The Home Front 1914 18

Endorsed by Edexcel, this book covers the topic of Britian at home in World War I. It provides background information on the topic.

Explores the experiences of middle-class men on the English home front during the First World War

The Great War had a profound impact on Britain. Not only did families risk their sons in active combat; every member of society was required to make a contribution to the war effort. National initiatives like rationing affected all, and civilians were now regarded as a legitimate military target. Reminders of this turbulent time survive today, in rituals such as Summer Time and Remembrance, nationwide war memorials, and the powerful myth of a lost generation slaughtered in a futile war. Here Ian Beckett examines the mobilization of the British people for the war effort and reassesses its impact on state and society. As evidence, he presents 40 key documents, including the King's rallying cry to the nation to 'eat less wheat', reports on social phenomena from anti-German riots to the drinking habits of women and juveniles, and Kitchener's initiatives to raise his New Armies.

Civvies explores the experiences of middle-class men on the English home front during the First World War. Although the conflict continues to attract enormous interest, most attention remains focused on the experiences of servicemen, rather than the majority of adult men who were not enlisted into the armed forces: we still know very little about those men who spent the war years on the home front. This book thus focuses on those middle-class English men who did not join the armed forces not because of moral or political objections to war, but for a variety of other (much more common) reasons, notably exemption, age, family responsibilities or physical unfitness, questioning whether and to what extent practices, relationships and identities were disrupted by the experiences of war on the home front. Civvies focuses on four inter-linked areas that were central to most English middle-class men's lives, and where the challenges of war on the home front forced middle-class men to rethink conventional understandings of appropriate, 'manly' conduct: the war effort, work, family and relationships, and consumption and leisure. The ways in which middle-class men navigated their way through these areas of life and negotiated the pressures and hardships of war on the home front, as well as their shifting relationships with 'others', either combatants or civilians, are all considered. Overall, this book questions whether, at a time when strong links were forged between manliness and military service, middle-class civilian men found themselves automatically condemned to 'unmanly' status, or did they develop alternative ways of being 'manly' civilians?

The civilian police during the First World War in Great Britain were central to the control of the population at home. This book will show the detail and challenges of police work during the First World War and how this impacted on ordinary people’s daily lives. The aim is to tell the story of the police as they saw themselves through the pages of their best-known journal, The Police Review and Parade Gossip, in addition to a wide range of other published, archival and private sources.

Challenges the tired orthodoxy that the Church of England had a bad First World War.

The history of the First World War continues to attract enormous interest. However, most attention remains concentrated on combatants, creating a misleading picture of wartime Britain: one might be forgiven for assuming that by 1918, the country had become virtually denuded of civilian men and particularly of middle-class men who – or so it seems – volunteered en masse in the early months of war. In fact, the majority of middle-class (and other) men did not enlist, but we still know little about their wartime experiences. Civvies thus takes a different approach to the history of the war and focuses on those middle-class English men who did not join up, not because of moral objections to war, but for other (much more common) reasons, notably age, family responsibilities or physical unfitness. In particular, Civvies questions whether, if serviceman were the apex of manliness, were middle-class civilian men inevitably condemned to second-class, ‘unmanly’ status?