Hollow Men

HOLLOW M EN
The Cultural and Economic Legacy of the
First World War

Stephanie Olsen

Remember us - if at all —not as lost

Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.'

I n his poem, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot eloquently

describes the sentiments of many Britons after the First World
War. For many, the end of the war represented the end of an age
of innocence and hope. World War I is widely recognized as a
turning point in the political, ideological, economic and social
history of Britain. Yet, while most historians would agree that it
marks a watershed, considerable disagreement exists about the
nature of its impact. Did the war catalyse and accelerate
tendencies that were bound to rise to prominence in any case or
did it decisively change the course of historical evolution? Like
historians who study other turning points in history, the
Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution and the
French Revolution, the student of the social effects of World War
I in Britain must confront the issue of whether the enormous
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social changes in post-war Britain should be seen in an

evolutionary or revolutionary context. Were the changes
primarily the result of the cataclysmic, traumatic effects of the
war on the British social system or were they the incremental,
cumulative, developmental, gradual results of transformations
which had long been developing in Victorian and Edwardian
Britain? Clearly, World War I was a catalyst for overwhelming
changes in every sphere, but these changes could not have
occurred without the effects of slowly moving, organic, socio­
economic, cultural and political forces. After World War I, many
workers left the tutelage of Liberals and Protestant
Nonconformists and determined to pursue the advantages that a
more militant trade unionism and autonomous Labour politics
promised. All of these developments were in place before World
War U The Fabian Society and the independent Labour Party
grew up in the generation before World War I and the Liberal
Party, with its programme of disestablishment of the Anglican
Church, temperance, franchise and educational reforms, no
longer seemed as relevant to workers; as some of its aims were
ccomplished and others appeared increasingly outdated.2
It must have occurred to the returning men that their
,ense of the injustice of war had been confirmed, that civilians
had profited while soldiers sacrificed their lives. They also found
that while they had been away, four years of change in the arts
had taken place without them. Feelings of dislocation, of
exploitation, and of lost time must have been very common.3
According to Samuel Fiynes, “Disenchantment is a condition of
loss, and that was the way the war extended its presence into
English culture after the Armistice - as forms of loss.”4 Loss
was to be found in the ordinary life of English streets, in the
disabled and unemployed ex-soldiers, in the women in
mourning, and in the great absence of a million men. It was
evident among the aristocracy in the dead heirs and the extinct
titles that the war had caused, and among all the classes in a new
impoverishment of life. There were not only the physical ruins of
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destroyed landscapes and dead and mutilated men, but the social,
intellectual, and moral ruins of the old, pre-war society. Out of
that view of reality came the mood which is characteristic o f ‘the
Twenties’. Post-war Britain stood on the shaky and gloomy
foundations of the war’s destruction.
The uneven economic events of the post-war period began
with a boom. In 1919, people spent their wartime savings on goods
that were again available after wartime shortages. The strong market
that resulted encouraged business to expand. The workers hired,
many of them demobilised soldiers with discharge pay, increased
further the demand for goods. During this euphoric time, many
capitalists invested unwisely in cotton, steel, shipping, and
engineering, since their investment expanded a productive capacity
already too large. The government decided to unpeg the sterling-
dollar exchange rate and come off the Gold Standard in March
1919.5 In effect the government was pledging itself to maintain a
lax monetary policy despite the rapid escalation of inflation during
the post-war boom. In a sense inflation was tolerated as the price
that had to be paid to blunt social unrest and to secure the smooth
reabsorption of millions of displaced servicemen and munitions
workers into a growing labour force. The post-war boom lasted
from approximately April 1919 to May 1920. Its origins lay part
in the sudden release of pent-up demand within the economy
both from industrial restocking and delayed consumption - an1
partly in the inflationary pressure of rapidly rising real wages.
Such a boom was unsustainable. Much of the increased
demand (including that from war-tom European states) was purely
temporary. There is also evidence that British industry was
becoming seriously uncompetitive as employers failed to achieve
gains in productivity to offset higher wage costs and the widespread
adoption of the eight-hour day during 1919. Both demand and
supply factors therefore contributed to the post-war cycle of boom
and slump - as did government monetary policy which, having
maintained a lax regime throughout the inflation of 1919-20,
became increasingly severe as the economy slumped during 1920-
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21.6 This slump owed much to the damaging impact of World War
1. The war destroyed a third of Britain’s shipping tonnage and denied
capital for infrastructure, leading to the deterioration of railways
and manufactures. The war also diverted resources to tanks and
explosives instead o f autos and electrical goods, the mass
production of which America took on.7 Moreover, the war effort
had increased the size and economic power of large units of
production. This continued pre-war monopoly was a frequent
occurrence. The big five high street banks emerged after the war.
So too did United Dairies, the chemical giant IC1 and the successor
company of British Gramophone, EMI. In the 1920s, the biggest
cinemas in Britain were built and entertainment became a huge
mass industry.8
The national economy began to shrink back to its
peacetime dimensions and wages shrivelled up accordingly.
Between 1919 and 1920, there were more than 2,000 strikes. As
the second anniversary of the end of war drew near a moral and
material shabbiness enveloped everything.9 Industrial unrest of
the Edwardian years had been suspended by a truce in 1914, but
that truce had begun to unravel in the later war years. In 1918,
there were strikes by miners, railwaymen, munitions workers,
cotton spinners, and even London police. In the post-war years
there were more strikes, as workers struggled to preserve their
wartime gains, and employers tried to return wages and hours to
peacetime levels. Unemployment grew after the war - by 1921
there were more than two million men and women out of work.
Trade union membership grew too, and so did the political party
that represented the unions. There had been 42 Labour MPs in
Parliament in 1914, but in 1922, there were 142. From 1920,
there was also a new workers’ party on the Left: the Communist
Party of Great Britain. Neither its membership nor its power was
impressive, but it was nevertheless a presence, a reminder that in
post-war Europe there was a new nation in which the workers
were said to rule, and a new international force called

