conservative veteran m.p.s and the ‘lost generation’ narrative after the first world war

Conservative veteran M.P.s and the ‘lost generation’narrative after the First World Warhisr_581 284..305

Richard CarrUniversity of East Anglia

AbstractUsing veterans of the First World War who became Conservative party M.P.s after 1918, thisarticle re-examines the way the conflict was interpreted in post-1918 Britain. Pointing to thesubstantial numbers of men who fulfilled the above criteria (and how they used the conflict toreach such office) it illustrates one way in which the war was already being used as a significantpolitical device before the more famous authors like Robert Graves began to bend the eventto their narrative will from 1929.This had two important consequences: the Conservative partywas given a greater ‘national’ appeal by proxy; and a somewhat simplified account of the warexperience began to be forwarded, albeit not without some contestation and contradiction,earlier than we might think.

Having, in coalition with Lloyd George, awarded great swathes of proletarian men andthe majority of women the vote in 1918, the Conservative party went on to win thelargest share of parliamentary seats in five of the seven general elections that took placebetween the two world wars. Despite acquiescing in ‘the greatest error in modernhistory’ – the mass slaughter of the First World War – the Conservative party was ingovernment for almost nineteen of the twenty-one years that separated both globalconflicts.1 A party threatened, as Ewen Green noted, with political oblivion prior to1914 – in large part through its inability to solve contemporary questions surroundingIreland and the house of lords – bounced back after 1918 with real aplomb.2 Therehave been numerous explanations for this, from the everyman, sympathetic leadershipof Stanley Baldwin and the successful tailoring of the Conservative message to anaspirational, middle-class electorate, to the failure of the party’s political opponents toadapt to the new political reality of (albeit limited) state intervention in botheconomic and social spheres.3 The following suggests that, while important, thesefactors underplay a significant point: that the party succeeded in getting veterans intoparliament to a degree that lent it a national, supra-party appeal complementaryto propagandistic projections of Baldwin, and well attuned to a nation in the thrallof conflict. The direct corollary of this was to give a public, high profile voiceto ex-servicemen years before the more famous literary accounts of the wartimeexperience, and its meaning, hit the shelves.

This study is at once a prospographical analysis of the sheer volume of veteran M.P.sthat the inter-war Conservative party mustered, and an extension of the type of

1 N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (1999), p. 462.2 E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: the Politics, Economics and Ideology of the Conservative Party,

1880–1914 (1995), passim.3 Respectively best represented by P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values

(Cambridge, 1999); R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1991); andM. Bentley, The Liberal Mind 1914–29 (Cambridge, 1977).

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Copyright © 2011 Institute of Historical Research DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2011.00581.x Historical Research, vol. 85, no. 228 (May 2012)Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

political culture narrative favoured of late by academics from Jon Lawrence to HelenMcCarthy.4 It fuses local newspaper reports and archival material concerning the publicengagement of politicians with parliamentary psephology to present its case that theveteran, both in vocal and numeric terms, was less marginalized from the mainstreamthan the post-1929 literature would have us believe. What follows is, clearly, only oneway in which the recent conflict was used and interpreted in inter-war Britain.Richard Overy has highlighted the Morbid Age of cultural pessimism that followed thearmistice, while work on contemporary demographic fears abounds.5 Nevertheless,there is also, as we will see, room to reinterpret party politics.

We are dealing with well-trodden terrain in both an academic and cultural sense.Few myths permeate British society more deeply than the idea that a generation ofyoung men was annihilated during the First World War. From G.C.S.E. English studentsreciting the poetry of Wilfred Owen to the masses who annually congregate at theCenotaph, remembering the conflict marks a rare occasion where, even nine decadesafter its conclusion, Britons engage in public, collective articulation of mourning.Perhaps by way of consequence, this issue’s historiography has proved rich and diverse.Adrian Gregory, Alex King and Jay Winter have ably explored the nuances ofcommemoration – highlighting the continuities of remembrance within Europeantradition, and the role of the political establishment in organizing the set-pieces suchas 11 November.6 The former soldier himself has been well served of late, with NiallBarr’s study of the British Legion and Deborah Cohen’s analysis of disabled veteransbuilding upon the classic work of George Mosse to provide a compelling, nuancedpicture of ex-servicemen engaging in a post-conflict society of which they felt onlyhalf a part – at once superior to, yet somehow divorced from, the humdrum nature ofeveryday existence.7

The greatest tragedy of the war is also, perhaps, its greatest paradox: that a significantnumber (though clearly not all) of those who might help us understand its meaningwere killed in conflict, and were unable to articulate themselves in the post-1918world.8 The much vaunted ‘million dead’ opened a gap which the cultural sphereattempted to fill. ‘The First World War was the great military and political event of itstime’, stated Samuel Hynes, ‘but it was also the great imaginative event’.9 In his seminalwork on The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell went even further, pointingout that his book could easily have been subtitled ‘An Inquiry into the CuriousLiterariness of Real Life’.10 In the conflict’s aftermath, as Rosa Maria Bracco has

4 See J. Lawrence, Electing our Masters: the Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), fora long-run perspective; and H. McCarthy, ‘Parties, voluntary associations, and democratic politics in interwarBritain’, Historical Jour., l (2007), 891–912, for the period in question here.

5 R. Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (2009). On demographic worries, see B.W. Hart, ‘Britishand German eugenicists in transnational context’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 2011).

6 A. Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008), A. King, Memorialsof the Great War in Britain: the Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford, 1998) and J. M. Winter, Sites ofMemory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1998) have interrogated theauthorship of commemoration in a measured fashion. Less measured, though readable, is B. Bushaway, ‘Nameupon name: the Great War and remembrance’, in Myths of the English, ed. R. S. Porter (Oxford, 1992), pp. 136–67.

7 N. Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics, and Society, 1921–39 (2005); and D. Cohen, The WarCome Home: DisabledVeterans in Britain and Germany 1914–39 (2001). Mosse’s work is legion but G. L. Mosse,‘Twoworld wars and the myth of the war experience’, Jour. Contemporary Hist., xxi (1986), 491–513, is probably ofmost relevance here.

8 Thus denying us the opportunity to hear directly what they felt they were actually fighting for, as opposedto the claims of post-war memorializing.

9 S. Hynes, A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture (1990), p. ix.10 P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), p. ix.

Conservative veteran M.P.s after the First World War 285

shown, the more famous works of Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen were‘accompanied by a host of minor literature which attempted to rescue war from futilitynot through the defunct rhetoric of glory and honour, but by describing for its readersthe link between the suffering and the lessons of the war’.11 ‘The cessation ofhostilities did not mean the end of the war experience’, noted Eric Leed, ‘but ratherthe beginning of a process in which that experience was framed, institutionalized,given ideological context, and relived in political action as well as fiction’.12 Patriotism,as Hugh Cunningham has noted, had formed a contested space throughout thenineteenth century.13 In a newly democratic and mass media age, and with such visiblesymbols – veterans – of national virtue, what it meant to be British was even more upfor grabs. The link between Conservatism and patriotism, as Cunningham argued, isand was by no means innate however.14 The narrative needed to be ensconced.

After 1918, the war, as Cohen succinctly put it, came home.This was not only truein the case of the over 700,000 veterans eligible for disability benefit as a result of theirexertions, but the far greater number who returned, at least physically, unscathed.Important though studies of both literary and pressure group worlds have been, theyobscure the direct party political consequence of the conflict that this article proposesto address. Historians have long highlighted the demographic fallacy of the ‘lostgeneration’ of 1914 – taking into account emigration rates before the conflict, theBritish population saw a net increase during the war, even among men of fighting age,and even in urban areas – but, until recently, this has yet to filter through to acomprehensive study of ex-servicemen in parliament.15 Perhaps this is because, asGregory has recently shown, in literary accounts of the conflict we expect everyone toperish.16 Additionally, the abhorrent nature of continental fascist parties led by FirstWorld War veterans and clad in militaristic uniforms, together with the Churchillianinstance that Hitlerism was ‘un-English’, also possibly played their part in erasingformer soldiers from post-1945 memories of the nineteen-twenties and thirties.Consequently, the early histories of inter-war Britain in particular almost uniformlyportrayed Westminster without the ex-serviceman who, if only demographically, waslikely to have been there.17 This study interrogates this gap – mixing statistical evidenceof numbers of veteran M.P.s with accounts of their public discourse – to outline theactions of a cohort which contributed significantly to the impressions we have of theFirst World War.Though this analysis is primarily concerned with this phenomenon’simpact upon party politics, the latter point is important. Historians such as Mosse havequestioned why it took until 1929 for the deluge of war memoirs by authors such asGraves and Remarque to emerge.18 As Gary Sheffield commented, once the literary

11 R. M. Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–39 (Oxford, 1993),p. 1.

12 E. J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979), p. xi.13 H. Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy: Britain 1832–1918 (2001), passim, but particularly pp. 80–1

vis-à-vis the middle class(es).14 H. Cunningham, ‘The Conservative party and patriotism’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, ed.

R. Colls and P. Dodd (1986), pp. 283–307.15 A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–45 (Oxford, 1970), p. 165. Adrian Gregory corroborates this with

reference to the nation’s capital (A. Gregory,‘Lost generations: the impact of military casualties on Paris, London,and Berlin’, in Capital Cities at War, Paris, London, Berlin 1914–19, ed. J. M.Winter and J. L. Robert (Cambridge,1997), pp. 57–103.

