Well thank you very much for that indeed much appreciate it thank you and lovely to see so many of you here this evening especially to see in the audience so many current and former students because most of you will have been through that exercise with me where we talk about the relationship between history particularly contemporary British history and the sense of what it is to be British and have a sense of British identity and we often do an exercise don't we those of you who done this can nod away if you like often do an exercise whereby we kind of try and see how far we can get into that discussion without somebody mentioning Winston Churchill or the second world war and perhaps not surprisingly we don't get very far before those second world war related themes start to emerge in the conversation.
Maybe also not particularly surprisingly the first world war never emerges in the conversation so we have embedded in our minds really this very much this idea that the second world war is a moment of national pride success POS of achievement the spirit of the blitz all those kind of things that we think about associated with the second world war and of course those if you're old enough to remember way back at the start of this Century the BBC ran its program looking at the greatest ever Britains and in its top 10 was Winston Churchill and there was a series of television programs in which we were all kind of campaigned to see one individual or another the best Britain and of course Winston church was the person who emerged at the at the top of that list not dgas H for example the British general from the first world War why is this?
Well perhaps not surprisingly the first world war is associated continually with a narrative of futility failure of leadership lack of compassion for the men a war that seems to have been a pointless War of no kind of relevance to our society to today whereas as I say the second world war bed very much in that kind of churchillian rhetoric of this being Britain's Finest Hour there is however much more similarity between the wars than perhaps sometimes is acknowledged in particular although with regard to the second world war we retrospectively think of it very much as being a war against the evils of Nazism there's a whole parallel history where nazi Germany stay within its boundaries and where actually the British might have been well and truly happy to contain them within Germany and let them do what they wanted within their own country so it was really only that sense of the balance of power and Britain's empire being a threat which really drew Britain into the second world war and those are exactly the same reasons that Britain went to war for in 1914 so in terms of motivation and the primary concerns of the British leaders you've got that connection that similarity between the two conflicts both Wars of course also involved very similar challenges.
In both Wars the professional Army was small though I think larger than it is today and to cope with the challenges of total warfare on a global scale then those armies had to be expanded to bring in citizens in the first world war in the first instance that was through voluntary Recruitment and then from 1916 onwards it was through conscription the start of the second world war we have conscription from the outset and that is one way which the second world war learned from the lessons of the first because they didn't have the same debate they didn't CL around if you like in the same ways they did in the first world war they immediately kind of introduced conscription but there you go learning from that the methods and the approaches from the first world war and one of the things I'm going to be emphasizing all the way through is the extent to which the first world war offered a model for how a lot of things happened in the second world war how there is a continuing relationship between the two. I think it's really important to bear in mind that many of the people who went to war in 14-18 were again the people who actually faced active service in 39-45 or if not that certainly lived through both conflicts and the people who ran the institutions of government again you've got that continuation of personnel so lots of ways in which the two wars were very much linked together. A lot of the developments in state policy across that period 1940 to 1945 and probably a little bit onwards were often driven much more by the idea of creating through the state of warfare State rather than what we tend to think of now as a welfare state and indeed many of the so the Apparently welfare interventions were interventions that were coming much more from a motivation and making sure that Britain had the fit population that could go out and populate the Empire but also crucially of course defend the Empire as well so it was that Warfare state mental which really very much do dominated as I say. Also that con sense of Britain's Imperial Britain's Imperial mission in the world it's worth bearing in mind that all five of Britain's Prime Ministers joined the first and the second world war so that's Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and Clement Atley because H forgotten about the last two or three months of the war were under Atley leadership three different parties there liberal, conservative, labour they all had the very same mindset really in terms of what Britain's place was in the world they were all imperialists they were liberal imperialists they were socialist imperialists they were conservative imperialists but they were all imperialists so we need to understand those common attitudes and common approaches which existed across.
I think also you know most military historians now would talk very much about how there were lessons learned from the first world war that play a part in the way in which the military side of the second world war was conducted as well and again moving away from this idea of the first world war negative, second world war a positive experience that's one of the things I want to explore a little bit more so that sense that the first world war in many ways provided a blueprint for things that were done in the second.
On this slide here I've put a couple of statements about each of the wars with a contradiction within them to show that you can present both apparently positive or apparently negative assessments of both conflicts so of course depending on your standpoint it's very easy therefore to in an evidence-based narrative to present a version of the wars that might conflict with the next person and I think that is one of the key things that we need to bear in mind with history and indeed how we approach problems in the present day. As well that there's a tendency to move very quickly to one version of an event or one version of a problem and therefore to say that this is the solution or that's who to blame and I think what we see if we just ask these kind of questions and see the kind of contra-distinctions that exist with regard to both Wars there are different coexisting narratives about them which both sets are true. Neither set is the only part of the story and I think that's the challenge in particular with the first world war that any attempt to, certainly in public discourse for most of the past kind of 100 years or so has been kind of increasingly drowned out by the much more negative assessments particularly since the end of the second world war particularly since the 1960s and again I might touch on that a little bit more in a moment.
So what I'd like to do in the remainder of this lecture is perhaps just reminders of the reasons for those negative perceptions of the first world war where have those viewpoints come from how is our collective understanding of the first world war been shaped into one in which probably most of you in the room when you think of the first world war tend to think in terms of that kind of trenches and tragedies label that Neil mentioned earlier on.
What he didn't mention is that I found out I was teaching that module at lunchtime on an away day in my first week at the University and as everyone else was sitting down to the lunch on the away day a man turned up in a white van and took me to campus to tell me I was teaching this module so I had about half an hour in the journey to decide what that was going to look like on that on that first day. It went well but I can't tell you what I did I can't remember it but as I say most of us will have had that kind of trenches and tragedies idea in our heads so try and look at where that's come from look at how historians have challenged these representations of the 1914-18 experience and then maybe through just looking at some case study work around my own research on the medical history of the world wars show very much how there's a positive narrative to say about the first world war how it set lots of lessons in place which were then kind of drawn upon in the second conflict. I would like to also briefly highlight some of the generalizations about the Second World War experience and in doing so emphasize a little bit that theme of public history that Neil mentioned at the start especially kind of challenging some of the myths around the experience of the Blitz. The idea of the home front the accent to which there were actually again several different types of experience that that people had of the war rather than being a single kind of British experience and certainly some of those myths that we sometimes get presented as everyone was in it together and a classless society emerge and all those kind of things how historians have broken down those narratives in recent years and again I've done some work that hopefully has contributed a little bit to that.
