Written by David Budgen.<\/p>\n
Children growing up in the era of the First World War were encouraged to help with the war effort in a number of ways; between 1914 and 1918 they collected conkers and wool from hedgerows, gathered salvage, and worked in war industries and on the land.\u00a0 Much of their leisure time too would also have been taken up with the war.\u00a0 In particular, a wealth of fiction \u2013 novels and story papers \u2013 utilised the war as a setting.\u00a0 \u2018Perhaps,\u2019 argues Niall Ferguson, \u2018the grim truth about war propaganda was that it had the greatest influence on the social group which mattered least to the war effort: children\u2019.\u00a0 This influence can be seen in the aforementioned ways in which children partook in the war effort.\u00a0 And yet, although children\u2019s books were undoubtedly topical responses to relatively contemporary events, the extent to which these works functioned as propaganda is worthy of some discussion.<\/p>\n
Children\u2019s authors certainly conveyed many of those same messages encouraged by official propagandists.\u00a0 The protagonists of their tales were often unquestioning patriots, whose belief in the justness of the war was rarely challenged.\u00a0 But what exactly were these writers saying about the war?\u00a0 The ethos that authors sought to promote was little different from ideas and values disseminated in the years before the First World War.\u00a0 Many novels followed closely the blueprint established by earlier writers such as G. A. Henty, and his successors had indeed been writing similar tales themselves in the decade or so before 1914.\u00a0 Early in the war, reviewers noted that in works written by such authors as Percy Westerman, F. S. Brereton and Herbert Strang, descriptions of battles seemed to be cribbed almost wholesale from recent newspaper accounts.\u00a0 Children\u2019s fiction did encourage an all-encompassing knowledge of the conflict and its various theatres \u2013 more so than modern children\u2019s fiction, which has remained resolutely focused on the Western Front \u2013 but the war was firmly seen in a traditional context.\u00a0 If these works did function as propaganda, then, it was in the inculcation of values that existed beyond the war.<\/p>\n
For boys\u2019 fiction, this often meant generalised understandings of duty and manliness.\u00a0 It was in fiction aimed at young girls, however, that we see actual engagement with social issues.\u00a0 Writers including Angela Brazil and Bessie Marchant were seen as the female equivalents of Westerman et al.\u00a0 They tended to be middle-class conservatives, with strict understandings of girls\u2019 roles in society.\u00a0 Their pre-war output, for example, was largely dismissive of the campaign for women\u2019s suffrage.\u00a0 Even Marchant, whose adventure stories were set in the far-flung reaches of the globe, was criticised in the Manchester Guardian<\/em> for the anti-suffragist rhetoric of The Loyalty of Lester Hope <\/em>(1913).\u00a0 Attitudes did change, however.\u00a0 In Marchant\u2019s A VAD in Salonika <\/em>(1917), a mother ponders the role of women in the war: \u2018We are compelled to send our boys into the danger zone, so why should our girls be withheld?\u2019\u00a0 Brenda Girvin, another popular author of girls\u2019 fiction, worked in munitions during the war, and her new-found friendships with working-class munitionettes influenced her writing in works including Munition Mary <\/em>(1918).\u00a0 Even that most conservative of writers, Angela Brazil, recognised the changes brought about by the war, noting in A Patriotic Schoolgirl <\/em>(1918), \u2019As nurses, ambulance drivers, canteen workers, telephone operators, some have played their part in the field of the war; and their sisters at home have worked with equal courage to make munitions, and supply the places left vacant by the men.\u2019\u00a0 As the war progressed, some authors of girls\u2019 fiction seemed to become more open to notions of change.<\/p>\n Of course, the tone of boys\u2019 fiction did change in the course of the war, and by the end more realistic depictions of warfare were common.\u00a0 Indeed, having previously partially abandoned the setting for other theatres, thereby circumnavigating the horrors of trench warfare, writers returned to the subject of the Western Front as it neared its conclusion.\u00a0 If more nuanced representations appeared by the end of the war we can ask again, was this propaganda?\u00a0 Was greater realism a hallmark of propaganda?\u00a0 Had avoiding the Western Front functioned as propaganda by omission, a deliberate attempt to shield children from the reality of the war so that notions of justness would not be questioned?\u00a0 This seems a little far-fetched.\u00a0 Most of these authors left behind little indication of their thinking beyond their actual literary output, but a few key points can be made.\u00a0 Firstly, if writers were avoiding the Western Front, they were not doing so completely.\u00a0 Furthermore, there were many other ways in which children could learn about the realities of the war in the trenches; schoolchildren were actively encouraged to attend screenings of Malins and McDowell\u2019s The Battle of the Somme<\/em> (1916). \u00a0<\/em>Indeed, children\u2019s understandings of war could be quite sophisticated.\u00a0 Story papers such as Chums<\/em>, for example, were satirising the Germanophobic spy scare within weeks of the outbreak of war.<\/p>\n As for the social attitudes and ethos perpetuated in children\u2019s fiction, we cannot be so sure that this influenced children greatly.\u00a0 While young working-class readers writing to Angela Brazil adopted the language and register of her protagonists, as Jonathan Rose has shown, working-class readers did not necessarily adhere to the ideology of their reading material.\u00a0 Fred Inglis argued that his childhood taste for adventure fiction \u201csprang from pure admiration for the reckless, athletic courage of the hero, the simplicity and vividness of his moral and pugnacious reflexes\u201d, and that socially conservative, even fascistic elements to such works as Bulldog Drummond<\/em> were bypassed, or even unseen, by many readers.<\/p>\n If children\u2019s fiction was intended to function as propaganda, it was difficult to ascertain its effectiveness, and often writers were preaching to the converted.\u00a0 There was plenty of other specific propaganda that encouraged support of the war effort and belief in Britain\u2019s cause.\u00a0 Topicality would have perhaps been more of a draw to young readers, who would have had a thirst for knowledge of the subject, and a desire for tales of adventure that went beyond the events of 1914-18.\u00a0 By the end of the war, boys\u2019 fiction had become more nuanced, but the legacy of those pre-1914 adventure stories was still very much evident, and most of the wartime writers returned to more traditional settings almost as soon as the war was over.\u00a0 In those works aimed at girls we can see a greater understanding of societal change, and a growing support for such developments, although this should not be taken too far.\u00a0 While there were certainly propagandistic elements to children\u2019s fiction aimed at both girls and boys, particularly in regard to their depiction of the enemy, they were not necessarily towing a government line.\u00a0 Moreover, although such works could be influential, authors could not guarantee the nature of that influence.<\/p>\n David Budgen is an Associate Lecturer in the School of History at the University of Kent and in the School of Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University.\u00a0Image Credit: CC<\/a> by Paul Townsend<\/a>\/Flickr.<\/em><\/p>\n