Everyday Life and the British Home Front in World War I

Maggie Andrews

The first mechanised large-scale war affected the civilian population of Britain in ways unimaginable to previous generations, causing disruption to the population’s everyday lives. The First World War fractured families, displaced people, destroyed homes and ended lives. The transfer of hundreds of thousands of men into the armed forces, voluntarily at first, and then, from 1916, by conscription necessitated the provision of training, accommodation, uniforms, weapons, ammunition and food, all of which were a mammoth undertaking. Alongside the need to replace men’s labour power in industry and agriculture it set the country on a war footing and precipitated social and cultural changes, at least for the duration of the war. War’s influence was often experienced in the minutiae of life. In Herefordshire, the requisitioning of horses (the main means of transport) in 1914 left small businesses struggling to collect and deliver everything from beer to newspapers and in Northamptonshire, the logbook for Blisworth School reported on 23 October 1917: “No school this afternoon – children gathering blackberries as suggested by a circular from the Local Authority.” [1] Children in this school, and many others across the country picked blackberries to make jam for the troops; one of the many contributions children made to the war effort. As the conflict progressed it increasingly impinged upon ordinary people’s everyday working and leisure lives and interfered with the domestic space of the home. The challenges of everyday life for civilians in wartime were many and varied, influenced by where someone lived, their age, gender, wealth and class. This essay discusses the bombing of civilians, leisure and the curtailments on alcoholic drinking and the production and consumption of food to argue that an understanding of the First World War necessitates a critical interrogation of the many incursions war made into citizens’ everyday lives.