Joel Morley

This book connects the First and Second World Wars. It uses oral histories and Mass Observation material to explore men’s attitudes to Second World War enlistment and the relationship they perceived between military service and masculinity, and how these were influenced by understandings of the First World War. Locating the cultural legacy of First World War in the subjectivities of men who participated in the Second World War demonstrates the breadth of sources that informed men’s understandings of the First World War in interwar Britain. Its cultural legacy was omnipresent and diverse, and informed young men’s attitudes and service preferences, but it reinforced Edwardian conceptions of wartime masculinity as often as it undermined them. Two decades after the First World War ended, they remained resilient in the subjective understandings of men who grew up in the Great War’s shadow.

This book connects the First and Second World Wars. It uses oral histories and Mass Observation material to explore men’s attitudes to Second World War enlistment and the relationship they perceived between military service and masculinity, and how these were influenced by understandings of the First World War. Locating the cultural legacy of First World War in the subjectivities of men who participated in the Second World War demonstrates the breadth of sources that informed men’s understandings of the First World War in interwar Britain. Its cultural legacy was omnipresent and diverse, and informed young men’s attitudes and service preferences, but it reinforced Edwardian conceptions of wartime masculinity as often as it undermined them. Two decades after the First World War ended, they remained resilient in the subjective understandings of men who grew up in the Great War’s shadow.

National service was a defining feature for a generation of young men in post-war Britain. Around 2.3 million of them were called up between the end of World War Two and 1963, when conscription ended. However, national service was forgotten almost before it had ended, a process aided subsequently by professional historians who have been reluctant to assess its longer-term influence on British social and political history. Based on original oral interviews with well over one hundred men, this book explores the ways in which compulsory military participation reverberated in the memories of interviewees long beyond the end of conscription, and how these early military experiences shaped their later life stores. Unlike existing accounts that tend to rely on memoirs written by officers, or else oral interviews that concentrate narrowly on the details of military service, this study focusses instead on men from working-class backgrounds and it situates national service in the context of the life course and the wider transformations that have occurred in British society since conscription ended. In so doing, the work shines new light on important areas of current scholarly interest and historiographical concern, including the changing meaning and experience of class, masculinity, and citizenship, as well as the complexities of popular memory.