16 Gregory, Last Great War, p. 3.The ending to Blackadder Goes Forth is arguably the best visual representationof this.

17 See Taylor, English History, p. 176; C. L. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars 1918–40 (1966), p. 8.18 Mosse, pp. 501–2.

286 Conservative veteran M.P.s after the First World War

dam of 1929–30 burst, any hope of an alternative history of 1914–18 was essentiallydrowned in its midst.19 Yet simply because the famous authors had yet to address thewar en masse, this did not augur that it had yet to be assigned contemporary meaning.Politics, the following will delineate, provided something of a forum for the ex-servicemen to vent in the 1918–29 interim – and occasionally one where, unlikeBracco’s account, notions of ‘glory and honour’ were not defunct.

Though centred around generational theory, this article does not propose to tacklethe theories of Karl Mannheim head on. Mannheim, famously, espoused theimportance of generations in enacting political change – particularly with regard tothe ‘front generation’ of which he was chronologically a part.20 Simon Ball has recentlysubjected the attempt of Sir Oswald Mosley to recruit young Tories to his New Partyin 1930–1 through such a prism, but this article concerns the narrative that veteransweaved in the 1918–29 period, not what they failed to achieve thereafter.21 In doingso it rather extends the work of Nigel Keohane, whose recent study on the Party ofPatriotism concentrates on the new challenges to Conservatism posed ‘in the years1914–18’, and how the cultural effect of war became a political weapon.22 Thoughstatistics are included for Labour and Liberal party ex-servicemen, the first section isprimarily concerned with the type of aristocratic interpretation of the war seenamong Tories who were of a similar social background to Graves and Sassoon.WhileGraves said Goodbye to AllThat in 1929 and sought refuge in the Majorcan sun, veteransturned Tory M.P.s would have to face their memories at home, and face them theycertainly did.23 The years of high office for the Edens and Macmillans have been welldocumented, as have the effect of the two authors during the same period.This articleforms a re-evaluation of the period between the transitive experience (conflict) andwhat is often understood to be its initial articulation (the semi-autobiographical novel).It offers a contribution to the memory of war within the wider context of thefamous literary interpretations, and, concurrently, an explanation of the foundations ofpost-war Conservative politics and electoral success.

We may clarify one point from the outset.The number of Conservative M.P.s who sawuniformed service during the First World War and then went on to serve in inter-warWestminster was in no way commensurate with a political flash in the pan, or indeeda ‘lost generation’. J. M. McEwen’s psephology of the 1918 parliament was exemplary,but his view that ‘forward [into parliament] came those who had been too old to weara uniform . . . [such men] dominated British politics in the 1920’s [sic] and the 1930’s[sic]’ can only be sustained by a narrow concentration on the 1918–22 administration.24

19 G. D. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (2000), pp. 6–7.20 As a slight corrective, C. Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim: Culture, Politics and Planning

(Cambridge, 1985), p. 83, shows that, while class did not supersede generation in Mannheim’s eyes, nor wasthe reverse true. Both mattered. It is worth consulting K. Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology,ed. P. Kecskemeti (1953); and K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. P. Kecskemeti (CollectedWorks, v, 1997).

21 S. J. Ball, ‘Mosley and the Tories in 1930: the problem of generations’, Jour. Contemporary British Hist., xxiii(2009), 445–59. Mannheim is regarded as something of a guru of modern conservatism, though his work focusedprimarily on the early 19th century (see Conservatism: a Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. D. Kettler,V. Meja and N. Stehr (1986), p. 3, on how Mannheim linked the rise of political conservatism to generationaltheory).

22 N. Keohane, The Party of Patriotism: the Conservative Party and the First World War (Farnham, 2010), p. 10.23 R. Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929).24 J. M. McEwen, ‘The coupon election of 1918 and Unionist members of parliament’, Jour. Modern Hist.,

xxxiv (1962), 294–306, at p. 306.

In fact, there were 448 M.P.s who sat on the Tory benches between the wars havingserved during the recent conflict.26 In total, 72 per cent of future Conservativesborn between 1875 and 1900 fell into this category. Not all, clearly, had long anddistinguished careers, but the average veteran member served fifteen years (a meanaverage of 1922–37) – long enough to make his mark. In all, 7 per cent of Tory FirstWorld War veterans would achieve cabinet rank after 1918, including every foreignsecretary in a Tory-dominated administration from 1931 to 1955, and every primeminister (if one includes Attlee) from 1940 to 1963. Compared to the non-combatant,1875–1900 born cohort, the veteran generation was much more successful.The typicalmember of that group only had a 4.5 per cent chance of reaching the cabinet, onaverage had a shorter parliamentary career (thirteen years, a mean average of 1926–39),and was statistically less likely to serve after 1945 (11.2 per cent compared to 13.8per cent). In the light of a general historiography which allots the veteran anon-mainstream role in post-1918 life, the numbers matter (see Table 1).

Even in the electoral catastrophe of 1923, almost two-thirds of the veterans inparliament were Conservative members. From the formation of the NationalGovernment in 1931 over 82 per cent of ex-servicemen in parliament were membersof the party, and 89 per cent pledged to support the administration. While OswaldMosley overtly portrayed his British Union of Fascists as a product of the trenchesafter 1932 – salutes, uniforms and drums – even he would have struggled to mustersuch levels of support from former soldiers.27 For all the cultural pessimism in theinter-war period, this achievement should not be overlooked.

Clearly there are explanations why this was so. The first concerns thesocio-economic status of the type of candidate likely to stand for each major party.Future Labour M.P.s could not leave home so easily during the conflict, with theknowledge that their job could well be filled upon their return. Similarly, they weremore likely to undertake roles vital for the war effort – munitions factory work, forone – than the would-be Conservative. Lastly, the example of Edward Wood (laterLord Halifax), who reached the front line despite being born with only one hand, wasless likely to be repeated among the working class – who would be even warier ofleaving employment under such circumstances, and would very possibly lack the

25 Compiled from Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament: a Bibliographical Dictionary of the House ofCommons, Based on Annual Volumes of ‘Dod’s Parliamentary Companion’ and other Sources, ed. M. Stenton and S. Lees(4 vols., 1976–81), iii–iv.

26 For the statistics shown here (and their significance), see R. Carr, The Phoenix Generation at Westminster:Great War Veterans Turned Tory M.P.s, Democratic Political Culture and the Path of British Conservatism from the Armisticeto the Welfare State (unpublished University of East Anglia Ph.D. thesis, 2010), introduction and ch. 2.

27 M. Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005).

Table 1. Number of First World War veterans elected in British general elections, 1918–3525

1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Conservative 148 143 113 200 135 221 171Allied to the Conservatives 24 – – 5 – 18 14Elected under any ‘Liberal’ banner 31 34 43 13 15 17 13Labour 5 9 14 14 32 5 18

Total 189 188 172 233 182 249 208

connections to ‘pass’ any army medical examination.28 Over 41 per cent, mostly theimpoverished, of those examined by the National Service Medical Board in the lastyear of the war were deemed unable ‘to undergo physical exertion’ or ‘totally unfit forany military service’.29 This is to be borne in mind – the First World War may havebeen a great leveller in that German artillery did not distinguish among classes, but itdid not lack class difference, as we will see.

At the same time, the general pattern of elections during the inter-war periodcertainly made it more likely that veterans would be Conservative than members ofany other party (see Table 2). For all the initial accusations of ‘hard faced men who haddone well out of the war’, it is important to note that sixty-four of the 281 Unionistsin parliament at the dissolution of 1918 did not seek re-election that year, openingsomething of a gap for fresh blood.30 From then on, only the 1923 and 1929 electionsdid not produce Tory-dominated administrations and, ex-serviceman or not, thepragmatic choice between the wars was clearly to follow the party of Bonar Law andBaldwin. Despite this, however, the percentage of each parliamentary party who servedreveal that, dominant electorally or not, the Conservatives were the front generation’sparliamentary party.

General electoral discrepancy aside then, the Conservatives were best placed todeliver the narrative of the ex-serviceman. Though the Tory party was and is amonolithic body in many ways – all twenty-one of the 1924 cabinet had attendedpublic school, with sixteen going on to Oxbridge – this was no barrier to veterans, ofwhom Simon Ball’s Guardsmen were but some of the more famous former Etonians toenter post-war politics.31 Interestingly, given the propensity of Edwardian schoolboyturned post-war author to portray a straight path from Eton and Oxbridge to thebattlefield, most future politicians had clearly experienced something of thenon-scholastic pre-1914 world (see Table 3). The playing fields of Eton may havehelped to win the war, as they had assisted during the battle of Trafalgar, but at thesame time, as this article shows, Etonians went on to influence later politics.32

28 A. Roberts, The Holy Fox: a Biography of Lord Halifax (1991), p. 10.29 J. M. Winter, ‘Britain’s “lost generation” of the First World War’, Population Stud., xxxi (1977), 449–66, at

p. 455.30 Baldwin Papers: a Conservative Statesman, 1908–47, ed. P.Williamson and E. Baldwin (Cambridge, 2004), p. 40;

McEwen, p. 294.31 See D. Butler and G. Butler, Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, 1900–2000 (8th edn., 2000), p. 71.