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Bolshevism that threatened the peace and troubled the dreams of

Conservatives.10
Through popular song, verse and imagery, entertainers
told the British public between 1914-1918 for what they were
fighting. They did not do this under orders from the government.
Entertainers acted independently, though profit and patriotism
went hand in hand.11 The production and sale of songs like “If
you were the only girl in the world”, “It’s a long way to
Tipperary,” and “Roses of Picardy” expressed the world of
sociability embedded in pre-war music halls and theatres, a
world of safety and affection that soldiers had joined up to
defend. According to Jay Winter, “Political ideas or abstractions
had little to do with their motivation or staying power.12
Toward the end of the war and in the post-war era, a new
sense of scepticism and hopelessness began to appear. For
military historians, the fourth year of the war is notable for the
Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele, in which British troops
attacked from the end of July 1917 into November, suffered
some 300,000 casualties, and gained nothing, and for the
German offensive in the spring of 1918, which took them once
again to the Marne, and lost them the war. For the historian of
English culture, it is the year in which the new war culture begar
to define itself to the civilian population, in books by Sassoon
and Graves and Nichols, in war paintings by Nevinson and Nash,
in the plain-speaking soldiers’ memoirs in anti-heroic war novels
about damaged men and martyrs.13 In his seminal study of
British literary culture and the war, Samuel Hynes argues that the
hellish trauma of the Western Front experience defied the
expressive power of conventional literature and undermined
traditional cultural sensibilities. Long-held notions about
sacrifice, duty, honour, respect for one’s social betters, and trust
in government gave way to a new attitude of cynical
disillusionment and ironic scepticism that established itself as the
central characteristic of the modem worldview.14

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One important post-war development was women’s

suffrage. It is perfectly true that a broad, liberal-democratic
movement starting in the late nineteenth century had come near
to achieving votes for women before 1914; it had certainly made
many other achievements. Yet the political advance of women in
1914 was still hindered by prejudice: the vigorous hostility of
most men, and the often fearful reluctance and opposition of
many women. The war generated a tremendous mood favourable
to change and democratic innovations. From May 1915 there
were Labour members in the Government, and although they
wanted many other things, no doubt more pressingly, they also
supported women’s suffrage. Whatever might or might not have
happened had there been no war, the war provided the
concentrated experience which both gave to women a new
confidence in themselves, and showed up the absurdities of the
many preconceptions about what they were capable of
accomplishing.15
Expansion of job opportunity was the central
phenomenon of women’s war experience. Yet at first sight, it
seems to have been a very short-lived one. In 1914, there were
fewer than six million women in paid employment in Great
Britain and Ireland. At the end of the war, this had risen by well
over a million. By 1920, almost two thirds of the women who
had entered employment during the war had left it again. A year
later, with the onset of the long period of trade depression and
unemployment, the figure for women’s employment was not
much higher than it had been in 1914. The slump, in fact, cut
across the development of the war, driving many women back
into more traditional forms of employment.16 There was,
however, a growing confidence in women’s abilities in the public
sphere. E.S. Montague, Minister of Munitions, said in
Parliament on 15 August 1916 that “women of every station...
have proved themselves able to undertake work that before the
war was regarded as solely the province of men.” The armies had
been saved, and women had assured victory. Montague asked:
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“Where is the man now who would deny to women the civil
rights which she has earned by her hard work?”317 Women in
the 1920s were much freer than their pre-war counterparts yet,
British flappers of the twenties and their sexually free mates
owed much to old, ribald, licentious traditions which survived in
the British working class and to the campaign for birth control of
the Victorian reformers such as Charles Bradlaugh and Annie
Besant .,8
As did all wars, World War I caused a growing emphasis
on youth as so many older Britons had been killed, wounded or
disillusioned by war; but this too continued precedents that can
be traced to the early nineteenth century. With a Rousseauistic
regard for youth as a separate, autonomous time for learning and
development, nineteenth century reformers had limited the
working time of young people, provided for their education
(1870), which was made compulsory (1880) and free (1891).19
In 1901, children under 14 were legally excluded from pubs.20
The Education Act of 1918, which is given credit for introducing
a new era in education, consolidated the victories of a previous
generation.21 During war time women took the place of men in
British factories and after World War I many continued to work
and some of their sisters assumed important places in the
professions and in 1918 as if in recognition of their wartime
contributions, women aged 30 and over were given the vote.22
All of these developments were the culmination of earlier
movements. Poor women had always worked in Victorian
Britain, even though a growing philanthropy and sexism
discouraged this.23 More mature industrialisation, by providing
more humane workplaces, and the important growth in white-
collar positions, made possible more acceptable female
employment. Professionalization of law, medicine and even
historiography at first excluded women as men pressed this lever
of a patriarchal society; but by the end of the nineteenth century
admitted women, based as it was on merit, which denied not
only barriers of class but of gender. Occupations traditionally
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performed by Victorian women, teaching and nursing, became