Neil said some very kind things about my commitment to teaching and the student community at the University earlier on and I think part of the reason why I'm doing a professorial talk tonight was recognition of my commitment to teaching and the student community so what I'd like to do also is draw attention to some of the achievements of our students how our students have the ambition to go on and be part of challenging some of these myths around both Wars that I've mentioned already and then finally I'd like to just go back to the first world war commemorations and some debates around what those commemorations were meant to achieve look at what they've achieved and then leave us with a question about how valuable we think the kind of trenches and tragedies now it is around the first world war and how far collectively we should be moving our mindset from that or whether we all think there might be a value in having a war that's represented in such in such a way.
The end of the first world war, I don't know if I can dig it out I might disconnect this microphone if I try and fight for it now it's hidden, it's not it's not fighting back I don't think yet so here I've got it's certainly not as polished as the one on the screen and it's long s parted from its metal ribbon well I've got my great uncle's first world war Service medal and as you can see on the screen what it says on the back is the Great War for civilization I remember which pocket I put it in now there'll be a panic later. The Great War for civilization that sums up the sense of achievement that the British had at the end of the war and the sense of purpose that the war had been about so that when you read things from the 1960s 70s and 80s and say oh it was all pointless that is not how people in 1918 saw it and yes this has come from the elite but lots of people throughout all layers of society believe that it had been about something it had been worth fighting.
Douglas a who many of you will have heard of and who's paraded as the worst of The Butchers and bunglers from the first world war was not unpopular with the men during the war itself and was certainly not unpopular in the decade after the war before he died in 1928 and anybody who knows anything about the poppy fund will know it was originally called the H fund and H played a part in that which again runs the idea that he didn't have any kind of sense of understanding about what the impact of the war had been or that he didn't care about the men in any way and when his funeral came in 1928 you can see the Streets of London were well and truly packed with mourners that the war was worth fighting.
As well is something that we see from kind of Edwardian literature writers like HG Wells for example this this book actually comes out during the War I think in 1916 but it picks up on some things that you might have come across if any of you have read the 39 steps by John Booker or you've come across The riddle of the Sands by Uran Chers which was also made into a film with Jenny Agor and Michael Yor in the 1970s it's not got a cast of thousands in it's quite entertaining how two Englishmen messing about in boats in the North Sea Mar have thought a kind of a German invasion and even have a comic encounter with the with the Kaiser but they all kind of capture this sense that kind of Britain's liberal system was under threat as a result primarily by the 1910 this sense it primarily under threat from Kaiser ISM bism whatever you want to call it kind of a German Germany basically of course simultaneously in German Society there was lots of literature talking about how awful the English were these terrible people gone around the world conquering bits of bits of it and then imposing a certain set of its values and saying to everybody there you go there's a global system so there's two sides to looking at this but certainly the British Elite and H in a good job of there I think of kind of capturing that sense felt that civilisation was indeed under threat.
Here we've got the journalist Hall Kane who's got a kind of Edwardian version of towels on the sun lounges in terms of talking about the kind of conflict between kind of what he sees as uh the Great British virtues and all the terrible things that are represented by the uh the German Empire under the Kaiser another theme that runs through it quite a lot as well is this idea that the one of the problems with the British character was that it was a bit lazy a bit too prone to kind of self- congratulation and was missing kind of the threats to its existence there a complacency there this feeds into all sorts of things and again links through to what I was saying at the start around uh interest in welfare-ism and so on and education for the masses because it it's not really that necessarily all these people care very much about the masses but it's a we need them to be educated enough to be able to compete with the German threat we need them to be fit enough in order to be called up into the force and if fact we we need them to do um so um again you kind of get this sense that the nation needs to have a a stronger sense of its Duty and its responsibility this is reflecting the huge debate that there was in Edwardian Society before 1914 about whether conscription should have been introduced in peace time and that was one of the the big political divides of the Edwardian uh ERA with the conservatives as the the pro conscription is very much on the the losing side the Liberals kind of being against that and indeed the fact you've got a liberal government or a liberal dominated government in Britain until 1916 explains the slow gradual shift towards uh conscription which this is is clearly part of that debate um historians I think people like Katrina penel in particular recently have done a lot of work uh to demonstrate that actually most of the population was were not going around on a dayto day basis talking about the threat to English or British civilization or worrying about the long-term fate of the Empire or anything like that and if they were patriotic they were patriotic in a fairly quiet undemonstrative uh kind of way yes people talk to the streets in 1914 Believe It or Not cheering the wall great idea there were actually uh some smaller though not massively smaller but some smaller demonstrations against the war just before it was uh called finally by by by us with um most people didn't take the streets at all they like today people not that different to tell we are today we see people protesting in London that we I mean I'm not going to ask for a share hands but actually if if you think about it most people who live in the country don't go on those kind of marches they don't protest and that was the the case in 1914 uh Peter Simkins who did a book called Kitcheners Army I hope I'm getting that right apologies to Peter if I'm not uh in in that he um demonstrated that the idea of a rush to colours again was also a little bit of a myth uh and certainly the voluntary volunteering I suppose took off more once the professional Army had gone off to mons and they started to be reports of of what had had happened and again the other images that you see of kind of crowded Street and people kind of waving them all off to war and looking patriotic there there after the war has been declared and there whil in a way I I guess clearly they're about supporting the war they were more about supporting the men going off to fight it was it was cheering on their friends and relatives who were going off and saying see you at Christmas kind of thing when you come back when it's when it's uh when it's all over because of course that's the other thing we have to bear in mind in terms of the the this popular psyche in 1914 is that most people were expecting a fairly quick War based on myths of what the fine cushan War would really been like so they they were not expecting these M to be away for for for years uh now Robert bruo kind of a French Frenchman who uh said alongside Britain's on the the Western Front um that says the same thing but in a slightly less kinded way about me uh the the British as you can see here from the his reference to kind of the in mind of the aage KY clad wager in but kind of pointing out that if there was the patriotism it's kind of a bit of a quiet patriotism and people are might almost to a degree of