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During the Second World War, some 250,000 British servicemen were taken captive by either the Axis powers or the Japanese. As a result of this, their wives and families became completely dependent on the military and civil authorities. This book examines the experiences of the millions of service dependents created by total war. The book then focuses on the most disadvantaged elements of this group - the wives, children and dependents of men taken prisoner- and the changes brought about by the exigencies of total war. Further chapters reflect on how these families organised to lobby government and the strategies they adopted to circumvent apparent bureaucratic ineptitude and misinformation.This book is essential reading for both academic and general readers interested in the British Home Front during the Second World War.

During the Second World War, some 250,000 British servicemen were taken captive by either the Axis powers or the Japanese. As a result of this, their wives and families became completely dependent on the military and civil authorities. This book examines the experiences of the millions of service dependents created by total war. The book then focuses on the most disadvantaged elements of this group - the wives, children and dependents of men taken prisoner- and the changes brought about by the exigencies of total war. Further chapters reflect on how these families organised to lobby government and the strategies they adopted to circumvent apparent bureaucratic ineptitude and misinformation. This book is essential reading for both academic and general readers interested in the British Home Front during the Second World War.

Alongside 'Dig for Victory', 'Make Do and Mend' is a well-known ideology from the austerity campaigns unleashed on Britain's home front in the Second World War. Less well known are the post-war prosperity campaigns. These campaigns mutated the moral economy created by wartime propaganda to encourage the British to become reacquainted with geographies of manufacturing and to focus again on imports and exports. Post-Second World War consumers were entreated to forego localism, embrace the global and 'export or die'. That the drive for the global was showcased in an equally compelling political campaign is particularly poignant. This article examines the processes by which the British were made to become part of the complex, distributed and far-spanning geographies of manufacturing prevalent today. It sheds light on a brief lapse from globalisation and addresses a critical need in geography for a historical survey of the making of present global production networks and global cultures of consumption.

This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English poets: Jessie Pope, a then immensely popular Home Front poet–journalist and staunch supporter of the Allied war effort; and Wilfred Owen, a soldier–poet whose verse would evolve from its Romantic-Georgian and pastoral roots to yield some of the most scathing indictments of the war. In focus are the poets' chief compositions, Pope's jingoist ballad, 'The Lads of the Maple Leaf' (1915), and the several drafts of Owen's antiwar trench lyric, 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' (1917–1920). The author argues that although the poems are diametrically opposed – politically and ideologically – they nonetheless share a set of cultural, historical, and literary markers which converge on Horace's ancient slogan in praise of an honourable death in battle, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Significantly, the article locates for the first time Pope's forgotten ballad as the most likely catalyst for Owen's famous gas poem. With Pope's poetry as a nexus, the discussion takes Owen's original mock-dedication of 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' to her and other pro-war poets as a point of departure for examining Pope's investment in the tropes and memes of Britain's imperial project, especially in relation to Canada. The aim is to explore Pope's mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen's warrior poet. Given that Pope's poem establishes at the outset Canadians' submissive loyalty to the British Empire, the article enlists Canadian combatant and non-combatant poetry to illustrate the colonial–imperial traffic of ideas informing the belligerent poetic–aesthetic turn the war provoked in Canada and Britain. The argument thus sheds new light on one of the best-known war poems, whilst bringing Pope's long-neglected agitprop ballad out of the shadows.

Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.

The First World War appears as a fault line in Britain's twentieth-century history. Between August 1914 and November 1918 the titanic struggle against Imperial Germany and her allies consumed more people, more money and more resources than any other conflict that Britain had hitherto experienced. For the first time, it opened up a Home Front that stretched into all parts of the British polity, society and culture, touching the lives of every citizen regardless of age, gender and class: vegetables were even grown in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Britain and World War One throws attention on these civilians who fought the war on the Home Front. Harnessing recent scholarship, and drawing on original documents, oral testimony and historical texts, this book casts a fresh look over different aspects of British society during the four long years of war. It revisits the early war enthusiasm and the making of Kitchener's new armies; the emotive debates over conscription; the relationships between politics, government and popular opinion; women working in wartime industries; the popular experience of war and the question of social change. This book also explores areas of wartime Britain overlooked by recent histories, including the impact of the war on rural society; the mobilization of industry and the importance of technology; responses to air raids and food and housing shortages; and the challenges to traditional social and sexual mores and wartime culture. Britain and World War One is essential reading for all students and interested lay readers of the First World War.

The front region of the house is a place where a performance is given, whereas the back region is where informal behaviour and domestic activities take place. This paper demonstrates the way in which socio-cultural values and norms have been reflected in the design and use of front and back regions of the English house over time. Firstly, focusing on issues of status consciousness and social relations within the household, the paper looks at past links between culture and house plans described in the existing literature on English society and housing. It then examines contemporary English society and housing by using both published work (official statistics and sociological/ethnographical accounts) and fieldwork (questionnaire-based interviews with homeowners and an analysis of descriptions of house plans), and considers how people's values and lifestyles are expressed by the front and back regions of a house and what meanings have been attached to these spaces. The paper concludes that research into the way in which we define front and back functions and activities, and use front and back regions of the house, will inform further studies.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading

Kibble discusses how H. D. referred to her own generation as the \"still-born generation.\" Three novels/novellas by H. D. that illustrate the decadence of the time during and after the Great War are examined: \"Asphodel,\" \"Murex\" and \"Kora and Ka.\"

The period of Herbert Henry Asquith's administration saw the continuance of a prewar laissez-faire attitude towards agriculture, reflecting the political temperament of government, optimism that the war would be of short duration and uncertainty as to how formal direction might be imposed upon an extremely individualistic industry. The official attitude towards dilution of the agricultural workforce was influenced by the Army's short-term needs and by fluctuating domestic circumstances. Non-military substitution presented distinct problems for agriculture. Northamptonshire's agricultural Advisory Committee summoned several ostensibly qualifying workers and told them that they would be exempt from military service for the present. Fundamental political and military developments brought mixed prospects for agriculture. The ‘plough policy’ and associated initiatives increased the tilled acreage in England by some 20 per cent in the two years to 1918. Agriculture can be regarded as one of the unequivocal success stories of the Home Front.