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Historians of the First World War often seem to have a very clear idea of who middle-class men were and how they reacted to the outbreak of the conflict. This book explores the experiences of middle-class men on the English home front during the First World War. It first focuses on the first twelve months or so of war, a period when many middle-class men assumed that the war could hardly fail to affect them. The book then delves deeper into middle-class men's understandings of civilians' appropriate behaviour in wartime. It explores middle-class men's reasons for not conforming to dominant norms of manly conduct by enlisting, and considers individuals' experiences of 'non-enlistment'. It also focuses on middle-class men's involvement in volunteer activities on the home front. The book also focuses on middle-class men's working lives, paying particular attention to those aspects of work that were most affected by the war. It considers civilian men's responses to the new ambivalence towards profit-making, as well as to the doubts cast on the 'value' of much middle-class, whitecollar work in wartime. The book further assesses the ways in which middle-class men negotiated their roles as wartime consumers and explores the impact of war on middle-class relationships. It considers the nature of wartime links between civilians and servicemen, as well as the role of the paterfamilias within the middle-class family, before turning to focus on the relationship between civilian fathers and combatant sons.
, had the hunger marchers not worn their medals of valour, neither would have been a respectable opponent. Playing the game was by no means an attribute of the upper classes but expected behaviour for all true British men (Newsome, 1961; Cunningham, 1986: 301). Despite all the efforts, both private and governmental, that went into creating a volunteer force to counteract the General Strike, few scholars have taken seriously the political and symbolic import of the volunteers’ activities. Since 1926, there have been no books and only five articles written specifically
conforming to dominant norms of manly conduct by enlisting, considers individuals’ experiences of ‘non-enlistment’ and assesses the extent to which the decision to remain a civilian in wartime was viewed as acceptable and justifiable. Chapter 5 then shifts the focus onto middle-class men’s involvement in • 17 • intro.indd 17 05/04/2013 11:04:06 Civvies volunteer activities on the home front, including service in organised, ‘public’ bodies such as Volunteer Training Corps and special constables, and ‘private’ activities like allotment keeping and vegetable growing: did
doing the jobs that the community designated as theirs. What they also did, however, was to unmask the conceit that eighteenth and nineteenth-century traditions of reciprocity and social obligation among classes were anything more than a form of fancy dress in the 1920s. Accordingly, the strikers interpreted the volunteers’ activities not only as a betrayal of an upper-class social contract to serve the entire community (instead of their narrow class interests) but also as an explicit act of violence against the working classes. Much as the upper classes tolerated a
shells at Woolwich Arsenal on Saturdays and Sundays’. Almost a thousand men had ‘volunteered from the Stock Exchange, Baltic, Lloyds, etc., in fact, everybody is most anxious to do anything they can to help’.16 The image of ‘city men’ spending their spare time manufacturing munitions made good journalistic copy, but was hardly typical of middleclass men’s volunteer activities on the home front. In fact, it was much more common for them to become involved in a range of ‘committee’ work, to offer their services to organisations such as special constables or Volunteer
Corps. In the US, volunteering is promoted through the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal organization which oversees volunteering through initiatives like AmeriCorps, and tracks volunteer activity levels. The National Conference for Citizenship, an organization backed by the federal government, works with different cities and states to strengthen civic life. It uses a ‘civic health index’ to track progress in cities, states, and nations. As well as official central government policies and programmes, civil society has its own agenda
manly citizens. In addition, just when new doubts were cast on the ‘value’ of much middle-class and white-collar work in wartime, reduced incomes, new regulations, restrictions on consumption and seemingly never ending demands on their pockets, all meant that many men found it increasingly hard to maintain their own and their families’ • 309 • conclusion.indd 309 05/04/2013 11:07:33 Civvies accustomed standard of living.45 At the same time, far from arousing admiration, their attempts to contribute to the war effort by undertaking volunteer activities on the home
states in the region. Despite the enormous amount of governmental, institutional and volunteer activity being devoting to Stability Pact activities, its 2004 Annual Report noted that ‘throughout the year, the key message of [Special Co-ordinator Erhard] Busek was that Southeastern Europe’s governments needed to follow up their commitments with rigorous implementation’. 13 The signature tune of post
sickening as the War. You do your best to make it sound interesting and then you get looked at like that. Most disappointing’ (‘What did you do?’, 1926: 568). Instead of the Great War’s hallowing the events of 1926, the paradigm was stood on its head: the volunteers’ activities in 1926 were used to question British soldiers’ involvement in the First World War, a literary theme that began to emerge during the war and which was becoming even more evident by the mid-1920s (Fussell, 1975). Exaggeration for humorous effect was also a favourite technique of Punch essayists who
–recovery and market-oriented world. A look at Canadian developments In Canada, Edward Jackson at Carleton University has conceptualized what he calls the ‘CUE (Community–University Engagement) Factor’. He writes of the dynamic triangle of community–university engagement being community-based experiential learning, community-based research and community-based continuing education. He calls on universities across Canada to, ‘increase their CUE factors by deepening and broadening their teaching, research and volunteering activities with the external constituencies that have the