thought whoever the government said was a problem at that particular time and and certainly I mean joking apart there were people in 1914 and still couldn't go the fact it wasn't the French that we were fighting it was the it was the Germans um brief also as you can see was not a huge T of British or English culture really and certainly hadn't enjoyed his trip to Wimbledon by the by by the sounds of of of things I've uh I've only ever seen the tennis I've never been to Wimbledon so I don't know if that's a fair fair fair assessment of Wimbledon or or other The Wombles of course but I don't I don't uh I don't think he'd ever encountered any of that um but but seriously I mean there is a popular patriotism but it's um it's it's not something that people are talking about all all all the time but it must have been there to a degree although otherwise how did the society sustain itself throughout those four years of war why did the people carry on fighting why did they people carry on working the factories why did they put with the risks the privations and all the things that we associate with war why did they react to victory in the way they did as well um not withstanding as the war progressed there was a there was a real sense that you know we can't just rely on patriotism to keep people going and indeed even patriotism itself around the Empire uh made an effort to kind of slightly reinvent itself uh so there was a slight democratizing of those the the uh relationships in the Empire uh Lloyd George had his Imperial War cabinet that had representation from all of the uh dominions it did have Indian representation on it as well although of course that was white British representation that was there for the most part for for India um but uh the Dominion Prime Ministers or representatives of the Dominion governments were part of this kind of network of a Imperial War cabinet and Jan smutz the South African uh um politician went to be um prime minister of South Africa in 1919 and I think I I think this fact is correct someone will Google it and correct me but I think he was the only leading political Statesman to sign the Treaty of Bei and also sign the charter that established the United Nations so is a is is a link with the the end of of of both Wars as well well there he is South African and he's talking about you the the Empire is the only successful experiment in international government that has been made the British Empire so it's a it's really about a network of good governance it's not it's not British Imperial self-interest so I kind of joing the war this this reinvention of the purpose of the of the Empire but even that's not enough to kind of justify the the war to people as it on the original meaning of patriotism even the original meaning of standing up for Belgian Independence which as that was an excuse anyway but even those original meanings they start to be lost by particularly by 1917 when there's a fear of kind of War weary weariness coming intellectually from both the left and the right as well um and obviously when you get the events in Russia of 1917 a real sense that we need to offer the people something a bit more than fighting for the king fighting for the Empire the sense of patriotic value so you you get other things that that come into the mix as well um the land the heroes and I have a student in the room somewhere Alicia who's currently doing her M's uh dissertation Alo Master's dissertation on the extent to which there was ever a will for a land heroes in particular looking at its failure in rural gisher so um we'll count for that when it's when it's published later um um so these promises of of the war being about creating a better society and even bigger than that it's going to be the war that's going to stop War there ain't going to be end war wars so all these massive hopes uh uh bits of propaganda promises for the future Lloyd George of course as prime minister particularly kind of uh uh dresses himself up in the clothes of the land fit for Heroes with his ministry of reconstruct and his his you know promises about jobs promises about housing in particular um all all of those things and I suppose for a decade or so after the end of the war they those things kind of people yeah they they were guarding to a degree people felt that they were being delivered on um by the time you get to the end of the 1930s um although and and again this what is myth isn't there and I see C right in my ey and I know she teaches this period but there's lots of myths about the 20s and the 30s because actually for most people if you were in a where people were in work the standard of living got better this was the era of people living in smaller family units in better houses going on annual holidays and all those kind of things unfortunately what we know is there were also huge visible pockets of deprivation which W visibly invisible or invisibly visible how you want to put it but which be became part of the memory after the second world war that the entire promise of a land the heroes had had had had had failed and that sense of that failing is part of what becomes a narrative about what was the first World War 4 it was the elite running the country badly taking us into a war that was meaningless exploiting the population and then there wasn't even any kind of reward afterwards and then of course this um veteran of of the first world war that we see on the screen there with the his mustache styled slightly differently to what you might be most familiar with uh when he rises to power in Germany in the 1930s then increase in ly a sense and hopes for that the um the war to end Wars are are also disappointed um to say the least so the second world war of course then becomes this huge National event certainly killing off the AC and the war to end all wars and and whilst of course there was during the first world war bombing of of UK civilian targets the scale of that is much greater during the second World War uh the the memory of that and how the British population coped with that becomes embedded within popular culture within the popular uh memory and does become part of that idea of the second world war being a war that uh where we were genuinely under threat and we had a genuine purpose and of course it was the right War to to to fight and therefore is part that lending that Narrative of positivity around the second war compared to the growing negativity um around the first world war that I mentioned uh a little bit earlier the British at war between 39 and 45 was very much an imperial Britain at War one of the things that was used in propaganda to reassure the British that Victory would ultimately be ours with that sense that even in the worst possible moment in 1940 at the time of the threat of invasion and the eve of the Battle of Britain we still had the Empire sitting be behind us and indeed Imperial troops Imperial were uh a key part of um things like the Battle of Britain for example we can see the the propaganda very much emphasizing that and Winston Churchill of course uh very much was fighting a war uh to preserve that Imperial uh family and yet of course ironically he becomes the image of a very British version of the war the further uh we get from it because in the 1950s 1960s we start to get the emergence of much more purely British narrative about what Britain did in the in the war it's not that um undue credit is taken for things it's more that just it's just Britain mentioned in the in the narrative and its key elements key points in the British narrative that start to be the things that are come through over and over again and and I'm sure you can all name name them the the evacuation from dawn Kirk the survival uh in 19 uh 40 the the achievement of D Day v v day and and how everyone comes together to celebrate kind of the the achievement in the war um there's lots of myths caught up in that but that's the narrative around the the second world war that we have that that starts to drown out uh narratives about the first world war or create is the cause of creating negative versions of the of the world war and then of course when you get uh to the 19 uh uh 60s um voices from the 1930s that now uh uh matter much more are ones that are projecting in much more negative assessment uh of the first world war um so for example the publication of uh