S. J. Ball, The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World they Made (2005).32 Though of course not exclusively in the Tory party. Labour’s chancellor of the exchequer (1945–7) Hugh

Dalton and the Liberal leader (1935–45) Archibald Sinclair were both former Etonians. For a far right alumnus,George Pitt-Rivers, see B. W. Hart, ‘Watching the “eugenic experiment” unfold: the mixed views of Britisheugenicists towards Nazi Germany in the early 1930s’, Jour. History Biology (forthcoming, 2011).

Table 2. Veterans as a percentage of each parliamentary party

1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Conservatives 39 41.5 44 48.5 52 47 44Combined Liberals – – 27 9 9 24 24Lloyd George Liberals 17 26 – – – – –Asquith Liberals 22 31 – – – – –Labour 9 6 7 9 11 10 12

Just as surviving soldiers turned Conservatives could mythologize the nature of theirwars, this did not augur a lack of bravery. As Alexander Watson and Patrick Porterhave recently shown, notions of sacrifice were abundant in wartime culture.34 To ageneration raised in the pre-war public school atmosphere of masculinity – expressedin both sporting terms, and the even more overt operations of the Officer TrainingCorps – this was undoubtedly a heady cocktail.35 As the current author has arguedelsewhere, the concurrently feminine nature of such existence – poetry, beautifularchitecture and a classically liberal education – may also have led some to wish tobreak free from such confusion and plump fully for masculinity.36 To be sure, the officerclass of Tory emerged from the conflict festooned with medals (see Table 4).

As these statistics illustrate, the opportunity was there to create a narrative: ofbravery, and specifically of Conservative bravery.Though the Liberal party was arguablysimilarly well placed to capitalize, it suffered more generally from a split in theleadership, and an inability to adapt to a world where the state had entered the public

33 Compiled from Carr, Phoenix Generation, app. E, and List of Etonians who Fought in the Great War 1914–19,comp. E. L.Vaughan (Windsor, 1921), passim.

34 To some extent, then, this article is both a corrective to, and extension of, the views expressed in A.Watsonand P. Porter, ‘Bereaved and aggrieved: combat motivation and the ideology of sacrifice in the First World War’,Hist. Research, lxxxiii (2010), 146–64. Porter and Watson argue that the violence inherent in pre- and early warculture created an atmosphere where sacrifice remained a resonant concept for soldiers, even when theircomrades had been killed and the realities of service brought home.A desire for vengeance, rather than timidityand sorrow, was the more common reaction to witnessing death. Perhaps post-1918 politics, this articledelineates, forms a continuation of this release of pent-up feeling.

35 See G. J. De Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (1996); J.Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinityand the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999); and F. Neddam, ‘Constructing masculinities under ThomasArnold of Rugby (1828–42): gender, educational policy and school life in an early-Victorian public school’,Gender and Education, xvi (2004), 303–26.

36 See Carr, Phoenix Generation, ch. 1.

Table 3. Number of Etonians who served in the First World War and then became Tory M.P.s33

Decade in which they left Eton Number who became M.P.s

1870s 21880s 181890s 311900s 281910s 30

Total 109

Table 4. Number of military crosses, D.S.O.s, Victoria Crosses and French Croix de Guerres inparliament

1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Conservative 40 34 30 55 36 60 45Labour 1 2 3 1 5 2 2Lloyd George Liberal 10 – – – – 1 1Combined Liberal 14 15 22 6 7 5 4Other 3 – – 2 – 1 –

sphere to a degree at odds with the party’s Weltanschauung.The Tory veteran belongedto a party that had not imploded during the war, that could be presented in thesimplistic back and forth of British politics as having acted honourably throughout theconflict, and came from a similar background, with the same form of Etonian literaryeducation, as the Julian Grenfells whose prose has so shaped understanding of theconflict to date. Put simply, they were well positioned to make an impact inpost-conflict life, and the Conservative party, it seems, latched on to this.

There have been many attempts to explain the arguably perverse phenomenon of Torysuccess in a newly democratic political culture.We must first note the influence of thatoddly mercurial figure, Stanley Baldwin. To Baldwin’s most staunch defender, PhilipWilliamson, the carefully cultivated image of amiable Worcestershire pig farmer hasblinded us to his considerable political skill. ‘Addressing his party and the public with anew note of purposefulness, idealism, and sensitivity towards labour’,Williamson argues,Baldwin harnessed ‘national values’ to ‘Conservative causes’.37 Andrew Taylor essentiallyagrees, pointing out that, unlike the industrial charter after the second war, Baldwinsuccessfully bridged the gap between party principle and the needs of the masses.38 Evenif, as John Charmley states, Baldwin’s projection as a simple, honest, quintessentiallyBritish chap sometimes amounted to little more than portraying the left, by contrast, asa foreign ideology in the pay of Zinoviev, there is little doubt his leadership was an assetto the party.39 For as David Close has concluded, by painting his policies – such as theywere – in broad brush strokes, Baldwin allowed the Conservatives to become sosynonymous with the nation that two successive (vastly)Tory administrations – 1931 and1935 – could be presented to the public as ‘National’ in character.40 In an age ofturbulence, dependability went down very well indeed.

Dependability, it should be said, went beyond the leadership. British political historyis full of examples of rogue elements within parties threatening to the rock the boat– whether through questioning the leadership, or making the party unattractiveelectorally. From radical Marxists in the early labour movement to rabid anti-Europeans in the contemporary Tory party, leaders have usually been wary of theirmore extreme followers. Somewhat unusually then, the hundreds of veterans backingthe Conservative party could actually form something of an asset – providing anacceptable face to sell the party’s more unpopular policies, while offering a balanceinternally to the right-wing elements within the party caucus. Veterans, of course,could be of the right:Winston Churchill during the General Strike, George Lloyd onIndia and Henry Page Croft generally were not exactly bastions of enlightenedprogressivism. Anti-semites such as Archibald James and Archibald Ramsay also beganto gain greater prominence as Hitler’s diplomacy unfolded in the nineteen-thirties.Yetmost veterans offset such elements. Harold Macmillan’s and Alfred Duff Cooper’sconciliatory rhetoric in May 1926, Edward Wood’s roundtable negotiations withGandhi, and works such as Industry and the State, The Great Opportunity (of whichGeorge Lloyd was, somewhat ironically, a co-author) and Bolshevism in Perspective were

37 Williamson, pp. 27, 336.38 A.Taylor, ‘Speaking to democracy: the Conservative party and mass opinion from the 1920s to the 1950s’,

in Mass Conservatism: the Conservatives and the Public since the 1880s, ed. S. Ball and I. Holliday (2002), pp. 78–99,at p. 96.

39 J. Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–96 (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 70.40 D. H. Close, ‘Conservatives and coalition after the First World War’, Jour. Modern Hist., xlv (1973), 240–60,

at p. 260.

evidence that the war had, by and large, produced a moderate, intellectually engagedbreed of Conservative.41 The sheer number of such men allowed Baldwin to steer acentrist cause, defeating a coup against his leadership in March 1931, and subsequentlyleading his party into office in alliance with MacDonald later that year. Baldwin’s ‘NewConservatism’ – ably highlighted by John Ramsden – appeared both the natural hometo, and beneficiary of, the war generation of young Tories.42

War has, after all, long been considered a decisive factor in elections around the globe.In America, founded lest we forget by violent revolution, a man’s character has essentiallybeen assessed by his bravery in the face of danger (a trend the internet is arguablyexacerbating).43 No surprise then, that even in the twenty-first century’s first twopresidential elections – McCain-Obama and Bush-Kerry – the candidate with themilitary record has virtually defined his campaign upon militaristic rhetoric:‘John Kerry:reporting for duty’, and such like. Similarly, over four decades earlier John FitzgeraldKennedy was able to use his brave service in the Second World War to counteract anylingering doubts that voting for a Roman Catholic was somehow ‘un-American’.Europe too has seen its ex-servicemen prosper politically.Whereas Hitler and Mussoliniused their exploits in the trenches to attract members to their ‘fighting part[ies], whichpursue aims ruthlessly, with every means, even with force’, Charles de Gaulle wouldappeal to ‘a certain idea of France’,‘where all [her] sons and daughters marched towardsthe national goal, hand in hand’, as they had supposedly done during the occupation(though where Vichy fitted in is anyone’s guess).44 That we do not place such culturalemphasis on military records in recent British elections possibly emanates fromChurchill’s crushing defeat in 1945, and the seemingly paradoxical image of the heroicwar leader being jettisoned by his own people. Nevertheless, that a Westminster electioncould be influenced by such ephemera is a notion we must consider.

To begin with, many Conservative candidates used their war records to camouflagetheir often scant governmental, administrative or even general life experience (1918saw the highest number – 168 – of new Tory members in the seven elections betweenthe wars).45 This was quite understandable – not only was service a noble endeavour,but it had robbed young men of the years in which they would normally have gainedsuch competences. ‘Mr Fred Henderson, who was also standing, had done good workat home’, proclaimed a 1918 election letter from Lloyd George and Bonar Law to theNorfolk people, ‘but not better than Captain [Michael] Falcon had done by helpingGeneral Allenby to secure one of the greatest victories in military history’.46

The account of Albert Braithwaite’s candidacy in the 1926 by-election in Buckroseis similarly indicative. Having referenced Braithwaite’s background in the Leedsbusiness community, his campaign manager followed up by ‘mention[ing] that Major

41 R. J. G. Boothby, H. Macmillan, J. de V. Loder and O. Stanley, Industry and the State: a Conservative View(1927); Lloyd and Wood; and J. de V. Loder, Bolshevism in Perspective (1931).

