British Popular Culture and the First World War (review)

This book is a collection of papers from a conference held at the University of Newcastle in 2006. Together, its fifteen chapters present a fascinating snapshot of the wide variety of work now being undertaken on the cultural history of the First World War in Britain. Although it focuses on a single country rather than spanning the globe, it is otherwise a close companion to other volumes in the Brill History of Warfare series that have come out of the conferences of the International Society for First World War Studies. The immediate 'cultural' association of the war for most readers will be poetic, but many of the authors in this volume have cast their net more widely, so that culture here includes trench reconstructions, television drama, magazine fiction, uniforms and the women who wore them, food and drink. The collection also reflects the strong academic interest in how the war was remembered: its chronological boundaries stretch from 1914 to the present day, with chapters on counterfactual histories, the war in British fiction of the 1940s and veteran politics.

The problem for the editor of any volume of conference proceedings is the wide qualitative range of submissions. For reasons that may be more structural than personal, the variety here is particularly wide. Since the topics under study vary from the underappreciated to the much analysed, some chapters seem much more indicative of work still in progress than others. Unfortunately, it is often those papers that uncover most new ground, and that would be of the most immediate interest to operational military historians, that are the least well developed. Rachel Duffett's study of soldiers' food and Jane Tynan's of uniforms will both make fascinating books; here they are too restricted by the brief format to offer more than surveys. Richard Espley's chapter on reconstructed trenches gets bogged down in a discussion of whether historical reality can ever really be rebuilt, rather than an exploration of visitors' reactions that might have borne out the same points in a rather less hectoring tone. Both Lucy Noakes (on women in uniform) and Stephen Badsey stand out, however, as contributors who break new ground with their research and present it in a readable, coherent form. Badsey's use of literary and historical counterfactuals to explore remembrance is a model of the fruitful interaction between cultural and military history that is increasingly characterising the study of the First World War. Perhaps ironically, given the book's anthropological approach to 'culture', two of the best chapters – Keith Grieves on how soldier poets thought of home, and Victoria Stewart on the war in 1940s British fiction – offer new standpoints on the old staple of war literature. Both demonstrate how valuable such sources still are to historians of how Britons reacted to the challenges of total war.

There is much in this volume that is informative, and much to stimulate further thought. Those working on the cultural history of the war may wish to purchase the volume simply for these purposes, whilst those teaching First World War courses (whether on Britain specifically or more generally) might find some chapters are good starting points for seminars. As a taster, perhaps for those sipping at the cup of 'culture' for the first time, its price will probably prove prohibitive. It might well, however, be a useful contrast to the mass of regurgitated battle narratives produced for the ninetieth anniversary of 1918.