willfred orin's poetry um you know made was was recognized quality poetry before the the second world war but by the time we got the 1960s and the 1970s it suddenly become the version of what the war was like um just the literary relution which is also an exaggeration but just a The Narrative and uh that was kind of The Narrative of the first world war that um I was taught at at school really and had it not been for access to some of the other things at home that Neil was talking about earlier maybe I might have been more more persuaded of it at the time and then critically of course David Lloyd George who was the uh prime minister in in Britain from the end of 1916 had a terrible personal relationship with Douglas h i mean they hated each other they really did I mean they both plotted with French Frenchmen to to outd do the other one that's how desperate they they were even though they hated they both hated working with the French as well so um so so um uh and and this idea in particular of of H as being an idiot who didn't care about the men who didn't know what he was doing um Lloyd George plays a key part in kind of spreading that as does I'm afraid Winston ch as well and his his his his War Memoirs which some of you who know more about Churchill's first world war career than others will think is a bit Rich given perhaps if anyone we might want to write a n about what the disastrous War they have we might we might want to write one about uh and and indeed they have been written haven't they about about church as War not least the galipo dardel EP episode um so you get the emergence of this kind of very negative representation of ha in particular as a person but he's a lightning Rob from this overall sense that Britain was run badly during the war the men were not taken care of the war had no purpose anyway um but of course David Lord George was there to make sure we won it um 1960s we get books like the donkeys by uh Alan Clark and you probably have all heard the phrase Lions led by donkeys the idea that was the the the Great British populist let down by these these terrible stupid leaders particularly on the military side uh I mean some of the authors who go down this rout don't really hide their feelings at all do they I mean John John Laughin B British buters and bunglers of World War I I mean you don't even need to read it if fact you don't need to read it but uh but I think you understand where he's coming from don't we and then of course in the 1960s we also had the production of oh what a lovely War which is actually I mean although I don't necessarily agree with all the sentiments is is a brilliant piece of work I have to say um it does divide people I remember uh must have been the 80th anniversary of the first world war and there was a there was a big dinner in in in leads associated with a with a conference that we'd had and and again those of you who know will no I'm not making this bit up either towards the end of the meal um um a choir arrived yes yeah so towards the end of the a choir a choir AR yes a choir arrived and started singing first world war songs and the thing is there were some very eminent or Qui not behaved uh military historians on my table and it started to get a bit a bit rockus on our table I have to say and then we did lose it and we're laughing a bit but one of the things I recall from afterwards is seeing that in this book of songs that we were given that the one song that had been crossed out very very vigorously do not sing this song was Oh What A Lovely War so lots of the other songs were used in the in the film as well but because of the association of that song with the the title of the the production and the message he was giving about the war someone was clearly very determined that that song was not going to be he sung um I was quite Rel when no more s songs were being sung to have to say um so brilliant Film Production but um it is all part of that kind of negative Narrative of the the the first World War I can't really do lions led by donkeys without mentioning perhaps the most the most widely seen one uh example of that and that is blackadder Goes Forth which again I have to say it's hugely funny I can laugh at every episode I'm not partly isn't bothered about the very of the first world war that it's putting forward though I have to say at the time there were some of us who were deeply frustrated that something coming out in the 80s just as we were starting to kind of counter some of the the very kind of black and white uh kind of um versions of the the first world war was perhaps a little bit know massively unhelpful really but very funny um I I always understand this why I chose this little extract because I always I always particularly laugh at the reference to uh hag's toris Allan though to be honest I suppose a ttis is probably funnier than a pigeon though I don't know but if he did have a pet it would probably more likely to be a pigeon and Neil Neil was talking about um U Ru com again study study study visits uh to uh uh for history students and one we we talk a group to Bletchley Park and we having been thrown out at the post office museum for laughing and told we were going to be reported to our tutors um we then had a really enjoyable walk around the the pigeons and wall exhibition there as well um no no honestly they they without medals and then that there a really I'm joking there was a really serious piece of work about about pigeon at w but anyway so I think he would have more likely had a pigeon than the toris but here we've got uh what's that then Jeffrey Palmer um playing he and um it's pretty egregious I think really where he's just kind of sweeping up soldiers in the dust pan and chuing and then the bin and that I mean yeah did they need to go so far I kind of question whether they did really need to do that but funny program problem is it's perpetuating unfortunately a very kind of narrow view um of the war B um so um I mentioned wilf uh Owen earlier talked about lloy George there were always uh literary figures and memoirists who were presenting and more new On's version of what their War experience had being like people like Charles Carrington in the sulton's war um sorry I have to just ccts a little bit quickly and guy guy Chapman uh who as you can see from those uh to uh quotations or quotes as Robin would uh call them um they um that they given it perhaps a little bit more balanced uh version of what the war experien was like and and really by the time uh I was seriously becoming a student of uh the the first world war as um uh Roy Bridge lost the the battle for me to do uh kind of Bulan special papers to to heue cassel's first world war paper I never did tell ro ro ro why I why I went that way I never told you actually either to be honest with you um it was not to do with the first world war um it was actually to do with the history of the labor party in the in the 19th century because we were doing a a module on kind of 19th 20th century Britain it was a have to say my least favorite course as we call them in those days and to be honest with you I never imagined that I would end up as a university lecturer teaching a lot of British history because I wasn't that interested in as a student but anyway anyway that's the way life Tak isn't but um so um what was yes so anyway so the reason why converted because uh Hugh entered the the room to do his lecture on the the rise of the labor party um 1880s onwards and he did an entire lecture with slides on William Morris ders linking this to the arts and craft movement and socialism and I thought that was I couldn't have imagined a better lecture on the rise of the labor party cuz I mean I'd read it all before anyway it was not that complicated so um uh you know uh and I wasn't going to do the essays on it anyway although we didn't have a sess work in those days but so I thought she can do that oh these modules these courses must must be great so um so and I thought I'm interested in the first of a war so you know what I how went in that direction by the time I was I was I I was doing that there was this kind of this growing debate around the the the learning curve idea now to call it to call it a curve is exactly call it a curb is um that suggest it was Lally All in One Direction which there wasn't so I'm not saying that throughout the first world war