiner (to name but three) placed an emphasis on diplomacy and high politics, reaching its apogee in the 1990s with the publication of John Turner’s authoritative British Politics and the Great War. ¹ By then research of women’s wartime experiences, both civilian and military, was already flourishing, pioneered by Gail Braybon and powerfully reinforced by the writings of Angela Woollacott and Deborah Thom. The need to examine the social condition of the wartime population was championed in the 1980s by Jay Winter’s seminal (and provocative) work, The Great War and the British People (first edition, 1985), whilst recent developments have revolved around specialist work on the arts in wartime and the reverberations of the conflict within British culture, as exemplified by Samuel Hynes’s A War Imagined (1990) and George Robb’s British Culture and the First World War (2002). ² Such works have appeared amidst a blossoming number of publications on the voguish topic of war and memory, inspired perhaps by the publication of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and carried further by reassessments of the war’s historical reputation as discussed in Dan Todman’s excellent The Great War: Myth and Memory (2005), Brian Bond’s thoughtful The Unquiet Western Front (2002) and Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory (2001). ³ In view of the range, quality and depth of all these contributions, perhaps it is not surprising that producing a general account of Britain’s Home Front during the First World War is a nettle that historians have been reluctant to grasp.