42 J. Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin 1902–40 (1978), p. 190.43 Initiatives such ‘Who served? Military service of politicians’ (<http://www.whoserved.com> [accessed 4

Feb. 2011]) are the modern manifestation of the type of issues this article addresses. There one can see thepercentage of former presidents with previous military service (61.9%), and statistical analysis of the house ofrepresentatives and U.S. senate. Results are relatively ambiguous: more Republican senators (3%) served inVietnam than Democrats (1%), while the opposite is true for the house of representatives (0.9% of Republicanscompared to 1.6% of Democrats). The Korean War has similar trends.

44 Nazism 1919–45, i: the Rise to Power 1919–34, ed. J. Noakes and G. Pridham (Exeter, 1983), p. 17 (Hitler on26 Oct. 1920); C. de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, i: l’appel, 1940–2 (Paris, 1954), p. 7; C. de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre,ii: l’unité, 1942–4 (Paris, 1956), p. 497.

45 McEwen, p. 299.46 Norfolk News, 7 Dec. 1918.

Braithwaite served in the Army as a private and rose to the rank of major and gainedthe DSO, of course, so did many others. He only mentioned this to show the kind ofman he was’.47 This idea that a war record begat some kind of vague moral supremacywas certainly one that Conservative campaign agents cottoned on to more quicklythan their mainstream counterparts. Leo Amery – prominent on the political stagebefore 1914 after all – devoted two pages of a 1918 election leaflet to his war service,while John Loder gave over approximately one-fifth of his 1929 version to the same.48

Contrast such bellicosity with the 1929 veteran Liberal candidate in Brecon, CemlynJones, who played upon his proficiency in the Welsh language rather than the war, andA. V. Alexander, whose Labour newspaper printed four pages in 1931 extolling hisvirtues without once mentioning the trenches.49 While Hugh Dalton’s London Schoolof Economics fellowship may indeed have suggested a more competent M.P. than hiswar service, people often vote as much with their hearts as with their heads, andperhaps his 1922 candidacy – even in academic Cambridge – should have recognizedthis.50 The Conservatives, it seems, may have better understood the psychology of themasses who, particularly in depressed times financially, lusted after heroes from aglorious past. ‘Gallant commander’, ‘the glamour of an old soldier’ – such descriptionslittered newspaper coverage of Conservative veteran candidacies.51 Put simply, the warsold, and the Tories were not afraid to capitalize on this.

Unlike their Labour opponents, Conservative candidates were virtually immune toany suggestion of treachery. Seymour Cocks may have written sympathetically toArthur Ponsonby that the 1918 election was ‘the biggest joke of the century . . . a jokethat will wear thin’, but one cannot ignore the fact that, despite Labour possessingmany exponents of the war – James O’Grady, John Hodge and Ben Tillett – that partycould perpetually be dubbed unpatriotic.52 The year 1918 is, to be sure, a slightanomaly.While, as Cocks noted, ‘the electorate evidently preferred the Bottomleys andPemberton Billings to serious politicians’, they would start to change their tune.53 AsSally Harris has noted, no member of the Union of Democratic Control (U.D.C.) –who had opposed the war from the outset and urged for a negotiated peace – waselected to parliament at the khaki election, though she neglects to mention NeilMcLean’s successful candidacy in Govan having been a conscientious objector.54 Thisbegan to alter: a tally of Labour M.P.s reveals twenty-seven former U.D.C. members inthe 1929 parliament (9 per cent of the total parliamentary Labour party) and thirteen

47 Driffield and Buckrose Mail, 29 Apr. 1926.48 Cambridge, Churchill College, Churchill Archives Centre (hereafter C.A.C.), papers of Leo Amery, AMEL

4/8, ‘Sparkbrook Parliamentary Division’ leaflet, 1918; Parliamentary Archives (hereafter P.A.), papers of BaronWakehurst, WAK 4/4, Leicester East election leaflet, 1929.

49 Brecon and Radnor Express, 2 May 1929; C.A.C., papers of A. V. Alexander, AVAR 8/1, ‘Hillsbro toWestminster Express’ newspaper, 1931. Alexander’s war was not the most glamorous (and certainly not the mosttrench based), but the point is that such modesty bothered Tories, whether they had seen over frontline or not,rather less.

50 On the importance of fitting one’s narrative to the hearts as well as the heads of an electorate, seeD. Westen, The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation (New York, 2007), passim. OnDalton, see Cambridgeshire Archives (hereafter C.A.), MPE 416/O32–3, election pamphlet, 1922. His leaflet ofseveral pages contained but two sentences devoted to the war.

51 Birmingham Gazette, 15 Nov. 1922; Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead Times, 22 Feb. 1921.52 Oxford, Bodleian Library, papers of Baron Ponsonby, c. 667, Cocks to Ponsonby, 29 Dec. 1918. O’Grady,

a Social Democratic Federation Marxist, and Tillett, of 1889 dock strike fame, were far from ardent gradualists(R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: a Study in the Politics of Labour (2nd edn., 1972), p. 32).

53 Bodl. Libr., papers of Baron Ponsonby, c. 667, Cocks to Ponsonby, 29 Dec. 1918.54 S. Harris, Out of Control: British Foreign Policy and the Union of Democratic Control, 1914–18 (Hull, 1996),

p. 221.

by 1935 (8 per cent of the total).These figures, it may be noted, were only marginallyless than the numbers of veterans they secured in parliament. Nevertheless, the ideathat Labour candidates would constantly have to face accusations of betraying theircountry – particularly when the Tories shifted the discourse in that direction – is animportant one. Gee versus MacDonald in Woolwich, as we will see, was perhaps theapex of this. For now we may note the 1920 words of E. D. Morel, founder of theUnion of Democratic Control, on his potential parliamentary candidacy in Dundee:

I retreat not one inch from the position I took up on the war when it broke out [and] I wouldnot be induced to compromise in this respect in the slightest degree in order to securevotes . . . you would have to be prepared for an avalanche of mud being thrown at yourcandidate, if I were your man. Mud no doubt is always thrown at elections, but this would besomething quite special and peculiar, and quite out of the ordinary. There are a number ofinfluential persons in governing circles who would move heaven and earth to keep me out ofParliament, and no calumny would be too vile, and no charge too grotesque for them tolaunch. In that respect they would stick at nothing.55

One method of highlighting such discrepancies in the party’s war records was theproduction of veterans come election time – for not by chance would Morel’sopponent be that great self-publicist, Winston Spencer Churchill (at that time still aLiberal).The furore surrounding the Zinoviev letter in 1924 was but such tactics playedout.The Conservatives were the patriotic, national party, and all others were dissentersfrom some perceived notion of ‘Britishness’. And what could be more British thanfrontline wartime service?

Despite women ostensibly being given the vote as reward for the sterling effortsmany had shown between 1914 and 1918, the ultimate test of humanity had becomeone’s courage in the face of direct physical danger. Nicoletta Gullace has thussuggested that the renegotiation of women’s citizenship during the war was as mucha by-product of efforts to reward male soldiers as of previous suffragette pressure.56

Nevertheless, in general terms, manliness was in, effeteness out.This had consequencesconcerning election campaigns for, as Jon Lawrence has pointed out, while the politywas in part more feminized than the rowdy nature of pre-war hustings, this was notuniversally so.57 If the violence inherent in the political ‘brawl’ worried sections ofright-wing opinion predisposed to see ‘a deeply rooted pathology within the socialsystem’, this fear was generally applied to the collective mob, not to the candidatesthemselves.58 When Tory candidate Oliver Locker-Lampson – who had served with theWiltshire Yeomanry in France – surrounded himself with a fascistic militia, left hisplatform to grab a cheeky questioner by the tie and hair, and addressed a meeting thatescalated into a collection of free fights, the Birmingham Gazette proclaimed itself‘amazed’ but by no means totally critical.59 Despite the relative feminization of thefranchise, the character of inter-war electioneering could be decisively tailored towardsmen. In part this was tactical; before 1928 women needed to be nine years older thanmen to vote – even after the ‘flappers’ entered the electoral playing field most parties

55 London School of Economics, papers of E. D. Morel, F2 1/7, E. D. Morel to D. Watt, 12 May 1920.56 N. F. Gullace, The Blood of our Sons: Men,Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great

War (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 7.57 J. Lawrence, ‘The transformation of British public politics after the First World War’, Past & Present, cxc

(2006), 185–216. J. Lawrence, ‘Fascist violence and the politics of public order in inter-war Britain: the Olympiadebate revisited’, Hist. Research, lxxvi (2003), 238–67, suggests that after Olympia violence at public meetingsincreasingly came to be seen as abhorrent.

58 Lawrence, ‘Transformation of British public politics’, p. 212.59 Birmingham Gazette, 17 and 25 May 1925.

were more likely to blame the supposedly unpredictable female voter when they lostthan chase their vote on polling day.60 Importantly, if Edwardian society had beenchauvinistic, the war reinforced within people’s minds that this was indeed logical.61

The Times spoke for many in declaring that women should be spared the rough andtumble of the political meeting, and others noted the lack of feminine presence atsuch occasions.62 If homes should be fit for male heroes, elections were, in part, tacitlytreated in a similar vein.