generals and politicians did continue to make mistakes sometimes very much the same mistake but there was learning that went on as well there was greater uh all arms cooperation there was the use of the creeping barrage which you can see here where eventually they got to a a situation where the artillery was was um supporting the advance of the on the Infantry better use of of aerial uh reconnaissance uh major use of radio technology experimented and developed the use of the tank and actually contrary to church who talks about them being kind of technophobes sometimes the problems were were that they weren't technophobes they introduced technology quickly and then had huge expectations of what it was going to do and set ambitious goals for battles which were totally unrealistic things to set so they weren't technophobes they did learn lessons um and and really that was the environment in which I was coming uh to um study uh the the first world war with h CLE um an incredibly knowledgeable uh self-facing kind of generous uh man sadly no longer with us owner of a beautiful home in Hamstead I don't think there are many PhD students who get to spend three and a half months of the year living in a in a plush Hampstead home having conversations with all sorts of interesting people in the British establishment who who have realize that here isn't homeing that some odd PhD student is in Resident instead sometimes they just come around find he's not there and help themselves the whiskey all sorts of things so it was it was fascinating to to to me but above above all a really wonderful supportive teacher not just to me but to to to everyone who was uh who was taught uh by by him and he was um um cultural historian a historian um one of the things I was involved in when I when I first finished my PhD was he asked me to be um um research assistant on the the the book he did here on um it's called the flower of battle I'm afraid don't show very well on that on that screen there but uh looking at um writers from the first world war and he he didn't go for all the particularly wellknown ones but what he was doing was showing that a broad range of writers gave you a broad range of opinions on the w and how they viewed the war depended on what had happened to them in their lives Before the War what happened during the war and often what happened to them afterwards as well so all sorts of different representations and that emphasis on understanding the true human story and the VAR variety of the human story was was what struck me from the start of being taught uh taught by him and coincidentally uh uh as I was just about to start doing research on my underground station which I did on shell shock in the British Army in the in the first world war Along Came uh uh Dr Peter little uh with his archive that he developed up at sundland and which had been acquired by the uh University uh of uh leads and he said Darby and we bought all right and bidding though come but no we haven't B you all right so um met by the University of of of Leed and as as as Neil said early I was in very privileged position of meeting lots of uh veterans showing them around showing visitors around researchers around and then my payoff was being left with the keys to the library Ben um so um and there you see uh that was in promotional literature for the little flection when it first came to leads and in a very kind of natural pose you see me there kind of uh selecting a book uh as uh with um with two of my colleagues from the uh from the history degree at the time L Ruth and Jenny uh and and Peter's whole approach was around kind of capturing the variety of personal experience and building a history of the war that reflected the personal Journeys that people uh went through and it came from a passion to to save those stories as well so that's why we will continually getting donations because he had all sorts of ways of reaching out into the community true kind of Civic engagement lots of uh exhibitions and Civic events came out of the way in which that that whole operation ran as as as well so Archive of six and a half thousand different kind of sets of personal documents I mean it was for me it was a it was a it was it was a gift and as NE said before was a huge reason why I chose to stay on it um but least him my PhD as well um what a complete my PhD the first kind of um publication I did was this chapter uh called not doctors work the role of the uh British regimental medical officer um primarily on the Western Front it's not in the title but that's where what it was um and what I was doing in my research was to some degree unknowingly because I wasn't very political about it I was just getting on with doing the job of Hope being a good historian but what I was doing was drawing attention to the fact that there's a really positive story should tell about the first world war as well as really horrific ones and I can tell you I read all sorts of things about the the the horrors of wounds that were treated how men died listened to recordings of of men recounting their emotional experiences often for the first time in their 70s and 80s and breaking down on tape so none of this is to hide the that the horror of the reality of War but I also saw the Nuance uh in in in the experience and as as as well what I did in this piece I suppose was really demonstrate the centrality of having doctors uh in the front line as regimental uh Medical Offices they were really key to the maintaining the morale in the British army which held up throughout the first world war because that sense of immediate Medical Care was really important but also they were part of the Army's discipline and this was one of the things that sometimes doctors found a bit difficult to get used to at first but they were about telling men off if they weren't doing the right thing it was inspecting that their kit was clean and dry and all the rest of it it was doing foot inspections to make sure that problems like trench for which had been a particular problem earlier on because although the trenches were providing protection from enemy fire they were pretty Rough and Ready especially the British ones to start with so it was a some while before they had kind of dot boards in there and so on which actually started to improve the drainage so looking after the the General Health of the men was was really key and the be the best ones were acting as a kind of a mix of a a really friendly GP a counselor Confessor advocate for the the men but they had to get the balance right because as I say they couldn't have loads of people saying they were sick when they weren't either so there was a they were also there were also officers as as as well and that was important there was a little bit of controversy at various times during the war about whether sending expert uh medical men into the front line where they're in danger of of of uh being injured or kill was a good use of them um generally in the end the debate came down on the side of it was but perhaps you didn't want them to stay there for too long because apart from everything else that the work was quite routine so it wasn't developmental from a professional medical uh point of view but um that there are some negative literary representations of medical officers but most of the references have come across in letters and Diaries tend to be more in in alignment with what we see there in that letter to uh uh kind of Charles mro's Mother after sadly the death of Charles marcero who was the um regimental medical officer for the 10th Italian North umand fuselier so I don't think that's just about protecting the feelings of the that the M he's being written to um next thing I moved on to was really kind of looking about the fact that you know they they had to prepare doctors for war so they they had to develop over the course of the first world war um increasing ly um sophisticated uh and um well informed ways of preparing doctors to to deal with the kind of injuries that they were uh facing uh to cope with how they would maintain morale imposed discipline understand the bureaucracy of the army as well you know obviously doctors ofday are much more used to dealing with bureaucracy because they're part of the Natural Health Service but the these these were these were um these were independent businessmen they work