Everybody’s Business: Film, Food and Victory in the First World War
One month after the outbreak of the Second World War, the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign was introduced in Britain in an attempt to grow more food to feed a nation in conflict, at which time the government persuaded people on the Home Front to convert their gardens into allotments in order to cultivate vegetables. Correspondingly, strategies were also created to encourage farmers to transform their land as part of the war effort. The campaign for the production of food not only concerned the need to educate in order to provide for the country, but also provided an impetus for community and patriotism. Outlining the need for home-grown products and productive cultivation of the landscape, Dig for Victory in the Second World War was a scheme that was professional from the outset involving the screening of numerous newsreels and documentaries in its implementation. That this plan was mobilised at such short notice owes a debt to the First World War, a period that witnessed the birth of film as official propaganda. However, the main disparity between the two film campaigns lies in their strategies for dealing with the populace. The Second World War was deemed ‘the People’s War,’ using the working class as central protagonists with the aim of disregarding class difference. Alternatively, the First World War deployed upper-and middle-class characters in fiction films in order to educate. These practices were put into operation despite the fact that the cinema audience during this period was predominantly comprised of those fighting starvation, and indeed those actually ‘digging for victory.’ This article analyses the strategies inaugurated in the cinematic food campaign in the First World War in both newsreels and fiction film, and traces a trajectory to the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War.
Life after Joe: Politics and War in the West Midlands, 1914–1918
By considering the political effects of the First World War in the whole of the West Midlands (rather than just Birmingham or the Black Country), this article seeks to demonstrate that, although the political culture of the region shifted in terms of behaviours and priorities, many of the features of the late Victorian and Edwardian regional polity survived the ‘deluge’ of war. The region became less politically homogenous, however, as the pressures of the war and the political responses to these exposed significant differences between the rural counties, the Black Country and the Birmingham conurbation. It concludes that the future political direction of Britain was by no means decided by 1918 and that the electoral results of the first fully democratic election demonstrated that there were many possible alternative choices for a population keen to cement the perceived unity of Britain which was credited for winning the longest and bloodiest struggle since the British Civil Wars.
Film Propaganda and its Audience: The Example of Britain's Official Films during the First World War
its policies by mounting a large and systematic campaign of official propaganda. Within days of the declaration of war, Asquith asked Charles Masterman (a member of the cabinet and chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission) to initiate such a campaign, and Masterman set up his largely secret organization at Wellington House - the London headquarters of the Insurance Commission. To begin with Masterman and his colleagues were exclusively concerned with neutral and allied opinion abroad, but by 1917 domestic enthusiasm for the war had begun to wane, and they turned their attention to public opinion at home as well. Indeed, in the last two years of the war, they also sought to influence public opinion in enemy countries as well. As the scale of official propaganda increased, the government twice took the