At the same time, women – even before 1928 – occupied a useful role in themindset of the Tory electoral machine.Violence, to be sure, was a male preserve: thewar had been seen to vindicate that. Yet a distinction had to be wrought betweenthe kind of rough and tumble seen at Tory meetings like Locker-Lampson’s, andthat at the other parties’, most obviously Labour. Sometimes subtly, often not,the Conservatives were trying to draw a fault line between the ephemeral appealboth parties offered. Thus a Cambridge newspaper could report the Conservativecandidate Captain Briscoe saying ‘that the Red Flag and the Union Jack could notfly together. (Applause). The day that the Red Flag was hoisted over the country, theUnion Jack must go down. He meant to see that the Union Jack was kept flying’.63

While the two parties were in fact not acting very differently – for all the symbolicimportance, they were essentially just waving flags at one another – it was theintention of the Tory propaganda machine to hammer home the divergence in tone.So it was with political violence. This, as Lawrence crucially points out, was nolonger an exclusively male polity.64 The boorish nature of pre-1914 politics wouldno longer do, particularly if Labour were to be portrayed as thuggish, disorganizedhooligans. Thus war veterans were very useful – fulfilling traditional masculineimages of bravery and strength, and not alienating women by virtue of theirprevious gallantry. If things got rough, the audience was seen as being in the righthands. The feminization of politics did not kill the pre-war rough and tumble, butlent it a new emphasis.65

The war changed the character of the British electoral map in other regards too.While we tend to think of the effect of conflict in national terms – in this sense, thata notable percentage of potential voters had been killed – war trauma was in fact feltmore deeply at a local level. Lutyens’s Cenotaph may have become the centrepiece forcollective mourning, but it is scarcely possible to find a town in Britain that does notcommemorate its own fallen sons. In an age where unifying concepts such as regularcross-country travel and a national mass media were only just starting to becomefamiliar, the world was a lot smaller. Grandstanding on issues of national importance

60 Taylor, English History, p. 332.61 In his essay ‘If I were a dictator’, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett did not exactly suggest a bold new era of sexual

equality: ‘The masses are incapable of thinking for themselves or of knowing what is good for them . . . Youcannot govern a country with a National Debt of seven thousand millions by consulting twenty five millionsof different people. Now the Conservatives have invited five million flappers, whose intellects are usually foundin their feet at their tender age to add to the general muddle. Mr Baldwin has in fact broadened the basis ofchronic misgovernment. I would send these girls back to their homes and their young men’ (University ofLondon, Senate House Library (hereafter S.H.L.), ICS 84/C/12/3, undated [c.1928]).

62 The Times, 7 Dec. 1923.63 C.A., MPE 416/O45, Daily News extract, 2 May 1924.64 Lawrence, Electing our Masters, p. 128.65 What happens to the British polity after 1918 is a complex question indeed. Jon Lawrence has qualified a

tendency towards the absolute feminization of politics, emphasizing both fears of brutalization and thecontinuation of aspects of political violence (J. Lawrence, ‘Forging a peaceable kingdom: war, violence, and fearof brutalization in post-First World War Britain’, Jour. Modern Hist., lxxv (2003), 557–89).

was obviously necessary on occasion, but M.P.s were and are elected at a local level.Here a war record offered two distinct advantages. First, service in a local regimentwas perfect local newspaper fodder. Christopher Lowther, speaking as a CoalitionConservative in 1918, was fervently keen to point out that he had ‘made a great manyfriends in [the CumberlandYeomanry]’, and could ‘honestly say it was in a way perhapsthe happiest time of my life when I was with all these excellent fellows from thiscounty’.66 Excellent fellows who would presumably pay him back on polling day. Putsimply, being a native of – or having some connection, like war service, to – one’sintended seat counted for much more than in contemporary times. Jack Strange,the gardener of Major Philip Colfox, was accordingly dispatched to a meeting of theLiberal candidate, a Welsh Methodist minister named Chapel, to ask him the way toHalstock – a remote nearby town – in the dark. During the same campaign, Colfoxwas able to scrape home despite local newspapers reporting ‘the Major has done itnow’ after he angrily responded to Chapel’s prediction of victory: ‘if you think thatyou are a bigger B.F. than I thought you were.’These were local elections fought withregard to local sensibilities and ‘a great local character’, like the veteran Colfox, couldget away with much.67

Second, many areas of the British Isles – Scapa Flow and Portsmouth for example– had essentially been on the front line, and were thus particularly attuned to theimportance of whether or not one had fought. In the years immediately following thewar, local press coverage could consequently be vitriolic. Hull, hit by German bombingraids during the war, is a good case in point.Throughout the 1918 campaign the HullDaily News was in virtual hysterics: ‘The Zeppelins [sic] Foul Work: Striking Recordof German Infamy’; ‘What Hull will Never Forget: The Murderous Work of theZeppelins’; ‘More pictures of Zeppelin Raid Damage’.68 That Hull would returnfour M.P.s with some form of patriotic war service – including three CoalitionConservatives – perhaps comes as little surprise amidst such a heady atmosphere.Liverpool elected four veterans in 1918, and Bradford two.69 The war naturally did notremove traditional barometers such as class and wealth from the political equation, butit provided a further plain on which contests could be fought, and one on which theConservatives held a distinct advantage. If, as Ross McKibbin points out, NorthernIreland (after 1921) was something of an electoral anomaly in that Tories had a fargreater chance of winning there than any other national party, there were otherconstituencies similarly weighted – though out of immediate experience rather thancenturies old rivalry.70

Some caution is necessary however. One does not wish to overemphasize theimportance of a war record, for it was no guarantee of positive coverage. The caseof Robert Gee serves ample notice of this. That Gee’s opponent in the 1921by-election at Woolwich should be Ramsay MacDonald, whose stance in 1914 hadbrought him social (even his son disagreed) and political isolation, constitutes one

66 Cumberland Times, 19 Nov. 1918.67 John Colfox to the author, 25 Aug. 2009.68 Hull News and the Weekly Supplement, 7 and 14 Dec. 1918.69 The contingent in Liverpool being Jack Cohen in Fairfield, Harry Chilcott in Walton, James Rankin in East

Toxteth and Nathan Raw in Wavertree (all Conservatives). Archibald Boyd-Carpenter in Bradford North(Conservative) and Charles Loseby (a coalition supporting member of the National Democratic party) were alsoelected that year. Hull and Bradford, particularly, constituted contested ground. Hull East had a Liberal M.P.between 1906 and 1918, and Hull Central went Liberal in the by-election that followed the death of Mark Sykesin 1919. Bradford East had similarly had a Liberal member between 1906 and 1918.

70 McKibbin, p. 263.

of history’s more interesting ironies.71 Almost from the outset, Gee – backed byprominent rogue Horatio Bottomley – seems to have decided to make the contestpurely based on the differences between his and MacDonald’s wars. When addressingconstituents, Gee ‘asked them to vote for the man who fought for his country – notfor the man who was a friend of every country but his own’.72 He would go onto declare himself ‘desirous on this and every occasion of preventing mischievousmen from entering the House of Commons, and particularly those who in timeof stress and peril did nothing . . . to back the men who were fighting theircountry’s battles’.73 Tellingly, according to the local newspaper, ‘in the view of someexperienced electioneers’ the MacDonald equals traitor ‘innuendo has been presseda little too hard at the Coalition meetings. Voters would like to know a little moreabout what the gallant Captain will do when he sits in the House of Commons’.74

Gee constitutes something of an extreme case – unlike a Mosley or Eden he wasnot a career politician, and not only did he not adhere to the rules of the game,he probably did not even understand them. Nevertheless, his success must beacknowledged, defeating as he did a future prime minister in one of Labour’straditional strongholds.

While veterans undoubtedly proved an asset to the Conservative party, it shouldalso be stressed that contemporary politicians needed such men to prevent thefermentation of discontent and conserve the status quo against any revolutionaryzeal. As Stephen Ward has shown, particularly in the years immediately following1918, the prospects for revolution in Great Britain were arguably as high as at anytime since Chartism in the mid nineteenth century.75 The extent to whichex-servicemen felt divorced from the political process in the initial post-conflictyears was indeed a point highlighted by both Labour and Irish opponents to theConservative party alike.76 Yet when the Liberal party in Brecon asked people in1924 to ‘vote for [the incumbent] Jenkins who is all out for ex-Servicemen’, itsimply could not fly in the face of Lloyd George’s failure to deliver upon hisfamous pledge.77 Though Jenkins had paid high tribute to ex-servicemen whenunveiling a local war memorial, he himself had not served, and the soldierly votedeserted him for the Conservative Captain Walter D’Arcy Hall, whose MilitaryCross and Croix de Guerre were arguably worth a thousand valedictory speeches.Conversely, while campaigning in Buckrose, one of Albert Braithwaite’s supporterswas able to claim that ‘no man in Leeds had worked harder than Maj. Braithwaitehad done on behalf of the pensioners, and the discharged soldiers, or done more tohelp those who had contracted illnesses during the war’. He was met with sustainedapplause.78 Therein could lie the difference.

Using veterans, the Conservative party was able to project an image of competence,stability and compassion somewhat at odds with a party whose return to the gold

71 Cambridge University Library (hereafter C.U.L.), RCS/RCMS 41, Malcolm MacDonald, unpublishedautobiography ‘Constant surprise – a twentieth century life’, pp. 61–2.

