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Abstract
For colonial troops from the British Empire, the military mobilizations of the First World War created the opportunity to visit the imperial metropolis – London – leaving the war behind. This article explores the experience and encounters of New Zealand's soldiers in London during the First World War and the ambiguity of their identity and belonging in a city that could be positioned as ‘home’. Using diaries, letters, newspapers and oral testimonies, the article builds on the work of Felicity Barnes to question the extent to which these colonial troops could feel at ‘home’ in the ‘Big City’, inside and outside the familiar space, to explore colonialism's tensions in a global war.
ORCiD
Anna Maguire http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9867-1122
Notes on Contributor
Anna Maguire is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Student at King's College, London and Imperial War Museums, London. Her PhD, entitled ‘Colonial Encounters during the First World War’ explores the experience of war for troops from New Zealand, the West Indies and South Africa through the framework of encounter. She is a member of the HERA funded project ‘Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict: Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents’.
Notes
1 Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (henceforth ATL), MS Group 2082, Diary of Henry Kitson, 28 July 1915.
2 Angela Woollacott estimates 10,000 visitors annually from New Zealand and Australia from the late 1880s to beyond 1900. A. Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London. Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5.
3 J. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 17.
4 ATL, MS Papers 4134, Letter from E. Gray, 4 February 1917.
5 F. Barnes, New Zealand's London: A Colony and its Metropolis (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012), 16. Elleke Boehmer's recent work Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) includes a coda on Indians and the First World War.
6 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 2.
7 Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, 4–5.
8 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 99. Exhibitions also played a role during the First World War, as ‘an effective medium for fashioning and disseminating images of modern war for consumption by a civilian audience’. See S. Goebels, ‘Exhibitions’ in Capital Cities at War. Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919. Volume II: A Cultural History, ed. by J. Winter and J. Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143.
9 D. S. Ryan, ‘Staging the Imperial City: the Pageant of London, 1911,’ in Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, ed. by F. Driver and D. Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 119.
10 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 6.
11 A. Woollacott, ‘The Colonial Flaneuse: Australian Women Negotiating Turn-of-the-Century London’, Signs, 25, 3 (2000), 762–763.
12 Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, 14.
13 Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, 34.
14 R. White, 'The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War', War and Society, 5, 1 (1987); J. Wieland, ‘There and Back with the ANZACs: More than Touring’, in Perceiving Other Worlds ed. by Edwin Thumbo (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991); Gray, 4 February 1917.
15 B. Ziino, ‘A Kind of Round Trip: Australian Soldiers and the Tourist Analogy, 1914–1918’, War & Society, 25 (2006), 52.
16 Imperial War Museum (henceforth IWM) Documents 16373, Diary of E. M. Ryburn, 26 August 1915.
17 A. Staines Manders, Colonials’ guide to London (London: Fulton-Manders Publishing, 1916), 18.
18 J. Curran, ‘“Bonjoor Paree!” The first AIF in Paris, 1916-1918’, Journal of Australian Studies, 23 (1999), 22.
19 Curran, ‘“Bonjoor Paree!”’, 22.
20 D. Gilbert, “‘London in All Its Glory—or How to Enjoy London”: Guidebook Representations of Imperial london’, Journal of Historical Geography, 25 (1999), 281.
21 A. Staines Manders, Colonials’ guide, 18.
22 A. Staines Manders, Colonials’ guide, 18.
23 ATL, MS 2003/71, Letters from A. Bousfield, 7 May 1916.
24 National Military Museum New Zealand (henceforth NMMNZ), MSS-058, H. Bourke, 21 September 1917.
25 ‘New Zealanders in England’, The Times, 26 September 1916.
26 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 68.
27 ATL, MS Papers 7899/2, Letters from A. Olsson, 14 June 1917.
28 ATL, MS Papers, Diary of J. Moloney, n.d.
29 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 69.
30 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 61.
31 ATL, MS 2003/71, Letters from A. Bousfield, 13 May 1916.
32 AWMM, Diary of F. Healey, 5 July 1917
33 NAMNZ, MSS-051, Letters of W. Malcolm, 8 March 1918.
34 NMMNZ, MSS-038, Diary of N. Coop, 20 March 1918.
35 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 60.
36 A. Staines Manders, Colonials’ guide, 168.
37 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 26; Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, 4.
38 Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, 163.
39 IWM Documents 16373, Diary of E. M. Ryburn, 21 June 1916.
40 IWM Documents 16373, Diary of E. M. Ryburn, 21 June 1916.
41 IWM Documents 16373, Diary of E. M. Ryburn, 5 October 1916.
42 IWM Documents 16373, Diary of E. M. Ryburn, 28 October 1916.
43 IWM Documents 16373, Diary of E. M. Ryburn, 28 October 1916.
44 J. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26.
45 AWMM, MS 2002/72, Diary of H. Hall, 19 August 1916.
46 J. Seed, ‘Limehouse Blues: Looking for ‘Chinatown’ in the London Docks, 1900–40’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006), 59.
47 A. Staines Manders, Colonials’ guide, 77.
48 A. Staines Manders, Colonials’ guide, 77.
49 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 31, 2.
50 AWMM, MS 99/22, Diary of E. Dredge, 27 April 1917; AWMM, MS 2002/97, Diary of J. McWales, 26 June 1918.
51 NMMNZ, MSS-058, H. Bourke, 23 September 1917.
52 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 38.
53 ‘A Pageant of War’, The Times, 10 November 1915.
54 AWMM, MS 2002/165, Diary of J. Maguire, n.d.
55 ‘What the Empire had done’, Everyman, November 1916
56 ‘The Tall New Zealanders’, The Times, 29 January 1917.
57 IWM Documents 12000, Private Papers of C. W. Saunders, 8.
58 New Zealand at the Front (1917), 48.
59 See A. Woollacott, ‘'Khaki Fever' and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994) and P. Levine, ‘"Walking the Streets in A Way No Decent Woman Should": Woman Police in World War One’, Journal of Modern History, 66 (1994).
60 IWM, Documents 5515, Diary of E. Hames, 19.
61 J. Crawford, ed., The Devil's Own War: The First World War Diary of Brigadier-General Herbert Hart (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2008), 11 November 1916.
62 AWMM, Diary of F. Healey, 5 July 1917.
63 New Zealand at the Front (1917), 48
64 IWM, Documents 19697, Letters of H. Tuck, 9 January 1917.
65 T. C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 80.
66 J. A. Lee, Civilian into Soldier (London: T. W. Laurie, 1937).
67 Lee, Civilian into Soldier, 255.
68 Barnes, New Zealand's London, 64.
69 A. Staines Manders, Colonials’ guide, preface.
70 D. Clover, ‘The West Indian Club Ltd: An Early 20th Century West Indian Interest in London’, Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers, 8 (2007), 4.
71 R. Carkeek, Home Little Maori Home: A Memoir of the Maori Contingent, 1914–1916 (Wellington: Totika Publications, 2003), 6 July 1916.
72 Carkeek, Home Little Maori Home, 2 August 1916.
73 Carkeek, Home Little Maori Home, 3 August 1916.
74 ATL, OHInt-0006/06, Oral History Interview with William Bertrand, Reel 1.
75 Bertrand, Reel 1.
76 P. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London: Routledge, 2013), 151.
77 Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 154.
78 Carkeek, Home Little Maori Home, 3 August 1916.