weren't used to kind of working in a bureaucratic sense they kept their own records and uh in in in their in their own way um there was a bit of an assumption early on in the war and it's captured and War deeping was a a writer who um being a doctor uh then when the war came along decides to be a doctor again and then once the war's over he goes back to be a writer and uh his book no hero this has a kind of a a medic as a central character one of the things that he gets gets told quite early on which I'm guessing is something that deeping himself heard from people is the idea that well doctors wouldn't need any special training because you're a doctor already we just stick a uniform on you and you go off and do know what you know you need to to to do uh and there was a gradual recognition that that uh uh was uh not uh going to be uh sufficient and uh the the sense of it not really being absolute preparation you get from some of those quotations on the screen there so let say during the course of the of of the war there was a development of more sophisticated uh training particularly focusing upon hygiene and sanitation because that in particular was what doctors were not used to to looking after and yet what the Army really needed was to make sure yes of course we don't deal with the wounded but what really need to do is make sure that men aren't necessarily out of combat use so we don't want people going down with preventable illnesses so understanding how you avoid those inspect those and so lots of stuff that a lot of doctors thought was a bit beneath them really that's the kind of thing that medical officers of Health VI who they were seeing as the you know the bit lower down there the professional ladder by many of the the men who went off to to fight so uh training on that was really important there was the establishment at the E of RMC School of hygiene at Blackpool uh then on the Western Front at the base hospitals creation of specialist training centers as well so Jeffrey ke brother of The Economist uh uh went on to be absolutely Central to the uh popularization of blood transfusion in Britain after the war and again you can see from uh that quotation there how he was able to develop his his his career as well so increasingly what we had was support for doctors to develop specialism and increasing kind of recognition of specialism LLY to a degree by the by the war office in the Army because they tended to think in terms of doctors rather than specialist surgeons or areas of specialist expertise but that does start to develop as the as the war progresses so again ways in which they're learning about what they they needed uh to do adapting uh to to circumstances then I went on to write a book looking at the experience of of of doctors more broadly in the First World War one the key things to looked at was that balancing of the needs of the army with the needs of the civilian population and how that was managed and actually it was managed uniquely through partnership between the profession um and the the government so even after 1916 when conscription comes in for the vast majority of the population it did come in for doctors instead professional committees which have been set up to manage the vol voluntary period continued into compulsory conscription and what these committees did and they had an overall National Committee of course and local committee sitting be beneath this the structure all started in Scotland the Scottish profession was a little bit ahead of England and Wales but they they they caught up and followed a a very similar model they they they looked at where gaps were and doctor off to the to the Army so yeah it became a mechanism for balancing the needs of the home and fighting front though I have to say a lot of the motivation for the creation of the communities in the first place came from concern from doctors if they did go off to fight the doctor down the road who didn't would steal all their patients while they were away so it was also about kind of protecting their business interests as well the other thing that took came through from the voluntary period and I've just a selection of quotations there which just give you that sense again that doctors like the rest of the population work up in a variety of motives as to as to why they went off to fight and elements of referencing patriotism others talked about humanitarian concern or just generally wanting to use their medical expertise and place that at the disposal of the nation I've not been too sure about dible to be honest I left England filled with the anticipation of cutting off legs and arms upon the stck and feel sounds a bit too Keen to me what I also looked at in the book was really that the success on the Western Front of the way in which the Army mobilized medical personnel to look after the men for the most part yes there were failings shell shock being the most obvious one where things could have improved at a better pace they will have to say look at other armies Britain didn't do too badly actually and in a way the foundation of the experience in the first world war leads into a much more positive attitude to those things in the in the second but yeah in all other respects kind of real really effective countering of disease so this was the first war where there were fewer deaths from disease than there were from enemy actually that's a major breakthrough certainly a transformation from the state of things that they've been during the the Crimean War where frus Nightingale was killing the war in her hospital sorry she was and and and and the and and and and and and and and the B war of course as well and and during both of those uh Wars and in in between the British Medical Association through the pages of the British medical journal was fighting a Perpetual war against the Army medical service and the Royal arming medical cuse it became from 1898 as it as it as it was reformed and improved itself and um so I think that shows the significance of the fact that in 1918 the British medical journal was publishing such a a positive assessment of the achievements of the army sorry the RO Army Medical call between 14 and 18 I can promise you it wouldn't have done that if it wasn't true because patriotism didn't stop it being very angry during the Crimean War and the and the B War publicly in the pages of the British medical journal um I not one remembering stats or even going on about stats too much but the the statistics on the on the on the screen there kind of also show you that you know most men actually came back from the first world war we we we we forget that and actually the number of who died from wounds is perhaps a small percentage and sometimes people think again n of this is to diminish the actual suffering of the experience that people went through but I think sometimes our Collective understanding of of of the the numbers involved has been skewed particularly by things like the The Lost Generation of oxb Grants and so they were again were a small percentage of the of the population as I said before there was some growing recognition of medical uh uh specialization um and um advancement of knowledge um mostly it was knowledge they already had so um blood transfusions things like that they knew how to do those before the war but not many people knew how to do it so it started to popularize the uh uh the techniques involved this this was the route of evacuation uh on the on the Western Front as it was intended um casualty clearing station so you have the regimental bearers mention before regimental aost what it hasn't got on there is the field ambulances that would that came just before the motor ambulance that was where the main field dressing stations were and then uh to these casualty clearing stations which were really meant to be temporary easily moved places and clearing station word really it was about kind of triage in the the P patient deciding who was worth saving who could be saved and then getting them on trains back to the base hospitals what happened as a result of um a trench warfare is that those casually clearance stations instead of being mobile increasingly became staple units and what they then started to do was use those forward casualty clearing stations had meant just been receiving centers and turn them into places where uh early treatment of wounds