72 Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead Times, 22 Feb. 1921.73 Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead Times, 22 Feb. 1921.74 Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead Times, 22 Feb. 1921.75 S. R.Ward, ‘Intelligence surveillance of British ex-servicemen, 1918–20,’ Historical Jour., xvi (1973), 179–88.76 See Jimmy Thomas on former soldiers and the Out of Work Donation Scheme in Hansard, Parliamentary

Debates, cxxxviii (23 Feb. 1921), col. 1094. Likewise National Archives of Ireland, UCDA P150/1900, ArtO’Brien to Michael Collins, 2 and 12 Dec. 1920, illustrate how the Irish viewed such a problem as a realopportunity for them.

77 Brecon and Radnor Express, 23 Oct. 1924.78 Driffield and Buckrose Mail, 22 Apr. 1926.

standard in 1925, handling of the General Strike, and subsequent passage of the TradeDisputes Act rendered such notions somewhat questionable.Yet merely presenting theex-soldier as a Conservative was not enough.A narrative had to be created to reinforcethe veteran’s credibility.

The repeated use of war records had two direct consequences. On the one hand, itgave the Conservative party a distinct appeal which helped it, together with theharmonious rhetoric of Baldwin, to seem credible in the post-1918 age. At the sametime, it served to obscure the true nature of the conflict, reducing it to a series ofsound bites and a rather vacuous, simplistic narrative of perpetual bravery. Bysurveying the nature of the future M.P.’s war, we may gain a greater handle on howthis narrative took hold. As Gregory notes, it was not so much that such a storycould never be questioned, more, as we will see, that there were limitations on theterms of dissent.79

As Gee and the Woolwich by-election showed, there was much to be gained fromportraying Labour as having acted treacherously during the conflict – and RamsayMacDonald’s opposition to the war in 1914 provided a gift-wrapped example, even iflater widespread acceptance of his party’s war aims rendered the charge fallacious atbest. Nevertheless, Conservative war veterans did appear to have bought into, andthereby helped enshrine, the myth of war enthusiasm which historians such as NiallFerguson would later challenge.80 To the ageing Harold Macmillan,‘it cannot be deniedthat to the individual war may and does bring an extraordinary thrill – a sense ofcomradeship – a sense of team-ship and a sense of triumph. Everything that the Kingsaid so nobly to his men before Agincourt was as true in 1914 as it had been in 1415’.81

While appealing to the spirit of the opening days of the war was not the sole preserveof the right – the Labour veteran candidate in Durham, Jack Lawson, noted that ‘whenthe call came in 1914 . . . history had never before seen the equal of the rush ofvolunteers which then took place’ – Conservatives went to great lengths to be seen asthe inheritors of this noble tradition.82 Asking why five million had enlisted, EdwardWood and George Lloyd argued that ‘the real cause lay in the natural and spontaneousrevolt of a people, bred in the principles of justice, liberty and fair dealing [and] againstthe doctrine of might . . . as exemplified before their eyes in the German treatment ofBelgium’ – a crucial link then, between the war and supposedly innate British values.83

And if Oswald Mosley was no doubt an extreme example of the type who denouncedthe immediate pre-1914 epoch for its ‘stupendous selfishness’, ‘restrictions’ and ‘artificiallife’, he was not alone.84 ‘Before the war’, declared John Davidson campaigning inFareham, ‘it had been said that [we] were a decadent race, but this had been provedincorrect. Men had performed acts of valour equal to any in the history of thenation’.85 The author-cum-Tory John Buchan likewise saw 1914 as ‘the point ofcontact of a world vanishing and a world arriving’.86 The war was righteous, not onlyin terms of defeating the Germans, but the world it was making possible.Victorian fin

79 A. Gregory, ‘Armistice Day 1919–46’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1993), p. 244.80 Ferguson, p. 174.81 H. Macmillan, Winds of Change 1914–39 (1966), p. 99.82 Chester-le-Street Chronicle, 31 Oct. 1919.83 E. Wood and G. Lloyd, The Great Opportunity (2nd edn., 1919), p. 14.84 See Harrow Gazette, 24 Oct. 1919.85 Hants and Sussex County Press, 7 Dec. 1918.86 J. Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door (1940), p. 166.

de siècle decadence had been removed, and in its place had arrived a new breed of man– brave in the face of danger, yet sensitive enough to appreciate both the mental andphysical consequences of such bravery.87

Once into battle, there was similar uniformity of story, and a notable distinctionbetween public and private accounts.Writing to Lady Desborough during the conflict,Alfred Duff Cooper – who, it is important to note, later made great play about wartimemorality being let down by Chamberlain-style appeasement – described a verydifferent type of conflict to that later eulogized.88 In June 1918 he commented that ‘Ihaven’t been near the war at present, and I cannot tell you how comfortable, easefuland luxurious is the base after the restrictions, scarcity and fatigue of London’.89

Almost like some lengthy excursion, he ‘rather like[d] the war at present but I’ve nodoubt I shall very soon have had enough of it. The principal drawbacks are, I think,boredom and discomfort’. One consolation for Duff Cooper was a bottle of port hehad recently received, and it is interesting to read how highly food and drink rank inthe wartime letters of future Tory M.P.s.90 Philip Lloyd-Greame (later Cunliffe-Lister),aside from informing his wife that ‘there is absolutely nothing to tell you’ about thewar, wrote to her to request ‘F[ortnum] and M[ason] chocolate’ and to pass on histhanks for a previous parcel of asparagus.91 While the wars of future M.P.s were clearlynot without bravery, such examples illustrate that they did not always fulfill thesometimes monolithic tales later woven in public. Oswald Mosley – no stranger tohyperbole to be sure – would later ask, ‘what option had I really got in this [war]except to be killed or to win the Military Cross?’ ‘This’, he concluded, ‘was lifesimplified’.92 Yet clearly there was an option, for neither extreme would occur.

The war, as often described by the non-combatants in parliament, was utterlydysgenic. To Neville Chamberlain, wandering around a devastated Ypres in 1919, thetown was ‘even more destroyed than I had imagined.There is literally nothing left andone could hardly find a square foot that had not been hit by some projectile’.93 Thisgap in experience was profound, or at least presented as such by both combatant andnon-combatant alike. To politicians at home, the most visceral points of contact withthe trenches were returning coffins and wounded veterans. To those at the front thehorrors were no doubt even worse, or at least more immediate, but they could findsolace in the courage that was being displayed before their eyes on a daily basis.To thewall of young Bob Boothby, doing enough work at Eton ‘to keep my place’ butthinking ‘of nothing but the war’, were affixed pictures of Jellicoe and Beatty ratherthan his parents.94 Boothby found it ‘difficult to exaggerate the traumatic effect of thecasualties in France upon the lives of boys who grew to maturity during the years

87 An interesting corrective is L. Delap, ‘The superwoman: theories of gender and genius in EdwardianBritain’, Historical Jour., xlvii (2004), 101–26. Delap highlights the Nietzschean, egoist ‘super individual’ adeptly.

88 See R. Carr, ‘Veterans of the First World War and Conservative anti-appeasement’, Twentieth Century BritishHist., xxii (2011), 28–51.

89 Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (hereafter H.A.L.S.), papers of Lady Desborough, C579/13, DuffCooper to Desborough, 30 June 1918.

90 H.A.L.S., C579/13, Duff Cooper to Desborough, 30 July 1918.With reference to later claims regarding thewar generation’s heroism, Duff Cooper also commented that ‘we seem to be winning the war this week and noton this front which is all one can desire’.

91 See Lloyd-Greame letters home to his wife Mary: 26 May 1916; undated [probably Aug. 1916]; ‘Tuesday’[summer 1916] (C.A.C., papers of Lord Swinton, SWIN I/1/1).

92 O. Mosley, My Life (1968), p. 67.93 The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, i: the Making of a Politician, ed. R. C. Self (Aldershot, 2000), p. 332,

Neville to Hilda Chamberlain, 23 Aug. 1919.94 R. J. G. Boothby, Boothby: Recollections of a Rebel (1978), p. 16.

between 1914 and 1918 . . . As we saw all the heroes of our youth being killed, oneby one, and not far away, our whole attitude towards life changed’.95 The 1903-bornRab Butler likewise saw the front generation as unique:

I was at Marlborough nearly sixteen, when the war ended. Did I realise then, as I do now, hownearly I had missed that, to so many, overpowering experience . . . When I first entered theHouse of Commons in 1929 the cloak room attendants zealously and persistently called us allby military titles. I was ashamed not to have my title but bore it for a year or two until I becamea Minister.96

While 1914–18 had clearly witnessed acts of heroism, as evidenced by the number ofwar medals M.P.s accrued, it was elevated to a plane by non-veterans such thatex-servicemen could scarcely fail to believe their own hype. They had survived anevent which had ‘wiped out’ (for this seemed to be the phrase of choice) a generationand somehow left them standing.97 Under these psychological conditions, what ‘homefit for heroes’ could ever be good enough?

