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ABSTRACT
Surveys carried out in the UK have revealed a marked lack of awareness of the contribution of non-white, non-European soldiers during the First World War. For many, the First World War is understood as an exclusively white, European conflict that was confined to the battlefields of the Western Front. This article considers how British cultural memory of the First World War was formed over the course of the 20th century, and asks why dominant memory came to exclude the experiences of the non-white soldiers of Empire. Drawing on the scholarship of Jay Winter, this article re-considers the two major ‘memory booms’ during which popular cultural memory of the First World War developed, and argues that each of these memory-making periods was shaped by interrelated forms of exclusionary racism. In the immediate postwar period, the experience of non-white soldiers was differentially commemorated according to imperial, taxonomic racial hierarchies. In the late twentieth century, meanwhile, First World War remembrance coalesced around a fundamentally white British national memory at the expense of the non-white ‘other’. Finally, this article considers how far the recent First World War centenary may have reshaped public understanding of the conflict and integrated non-white, non-European experience into British cultural memory of the war.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Delingpole, “Delingpod 52.”
2. Olusoga, “Art as Lens,” 12.
3. Waldman, “Foreword,” 9.
4. Bostanci and Dubber, Remember The World, 12.
5. British Council, “Report shows lack of knowledge.”
6. Winter, Remembering War, 1–3.
7. Winter, Remembering War, 20.
8. Bernard Porter, “The Absent-Minded Imperialists,” 169.
9. Ibid., 384.
10. English, “Empire Day in Britain, 1904–58,” 248–9
11. “Yesterday Empire Day was celebrated,” Times, 25 May 1905, 9.
12. Hall, “Introduction,” 19.
13. Mackenzie, “Propaganda and Empire,” 7.
14. Ekoko, “The British Attitude towards Germany’s Colonial Irredentism,” 287–307.
15. Gallagher, “Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire,” 355–368
16. Olusoga, Black and British, 431.
17. Leenders, “A Hazardous Experiment,” 163.
18. Robb, British Culture and the First World War, 14.
19. Ibid, 24.
20. See: Hassett & Moyd (eds), “Colonial Veterans of WWI.”
21. Kenyon, How the Cemeteries Abroad Will be Designed, 11.
22. Commonwealth War Graves, Report of the Special Committee, 6–10.
23. “Browne interview with Sir Frederick Guggisberg,”18 May 1923, 95, qted in ibid.
24. Olusoga, Black and British, 431.
25. Siblon, “Negotiating Hierarchy and Memory,” 306.
26. Clouting, A Century of Remembrance, 124
27. Winter, Sites of Memory, 78
28. King, Memorials of the Great War, 27
29. “Subscriptions, accounts, design relating to Great War Memorial Cross,” P362a/PC/35/1, Gloucestershire Archives
30. “Hucclecote at War,” D9846/711, Gloucestershire Archives
31. King, Memorials of the Great War, 128.
32. Public Record Office, RAIL 258/447, Report by J. Burnet, T. Tait and C. Jagger, 21. Feb. 1921, cited in ibid, 129.
33. Said, Orientalism.
34. Siblon, “Negotiating Hierarchy and Memory,” 309.
35. Gilroy, After Empire, 98.
36. Ibid.
37. See Sturken, “Memory, consumerism and media,” 1–12.
38. Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 117.
39. “B.B.C. and the Armistice,” Times, 10 November 1932 12.
40. Trott, Publishers, Readers and The Great War, 21.
41. Marsh, Edward, “Rupert Brooke Still Popular,” Daily Mail, 17 May 1927
42. Trott, Publishers, Readers and The Great War, 41.
43. Ian Andrew Isherwood, Remembering the Great War, 88.
44. Todman, Myth and Memory, 163.
45. Hanna, The Great War on the small screen, 13.
46. Santanu Das, “Reframing First World War Poetry,” 4.
47. Olusoga, “Beyond the Western Front,” 53.
48. Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” 21.
49. Gilroy, After Empire, 100.
50. Hanna, The Great War on the Small Screen, 36
51. See, for example, Busch, “Television through the Eyes of Ordinary Soldiers?”; Hanna, The Great War on the Small Screen; and Ramsden, “The Great War: The Making of the Series.”
52. Hanna, “A small screen alternative to stone and bronze,” 108
53. See Barua, “Inventing Race.”
54. See Dawson, “A Lament for Imperial Adventure.”
55. Olusoga, Black and British, 523-524.
56. Gilroy, After Empire, 98
57. Strachan, “Commemorating the First World War.”
58. Ali Rattansi, Multiculturalism, 121.
59. Jarboe & Fogarty, “Introduction,” 1–20.
60. A survey from the UK in a Changing Europe found that 70% of Leave voters put regaining control over immigration in their top two reasons for wanting the UK to leave the European Union.
61. Mycock, “The First World War Centenary in the UK,” 161
62. Cameron, “Speech at Imperial War Museum.”
63. DCMS Committee, “Oral evidence: Lessons from the First World War centenary, HC 2001,” Parliament.uk, 26 March 2019.
64. DCMS Committee, Thirteenth Report of Session 2017–19, 17.
65. Rutter and Katwala, Crossing Divides, 15.
66. Josephine Burns, 14–18 NOW: Summary of Evaluation, 20.
67. Jeremy Harding, “Ends of the Earth,” London Review of Books, 6 December 2018.
68. Woolf, “Introduction,” 13.
69. Rutter and Katwala, Crossing Divides, 46.
70. Littler, “Introduction,” 1.
71. Rutter and Katwala, Crossing Divides, 10.
72. Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, 14–18 NOW Evaluation, 10.
73. DCMS, “Statistical data set.”
74. Buckerfield and Ballinger, The People’s Centenary, 29.
75. Rutter and Katwala, Crossing Divides, 16.
76. The research of scholars such as Christophe Declercq and Hannah Ewence into the ways Belgian refugees have been remembered in Britain offers an excellent introduction to this area.