respectable professions. On the one hand, the female franchise
was made possible by the war, but on the other, this victory
which went back to Wollstonecraft and Mill and the Pankhursts
was merely delayed by the war.
Another characteristic of post-war Britain was a marked
decline in Church attendance. The decline in religious
observance which post-war Christians lamented had Victorian-
Edwardian roots. The 1851 census had revealed the
disinclination of British working people to go to Nonconformist
chapels and especially Anglican churches.24 The intellectual
origins of unbelief had been laid in mid-century by the
evolutionism of Charles Darwin and later by the agnosticism of
Thomas Huxley.
The post-war era was also marked by a decline in
alcohol consumption. Contrary to the U.S. image of bathtub gin
in a prohibitionist era, by 1935, British workers drank about one
third the alcoholic beverages their ancestors had consumed in
perhaps one third the pubs even though there was no prohibition
in Britain. The greatest improvements were made in the first
third of the twentieth century, but they owed much to the moral
suasionist and legislative reforms of temperance enthusiasts, the
growth of mass recreation and deep attitudinal changes which
were clearly in place before World War I.25
The rise of the welfare state has also been attributed to
the post World War I period. Twentieth century Labour
governments embraced more state activity. But many of the
features of the welfare state had been introduced by the Asquith
government before World War I - old age pensions,
unemployment insurance, etc. Fabians and Labour politicians
had developed socialist theory.26 Under the influence of thinkers
like T. H. Green, liberal theory had been transformed from the
laissez-faire doctrine of J. S. Mill or Herbert Spencer to the
interventionist creed of Asquith or Lloyd George.27

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The First World War had a profound impact on the

culture, society and economy of post-war Britain. To many, the
end of the war marked the beginning of a new era. At first,
Britons enjoyed a kind of euphoria, brought about by victory and
a strong economy. The immediate post-war years also brought
about vast societal changes like women’s suffrage. The war was
the impetus for these changes, not an exclusive cause. The
changing economic and cultural circumstances of Britain, though
blamed on the war, were merely accelerated by it. The rise of the
working class, the growing voice of youth and the growing
importance of women in society; the growth of new attitudes
towards mass education, the arts and religion, sex, drink and
recreation, fashion; scientific and technological developments;
and the decline of laissez-faire liberalism and the advance of the
collectivist idea of social reform and state control - all made
England of the 1920’s a vastly different place from the England
that went to war in 1914. The war did not, however, change the
course of historical evolution, but was merely a catalyst that
accelerated pre-war tendencies.

* * * * *

Stephanie Olsen is currently a first year M.A. history student

and graduate fellow at the University of British Columbia,
working on fatherhood in nineteenth century Britain. She
completed her B.A. (Hons) in International Studies (History
concentration) at Glendon College, Toronto in 2001.

ENDNOTES
'T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men" Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 77.
:Peter P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy o f the British Idealists. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 162-165.
3Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London:
The Bodley Head, 1990), 237.
4 Hynes 311.
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5A. J. P.Taylor, English History’, 1914-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965),
140.
* Paul Johnson, ed. 20,h Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change. (London:
Longman, 1994), 162-3.
7R. S. Sayers, A History’ o f Economic Change in England. (London: Oxford University
Press, 1967), 48.
*Jay Winter, “Popular Culture in Wartime Britain." European Culture in the Great War:
The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914-1918, cds.Aviel Roshwald and
Richard Stites. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 342.
’Ronald Blythe, The Age o f Illusion. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964) 7.
,0Hynes 355-356.
11Winter 331.
'-Winter, 335.
'»Hynes, 235.
,4Hynes 337-340 passim.
'»Arthur Marwick, Women at War. 1914-1918. (London: Fontana, 1977) 157.
'6Marwick 162.
'’Marwick 158.
'»Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History, 1750-1997, Second edition. (London:
Arnold, 1997), 44-46.
'’Royle 359-361.
•^Gerald W. Olsen. Drink and the British Establishment: the Church o f England
Temperance Society’, 1873-1914. Forthcoming, 2000. 92-93.
:'Kenneth O. Morgan, ed. The Oxford History o f Britain. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 589
-Morgan, 590.
^Royle, 92-95.
:JMorgan,520.
^Olsen 180-215 passim.
^Morgan 569.
N icholson 157.

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