As Correlli Barnett has argued, the increasing Tory sympathy for the plight of theworking man was a direct product of the First World War.98 In such a conception,aristocrats mucking in with the average Briton were seen to have produced a change inattitudes that made not only the respectable ‘middle opinion’ of the nineteen-thirtiespossible, but paved the way for Churchill’s coalition government to help build thewelfare state.99 Behind the nation over party rhetoric was the fact that the working classneeded to be brought into such a framework.WhileTory radicals, most obviously JosephChamberlain, had attempted to win over the masses before 1914, the war was indeed arare moment when men of all classes shared a common experience, and a common goal.Few times in Anthony Eden’s life, he later recalled, possessed ‘the same close personalcharacter of comradeship as life with theYeoman Rifles,where we had enlisted together,trained together, fought together.The more beastly and dangerous the conditions, themore this association seemed to count’.100Yet one must be cautious here in two regards.First, it was hardly a brotherhood of equals. For example,Harold Macmillan, put to workcensoring soldiers’ letters, seemed to adopt a more paternal than fraternal stance: ‘theyhave big hearts, these soldiers, and it is a very pathetic task to have to read all their lettershome . . . There comes occasionally a grim sentence or two, which reveals in a flash asordid family drama.’101 This was no doubt closer than these men had come to the poorbefore 1914, but social barriers did not simply melt away. Such Conservatives cared, butin a slightly removed sense.

Second, it took further, post-war exposure to really ingrain such sympathies andto gain a greater knowledge of working-class life. To Duff Cooper, campaigningafter 1918 was as big a culture shock as the war years. ‘I learnt a great deal inOldham’, he later wrote. ‘I had no idea before I went there that in every ward of

95 Boothby, p. 16.96 R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible: the Memoirs of Lord Butler (1971), p. 8.97 Including the prime minister (see S. Baldwin, Our Inheritance: Speeches and Addresses (1928), p. 226 (3 June

1926)).98 C. Barnett, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945–50 (1995), pp. 123–5.99 And, let it be noted, veteran Tories viewed the unifying experience of coalition rather than leftist

reformers like Beveridge as the creative force. As Oliver Lytellton put it, ‘the Socialists today are making a greatsong and dance about their responsibility for the creation of the Welfare State.They point to the National HealthService as being their child. In point of fact, everybody knows that it was fathered by Mr Churchill’s CoalitionGovernment’ (C.A.C., papers of Lord Chandos, CHAN 4/17/08, undated typescript).

100 A. Eden, Another World 1897–1917 (1976), p. 150.101 A. Horne, Macmillan, i: 1894–1956 (1988), p. 36.

a great industrial city there were working men’s clubs devoted to each of the threepolitical parties. There were eleven Conservative clubs in Oldham and each had tobe visited at least once a year.’102 Such visits gave him the chance to hear theordinary man’s complaints and discuss potential solutions, as well as offering him agreater overall understanding of working-class mentality. Before 1924 Duff Cooperhad been a diehard, seeing the right of the party as remaining true to Conservativetradition. Yet ‘in Oldham I had a glimpse of the condition of the people and hadrealised that a man’s head must be as wrong as his heart who denied the need ofsocial reform’.103 When it had reached into urban areas in the last three decades ofthe nineteenth century, as Jon Lawrence has shown, Conservatism was quite capableof capitalizing on a fluid working-class vote. Appeals to individual liberty againstLiberal moralism, and to the ‘respectable’ working class who were willing to payslightly more for the better type of working man’s club that Duff Cooper wouldencounter in the nineteen-twenties, had gone down rather well.104 The key was tofind a hook for the party: during the nineteenth century it had been issues such asanti-prohibitionism; in the nineteen-twenties it could be the commonality of thetrench experience. Just as with the literary authors, therefore, the post-1918experience could be just as transformative – particularly for young men with littlelife experience – as 1914–18 itself.

The simplicity of the war narrative was, it is true, further challenged by attitudestowards the conflict’s more controversial elements. Upon the death of Douglas Haigin 1928, the political establishment (particularly Geoffrey Dawson’s Times obituary)gave cautious praise to his war record – though Baldwin himself preferred toconcentrate on his post-war work with the British Legion.105 Veterans, however,largely ignored the question – perhaps as a result of the large number who hadsocial connections to Haig’s former private secretary, Philip Sassoon – though DuffCooper’s 1936 biography was, on the whole, sympathetic.106 As Gregory points out,‘Conservative tendencies are inherent in justifying modern wars, just as utopian dreamsof reconstruction or apocalyptic visions tend to arise out of the strains of fightingthem’.107 Protecting the righteousness of the war meant, to some extent, protectingHaig.That Jack Cohen, who had lost both legs in the conflict and been elected as anM.P. in Liverpool, was so intertwined with the British Legion (and thereby the formercommander-in-chief) perhaps rather sealed the deal.

Haig aside, the conduct of the war engendered other dilemmas. It is worthwhilebriefly turning to the experience of Colonel Albert Lambert Ward, who commandedthe Howe Battalion of the Royal Naval Division in 1916. In one of his firstparliamentary speeches, Ward, elected in 1918 as Conservative M.P. for Hull NorthWest, delivered an address which even in the dusty pages of Hansard remains deeply

102 A. Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (1953), p. 133.103 Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget, p. 141.104 J. Lawrence, ‘Class and gender in the making of urban Toryism, 1880–1914’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cviii (1993),

629–52.105 See Hansard, ccxiii (8 Feb. 1928), col. 92 onwards.106 A. Duff Cooper, Haig: the SecondVolume (1936), p. 439: ‘that Haig’s views on strategy were sound it has been

the main thesis of this book to prove.’107 See Hansard, ccxiii (8 Feb. 1928), cols. 91–114.To Baldwin, ‘nor . . . has the time come upon anyone’s part

to attempt a military appreciation of the services of Lord Haig’ (cols. 91–2). Jack Cohen agreed, arguing that ‘thepart that Lord Haig took during the war . . . concerns me very little, seeing that I am only one of millions whoserved under his command’.

moving – similar in tone, it appears, to A. P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle published thatyear.108 A subject ‘impossible to bring . . . forward during the war’ had been on his‘mind for a considerable time’:

I should like to obtain an assurance from the Secretary of State for War that there shall be nodifference made between the graves of those men who were killed in action or died of woundsand disease, and the graves of those unfortunate men who paid the penalties of their lives underSections 4 and 12 of the Army Act, or who, in other words, were tried by court-martial andshot for cowardice or desertion in the face of the enemy . . . I bring this forward because it hasbeen on my conscience for some time, as, unfortunately, it was my unfortunate duty to sit ona court-martial at which five men were sentenced to death . . . I had the uncomfortable feelingthat, even with my limited knowledge of law, I could have got each one of those men off ona technicality if I had been in a position to act as their friend.109

How could men without such horrific experience ever truly understand the tragedyof which Ward was a part? This was a question he himself went on to cover:

I ask the House not to dismiss this petition by the remark that these men were cowards anddeserved their fate. They were not cowards in the accepted meaning of the word. At any ratethey did not display one-tenth part of the cowardice that was displayed by the crowds inLondon who went flocking to the tube stations on the first alarm of an air raid . . . I think itis well that it should be made publicly known and that the people of this country shouldunderstand what war is, and that Hon. Members of this House who have done well in the War,without perhaps having been very near the front line, should understand that from the point ofview of Tommy up in the trenches war is not a question of honours and decorations, but waris just hell.110

Ward’s speech would pass without comment for the rest of the debate. Indeed, it wasonly in 2006 that all 306 British soldiers shot for desertion and cowardice werepardoned, with families of the executed suffering for many years ‘financial hardship(not helped by the lack of military pensions), stigma, and shame’.111

According to Putkowski’s and Sykes’s Shot at Dawn, Ward’s question had beenprompted by a newspaper report concerning ‘Jim’ who, having served bravely,experienced shell-shock which prevented him from leaving his trenches and engagingthe enemy.112 ‘Jim’ was, it appears, Private Frederick Butcher, executed by friends andcomrades who softly whispered ‘au revoir’ in his ear minutes before pulling the triggerswhich ended his life. Butcher’s mother was informed that he had been killed in action,and his name appears on Folkestone’s war memorial.113 After Ward’s abortive effort, theLabour M.P. Ernest Thurtle took up the mantle. Getting the Labour party to adopt theabolition of the death penalty for military cowardice in 1925, he took the motion tothe floor of the Commons in April 1930.

108 A. P. Herbert, The Secret Battle (Oxford, 1919), p. 130. Herbert, later an independent M.P., commented ‘thisbook is not an attack on any person, on the death penalty, or on anything else, though if it makes people thinkabout these things, so much the better. I think I believe in the death penalty – I do not know. But I did notbelieve in [the protagonist] Harry Penrose being shot.That is the gist of it; that my friend Harry was shot forcowardice – and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew’.

109 Hansard, clxxxviii (29 July 1919), col. 2040.110 Hansard, clxxxviii (29 July 1919), cols. 2041–2.111 The Guardian, 16 Aug. 2006.112 ‘According to’, because the date of Ward’s speech, 31 July, seems to be before the newspaper article cited

(Lincolnshire Report, 9 Aug. 1919).113 J. Putkowski and J. Sykes, Shot at Dawn: Execution in Word War One by Authority of the British Army Act

(1992), pp. 255–7.

