The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916 (review)

This brief book, containing just 131 pages of text, attempts to explain why working-class Britons responded enthusiastically to the outbreak of war in 1914. Although impoverished, often isolated from the political system, and having almost as much suspicion about their own government as that of Germany, working-class men nevertheless volunteered in numbers so large that they overwhelmed the British recruitment and training systems. This important question is far too complex for a book this small, leaving us with more data than analysis and more questions than answers.

The Great Britain of 1914 that Silbey describes was "on the edge of an appalling catastrophe" (Leo Amery quoted on 17). To be sure, the question of Irish Home Rule added to the tensions inside Britain, and the suffrage controversy divided Britons on an issue with both political and emotional overtones. Still, to depict Britain as "on the edge of a civil war, a sex war, and a class war" surely overstates the point (17). This inaccurate image of a society coming apart at the seams is used to frame the problem and to provide a contrast to the willingness of Britons to fight for that same society.

Silbey's explanation for British war enthusiasm follows a well-worn course. He argues that two factors were paramount. First, the advent of a national media network and mass literacy led to a connection between the working class and the goals of the nation and the empire. Seeing themselves as members of that nation and empire, men came to identify with Britain, even if their understandings were often conditioned by local loyalties. Serving in the British Army, then, meant not just defending the foreign policy goals of Whitehall, but defending one's family, network of friends, and town. This analysis somehow assumes that literacy and newspapers were required to make men feel a connection to their homes and families.

Second, the book argues that money played a major role in leading men to enlist. The low wages, chronic unemployment, and occasional underemployment that the working class experienced made the Army a more attractive employer. The crisis of the war, he argues, allowed men to join a relatively well-paying institution that, before 1914, working class people had traditionally held in low regard. The mood of national crisis in the summer of that year removed the anti-military stigma and thus allowed men to combine selfish and selfless motives because a common patriotism masked the more practical reasons for enlistment.

Silbey combines memoirs of British veterans with statistical analysis to dem- onstrate these points. His evidence, however, is often loosely tied to the central arguments he wants to make. The argument about wages is a good example. The Army paid privates eight shillings, nine pence per week in 1914. Including food and clothing, this figure increases to a still modest 13 shillings, nine pence. By contrast, builders earned 29 shillings, coal miners 33 shillings, and police constables 72 shillings per week (86). Even agricultural laborers, among the lowest paid British workers, earned a wage comparable to privates. These figures might explain a rush of unemployed men to the Army, but clearly they will not explain why men left well-paying jobs in order to enlist. The heavy reliance on memoirs, moreover, may distort the picture further, as veterans became less likely after the war to cite patriotism, which had become a much less fashionable motivator in the atmosphere of the post-war years.

The working-class men Silbey quotes almost always appear as innocent, or, to use a chapter subtitle, "young and silly." Even the same long casualty lists from the war's early months that necessitated their enlistment failed to dampen that innocence. The men thus appear to have had no sense of their impending trial by fire. Contemporary observers like journalist Philip Gibbs saw the...