Huddersfield In The Great War

When war was declared in August 1914, it not only changed the lives of the soldiers who fought, but also the lives of their families, their neighbourhood and, ultimately, the whole of society. Women came out of their homes to take up work in industry, to drive the trams, to police the streets as well as nurse the wounded. Government, local and national, imposed extensive controls on all aspects of social life - who could remain in work, who had to fight, what could be grown as crops, what clothes were appropriate and how to feed a family. ??This study looks at how these changes affected Huddersfield and its inhabitants, showing how employment changed, how the town contributed to financing the war and how the local tribunals dealt with those who did not want to fight. Local families, from the highest to the lowest walks of life, find their stories illustrated here.

Huddersfields Roll of Honour 1914-1922 is a detailed account of 3,439 service personnel from Huddersfield who lost their lives during the First World War. In the Preface, HRH The Duke of York KG writes: This publication represents the lifetime work of Margaret Stansfield who sadly passed away in 2012. Margaret spent 30 years compiling the 3,439 biographical entries giving a poignant insight into the background, working lives and families of those who selflessly left Huddersfield to fight for their country never to return. Along with the biographical accounts there are many moving letters to the families of soldiers who lost their lives reflecting an attempt to bring comfort amid the darkness that their loss brought to both families and comrades alike.

Around 250,000 Belgian refugees who fled the German invasion spent the First World War in Britain – the largest refugee presence Britain has ever witnessed. Welcomed in a wave of humanitarian sympathy for ‘Poor Little Belgium’, within a few months Belgian exiles were pushed off the front pages of newspapers by the news of direct British involvement in the war. Following rapid repatriation at British government expense in late 1918 and 1919 Belgian refugees were soon lost from public memory with few memorials or markers of their mass presence. Reactions to Belgian refugees discussed in this book include the mixed responses of local populations to the refugee presence, which ranged from extensive charitable efforts to public and trade union protests aimed at protecting local jobs and housing. This book also explores the roles of central and local government agencies which supported and employed Belgian refugees en masse yet also used them as a propaganda tool to publicise German outrages against civilians to encourage support for the Allied war effort. This book covers responses to Belgian refugees in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in a Home Front wartime episode which generated intense public interest and charitable and government action. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora.

What was it that the British people believed they were fighting for in 1914–18? This compelling history of the British home front during the First World War offers an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war. Drawing on official archives, memoirs, diaries and letters, Adrian Gregory sheds new light on the public reaction to the war, examining the role of propaganda and rumour in fostering patriotism and hatred of the enemy. He shows the importance of the ethic of volunteerism and the rhetoric of sacrifice in debates over where the burdens of war should fall as well as the influence of religious ideas on wartime culture. As the war drew to a climax and tensions about the distribution of sacrifices threatened to tear society apart, he shows how victory and the processes of commemoration helped create a fiction of a society united in grief.

Halifax was surprised by the outbreak of war in August 1914 but within days the public mood had turned into a staggering display of unified support. Voluntary fund raising organisations sprang up and bore witness to an incredible self-help ethic that supported the troops at the front, their dependant families at home and the returning wounded. People came to fear the Zeppelins, were forced to retrieve their children from German naval guns in Scarborough and read with horror the stories of local lads gassed at the front. Residents of German descent found themselves in difficult situations, and Belgian refugees were offered sanctuary.Struggling local industry was revitalised by government orders for Khaki cloth, machine tools and munitions. Halifax can claim to have contributed many interesting technological items such as bomb release mechanisms, flame projectors and Tommy's iconic bowl shaped steel helmet. Women were increasingly employed in traditional male occupations. In 1917 the food crisis fermented tensions, but at the end of 1918 there was triumph of a sort.

For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. At every turn propertied elites challenged their right to govern. Prominent US labor historian, Shelton Stromquist, offers the first global account of the origins of this new trans-local socialist politics. He explains how and why cities after 1890 became crucibles for municipal socialism. Drawing on the colorful stories of local activists and their social-democratic movements in cities as diverse as Broken Hill, Christchurch, Malm, Bradford, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Hamilton, OH, the book shows how this new urban politics arose. Long governed by propertied elites, cities in the nineteenth century were transformed by mass migration and industrialization that tore apart their physical and social fabric. Amidst massive strikes and faced with epidemic disease, fouled streets, unsafe water, decrepit housing, and with little economic security and few public amenities, urban workers invented a local politics that promised to democratize cities they might themselves govern and reclaim the wealth they created. This new politics challenged the class power of urban elites as well as the centralizing tendencies of national social-democratic movements. Municipal socialist ideas have continued to inspire activists in their fight for the right of cities to govern themselves.

The first comprehensive survey of the memorialisation process in Britain in the aftermath of the South African War, uncovering the themes and myths that underpinned the interpretations of the war as well as shifting patterns in how the war was represented and conceived.