There are two ways to view the debate that ensued. On the one hand, over halfof Conservative veterans (58.5 per cent, eighty M.P.s) voted for Lambert Ward’samendment to retain the death penalty for those who deserted under, essentially,conditions of shell-shock, and then went on to encourage the others to desert. GeorgeCourthope’s motion to keep the penalty for deserting a patrol post saw similar, ifslightly reduced, levels of support from Tory ex-servicemen (53 per cent, seventy-two M.P.s).114 No Conservative member voted with Labour, arguably vindicatingPutkowski’s and Sykes’s charged remark about ‘the Tory dinosaurs in both houses’.115

On the other hand, there was more support for an evolution in policy than LambertWard had received in 1919.Though right-wing M.P.s like Tufton Beamish believed that‘the man who is conquered by fear is a coward, and deserves all he gets’, members likeJohn Hills, Gerald Berkeley Hurst and Lambert Ward himself reached rather differentconclusions.116 Denouncing the principle of pour encourager les autres which hadjustified the 1914 Army Act, Hills did not ‘see what good you can do by shooting aman for cowardice, neither do I see that by carrying out a sentence of that kind youstrengthen the nerves of the comrades of the man who is shot’. Calling conscriptioninto question, he believed that politicians ‘have no right to take a man from the factoryor the farm and put him into khaki and a tin hat, and then shoot him if he showscowardice’.117 Abstaining from such votes was thus as much from genuine convictionas party politics or simple laziness, making the numbers somewhat ambiguous. These,to be sure, were difficult questions for veterans. In the decade between Ward’s andThurtle’s grandstanding however, mores had clearly shifted. This was partly a resultof the increasingly ex-service nature (39 to 52 per cent) of the Conservativeparliamentary party.

After the horror of battle came, rather cinematically, the redemption of the finalvictory. Analysing reactions to 11 November 1918 is somewhat difficult, particularlygiven Adolf Hitler’s infamous claim to have experienced the revelation that he mustenter politics while convalescing in Pasewalk military hospital. Nevertheless, it isinteresting that Conservative politicians made similar statements. While sometimesmore prosaic – ‘we need time and distance to gain the correct perspective’ – andcertainly confused – ‘most of us were at a loss as to how to take up our lives’ – therewas a similar tendency to view armistice night as transformative. Mosley, as ever, tookmatters to the nth degree. Passing through London, scoffing at the ‘smooth, smugpeople, who had never fought or suffered’ gorging themselves on fine wine and goodfood, he stood ‘aside from the delirious throng, silent and alone’.118 That he ‘dedicatedmyself to politics’ that evening seems a little disingenuous – by that stage he hadalready been adopted as Conservative candidate for Harrow – but he was not alone inhighlighting the drama of the moment. Duff Cooper likewise denounced the ‘sillypeople . . . laughing and cheering’, though given that he had spent the first three yearsof the war wishing ‘I had something to do instead of everlasting office boy work’ itis important to question such reactions.119 As Gregory has shown, not only did British

114 Hansard, ccxxxvii (3 Apr. 1930), cols. 1564–627.115 Putkowski and Sykes, p. 273.116 Hansard, ccxxxvii (3 Apr. 1930), col. 1572.To Berkeley Hurst, rather like Lambert Ward before him, ‘it has

always seemed to me an abominable thing that where, owing to exhaustion, or shock, or exposure to longprivations, a volunteer, perhaps untrained or only partly trained, has given way to nerves, he should run the riskof the death penalty, while men who have not volunteered are living at home in ease and comfort’.

117 Hansard, ccxxxvii (3 Apr. 1930), cols. 1574–5.118 Mosley, p. 70.119 See his comments on 22 June 1917 (The Duff Cooper Diaries 1915–51, ed. J. J. Norwich (2005), p. 53).

soldiers celebrate the end of the conflict, they had a tendency to mask such elationin retrospect: ‘the Graves of 1918 is the real ex-serviceman, with a tough, cynicalposture and a suggestion of regret that things had not been a little more rowdyand celebratory.’120 James Stuart, future cabinet minister, was but one who spent themonths following November 1918 in hedonistic revelry, in his case spending his warsavings of four years in just a few weeks of Brussels-based celebration.121 To be sure,veterans were by no means fraudulently documenting their experience, but they didstand to benefit by its romanticizing. In the nineteen-thirties such men began tricklinginto high office – Anthony Eden and Alfred Duff Cooper constituting just two ofeleven former soldiers in Neville Chamberlain’s first (1937) cabinet – and the authorspicked up the baton.

This article has outlined how Conservative veteran M.P.s in the nineteen-twentiesstood to benefit from playing up their war records, most obviously during elections.Atthe same time, it suited the Conservative party in the newly democratic age to havemen whose honour was unquestioned – or, more accurately, unquestionable at the time– while portraying their opponents as alternatively quasi-Bolshevik (Labour) andfraudulent (Lloyd George). Baldwin’s quintessential Britishness was largely based onhis amiable mannerisms: however implausible a friendly captain of industry turnedcountry squire may seem, it was an attractive proposition.There was little more Britishin the aftermath of 1918 than service in the war, however, and in this regard the youngmen delineated in this analysis were a useful complement, providing an extra layer tothe One Nation, country before class appeal that Baldwin was trying – rathersuccessfully, as David Jarvis has shown – to cultivate.122

John Charmley, among others, has portrayed the Eden generation of Tory as inBaldwin’s thrall.123 There are, however, clear limitations here that other studies haveexplored.124 Being at least nominally wedded to Baldwin and his politics of ‘safety first’certainly brought some problems: Conservative ex-servicemen had entered parliamentto a significant degree and yet, as Deborah Cohen has shown, British provision forformer soldiers in the post-1918 world was vastly behind that of both the French andGerman governments.125 Despite those nations experiencing democratic crisis aftercrisis (fatally in the latter case), and the fact that the British state came into play in areassuch as housing to a degree never seen before the war, ex-servicemen were rewardedfor their efforts with neither jobs nor benefits. The question therefore became thatof how to pacify a potentially mutinous force, the former soldier.The answer at whichthe establishment arrived was, as Niall Barr has shown, ensuring a conservativeethos within the British Legion.126 Yet parliamentary former soldiers were also a keycomponent in this story.They were well placed to protest against contemporary policybut chose, Mosley apart (and his New Party saw Labour but not Tory veterans join),

120 Gregory, ‘Armistice Day’, p. 76.121 J. Stuart, Within the Fringe: an Autobiography (1967), pp. 27–8.122 D. Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism and class politics in the 1920s’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxi (1996), 59–84.123 Charmley, p. 78.124 S. Ball, Baldwin and the Conservative Party: the Crisis of 1929–31 (1988), p. 208.125 At first glance, the European comparison really does do British democracy few favours, with Weimar

allocating over 20% of its 1931–2 expenditure on war pensions, while France mustered 15%. Britain laggedbehind on 5.9% (Cohen, p. 194).

126 And indeed its predecessor, the Comrades of the Great War (see Barr, p. 13). Gullace on women isinteresting too. Her study ‘reveals the way military obligation and service to the state gained an ever moreauthoritative place in measures of civic worth’ (Gullace, p. 3).

to demur. That Eden and Macmillan would emerge to lead administrations of theBaldwinite centre-right in the post-1945 period, rather than a genuinely activist centre,is evidence of the Faustian bargain that veterans had struck. In the long run, clearly,such men could be personally successful. In the short run, however, a story needed tofill the gap, and that story was the narrative of wartime bravery, enthusiasm and, finally,pathos delineated here.

The authors were but one side of the cultural legacy of war, nor were they the onlycreators of it.While ex-servicemen turned politicians portrayed the literary accounts ofwar service as inaccurate at best, they too were operating on a similarly allegoricalplane. Coming across a collection of Alec Waugh poems in the trenches, Alfred DuffCooper found them ‘miserable’. ‘These new poets’, he wrote home to his lover DianaManners, ‘seem to me especially bad’.127 Though he acknowledged the harm anddestruction that war could bring, Duff believed there was also ‘romance in it. Nothingso big can be without it – and there is beauty too – I have seen plenty from ourparting at Waterloo until today.And those poets ought to see it and reproduce it insteadof going on whining and jibing’.128 Decades after the conflict Henry Page Croftprovided a similar interpretation. Having ‘read many of the war books which were therage about the years 1929 and 1930’ he ‘could only come to the conclusion that thewriters were all shell-shock cases as indeed most of them confessed themselves to be’.According to Croft, ‘they describe[d] the whole tone of the British Army in languageso much at variance with the truth: there was nothing bestial or craven about themen I had the honour to serve with’.129 Perhaps so, but such men were not abovereinterpreting the conflict either. Ultimately veteran candidates were prepared towhine and jibe, and to outline the bestial, craven world in which, to be sure, they hadshown much bravery, in order to achieve political prominence.The two consequenceswere to bestow upon the Westminster system a legitimacy that had seemed underthreat in the 1918–20 period, and to allow the literary chroniclers of the Great War topick up the threads of a partially established narrative and bend it to their will. ThatMacmillan and Eden would come to lead both the Conservative party and the nationafter 1955 may, as Simon Ball notes, have been partly down to their own hard work,but it was also the logical consequence of a narrative that both politician and authorhad been weaving for almost forty years.130

127 Duff Cooper to Diana Manners, 26 July 1918 (A Durable Fire: the Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper 1913–50,ed. A. Cooper (1983), p. 82).

128 Duff Cooper to Manners, 26 July 1918 (Cooper, p. 82).129 H. Page Croft, My Life of Strife (1972), pp. 98–9.130 Ball, Guardsmen, passim.

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