uh uh could uh take place and Sir Anthony Balby who was came in as one of the consultant surgeons so again this is where we've got kind of Civilian uh uh surgeons and Physicians collaborating with uh the Army medical service with the war office uh started to push the case for S more surgery happening in the caring stations there was the organization of surgical teams again we take for granted today that when you go in for an operation there's a an amtis a surgeon and medical AIS and sisters and so on that was a model that came out of the the first war so it says that is new that organizational thing is is new more so than some of the medical knows that was actually uh uh popularized and as a result of that more surgery did start to take uh place in the forward lines and they learned the importance of of doing proper surgery as well because um in the B War they they tended to leave wounds because um uh they hadn't get infected with um microbes and so on from um agricultural soil because it wasn't agricultural soil that they were fighting over in the nature the bullet wounds was different the kind of wounds that they faced in the first world war they quickly realized if you just left those and have this conservative approach then Gang Green set in a lots of Limbs were understandably lost as a consequence of that so uh under bulby it's through this forward surgery and you can see how the forward surgery kind of increased in its rate as the as the war progressed um we had the the move to kind of wound exision um uh taking kind of dead tissue out making sure there were no foreign bodies in there and having them what they called a delayed primary suture so they didn't close the the wound completely until they were sure that they it was a it was a clean wound and that had a a huge transformative effect on in survival rates and also began to reduce the number of of cases where there were amputations of uh limbs um other uh Innovations as as well as things like the introduction of the Thomas splint Robert Robert Jones Robert Jones was instrumental in that and again the introduction of that saw a massive reduction in the the uh deaths from um fractures from I think from 80% not surviving to only 20% not surviving so really quite transformative um perhaps something that those of you might already be aware of is um the the breakthroughs in plastic surgery as well um particularly from the second world war the work of Archer B rakindo and the uh the the guinea pig Club from the the RAF is perhaps better known but actually it's the work of how Gillies in the first world war that was uh kind of laid the foundations for for for that um great things were achieved I have to say sometimes reading the letters and Diaries of the patient some of them even though they're transformed by the end of the process often say they would rather have died and they did indeed feel like guinea pigs but huge achievements in terms of the development of um of of plastic surgery uh quickly uh Battle of passendale um archetypal images of the first world war associated with that particularly the the difficulties of uh uh moving the the wounded in the very muddy conditions of July and then again uh kind of October of 1917 at the time of the third battle of the they had particularly unseasonable weather um whether or not they should have known that and how they should have responded to those conditions becomes part of the debate about whether the battle should ever have been fought should it have been stopped sooner and who's responsible for that and is it aggo is it Lloyd George and when was the right thing to do and I can tell you that book um doesn't reach a definitive conclusion itself there's all series of different views represented within it but what I was able to is to show that despite those uh debates put those debates to one side the development of the expert the medical expertise continued to advance right through 1917 in terms of the quality of the surgery that was taking place the the life-saving impact improvements of Sanitation so they stopped um sanitary units moving with their division and instead gave them an area that they were permanently responsible for so they got to know that area where the threats and uh to health were and and made sure the preventative uh measures uh were in in place they had increasingly specialized lines of evacuation for the cases so head wounds might all go to uh one casual de clearing station suspected shell shock cases might go to others they also dropping the term shell shock because it was unhelpful anyway so again lots of ways in which they continued uh to move things forward um there were some risks with this because increasingly these City clearing stations were well within range of enemy fire and some were hit and again then there were debates about whether there was deliberate geran action or whether this was just the a risk we taken by placing them where they were and then of course in 1918 as we moved back to Rapid uh kind of movement this whole model of having the C of the clearing stations for becomes uh you know untenable because then they're just not um they're not they're not rob you know but lots of positive developments is really what I was to summarize um just talk isn't about the the the wars has been socially transformative and uh in particular references I'm going to have to take my notes I always I get these organizations I I'm not I'm not going to put these these ladies in the wrong organization so uh wspu and nuwss I'm going to make sure I put the right picking I one so um the Women's Hospital cor so Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flor and muray came out of the women's social and political Union and then the Scottish Women's Hospital led by Elsa englas came out of the national Union of women's sufferage societies um the bushari wasn't interested in women doctors frankly um the serbs and the French they they said yeah come on over so uh the Scottish women's hospitals went to France they went to Serbia they went to Salonica setting up hospitals Women's Hospital core were based primarily uh in France eventually the war office con will seem to be all know what they're doing and they they give them a hospital to run the End of the Street in in in London and as the war progresses and they get more and more concerned about um the British wasn't enough doctors then they start to train more women and so medical schools that said we can't have women medical students here kind of letting them in well the problem is once the war's over there are no opportunities for those women who qualify in the early 1920 so we spend all that time training them and then there's no jobs for them so they disappeared from the profession and in the second world war far from they being Advan um that there's no going overseas for women doctors in an organized way because the Army still doesn't want to do that and the women's movement has actually gone into reverse in the 20s and 30s so those networks I just mentioned that helped to mobilize the women in 19141 18 they've they've gone so Women's Medical contribution is quite hidden on the home front in the in the in in in the second World War and until 1944 when legislation comes in to stop it some of the medical schools in London still did not accept any female medical students and even after that they only took a quota you know so it was very tokenistic um I did a book uh called uh the great world war and I was always a bit tentative about this title because I didn't want it to give people the impression that out we were saying that they were just the same war or that the second world war was inevitable it was always going to happen but we went for the title because it was about trying to talk about that Continuum that um I mentioned before and what a lot of the contributors also draw attention to and the exhibition that you see a picture of there that went alongside it was again the variety of um personal experience and the fact that actually sometimes people had a similar experience in the second world war to what some people had had in the first that was actually different to what other people were having in the second world war so that kind of sense of of variety and then my own contribution with uh Professor Nick bosen was was really picking up on some of the things I've alluded to right the way through the uh lecture so far which is that sense of lessons taught in the first World War uh being built upon um in the second though I would say one lesson that they really didn't learn right away was that one about a battle fatigue and a shell shell just to use that term because the Army did into didn't go into the second world war with any better kind of some sort of psychiatric preparation than it had previously um talked about mythbusting in the second world war before and um again through the second world war experience Center which Neil mentioned my association with earlier I did do some of that kind of challenging of the idea of everyone celebrating the E day I mean if if you read accounts of what people were doing in leads on theay you'll find there was nothing to do um and see um uh we see that kind of yes morale held up but then some British cities uh much smaller than London the impact of the bombing was therefore much more was more impactful on on people's communities and yeah communities came together to a degree but also it it blew literally blew communities apart and they they they they weren't restored um yes ideas come out of the second world war about kind of creating a better Society but actually not as strongly as you might think and any consensus around that if there was ever one broke down uh quite quickly I I realize I'm I'm not managing my time very well but I I'll try to speed up a little bit until you actually get out of the building soon so um I do just want to draw attention to CH of some students uh some of whom are in the uh the the room uh very ambitious for our students here at Derby and two students of mine andrewy and rapine Edwards Banks were placed in the Royal historical societies undergraduate dissertation prize uh Andrew highly commended and Becky who's there and pictures as you see with the editor of history today uh won the prize uh what Andrew Drew attention to was all those myths about how bad the generals were in the in the first world war showed how lessons were learned yes mistakes continued to be made and I do like his conclusion which is to say not to acknowledge what they learned is really not to acknowledge the achievements of the men themselves that learn what you think of the of of of the generales what Becky Drew attention to was the fact that all those um um committees that existed to deal with the issue of conscientious objection were actually not some horrible group of people who were forcing men off to war but were actually uh managing the interest of individuals and their claim to make a conscientious objection they were also managing the needs of the the the nation you know if if we send the the last Village butcher off to fight then we're not going to have a butcher in the village so are we going to send him probably we're not going to so there's a whole set of nuance decisions that they were actually uh making and then one of our PhD students Jane Flynn uh Drew attention to the fact that horses far from the myths that you might be aware of with the first war continue to play a really important part in in the success of the British forces we have here uh also a second year student conference uh every year it since 2008 where second year students research topic and in 2014 it was on the theme of The Great War and so incredible was the standard of the work that we had them uh uh published in a edited volume we even had a a book launch down in the atrium with a cake of course have a cake a book launch um and uh and as you can see from those posters there's a whole variety of themes that the the students tackled around I identity and again they they didn't have a common view so the common thing was understanding and wanting to understand different stories not telling the same uh story and I think the key thing to understand about there's lots of nonsense in the press the moment about the value of Humanity's degrees and so on that that we what we teach you to do is is not what to think what ways of thinking uh and get get students to kind of Step Back From ner reactions to things to put things in perspective to look at evidence and to see that there might be many and several ways of experiencing something many several ways of of of of of of of of of viewing it and that's that's really what I've really always tried to do in my in in my academic career as well in my in my writing so I know I'm heading to my conclusion PA you don't need to wave at me I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm nearly there I'm nearly there I'm nearly there I promise yeah so um so this takes me to um David Cameron uh I know I was going to say remember I was going to say remember him but he's back isn't he so um uh in 2012 when he was launching the uh the plans for the centinary uh commemoration he talked in in these terms about trying to create um a national sense of celebration around the first world world war there were lots of really good quality commemorative events that that took place and I was I was privileged to be involved in a number of those myself uh the town of ashborne just up the road did a a full week of for celebrations they think they set up the little community hospital they had and I went and did a talk about medicine in the war um one of my students from many years ago now Margaret Taylor invited me to a exhibition that she put on in Elliston Parish Church lots of really good Publications and funded research and Community projects that came out of the commemoration so in that sense I think you know it did it did work it did have value and that bit of what Cameron was looking for succeeded there were others like um I believe mentioned this Michael go who um wanted to see much more muscular version of britishness being presented through all of this and um what was very wor about lefties in in the universities and schools who will be stopping this kind of patriotic view of the war being presented totally missing the fact that the the most of the biggest attacks upon whether the war was worth fighting and come from historians from the the people like Neil Ferguson for example with his pity of it or idea that Britain should have just watched and contined to look after its Empire in an I'm all right go kind of of of fashion but I think those hopes for for building a sense of britishness around it we always going to be really challenging because as I've established many several times during the course of this talk now the first world war is a hugely contested event and there's a very powerful image of of of what it is and on top of that British is a very contested thing and indeed part of the reason why the government was jumping on any opportunity uh in that period I think is is understandable give them uncertainties about where Britain's going in in in the world so I think the the Legacy the the commemorations for to my mind and this is a point I make in this most recent chapter I've written is that yeah it's led to lots of reallying good research it has led to lots of community engagement more people than ever perhaps shown an interest in their family history and when they do that they see the variety of experience that people had um but they don't associate the variety of their individual family members experience with their overall narrative uh of the of of the first world war and so I do think it's going to be sometime yet if ever that the wilred oen lon LS by donkey's black add versions of the of the war disappear from the popular mind and and some you might think that's a good thing um because maybe it's good we've got a version of warfare that reminds us how awful Warfare really is on the other hand we might say there it's a bad thing because um start generalizations about the past I mean we don't learn the right kind of lessons or learn any lessons and we also tend to gloss over the reality of what it is to go through those uh kind of of experiences and to go back to the point that Andrew syy mentioned in his article that I cited a moment ago is it perhaps really also not just to diminish the leaders but to diminish those who fought who made the weapons who made all sorts of sacrifices during the that first world war to ultimately achieve Victory are they good thank you
Ian Whitehead's Inaugural Lecture: Britain and the World Wars video
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